It has been literally (and I’m using the word correctly) years since my last post. Been keeping away because, while ridiculously productive taking pictures, I just can’t seem to work up the desire to write. Well, that’s not true: I keep a journal in which I write almost every day, sometimes pages of notes about the pictures I’m taking, the books I’m reading and assorted crap. Blog writing though… I don’t know… I start out and a sentence or two in (like right now!) I ask myself, ‘who cares?’ and don’t even bother to save the draft. Today I thought I’d ease myself back into it.
I’m preparing for a trip to New York City next week to see an exhibit of about fifty photos by Eugène Atget at the ICP – if my back can stand it, that is – by familiarizing myself with his work.
His photography, usually done on early mornings before there were people out and about, resonate deeply with me because they remind me of the pictures I would take walking around the near empty streets during covid. They are also the sort of photographs I would like to be able to take now but can’t unless I, too, get up very early to hit the streets before 5 O’clock.
[The picture above was taken on 19 December 2020, early afternoon, in DUMBO (Brooklyn, NY)]
2020.12.19 (13:39): the lunchtime crowd in DUMBO, Brooklyn
The blog entry linked below is from Art Blart (‘art and cultural memory archive’) which I only discovered this year, but has become a great resource for me.
So, I’m at lunch, having a beer (or two (or three (or I lost count))) and I’m scrolling Instagram thinking, ‘do men actually like women or have we been conditioned to like women?
What if we were originally meant to partner with dogs so as to create a race of elite beings who not only have opposable thumbs but also incredible senses of smell and hearing while maintaining man’s ability for color differentiation?
And what if a group of rich white men started making the rest of us believe that women were what we were really after, rewriting the history books and religious texts we read to reinforce this outrageous lie?
And all the while these dog fuckers are having the time of their lives, breading a super race, keeping us head down in servitude working for their enrichment and entertainment!
Well to them, all I have to say is: ‘Thanks! I may be living contrarily to the laws of nature, but I like it!
Yesterday I used my lunch hour to go to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore to get the latest issue of i-D Magazine. Turns out they didn’t have it. It’s an import from the UK and they are still one and a half issues behind on the magazine racks here (another issue is due out soon).
I was disappointed that I had wasted my time on the short drive, made long because of the traffic. But was it a complete waste?
As usual, I had one of my cameras with me. I took some meh shots walking through the bookstore …
Looking out the window by the magazine racksDescending the escalator to the lower levelAnother shot looking out the window by the magazine racksA selection of magazines (why is short American Short Fiction on the upper shelf where short people would find it hard to reach?)
… but, going back back outside through an entrance I rarely use, the area looked slightly different than I remembered. I thought I’d try doing one of the ten exercises I started writing about a year or more ago. I would stand in the same spot, moving my feet only to turn a bit, and take a series of pictures.
Here, now, I shall impose the results upon you.
They’re just moving furniture into this restaurant. One of two places that are ‘opening soon’Don’t know what either Plans A or B were, but neither proved to be successful. The sign out front advertises the ‘coming soon’ of a comedy club. The weather’s been dismal and I look forward to a few laughs.This was the something-or-other building on Tresser Boulevard. Now it’s the something-or-other-else building. Companies come and go taking their names with them; buildings stay until they start to crumble and are torn down – hopefully before falling on someone.#1 Those eyes! A mural created by Sen2 (Santo) Figuero [@sen2figueroa on Instagram#2 Same position as #1 – different focus#3 A little bit lower now.#4 And a little bit lower now.#5 A little bit higher now.
All shot with the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II on aperture mode with LUMIX II Aspherical 20mm f/1.7 lens
Today I finished this book in the same place where I found it. [Olympus OM-D M-5ii, LUMIX 20mm Lens, f/16.0, 1/30s, ISO 180]
Just finished reading Tim O’Brien The Things They Carried, a coherent collection of short stories about Tim’s time as a soldier in Vietnam. I call it a ‘coherent collection’ because the stories, any one of which could stand its own, flow in either chronological or narrative order.
It’s a book I picked up by chance off a shelf at Third Place, a shared work space in Stamford, CT. Written in 1990, it had only just recently been brought to my attention: my wife, Jane had finished reading it a few months before and told me about it without a lot going into much detail (something like ‘you’d like this. It’s about Vietnam and it’s very moving at times’), but I dismissed it as something that had been written either after the fact by someone who hadn’t been there or by an embedded reporter. But I came across it at Third Place and the coincidence made me pick it up, read the first few pages and become hooked.
I read the last few pages of the book today in the same place where I found it – not by design, it just worked out that way.
The book resonated with me in so many ways (it was real; it recalled the military for me in ways that I hadn’t thought about since I left; it was philosophical; it was instructive) , and I found it moving more than just at times.
In the last story, ‘The Lives of the Dead,’ a childhood girlfriend, Linda, who died from a brain tumor around the age of nine, answer’s his question, ‘What’s it like to be dead?’, in a dream saying, ‘Well, right now [in the dream] I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like… I don’t know, I guess it’s like being instead a book that nobody’s reading… All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.’ I loved that analogy.
It’s one of those books I’m sorry I finished: it made good company and I’d like to have kept on reading it.
Here I will admit to having a kind ofphotographic Tourette’s Syndrome in that, when out by myself, I cannot sit more than a few minutes without pulling out either my phone or my camera and taking a picture. The impulse is still there when I’m with others but, unless there is something truly compelling, their presence tempers my impulse to snap anything that catches my attention.
So, to illustrate, let me take you through the hour I spent at coffee this morning at a cafe on Grigg Street, Greenwich [CFCF Coffee – if you’re ever in town, I highly recommend any of its three locations] while trying to read through the magazine I brought with me.
There are fifteen pictures below out of roughly sixty taken and several different edits – so, for the sake of argument, let’s average it at one picture per minute.
Grigg is a short (one-block) street close to the bottom of what would be our ‘High Street,’ Greenwich Avenue. There are only a few shops there, notably CFCF, Diane’s Books, and Grigg Street Pizza. Not a lot to take pictures of. However, there are…
9:14: Blue Skies/Blue Umbrellas; White Skies/Black Umbrellas (Color: iPhone XR/B&W: Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II)9:16: The corner of Grigg Street and Greenwich Avenue – this is a window into Meli-Melo, a very popular restaurant (which I have yet to go to, since it’s jam-packed every time I try). I love the bottom of the window frame that gives the original name building and year it was erected. (Olympus)9:17: A woman sitting across at a table Greenwich Avenue – I didn’t even know there were tables there (Olympus)9:18: I don’t know why this woman’s feet caught my attention, but I kept seeing them out of the corner of my eye while looking down at my magazine. Finally, I gave in and took a photo (iPhone)9.19: Then, looking down at my own feet, wishing I had better taste in socks (grey carhart socks with brown pants? Please, someone rescue me from my lack of fashion sense!) (iPhone)9:19: within seconds of my last picture, this man and his prodigious beard catches my attention. That’s the beard I want to grow, but I just don’t have the patience to maintain it (iPhone)9:23: Three minutes and, perhaps, ten pictures later… the woman who was with the beard, sitting at the table in front of me. I thought shooting her through the empty chair in front of me would make a nice picture. It’s the lack of someone in that chair opposite me that has made all these pictures possible (iPhone)9:27: The leaves in the planter next to me catch my attention. Upon inspection, they appear to need a shave . This is actually a composite of two pictures to mimic depth of field: one with the front leaves in focus and the other with the inner leaves in focus (iPhone)9:40 & 9:41: Whenever possible, I try not to post pictures of people where their faces are fully visible, but I couldn’t help it here: this couple is just too good looking. Before this shot I think they were taking a selfie (iPhone)9:42: Sink in the restroom. Good to see that whoever was there last used soap (iPhone)9:52: Effortless elegance (iPhone)10:05: Suddenly, there’s a crack in the sidewalk that needs photographing (iPhone)
This clock is located at 145 Duane Street which used to be the headquarters of the Nathaniel Company, a shoe wholesaler which had been in business from the 1860s until 1953.
Duane Street was central to the City’s shoe industry.
Their original building at this location was destroyed by fire in 1864 and a new building with a cast-iron facade was built in it’s place. A second fire in 1894 gutted the top floors and severely damaged the lower, but the cast-iron facade survived and the building was repaired. This clock was added sometime after an fire in 1894.
This clock no longer works. I don’t know when it was last operational, but pictures I’ve seen of the building from 2009 and a bit before has the clock showing the same time as mine, the clock is accurate two times each day now.
The Silk Clock, 470 Park Avenue (corner East 32nd Street), New York City, NY
When you walk around New York City you see all sorts of interesting things. I’m always on the look out for old clocks on the side of buildings. You see them everywhere, especially below Canal. I stumbled on to this one a bit further up town on Park and E. 32nd and was fortunate to find some information about from a 1996 New York Times column. Thought I’d share it.
Q. What is the history of the interesting clock on the building at 470 Park Avenue South, between 31st and 32d Streets? There is a wizard, a man hammering and a woman on it, and they move. What does all this represent?
A. It’s called the Silk Clock, and if you look at it carefully, you can envision a scene out of Arthurian legend, says Conrad Milster, the chief engineer at the Pratt Institute and a clock aficionado. At every hour on the hour, the wizard Merlin raises his wand and taps the squatting blacksmith on the head, who hammers away at King Arthur’s sword, while the Lady of the Lake rises out of the clock’s case. The clock, built in March 1926 by the Seth Thomas Clock Company of Thomaston, Conn., got its name from the building’s original owners, Schwarzbock Looms, who worked in the silk industry. Fittingly, the face of the 2-foot-by-3-foot clock is adorned with a silkworm motif, including mulberry leaves, the worm’s favorite food. But over time, the city’s grime fouled the clock’s mechanism, and it sat idle for several years — no one knows exactly how long — until the building’s current owner, S.L. Green, asked Mr. Milster to restore it in 1984. It’s a New York rarity, says Mr. Milster, in that it’s still run by a weight-driven pendulum. And its whimsical characters create quite a commotion with passers-by when they swing into action, says Darlene LaColla, the building’s concierge. But don’t set your watch by it. Because the five-foot-long pendulum is made of wood, seasonal shifts in the humidity cause shrinkage and expansion, which can tamper with the clock’s accuracy by a few minutes.
I’m in the middle (almost finished, actually) of reading Hold Still a memoir (with photographs) by Sally Mann, a photographer I’ve admired since the late 80s. Really good read and I recommend it, not just for the discussions of her work and some of the controversy it caused in the 90s when Immediate Family came out, but the general way she writes about her life, her children, her husband and their family histories – really well written stuff.
Anyway, this morning I decided to print a self portrait of hers from 1974 intending to use it as a bookmark (I do that a lot: use pictures I print as bookmarks). The printer, it turned out, was out of paper and when I went to load it, I put the paper in upside down. This is how the picture came out:
I kind of like how the picture came out, but unfortunately, it never dried (I’m talking 6 hours later!), so I couldn’t use it as intended. I wonder if spray fixative would have let me keep it?
My first post in a while. Consider this a warm up for getting back into the writing habit. Consider yourself warned: you may be bored.
I’m booked on the 11:29 Amtrak Northeast Regional from Stamford to Charlottesville. I had asked my friend, Emil, for a ride to the station. He said yes, but first he needed to take his wife, Sarah, to work at eleven. I was initially okay with this, but when 10:30 came around I became anxious about the potential that he might not get me there on time and, as I didn’t want to chance missing the only train to Charlottesville from Stamford today, I arranged for an Uber, texted Emil that I was getting a ride to the station.
I thoroughly enjoyed my driver, a woman named Joy who moved to Stamford from Port Chester two years ago with her husband and two children – for the schools and a safer neighbourhood. We talked about the advantages of living in Connecticut as opposed to New York State. Her one complaint was the property taxes on vehicles. Between their two cars they pay something in the neighbourhood of One Thousand Dollars annually. She’s glad that gas prices are going down; at their peak they were cutting into about half of what she would make on average. Uber, she said, was giving a Fifty Cent per trip gas ‘help.’ We both had a good laugh at that. I liked her so much I gave her a Ten Dollar tip, just Two Dollars less than the fare.
Stamford Station wasn’t particularly busy. At the newsstand I picked up copies of the Financial Times and The New York Times, a tin of Altoids and a bottle of Canada Dry seltzer. Both papers were thin: I’m already done with the FT and am saving the NYT for the leg from DC to Charlottesville.
Took some pictures at Stamford before the train arrived (late).
I am enjoying my seat in the Business Car. Five-F, a window seat on the West side of the train (if you consider that we’re traveling South). So far, no one sitting next to me.
Just outside of Manhattan, about fifteen minutes from Penn, the train comes to a slow and squeaky stop. We sit there for perhaps ten minutes with no word from the crew. When we start moving again, the conductor announces: ladies and gentlemen, as you can see we have no power in the cars, but the good news is that we’re moving. We apologize for the problems which we’ll address with the maintenance crew when we arrive at Penn Station.
The worst part about the lack of power, it being daytime, is no air conditioning. In ten minutes or so that we’ve been traveling, the air has become thick and uncomfortable. No problem for the remaining five or so minutes to Penn, but I wouldn’t want to finish off the trip to Charlottesville this way.
The train came to another stop, high above some part of Queens (interesting that instead of going through the Bronx as other trains I’ve taken to Washington do, we’re traveling across Queens and Brooklyn – sort of along the BQE). There we stayed for a good fifteen minutes before moving again. Power has been restored to the cars, so the AC is back on, but the ride is going slow. We were told that it would be another ten minutes to Penn about ten minutes ago and Manhattan is still across the river.
Power substation in the Bronx near the Randall’s Island Connector
The passage from New York to Washington, DC was fairly uneventful. At one point I walked two cars up to the Bar Car (through the Quiet Car and one of the Coach Class cars). For lunch I had the Angus Burger (a cheese burger microwaved to a shoe-leather consitency), a bag of Miss Vicky’s chips (sea salt), and a slim can of Stella Artois. These I ate at a table I shared with a young woman in possession of a stack of word search and crossword magazines, a bag of peanut M&Ms accompanied me back to my seat. They’re gone now.
Riding through New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland
It was raining hard as we pulled into DC. We sat there for a good long time as they changed the engine, the crew, cleaned the train and took in new passengers – might have been an hour, might have been longer; thank God for the distraction of a good book (still deep into Sally Mann’s memoir, Hold Still). At some point the rain stopped and I didn’t notice. Looking out the window at 17:43 I found it to be darker than I expected (because of the clouds? because we’re that much more south from Connecticut? because of the approaching Autumn?) As I asked this last question, the train started moving.
Union Station, Washington, DC
Hopeful that we would get to Charleston at a time approximating our scheduled arrival, I was disappointed when the conductor informed us that we were an hour behind schedule in a scolding tone, as though we were responsible for the delays. ‘Whatever time you expected to arrive at, just add an hour to that!’ she said out loud while, silently, I heard her add ‘you bastards!’
Texting my wife this last update (and by the way: we’re stopped again in the middle of nowhere, so maybe the hour delay was an optimistic estimate), she hopes that I’m comfortable at least. Must say that, in spite of it all, I’m doing pretty well. Getting in some reading, writing, photography (out the train window) and music reading. I said I was contemplating walking back up to the bar car for a stiff gin and tonic after we pass Alexandria. We’ve been stopped just outside Alexandria for the past fifteen minutes, so I’m getting up now.
Thirty minutes later, still sitting outside of Alexandria, double gin and tonic in hand. On the train, they don’t actually make a gin and tonic. Sort of like the pubs in England, they give you a do-it-yourself kit. The main difference is that rather than pouring the gin in your glass and handing you a bottle of tonic, here you get the gin in airplane bottles. The only thing they put in the glass is the ice – and thankfully, they give you a lot of that because the gin is warm and the tonic is warm so you lose the ice quickly.
On the way back from the bar car I stopped between cars and called Jane. Not a lot going on. Some continuing drama over the thefts of personal property at work which I’ve written about elsewhere. Basically, more victims and an ineffectual response from management that probably emboldened the ‘barracks thief’ in their pursuit.
19:08: after more than an hour, the train moved thirty feet. We’re getting there! I’m afraid that earlier statement of a one hour delay was highly optimistic (since, as I say, that was over an hour ago). I’m sure this is also our fault and I hope the conductor doesn’t come down the aisle flogging us for it.
19:17: we have just inched into a station that is not Alexandria. We’ve stopped yet again.
Train stopped for no apparent reason just outside Burke Center, VA
19:46: Still outside of Alexandria and we were ‘reminded’ that we are stopped because of a tree on the tracks. REMINDED? This is the first time anyone is hearing of it. This is becoming an epic adventure of Homereque proportions.
20:22: Announcement: ladies and gentlemen, the maintenance away crew has arrived and are at work removing the tree in front of us
21:45: Woman lost control of her car and ended up on the tracks. They moved the car and we’re on the move again
22:54: One Virginia woman describing to another Virginia woman where her daughter lives in New York City: ‘I don’t know if you know it: West Village? It’s right next to Greenwich Village.’ I roll my eyes so far back they actually face forward again.
The never ending journey
22:51: Well…. I don’t know how to say this without slamming my head against the seat in front of me, but there is a ‘defect’ on the track and we’re stuck in Manassas for a while. WTF?
22:55: Oh! Either we’re moving or I just passed gas. Too slow to tell
22:55 and a half: No, we’re moving. Verrrrrrrrrry slowwwwly
00:42: Arrived in Charlottesville. There are many ways to look at a bad situation. I’m going to look at this as having gotten an extra five hours on the train for free.
Joearf’s Thoughts 