iphone stuff

i just got my credit today for the scanner that broke, but they made the check out to Susan instead of me, so i have to wait until she gets back before i can use it. so in the meantime with the dearth of new photos and old photos to scan in i decided to throw in some photos i take occasionally with the iPhone. i don't usually look at these pictures on anything but the iPhone, so it's sometimes interesting to see what i have on there. it seems to have this weird selective focus if i look really closely, but otherwise it takes pictures "just ok" for evidentiary uses (it's an older 3G model). these are pictures i took of weird or interesting looking graffiti, mostly within a few blocks around my work.


Ross the Boss comes back to America


JA and SANE


BERE + MENO over JA


sloppy white wall


DAYS over someone, can't read it. KACE over LEETO


JA and OJAE over COLT45


a quick MR. GRACEFUL across the street


he was a cool dude


i love stuff like this. found in a back alley while scouting fishing spots.


the Philadelphia favorite

Golden Gate

I got my computer back this week. It had some major problems and had to get the hard drvie and video card replaced. So far so good. I sent my scanner back to the warranty place, and while it can be a pain in the ass, the extended warranty B&H sells you is usually almost always worth it to replace broken gear, especially in these days when stuff is obsolete the day you bring it home. So I haven't been able to scan anything new in yet, but I have pics from the Pen-FT from the summer and some Yashica t5 stuff from the recent Poconos trip. No idea what will come from those. I'm going to process some stuff this weekend, but i gotta wait for the scanner or the check to come back before i can get anything new up. Sorry.

I took this photo of Emily on the Golden Gate Bridge with the Yashica t5. This must have been 2004. It was near the end of a really long trip to get from downtown SF to the bridge. We ended up taking a bunch of buses, got lost a bunch of times, ended up stranded in shopping centers in Marin, stranded in a little sea town (maybe it was Tiburon?) waiting for a bus that seemed would never come, ended up begging that bus driver to let us off basically on the highway because we were on the wrong bus again and were headed over the bridge. We got off on some onramp/offramp on the north side of the bridge and started walking over. It was one of those early summer days when the fog is just starting to roll in during the evening, but before those August days when the fog just covers everything. The light was quite nice though you can't really see that in this shot as I used the flash so the red of her sweatshirt popped a little more. I guess there's a balance in there somewhere, but i didn't get it. Gorgeous up there around that time of day, especially on the west side. Windy up there, though.

Have you ever seen the documentary The Bridge?

scanner down!

i haven't been able to post much lately due to the Brooklyn Fishing Derby, which you can check out here. For the record, I think Wordpress sucks. Also, my scanner has a problem and I have to send it back to get it fixed, so i haven't been able to scan in anything new yet, but i'll dig through the crates to see if i have anything interesting already scanned that i haven't posted yet. on that note, the computer i bought off Shelly is taking major shits all over my life: repeated kernal panics, software repair issues i don't understand, and a major heat sensor hardware problem i have to get fixed. technology is wreaking havoc right now.

whiskey shot

this is one-half of a half frame shot from the same roll as the previous post with the Pen-FT. we were at this place called Fatty Crab that had this whiskey shot and this incredible pickle juice back deal. It's a trendy thing now, but the first I'd heard of it was at this place a couple years ago and I still think it's the best pickle back. I've seen some places serve straight green water from a pickle jar, but this place made its own every day. It got to the point where Gary and I were ordering whiskey shots just so we could have the pickle juice with it. We both got pretty drunk.

the highline

These are among the first photos I ever took with the Pen-FT. They're wildly inconsistent and still are at this point. Some basic problems with the film not advancing correctly to the still present metering problem—I'm beginning to think the lens itself is shooting a half-stop too slow because the meter looks fine compared with my handheld Minolta Auto V. You can almost see the schizophrenic nature of the camera at this point, although admittedly I was, and still am, still learning how to use it (see all those damn photos from my last SF trip I lost, or rather, don't see them). These photos are of Susan and my friend Kevin while we were waiting in line to get up to the Highline, and then finally up top. Around this time there were rumors the hotel directors were paying people to have sex in the windows where everyone could see, so the walkway was often crowded with paparazzi photographers with $10,000 setups. Some of these are actually quite good. Others I almost have to ask what decade they were taken in: the 70s?

august montauk

for my last birthday i had to get out of town on a kind of retreat. matt came along after he called my bluff when i told him he could come, fully believing he'd never wake up in time. well, he did and we caught the train from jamaica station to montauk. we took an $8 cab from the train station to the montauket, a weird kind of place with a nice dining area, an attached dive bar, and 4-H club like accommodations upstairs. this is where we were staying. having no idea how far we were from town, we decided to walk to town which was a few miles. we rented these shitty mountain-hybrid bikes to ride around town. we hit up a bar and had a few shots, a couple beers, a burger and fries, and fish and chips. then i stupidly decided it was time to head to Montauk Point. aside from being a pretty off-time to fish out there in the Mecca of striped bass land (our original plan was to roll up there on a tandem bike), my aforementioned lack of distance-awareness made me think it would be like a 15-minute ride out there, judging from my memory of the trip Susan and i made out there last year for my birthday, by car. i also didn't realize that matt hadn't ridden a bike in something like 15 years and that the bikes we had sucked really bad. it turned out to be 6.5 miles each way on a winding, hilly two-lane road. the ride back to town was in pitch blackness, no moon, no street lights, cars flying past us at 70mph. only a headlamp, which actually saved our asses. before we left the lower lot i told matt, "before we die tonight i want you to know one thing: i never liked you." just some black humor for the way home.

this is the second year i've made it out to montauk for my birthday. the fishing isn't so good around this time, but it's good to see the ocean and wash away the year's sins and sorrows. part of the reason i came back is because the burden of memory of thinking "the last time" was getting to be too much for me and i needed a new memory, a new last time. i once had an idea of remembering and cataloging all the last times so i could replace each one in turn, but of course that's impossible.


montauk bug


13.5 miles round trip on this piece of shit, with 25 pounds of gear on my back.


finally made it.


dude, matt. it's just over this hill i swear.


matt taking in the bluffs sunset.


this was in the drawer at the montauket.

fish bum

among other things i've been doing instead of updating the blog is making a fishing zine. this is the first zine i've produced in probably five years, since the one Casey and i did for the art show "The Dogs" in LA. i guess with all this digital/internet stuff i wanted to make a physical object again. this one focuses on urban fishing, with the idea that i'd go around the city and find the hidden spots still left along the city's riverbanks, and talk to the people who've been fishing them for years and years. there's a lot of history in these waters; and it's not just the foul history of dumping raw sewage and oil. this first issue is about part of the East River, with a focus on the Brooklyn Fishing Derby, which i helped organize this year. Hit me up if you want a copy. i may ask for a buck or two for postage. Letterpress cover via Vandercook Universal 3 (sticking to the technical aspect of this blog). the guts are ghetto photocopy. photos by me, and friends maria haddad, liz amoroso, and geralyn shukwit. maria also designed and laid out the pages, some of which i screwed up in the cutter.

more photos and possible things of interest coming up soon.

you don't got a hold of me

mark kozelek takes an AC/DC song about a handjob and just makes it that much more beautiful.

block ice

august 8, 2010

it's a sad and beautiful word

goodwill 2008

this is a photo i took of some guy's portrait that's hanging in the downtown Brooklyn Goodwill. i remember it was crazy cold this day and we ducked inside the store to take a break from the ridiculous wind while we were on our way to the Transit Museum. The picture of the guy with the coke bottle glasses flashing the goat horns was so hilarious to me, juxtaposed with those nasty platform sneakers on the shelf. They had like 10 pairs of them.

my apologies to the one of you who check this blog every few months. i have a post coming up with some pics from Montauk in August taken with the Yashica t5. i've also been pretty busy helping organize this year's Brooklyn Fishing Derby. if you're in NYC and want to get in on some fishing fun check out the derby site. if you don't live in nyc and want to see where i'm posting all my fishing pics this fall, check it out too.

this photo was taken with the pen-ee.

another seagull

requisite birthday bird shot. from august 8 in montauk.

this one time

1997

I found this photo while I was back in Delaware going through a big crate of film and random terrible pictures. This is the first friend I made at the University of Delaware. I have a very strange sense of memory of this time period in which I remember really mundane details and yet other more vivid experiences meld together with a haziness of late morning dreams and memories rehashed and recited and pitched together into a cloudy intangibility. I say this because I remember I first saw Sally on my second or third day at UD in Anthropology class, and when I finally talked to her it was in the library on the third floor. We were studying for some Anthropology test or quiz, separately. She was wearing a Batman T-shirt, I remember that very clearly. I got an A on the test.

A year later I dislocated my ankle skateboarding and was hobbling around on crutches for most of the summer and I went to go visit her in Smyrna or someplace just south of there. Here's where my memory becomes unreliable. I remember walking around some redneck town where she's from: a girl with a mohawk and a China-man on crutches. We went to go eat pizza. We went to the video store to rent "Better Off Dead." We went to this empty, dilapidated pier to sit by the river. This part I remember so vividly that I have to be making this up: I remember there was a breeze at our backs so there weren't any bugs. Across the water I could see the river widening and opening into the ocean, and above that the sun was setting in a deep, humming orange behind these huge ominous dark clouds and lightning was flashing intermittently making them glow and appear to creep across the horizon. See? It was so hauntingly beautiful there's no way I could remember all of that, but that's the memory I have most about that day. That and riding shotgun in Sally's pickup truck listening to Action Patrol. And her high school graduation picture in which she looked like such a normal, nice girl in a white summer dress.

Not that she was anything but nice. She was pretty awesome, highly intelligent, and very sweet to talk with. I'm pretty sure I had the hots for her at one point, but then I saw all these dead animals she kept in her freezer. We were friends until she graduated from UD and I don't think I've seen her since. I probably took this photo with either a really old Nikkormat with a 50mm, 1.4f lens or this Canon Elan IIe I bought a couple months before I went to California then sold shortly after I got back to buy a Nikon N90s. Yeah, blah blah blah. It must have been on the lawn near the Pencader dorms.

1999

This past weekend I was back in Delaware, driving around Newark with my nephew in the back blasting some Jawbreaker out the speakers of my brother's car. It felt like it was 1995, if you didn't think about the fact that none of my friends were around and pretty much every Main Street mainstay is gone to the yuppies save for a few survivors like Bing's Bakery, the National 5&10, Wonderland, the Newark Paper Store, and Al at Newark Camera. The diner is turned into some kind of condo/fancy restaurant with a parking garage, the Stone Balloon is now a wine house and condo, Bert's got bought out by that Gelato dude, Rainbow is still there but it's been sucking since it moved the first time, the bank wall and the parking lot are all either gone to the yuppies or cordoned off by the city to generate a few more bucks from charging for every kind of parking imaginable in a three block radius of Main Street. I'm usually glad I don't live there anymore, but occasionally it's nice to visit.

I got to hang out with Sarah today, which was really good since I haven't seen her since her daughter's birthday in March. We are best friends, but don't get to see or talk to each other often enough since I'm in New York and she has a family with two little kids in Delaware. I must have met Sarah when I was 16 or 17. I remember thinking she was a snobby bitch when I first saw her in Newark Shopping Center one summer night because she looked so cool and I was so dorky and she seemed to know everyone and I was just meeting people like I'd just moved to town, even though I'd lived there my whole life. Anyhow she seemed like one of the popular punk girls and I pretty much thought everyone looked down on me and thought I was ugly so I usually reacted to this ridiculous self-consciousness by being a dick and thinking every girl was a snobby bitch, and otherwise not talking to people, which usually pretty much fulfilled my own prophecy. I guess sometimes I still do this, to my own detriment.

Not with Sarah though. She somehow kicked down the door I left half closed and it seemed like only one day before we were talking all the time, laughing at pretty much everything we said, and arguing in epic clashes that reminisce an alcoholic couple married for 30 years. Only her husband may have experienced more wrath, but mine was probably worse since he'll usually quickly give in, but I would dig in for the long haul like I was preparing to take a hill in the Pacific Theater. I'm just as stubborn and hardheaded as her which would draw out our fights for months in my vain attempt to win the argument. Even during these times we would still call each other every day and start talking like nothing was wrong, until inevitably our conversations would quickly degenerate into full-blown screaming fests over the phone. Sometimes we'd do this a couple times a day, and it would go on like this until I finally admitted she was right and I was wrong.

But I can't begin to count the great times and experiences we've had together for the last 16 or 17 years. Our relationship has never been sexual in nature, so it's always been like we were high school kids on the first days of summer vacation. Today we sat in a park eating fruit and talking shit like always and it's always so easy to talk about everything that we've missed in our lives no matter how long it's been since we last talked. A ferocious storm blew in with gale-force winds and hail so we ran back to her car, and when we saw it was raining too hard to drive we sat around listening to emo-hardcore tapes old friends had made her in 1995 or 1997. She'd just seen Cap'N Jazz the night before, and I laugh because that time period is funnily awful to me and I'm a little embarrassed at myself about it. Talking with her in the car, listening to those tapes, watching the rain and hail blow sideways down this little green valley in the park, made me really glad some things don't change. When the shit hits the fan in my life, Sarah is the first person I need to talk to. She's my best friend.

I took this photo on our first trip to New York City in 1999 outside a bubble tea place on Mott Street. I was going to visit with Pat Tsai and Samantha, who was visiting from Yale. I met Samantha through Pat the previous summer in LA. Sarah and I were super late as usual, and I remember we didn't bring a map because we thought we'd find the street address by driving around, which we did, 2 hours after crossing the Lincoln Tunnel. I ended up making out with a girl under a sleeping bag that night on Pat's kitchen floor, with Sarah sleeping on a couch a mere 10 feet away. She didn't know then, but I think she would have understood what I was going through had she known.

mojave two

hmm.... apparently this photo is too racy for Photobucket because they keep flagging it as a violation of their TOS and taking the picture down. so now i'm trying Flickr, which took me a long time to figure out how to link to the full-size image. it's just not as intuitive as they think... i think. anyhow, this is a shot from the Mojave Desert. nice belly. hopefully Flickr doesn't take this one down also; if they don't i'll probably just switch to Flickr full time.

summers in san francisco

these are a couple of old photos from SF when i was living there, probably around 2002 or 2003. the top one i took with the Olympus Pen-EE. the film got heat damaged at some point, which you can see pretty well in the left photo. i'm not sure why i didn't put this one in with the other Mission Records posts i did a few months ago. i've been digging through a bunch of film and scattered prints in an attempt to get organ-izized and i've found a lot of stuff that i missed because i'm so dis-organ-izized. but i'm getting there...

the second photo is a cross-process pic of sara sandberg at a cafe near the Bay Bridge, right by the bay in fact. i can't remember what it is called. we went on a walk around SF after i moved there. i remember we went back to this apartment she was subletting in the Tenderloin, bought a bunch of 40s, met up with Cinque who cooked this amazing and incredibly spicy thai curry, then we all got super drunk and passed out for a couple hours, and woke up and it was just light out in the evening. i remember summers in San Francisco as cold and foggy; every late afternoon i could see the fog rolling in thick over Twin Peaks from my window, whenever i happened to look out that window. i've been feeling pretty nostalgic for SF lately, maybe because the weather's been so ugly here in New York, but i'm beginning to wonder if i could ever live there again.

SF graffiti

Z

This is a picture I shot of Zarathustra, who goes by several iterations of his ridiculously long name. He's an awesome artist, activist, writer, and all around creator of positive things... mostly. He's also from Delaware and some of the older people from Newark might remember him. I don't remember much about him from Delaware, but I re-met him in San Francisco where he lives now.

I was thinking about Z the last couple days as I've been reading "On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City" by Erick Lyle (who I knew as Iggy Scam) of Scam Zine, one of the great punk zines about getting over on the man, punk and politics, and in a much bigger sense, trying to create a life you want to live, though that last point probably wasn't as apparent as it is now, when one can read all his zines and see him trying to figure it out, the prevailing direction he was always, still is, and back then probably then a little unbeknownst to him, heading toward. He interviews Z a couple times in the book, about graffiti and activism, and helping create the incredible 949 Market Street community space that the cops eventually shut down. There might be more, but I'm only halfway through the book, though I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone, especially anyone who has spent time in SF. Another thing I remember about Zara and Erick is that they were probably two of the top four shoplifters I've ever met.

It was really cool to read Erick's book and see interviews with people I knew back then, the things they were doing before I met them, and how they were living in the city those years ago: living on welfare, donating time at food banks and needle exchange groups, hanging out and meeting the neighborhood and being known by them, really on-the-level kind of stuff. I found his history of Hunt's Doughnuts, a SF fixture on 20th and Mission that became synonymous with all-that-was-wrong with the City, really intriguing and well done. It made me want to re-read that history of Mission Records article I wrote for MRR back in 2005 or something. Two notoriously infamous places only blocks apart with a long, storied, and somewhat lost history. Aside from reading about old friends, Hunt's Doughnuts was probably my favorite part.

I was involved with these people back then. They were variously my friends and associates, partners in crime, though I think back then I was much more into the destructive, illegal side of things than positive activism. It was really Mission Records that brought me into their lives, living with Buzz and in the space. I missed the heyday of the place and only had the ghosts really to experience. But all those friends really showed me that things could be poor and dark, a struggle and great all at the same time.

I took this one outside of, I think, Rachel's house, which was on Capp Street at the time. We may have been doing something for the Anarchist Fashion Show. Actually I wasn't doing anything; I was just wearing clothes Z made.

in my hour of darkness

This is the only thing that I can stomach after losing the Stanley Cup Finals last week. It's a parody game call of the final play of the season, that ended with the Flyers losing in OT in game 6. The video is actually pretty funny... "Oh, it's a goal... postgame coming up." Anyhow, I'm still super bummed, but still proud to be a Flyers fan for 24 years. More photos coming when I can get over the loss.

after the fall

i haven't been updating recently because i've been watching the philadelphia flyers unlikely and improbable run to the Stanley Cup. well, they finally lost it last night to a weird goal that should have been saved, but it wasn't. very depressing for me, since it's been a good 23 years since i first watched them in the finals. not that this photo has anything to do with any of that. this one is from the yashica t4, in 2004, on a short road trip to big sur from san francisco on the 1. very weird time for me back then.

you're gonna miss me

montauk











Photos that I didn't mess up from my last trip to San Francisco. Other than the first photograph, the rest are from Stinson Beach north of San Francisco. I took all of these with the Seagull 205A. Great camera that always continues to impress. It's a shame these are all I have to show for my last trip out there, but the Olympus Pen-FT still had some kinks to work out apparently. I think I finally figured what was wrong with that camera, though I still have some testing to do. The lens (I think it's the lens) seems to be shooting a half-stop fast, so I'm testing stopping it down a half-stop and see what happens. It's still very trial and error.

I miss it all so much. You never should have left me.