new years eve.
I rang in the new year at the local, but the shenanigans started much earlier in the day. After a trip to a Chelsea optometrist to get a new pair of glasses, I decided to stop into Co. for some pizza; after all, I’d ended 2009 with a great meal at Motorino — why not continue the trend in 2010? One sausage, fennel, and mushroom pie and a glass of sparkling Gruner Veltliner later, I stuck around for a bit, to catch up on some reading. Two gentlemen sat down next to me at the bar, in a jovial and generous mood, buying another glass of Gruner for me while they scarfed down three pies between the two of them. “We needed a snack before our 8:30 reservations at Per Se!” they proclaimed. They were hilarious (and, apparently, serious about their Per Se reservations — goodness, some people know how to live). Then they proceeded to buy a round of the Gruner for the bar. It was a most perfect, if unexpected, way to end the year.
new year, new film.
This post really ought to be titled New Year, New Film, Same Old Inability To Focus Which Might Mean Another Trip To The Optometrist. Or basically: Happy New Year! I’m really digging this first roll of Kodak Ektar 100, which is proving to live up to its proclamation of World’s Finest Grain. It’s giving me a much sharper, more vivid experience than the Portra 160NC, and right now it’s the kind of change I need in my photography. I just wish my Super Takumar lens (50mm f/1.4) would just give me a break already. Such a sensitive little thing! Goes off-focus with the slightest of ease. Hrmph.
Case in point: A lovely Sunday brunch with JT at Gusto in the West Village. We decided to indulge in late morning pastas, eschewing all forms of egginess save the lone yolk atop JT’s carbonara. No alcohol, no caffeine. And yet, my hands and eyes proved much more unsteady than I would’ve expected … well, maybe I can blame the pictoral fuzziness on the champagne from two nights earlier. Probably not. I’m starting to think that maybe the Pentax/Takumar combination is best utilized at middle distances, and not for anything terribly up close. Hmmmm.
(This photo immediately above, of JT’s krama, is such an anomaly in this batch of Ektar — it feels much more Portra-ish in its muted tones, and also is much more reminiscent of Lomo-style optics. Odd!)
In any event, at least the very top photograph, of pre-meal fritters, came out alright. And goodness me! I’m just excited to see what else Ektar can do, especially outdoors. I’ll be posting a few more photographs from this test roll in the next few days. And I hope everyone had an exceptionally raucous and memorable New Years.
[untitled.]
Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Many things weren’t supposed to happen the way they did this year for me, and I’d thought that I had effectively ended my year, a few days early, on a clear and hopeful note: load my cameras with Ektar and begin to see anew. And then that happened: possibly the best photograph I took all year happened in a moment of pure happenstance last night, with my very un-film-loaded iPhone, and — here’s the kicker — using a fake Polaroid app. And now it’s 14 hours before the new year, and my clarity has completely unraveled once more.
I’ve been working on a longish essay on my issues with iPhone apps like ShakeItPhoto (which I used in the photo above) and Hipstamatic, and though I’m hoping to post it here in the next few weeks, my position is basically this: in making everything aesthetically pleasing, the apps water down what it means to see photographically, to truly capture moments of grace. The apps render otherwise unremarkable photographs beautiful, and that just sort of pisses me off. Even if I sometimes use the apps too.
Last night on the subway home, I was standing next to a seated man with a green-gilded book in his lap. I almost never use my iphone camera for anything other than quick food snaps when it’s too dark to use my film cameras, and I certainly never take photos of random people on the subway, but there I was, trying to surreptitiously take a photograph of him sitting there right in front of me, quietly reading. And here it is. And I can’t tell if I think it’s awesome because it is awesome, or if it’s awesome only because an app has rendered it so. I don’t think a film camera (other than possibly an actual Polaroid) could have captured this as well as the iPhone did — and, more to the point, I don’t think I would’ve even attempted to take this with a film camera, unwieldy manual lens be damned. And now I find myself reveling in the pleasures of an image whose technological provenance I’ve spent the better part of the last six months quietly raging against.
That’s all I’ve got for you. Like 2010, I can’t seem to end on a particularly edifying note.
the gamechanger.
(OK, so yes, this photograph has already made an appearance in this blog, way back when. But who doesn’t like to linger on a close up shot of Maialino’s bomboloni con crema?)
But here’s the thing: discovering Maialino’s brunch this year has changed my relationship to noontime on the weekends. And all for the better, might I add. And since I only manage to eat there about once every six weeks, it’s not a place I ever tire of, even though I’ll probably order the same dish every time.
The same hasn’t been true, however, of my film choices of late. I’ve been tiring of my old standbys, Kodak Portra 160NC and 400NC. Don’t get me wrong — I love seeing New York shot through those slightly muted tones; it gives the city a much calmer air. But that calmness has dulled my own sensibilities a bit, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to get reinspired by what I see around me. And finally this week, a single photograph has reinvigorated me. Taken by Dunstan Lee, aka slowbicycler, the photograph pops in such wonderful ways, and is infused with such a great New York-ness that it just kind of kills me. (I can’t embed the photograph here, so please do click on the link above.) I hadn’t given Kodak Ektar much thought before this, and now all I can think about is finding some time to get over to B&H and scoop up a few rolls, to see what my Nikon and Pentax can do with them.
So yes: in the new year, I hope to have a new New York to show you.
winter slumberland.
Well, the Great Blizzard of Late 2010 descended upon us last night. I spent the first few hours of it holed up at a cafe near my house, then ventured into the city to meet up with my old friend Matt (aka Kitty — long story), where from our perch at Marshall Stack, then Lil Frankie’s, and finally DBA, we watched the city slowly shut down. I love how quiet everything gets, and I love waking up in the morning to the sounds of …. absolutely nothing, as the absence of working snow plows meant that my street was completely car-free.
It’s still very quiet now, but that’s mostly because I decided, perhaps foolishly, to be a productive worker bee and make the trek to my midtown office, where I think there are maybe ten people around. I don’t think I’ve ever seen midtown this unpopulated, this still. I want to derive some sort of pleasure from this, but it’s hard when, well, you’re in midtown. At work. When you probably didn’t have to be.
Ah well. Everyone else: enjoy your snow day!
[Photos taken in January 2009, on an Amtrak train from Connecticut back to NYC]
l’artusi.
Since we’ve been on something of a biscuits and gravy kick the past six months or so, there was no way that Mark and I were going to miss out on the b+g iteration at L’Artusi after this glowing review on Serious Eats. And indeed, the b+g that we got were quite tasty, with both dried and crumbled sausage thrown into the mix (though the dried sausage started to taste a bit like pepperoni — not a bad thing in general, but it started to infuse everything with a very un-biscuits-and-gravy-like pizza-ness). And Mark’s bloody mary was good, as was my glass of white wine. But the restaurant itself — huh.
Here’s the thing: I normally don’t go to places that require reservations for brunch. The only exception to that rule is Maialino, but it’s such an exemplar of good service and excellent food that I don’t mind the added step. Sitting among the well-heeled in a light-infused space next to Gramercy Park — hell, I’d be at Maialino all the time if I could. (And indeed, I celebrated Christmas at Maialino today with a lazy, genteel brunch at the bar. More on that in a post to come.) So yeah, if you’re gonna require reservations, you’d better be worth it, on all levels. But L’Artusi’s in this bizarre two-story space with a skylight that bathes maybe a third of the restaurant in natural light, while the rest of the place is blanketed with deep blue walls and white wainscoting. It’s like farmhouse meets corporate hotel chain. When we got there, and realized that we needed reservations to sit at a table, we were offered seats at either the regular bar or the “cheese bar.” OK. Cheese bar. (We opted for the regular bar.) Also, and no offense to blondes, but there were A LOT of you at the restaurant that day. And you were all celebrating a baby shower. And I think you all went to the same colorist. What was I talking about? Oh, right. Yeah, it was like eating in a Sex and the City episode, only actually eating and not pecking at my food. I can’t remember the last time I felt so out of place at a restaurant with regular ol’ brunch prices.
At one point Mark started to talk about how he wanted to work at a corporate law firm again, just for a year, so that he could make enough money to have a lifestyle similar to everyone around us. It’s that kind of place: where you feel so out of place that you start to have deluded, bizarro aspirations, just so you can fit in. Sweet jesus, that’s what it is: L’Artusi’s where everyone you hated in high school now goes to brunch.
this week.
Nuts. This week: absolutely bonkers. All I can do to keep sane at work, as I get buried under ever increasing piles of paperwork, is to make plans for evening meals with friends. Tuesday night I met up with Donny to check out Cocoron, the new soba place near the corner of Allen and Delancey. And it was lovely! For starters we tried some hijiki and steamed chicken meatballs covered in sticky rice. (Yes!) Up next: two steaming bowls of exceptionally warming soba, mine with pork and scallions and Donny’s with a variety of veggies and sprouts. The salty sweet broth hit all necessary spots on a chilly night, and helped to calm me down after a long day at work. We lingered a while afterwards, watching the chefs work on their tamago technique — and even got to sample a bit of their handiwork.
Christmas is just around the corner, though I can barely tell this year with all of my time in the office. I’ve planned proper meals for the rest of the week, though, and I’m hoping that those will get me in the right mood for Saturday. Or at least a non-frenzied mood. End of the year work insanity has also left me feeling a bit uninspired, photography-wise, and so I’m hoping the good eats will coax the camera eye back into action.
the birds.
Back in 2007, while on a visit to the Cooper Hewitt Museum, I stumbled on a great exhibit by designer Ingo Maurer. I’d never heard of him before, but I snapped a handful of photographs of his amazing lighting designs. (One of the photos served as the header of my old blog.) I hadn’t thought about him in a little while, but this morning while wandering around my Flickr page, I came across this photograph of one of his pieces, which I’d taken with my old Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim (which weirdly sounds like a cigarette). The Vivitar UWS is known as the poor-man’s Lomo, since it costs something like $5 and is completely, hopelessly plastic and will break with great ease; my own Vivitar came apart last summer in Amsterdam, after a futile battle with a jammed rewind mechanism.
In any event, I love this photo, because even with the plastic optics and poor-man’s exposure, it really brings out the beauty of Maurer’s work – something that was evident in the exhibit, but nonetheless a bit muddled beneath the gallery lights. Time Out had a nice write-up of the show here — and you can see the design in question over on the left hand side of the photograph.
suckling pig feast at back forty.
This was at the end of the meal, right before Mike blew out the candles on his birthday fruit crisp. I’m giving advance warning to anyone who might not want to see pig photos to steer away now. Here’s a picture of a couple of random drinks as a visual buffer.
Ok, carnivores, here you go. Complete and utter porcine madness at Mike’s birthday dinner a couple of weeks ago. (And despite using 800 speed film pushed one stop, many of the photos still turned out a bit dark, which might be for the best.) The suckling pig, cut into manageable serving portions:
And, of course, this:
(I’m normally quite opposed to using flash in my photographs, but I happened to snap this pic as Mike was using the flash on his camera. In case anyone needed to see the pig’s head in … er …. better light.) There’s a photograph floating around on flickr (not on my flickr page) of me and the pig head in terrible embrace. It was that kind of night. I’d show you more, but I suspect I would offend even some of the carnivores here. In any event, lest we forget the reason for fourteen people converging on a farm table in the East Village, here’s one last photo, of dear Mike blowing out the candles. It was a very lovely, mildly gruesome, absolutely perfect night.
m. wells diner.
Last weekend, we celebrated Mike’s birthday with a suckling pig feast at Back Forty. (More on that in a post to come.) To celebrate the fact that we survived the suckling pig feast, Mike, Fred, Ziki and I met up the following morning at M. Wells Diner in Long Island City for a brunch that rivaled the pig feast in sheer gluttonous awesomeness. Fred got the seafood cobbler, described by our waiter as “shepherd’s pie meets Montauk,” a completely apt description for a haddock (we think, anyway) and bechamel-filled ramekin topped with biscuits and gruyere. Sweet lord. Ziki opted for the diner’s signature egg sausage sandwich, a homemade version of McDonald’s Sausage-Egg McMuffin (and a hundred times better). Mike and I split half a meat pie, which, well, you can check out the photo above and the one below. Oh my god oh my god. It came with a cranberry ketchup that gave the proceedings a slightly Thanksgiving-ish air (not a bad thing at all). And we collectively decided that the meal wouldn’t be right without a side of fries. And some banana cream pie for dessert. Of course.
I can’t decide if I love or hate the fact that M. Wells is all the way in Long Island City — it’s a trek to get there, and so I rarely go. But visits end up being such special occasions, with such gastronomic debauchery, and I think that that would be lost if it were more conveniently located (read: down my street). Bah, who am I kidding — I would kill to have this place nearby. I don’t think I could ever get enough of it.
Oh, and for the photographically inclined: this is what Portra 800 looks like when you push it one stop and take pictures in daytime at mostly f/2.8. I was sure they’d come out much grainier and overexposed. Go figure.
hong-an tran 