long overdue update. lots of work going on, but here's one in the spirit of fourth of july. everyone was mad at me by the time these fireworks were gone. summer in nyc.

jacob riis

july 2011, taken with the Olympus Pen-FT

fort tilden on a cold may day

two dead thresher sharks caught by someone and thrown up on the beach.


bride of frankenstein



Fort Tilden a day after the Rapture. May 22, 55 degrees. All photos taken with the Yashica t5.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

¡que accidente!

not really a real update, though I have one in the works. i just took a couple shots of my new additions and subtractions today. i crashed my bike on Greenpoint Avenue an hour or so ago. i got cut off by a BMW that was going around another car turning left. the funny thing is i probably would have been ok had the BMW not run over my right foot as he was trying to get his car out of the way after i'd crashed. also... brakes. what the hell man. i actually converted one of my track bikes to a single-speed freewheel with brakes and was riding that one today. the stopping power of that front brake is impressive, the back one not as much. maybe i'll put the fixed gear side back on and keep the brakes and use all three to stop the bike next time. the guy in the car was pretty cool and this German girl up the block helped me out with some bandages and Neosporin-type ointment. speaking of which, gauze and bandages are expensive! who knew? i might owe her some money.



also my sneaker got all destroyed too.

the march girl

to borrow a chorus from the great band Dead Moon:

it's ok.
we've all seen better days.
it's ok.
we love you anyway.

happy birthday.

"You don't eat the fish out of there, do you?"

polaroid shot by susan


bluefish

Finally posted the article on the Brooklyn Fishing Derby on FANZINE. It's a long piece, but a good read. Ever wonder what you can catch out of the East River, aside from arsenic poisoning? Dark days and hobo fishing at its most amateur, as well as the controversial new saltwater fishing license issue. Read it here.