Thomas Locke Hobbs
| Currently: Buenos Aires |
Sam, Bryan & Paul
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| Sam and Bryan came over for dinner on Friday night. We had Confit de Canard which Luc had brought me from France. I can't cook, so Sam, a real gourmand, did the honors. The photos above where taken later on, after a bottle of wine, some 70 year-old Armagnac [also courtesey of Luc], and an open bar in the East Village. On Saturday I did another round of art gallery hopping. My favorite show was a series of portraits of drag queens in the South by Rueben Cox. Unfortunately, Saturday was the last day. The images on the gallery's website are pretty good, however. I read the artist's bio and was amused by this line, "Accepted to Yale and Columbia MFA programs, did not attend". There's a debate about the value of Ivy League schools. Economic studies have suggested that people who get into an Ivy League school but choose not to go make just as much money as those who do. In the case of the art world, however, I can see how attending the right program [as opposed to merely being accepted] would give entry to the right galleries...and, I suppose, be important for the artist's development. |
Salem Cemetery
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| Gravestones in the old section. They've been encasing severely weathered headstones in concrete with the writing facing out. It reminded me of some contemporary art sculture works. The cemetery is full of Hobbs' going back to the 1830s with one who died in a cholera epidemic. |
Objects in my grandparents' House
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| The brief visits over the years to my grandparents almost seems like a separate existence with it's own rhythms, routines and environment. Now that I take pictures of stuff, I wanted to document these things. Phil Greenspun has a review of a biography of Che Guevara, and also some pictures of Chile. |
My Grandparents
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| This past weekend I went to Salem, IN to see my grandparents, Duke & Helen Hobbs. |
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| Peter, their Shelty. |
Blue Elevator
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| Walking into this elevator I felt as if I'd suddenly stepped on to the set of Kubrick's 2001. |
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| Espiscopal [?] church on 5th Ave & 10th St. The stained glass was illuminated from the inside which struck me as unusual. The blur at the bottom of the photo is a taxi going by. BlueJake has some cool pictures of Chile. |
Laundry
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| Carting my laundry off. They just raised the price of drop-off service from $.60 to $.75/lb. I moved to NYC in June of 2001. With 9/11 and the recession, prices essentially didn't change on anything for about two years. It established a baseline in my head for "New York" prices. Over the last year or so little things like the subway, a slice of pizza and now my laundry have increased 15-50%. I don't want to sound like an old fart bitching about inflation but the rise in prices has made me aware, at least, of the time that I've lived here. |
Georgia, Republic of
| Recently I met up with my friend Eric from Boston and his boyfriend Kevin who's on break from a two-year stint with the Peace Corps in the Republic of Georgia. Kevin has a blog about his experiences; Kevin in Georgia. Eric went to visit in September and posted pictures. One of the more interesting images is of the Hotel Iveria, a former luxury hotel taken over by Abkhazian refugees. A quick search on Google reveals lots of great images of the structure and all the ad hoc modifications made by it's current residents. [More photos 1, 2, 3]. |
One Bryant Park
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| 6th Ave. & 42nd St. Right now half the block is an empty pit, offering unusual views of the surrounding buildings that will soon disappear. A 50-story building is going up here. Wired New York has some good renderings of the new building. |
Staten Island Ferry
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| The colors and the light on the Staten Island Ferry are soft and beautiful. Usually i'm too preoccupied with looking at the receding skyline. I'd never really noticed before the worn beauty of the ferry boat's interior. Luc, ever the trooper, willingly posed at my direction. He's back in France now. |
Luc's Fabulous New York Life
| The highlight of a typical week is a good workout and CSI:Miami. But this week I have Luc to drag me from one fabulous party to another. |
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| Of course these adventures are documented in much more obsessive detail on Luc's blog. |
The Strand
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| I hadn't been to the Strand since they opened the 2nd floor. On the stairway up you get this interesting view of all the fluorescent lights above the stacks. Update: In the interests of disclosure, I should note that Luc took this picture. I also used his camera for a few of the pictures below. Luc's blog has a post with some of these. |
Groups, this past Weekend
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| Leonard & Luc after lunch on Saturday in SoHo. |
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| Luc, Andrew & Me, in the reflection of a hallway mirror while waiting for the elevator after a party on Saturday night. |
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| Luc, Rick and Bryan after brunch on Sunday at Intermezzo. Here's bryan's write-up on his LiveJournal. |
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| Nothing special here, just some more pics of steam coming up from the street. This was on Christmas morning. It was unusually warm and the jet of steam very strong, which isn't quite captured in the picture. |
N-R-W
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| I got used to saying "the NR". Even after a year of the N running express over the Manhattan Bridge I still have a hard time saying "RW". There's too many syllables in 'W'. Should I just say the "BMT Broadway Local"? |
7 WTC
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Astor Place
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| Two new buildings under construction. I took these on the morning of the 1st. I didn't go out late and so I woke up early. The skies were bright and clear, the streets deserted and the temperature unseasonably warm. |
Happy New Year - My new toy
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| My weathered & beaten mini-disc player gave out just before Christmas. I've replaced it with the unbelievably tiny Creative Muvo N200. I find I listen to the same handful of trashy pop songs over and over again, so the vast storage of an iPod would be wasted on me. This runs 15 hours on a single AAA rechargeable, stores 8 hours of music, has an FM receiver and is the size of a zippo lighter. On the computer it appears as a flash drive. To add a new song, there's no playlists, you just drag and drop the mp3 files. |
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 | For more about me, please go visit my old geocities page. |