starring mike d as …
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…. special guest star on the Ironic T-Shirt episode of Glee.
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… jaded Freelance Creative Type (see artfully-wrapped skinny scarf)) on his morning commute to his rented workspace in that building in the Flatiron District around the corner from the Stumptown Coffee.
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… renegade (see t-shirt) agent to the stars, at his weekly power lunch, deleting all of the unlistened-to voicemails from Darren Aronofsky.
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… as special guest star on Glee who really cannot stop singing.
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… as photographer (of yours truly). We decided that the negative turned out much more interesting:
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All photos taken at, or en route to, Peels, for a post-birthday lunch. So nice to luxuriate on a weekday!
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11 january.
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Happy Birthday! To me!
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medium format gents.
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They’re good eggs, these gents.
1. Andrew | Gowanus
2. Jason | Park Slope
3. Jeremy | Chelsea
4. Daniel | Boerum Hill
And a bonus lady! My niece, Alia, with her dad (aka my brother), taken while I was back in Los Angeles for the holidays.
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new year’s eve.
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December 31, 2011 was less about New Year’s Eve for me, and more about ending a pretty crazy year on a happy note, filled from beginning to end with good company, good food, and good cheer. A success? Methinks yes. The day started at Mike and Justin’s place for some Premier League soccer watching and some glorious breakfast pizzas. Yup: fried eggs over leftover bacon & sausage pizza. Outstanding. Later, my friend Jeremy and I wandered around Red Hook as the sun set, taking lots of photos and managing to get lost, before we finally found our way back to Court Street and Prime Meats for some cocktails. Then! Chinatown, for soup dumplings at two different (but perhaps related?) spots, Shanghai Asian Manor on Mott Street, and Shanghai Asian Cuisine on Elizabeth. (The former’s xiao long bao are a tad better.) Finally, it was off to a party at my pals Michael and Sara’s place, where we rang in the new year with maybe a wee bit too much Bulleitt Rye (excellent!) and Champagne.
So yes, indeed, a resoundingly successful end of the year and start of this new one. Hope you all had equally wonderful days into nights.
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los angeles i’m yours.
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While I was home for a brief holiday visit, I took the car out on Christmas day, around 3 in the afternoon, to snap a few shots of my parents’ neighborhood with the Hasselblad and the Polaroid back as the sun slowly dropped below the horizon. The shots taken with the Polaroid back have this slightly dreamy feel (probably helped by the fact that they’ve been blown up well beyond their original size), while the ones taken with with the regular A-12 magazine clip loaded with Kodak Portra 160 have a more expansive, documentary quality. (For comparison, see the last photo of this post, and the first one from the previous post.)
I like both types of images, but what struck me the most, as I tooled around the suburbs, was how beautiful and desolate everything was, all at once. It was, of course, Christmas day, so hardly anyone was out, and the parking lots were quite empty — but I think that made the sheer vastness of the environs stand out so much. So much of LA is asphalt, of getting to and from destinations. Growing up I detested all of the roads, of the time it took to get anywhere. Now, when I’m home, I can’t help but marvel at the scale of it all. LA is all sprawl, but it takes a lot of planning to sprawl as much, and as elaborately, as it does. Photographing it, or at least trying to, was something of a quiet delight. I can’t wait to return.
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los angeles | preview.
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I came, I saw, I ate a lot of food and took five rolls of Polaroids. Until I get around to scanning everything, here are a couple of my favorite shots for your edification. Hope everyone had a relaxing weekend.
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456.
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A few nights ago, my housemates and I threw ourselves a three-person, all-out holiday dinner, complete with pan-roasted chicken, oven-roasted root veggies, and mashed potatoes. And a couple of lovely bottles of red wine. Maybe a nightcap’s worth of bourbon. It was great, full of blustery conversation and clean-platedness, tiny kitchen notwithstanding. The Hasselblad + Polaroid back made an appearance early on and never quite left the proceedings. (Mental note: the Fuji 3000-speed instant film might be kind of amazing.)
How do you top that? Not sure. We’ve planned to do this all again soon, possibly with beef bourguignon and some homemade pasta — yes, that is indeed how we roll. There’s no way the Hasselblad + Pola is going to miss out on that.
In any event, have a lovely holiday, however you choose to celebrate/acknowledge/sleep through it. I’m spending much of the extended weekend on planes, no doubt catching up on episodes of terrible television shows available on my in-flight entertainment package. Good times!
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new jersey.
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It’s something of a shame that when I think of New Jersey, I think not of that silly MTV show, or The Boss, or even, say, Bon Jovi. When I think of New Jersey, this song always comes into my head. Always. It’s a great song, but doesn’t do the state any favors.
It was a treat to head out of town this weekend for an overnight trip to Princeton, emptied of most of its students for winter break, quiet and still just about everywhere. And gorgeous. The midday light was absolutely spectacular.
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polaroid weekend.
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So last Friday I went and got myself a Polaroid 100 back for my Hasselblad — basically making Dashiell instant-film-ready. The resulting images are tiny — just the size of a regular 120 negative, so not much larger than 2×2 inches (i’ve blown them up here for your viewing pleasure) — but there’s something gorgeous and dreamy about them: not quite capturing the focusing capabilities of the Zeiss lens, but still taking in all the proportions of a Hasselblad shot, slightly blurry and mesmerizing, evocative but still fully present, all at once. It’s been great fun, taking the images and pulling the polaroids out of the back of the camera, and waiting the requisite 1-4 minutes for the film to develop. Or at least it’s been fun for me; I can’t speak for my photographic subjects/companions, who may have looked upon this entire endeavour with bewilderment. But hey! , look at how everything turned out: like a dream, nudging ever so willfully into the real.
Also, I’ll take this over the Hipstamatic app any day. Just sayin’.
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eleanor, recently and blurrily.
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Yes, yes, I’ve been neglecting my Leica ever since the Hasselblad came into my life. When I took this roll into the photo lab this afternoon, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what was on 3/4 of it, since the Leica hasn’t been in my bag a whole lot recently. What a wonderful surprise, then, to see so many ridiculously off-the-cuff moments, the instances that would have been impossible to take with the bulky Hasselblad. And so much food! A little Thanksgiving here, a Mike-made brunch there, and some pastries thataway. My first exposure to a shotgun! And of course, friends all over the place.
I wish having two cameras in my bag weren’t such a daunting, weighty thing — it would be great to carry both the Leica and Hasselblad around at the same time. Until I find a way to increase muscle mass solely for the purposes of carrying around the equivalent of a two year old (or at least that’s what it feels like), enjoy these for now.
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hong-an tran 