Thomas Locke Hobbs
| Currently: Buenos Aires |
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| I can always count on random pictures from the Met to fill up space on this blog. My friend Jesse Archer is on the cover of this week's HX Magazine. |
Shopping and Politics
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| Marc Jacobs on Bleecker is selling George Bush cards, modeled on the Saddam Playing cards. They feature deadpan descriptions of major Republican figures. I particularly like this detail about John Ashcroft...
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| They also have T-Shirts. |
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| This seems to be a trend. The Village Voice this week has an article about swanky downtown shops getting political. |
Bowling Green Station
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| The Bowling Green station is clad in this very bright orange brick which must've looked very trendy in the 1970s and, interestingly, is trendy again today. The color-scheme was part of a half-assed 1970s scheme to modernize the subway and there are a few other stations in the system done up in similar colors. Of course now with the photography ban, I won't be able to take these pictures anymore. The noose tightens. |
Modernist Ziggurats
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| There's a certain kind of building around downtown and midtown. They were built between the mid-1950s and 1961 and are basically filler buildings. I call them Modernist Ziggurats. Their set-back form is dictated by the zoning regulations in place between 1916 and 1961 but their facades are influenced by the International Style, making them kind of bastard children of New York, high rise architecture.
Some Links: - Equitable Building [as seen from the World Trade Center], the 1914 building that prompted the original zoning regulations which said that office towers had to have set-backs and lead to the distinctive ziggurat look of pre-war buildings in Manhattan. - Metropolis of Tomorrow, the book by Hugh Ferriss with lots of brooking, gotham-like sketches of ziggurat buildings. Published in the mid 1920s. - Seagram Building, the Modernist classic by Mies van der Rohe and influential in having the zoning regulations change to encourage open plazas in exchange for higher floors. |
Albino Vampire
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| I picked up an Infrared Filter for my Canon Digital Rebel to try out Infrared Photography. This is an opaque filter that only lets in IR-rays. If you use it on landscapes, the sky is black and foliage is white. Kodak makes special IR-sensitive film which is expensive and has to be opened in a darkroom. With digital it's easy, you just screw on the filter and play with exposure times until you get it right [the above picture is 3 seconds, f2, 400ASA].
I read on this page of Digital Photography Hacks, [more hacks] that taking portraits in IR can remove skin blemishes and give a soft, glowing look to the subject's face. This page did not say that my eyes would be pale blue [they're really dark brown], my eyebrows would be white and I would look like some freakish albino vampire. |
The Trachtenberg Family
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| Friday I saw the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players with my friend Aaron. From their website, they are, "an indie-vaudeville conceptual art-rock pop band that takes vintage slide collections that have been found at estate sales,garage sales,thrift stores,etc., and turn the lives of annonymous strangers into pop-rock musical exposes based on the contents of these slide collections." The Show was at Northsix in Williamsburg. |
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| I'm so glad I don't live in Williamsburg anymore. |
Postwar
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| Thursday afternoonw as so nice I decided to walk the 50 blocks home along 3rd Avenue. I was able to look at some of Manhattan's finest, post-war, residential architecture. Someday, perhaps, white-glazed brick apartment buildings may be as beloved as Cast Iron Lofts. |
Traveling Light
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| I really fetishize traveling light. In the summer that means leaving my apartment with no bag and no coat. I'd die if I had to wait 20 minutes for a subway at night with nothing to read, so I rip articles out of the New Yorker. Their small text and thin pages make them an ideal magazine for this purpose.
Some cool photography related links: Bogota - Dog Days, by Alec Soth, recently seen at the Whitney for his Sleeping by the Mississippi. Large Format Photoblog. Roark Johnson is taking a photo a day with his 8x10 view camera and posting them to his website. Coincidences. A really good photography related blog where I found the two links above. |
Graffiti Trucks
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| I'm glad the tradition of painting moving vehicles with graffiti art lives on. I think it would be a neat idea to commission well-known graffitti artists to do up certain subway cars. I'm sure it will take 20 years, at least, before such idea would be palatable to the MTA, if ever. Some Books: Subway Art, Broken Windows |
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| And the Village Voice has a new logo on their street boxes with faux-graffiti. A good summary of point-and-shoot vs. single lens reflex digital cameras. National Magazine Award Finalists [with links to many of the nominated stories] |
Bronx Zoo
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| I went to the Bronx Zoo on Sunday for the first time. I really enjoyed watching the different primates. |
PS1
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| On Saturday I went to PS1 with Luc and his friend Peter. They had some larger pieces from MOMA's Dieter Roth show that wouldn't fit in MOMA QNS. |
Urban Vinyl Toys
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| From the Qee Series 4, for sale at KidRobot in SoHo. |
Patti Smith
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| On Tuesday I saw Patti Smith perform at the club Warsaw in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Smith sang a lot of songs off her new album Trampin' |
Bike New York
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| I did Bike NY on Sunday with my friend Matt. At $50 it wasn't cheap but riding on FDR, the Gowanus Expressway and across those bridges was worth it. Thanks to my friend Steve for lending me the bike. |
Manhattan Ecosystem
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| In Central Park on Saturday I saw some sort of Falcon clutching a pigeon it had recently killed. I think pigeons are just rats with wings and so I'm all for natural population controls provided by birds of prey.
Meanwhile... |
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| All the Tulips were out in the Conservatory. |
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| I have a weakness for Wendy's chili. Not that it's very good but it's only $1.07 with tax and is nearly a full meal [low in fat, high in protein and fiber too!]. Also, eating at Wendy's appeals to my New York on the Cheap fantasy where I hold down some fabulous but pitifully remunerative job, live in a $300/mo. room in Newark in a house full of crazy Brazilians, spend my Sundays lounging at Sheep's Meadow, ride the Staten Island Ferry and dusk, traverse the city on unlimited Metrocards, hit-up open bars and gallery openings every night of the week, enjoy opera in Central Park with $5 bottles of Shiraz, pay 25 cents to get into the Met [evil stares be damned], and |
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 | For more about me, please go visit my old geocities page. |