doylestown.
My upcoming trip to Pittsburgh reminded me of the last time I was in a non-Philadelphia part of Pennsylvania. Back in November 2008, on the last weekend before the presidential election, Daniel and I clambered aboard a bus in the wee hours in the morning and traveled down to Doylestown as part of the Obama campaign’s (nearly-)eleventh hour effort to sway the Bucks County vote. Along with two other volunteers, Troy and Robert, we drove around designated parts of town, knocked on doors, and reminded people to vote that Tuesday. At one point we were even trailed and interviewed by a French TV crew.
During our down time between neighborhoods, I took a few photos on my Nikon loaded with expired Ektachrome 64. (That bottom photo was taken just shortly after the very top photo of the pink leaves, except severely underexposed; cool, eh?) And after I adjusted the aperture and shutter settings for him, Daniel fiddled around with the manual focus and managed to snap a photo of yours truly. By the time we got back to the city that night, we were exhausted but hopeful. And sure enough, on Tuesday night, Bucks County went to Obama.
The current political quagmire aside, those first few days of November were pretty exhilarating. I suspect the upcoming midterm elections will be just as electrifying, though perhaps for less than ideal reasons. Let’s just focus for now on the pretty pictures, shall we?
the ruinista thing.
It’s Friday. I figured I’d take a low-readership day to muse a bit on a couple of things: my past, and the past.
[York, UK, 1997]
So about that ruinista thing: yeah, I’ve got a thing for ruins. I’m fascinated by them, in that way that just about everyone is fascinated by how tangible evidence of physical decay maybe more poignantly speaks to our fascination with our own mortality. But I’m much more curious about what still-existing ruins suggest about what we want to say about ourselves as a collective — local, national, or otherwise. And how ruins help shape that collective history and give order to the present. I even wrote a doctoral dissertation about it.
At the most recent ladies night, Shannon asked me about my dissertation, at which point I think my eyes glazed over slightly. I used to be able to give a 50-word summary of what it was that I had spent the bulk of my adult life thinking about; now, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what, exactly, I had been doing from 1998-2006. So I dug out my dissertation abstract from an old email by way of response:
Ephemeral Monumentality: A Critical and Visual Inquiry into Ideologies of History and Progress
In this dissertation I argue for an expansion and transformation of post-structuralist and Frankfurt School critiques of history and progress through a rigorous integration of images and visual materials into the critical methods themselves. I suggest that etchings of a ruinous ancient Rome by 18th century Italian architect Giovanni-Battista Piranesi are emblematic of a critical and visual rethinking of emerging, Enlightenment-era-related conceptions of time – conceptions which continue to give order to our experiences today. Using these etchings as a visual framework for my project, I explore and critique the disciplinary parameters guiding the construction of historical narratives; from there I offer a reworked understanding of emerging notions of subjectivity and their relationship to a linear conception of historical time. This image-oriented critique of history as a continuous, seamless narrative culminates in a discussion of the dialectic between monuments and ruins, where I argue that in perpetuating a nostalgic longing for the past, romanticized writings on ruins also render invisible a productive reading of urban space as the necessarily discontinuous co-existence of past and present.
(For what it’s worth, I fully recognize how absurd all of this sounds from an academic jargon standpoint. I wrote about this a little while ago on my old blog.) Basically, I argued for 200+ pages that the simplistic, nostalgic romanticizing of ruins gets in the way of much more interesting inquiries into what ruins might tell us about our collective identity, or perhaps more precisely, our idealized collective identity. Why do we hold on to decay? Why do we need barely-standing physical markers of the past in the present? What in our notion of ‘history’ demands palpable evidence of some kind of continuity (however imagined or artificial) with a world no longer extant? And, to loop back to the beginning, what does our nostalgia suggest about the history we want to write for ourselves? And what does photography have to do with any of this?
There’s a lot of thinking out loud here — but I’m thinking I’ll use this space, perhaps on Low-Readership Fridays, to work through some of these ideas and questions. In a post at aforementioned old website, I wrote at (medium) length about the fetishization of decay, and began to poke a little bit at how photographic images of ruins play into that fetishization. I’m hoping to explore that more here, especially as I work through questions I have about my own photographic desires. Why do I photograph ruins? Or more tellingly, why, after my dissertation, did I basically stop looking at (or for) ruins? Am I burnt out on them, or is it a fear that I’m perpetuating all of my worst critiques about nostalgia for, and aestheticization of, decay?
So, yeah: ruins. Read all about them, here, on Fridays!
Back to our reguarly scheduled programming shortly.
Edited to add, three hours later: I can’t believe I wrote an entire post about ruins and all of that, and didn’t once mention Walter Benjamin. Shows you how far I’ve come (gone?) from academia.
keflavik.
In my I Need To Travel, Stat, Even If That Means Being In Airports All The Time manifesto yesterday, I forgot I had taken this photograph, back in June 2009, on the way back from my trip to the Netherlands. We had a two or three hour layover at Iceland’s Keflavik airport, so I wandered around with my Yashica Mat 124, taking photographs of planes parked at the gates, and of the vast flatness of the landscape surrounding the airport. This shot of a nearly empty, darkened corridor, though, is the one that came out the best.
excellent eats with jt.
Last night, over burgers at Savoy, my friend JT asked with joking indignation why he hadn’t yet shown up on my month-old blog. Patience, my dear, patience. (I’ll also take single-malt bribes.) But it got me thinking about how he and I have had some pretty spectacular meals, both homemade and dining out. From the top, this includes: the Vesper Brett charcuterie plate at Prime Meats; a masala dosa from the Dosa Man in Washington Square Park; homemade gnocchi; freshly-shucked oysters from The Lobster Place in Chelsea Market; Irish fry-up (and noontime Guinness!) at Molly’s Shebeen; homemade bacon-egg-n-cheese sandwiches; and bwah moun, a spicy chicken + ginger soup at the now-departed Kampuchea. And mind you, the ones pictured here are instances where I’ve actually had my camera around — this doesn’t include insane meals at Minetta Tavern and Babbo.
So dear JT: your time will come. Keep supping with me in style (cough cough SINGLE MALT cough cough), and that time will come much, much sooner, I can assure you. Also, never ever get rid of this phone. It is awesome.
jetlag-free living.
In 2009, I took two big trips: London/Berlin in February, and the Netherlands in June. I also went home to Los Angeles — twice! — to celebrate my nephew’s first birthday in October, and then for the holidays in December. The LA trips were 4-day affairs, wee little trips, but still: I did my fair share of traveling last year. And, while traveling and airports and layovers and all of that can be exhausting, it’s really quite lovely to leave your town, traipse about a new one (or laze about in an old one), and return again, seeing New York anew and remembering why you call it home.
Well, in 2010, I’ve made only one trip requiring actual flight — Vegas, baby! — and am heading out to Pittsburgh next week to visit an old friend. But that’s it for this year; I won’t be heading home for the holidays, and a trip to China has been postponed until some time later next year. Just two 4-day trips in 2010. To be sure, Las Vegas was pretty hilarious, and Pittsburgh no doubt will be a great, gut-busting time. (Tessaro’s and D’s Six Pax & Dogz are in the cards, and that’s just Day One.) But I sort of miss jetlag, and the disorientation of waking up and being not quite sure where I am, and I miss being away just long enough that I momentarily forget that I was ever a New Yorker. And, when it comes down to it, I’ve been in the city much too much this year, and have found myself wondering at times why I call it home. (Blasphemy!) I need to leave New York more often, so that I can return to it with a clearer head and refocused eyes.
So that’s my New Year’s resolution, three whole months before I have to make it, and probably the only resolution I’ll ever stick to: I’m going to be much more jetlagged in 2011, dammit! Lisbon, Madrid, Shanghai: you have no idea what’s coming to you. And New York: I’ll come back, as always, knowing exactly why I’d never leave you for good.
[LAX, October 2009]
ladies night.
Recently, several of the ladies at my local (including yours truly) have been meeting up on a semi-regular basis outside of the local. Rather than cheating on the local, we’ve been meeting at nearby apartments (sounds tawdry, no?), where we make food, drink wine, and talk about our work weeks and occasional gentleman drama. It’s a nice way to unwind without said gentlemen in the immediate picture, but mostly it’s been a lovely way to get to know the ladies outside of the context of the local. Three of us are involved in the legal universe, one is in publishing, and another is a dancer, so our conversations range from where to get the best pizza in Pittsburgh, to volunteering at an adult literacy program, to how to stay friends with your ex, to the relative merits of David Bowie. It’s sort of wonderfully banal and middlebrow and Chardonnay-free, and I hope it becomes a tradition that continues well into the (un)foreseeable future.
chelsea, july 2009.
Daniel and Sally in the backyard of Sally Pope’s glorious brownstone in Chelsea. I’m almost certain this was the 4th of July, which undoubtedly meant an incredible food spread and an endless array of spectacular wine. Then again, it seems like any old day in the Pope household involves impossibly wonderful food and wine. My envy is profound.
In fact a few weeks after these photos were taken, Ralf, another member chez Pope (and producer of much of the glorious in-house fooding), held his second annual Summer Suckling Pig Out at his nearby restaurant, Trestle on Tenth (a spot I highly recommend — the crispy duck necks are irresistible!). By the time we left, 6, maybe 7, pigs had come out, and the festivities were only just getting to that raucous, buzzy part of the afternoon. Here’s a photo of Ralf and pig no.1.
Each pig was successively crispier, and around pig no.4, I found myself batting my eyelashes at Ralf, demurely requesting (ok, not that demurely, and more like pleading for) one of the crispy pig’s ears. With a drink in one hand, a pig’s ear in the other, and my big old Yashica hanging from my shoulder, I couldn’t imagine a better way to laze away a Sunday afternoon in July.
no.7 sub
Last week I finally got a taste of No.7 Sub, the crazy-combo sandwich shop that opened up in a pocket-sized storefront of the Ace Hotel in the Flatiron District. BG ordered the roast beef (top) with chimichurri, hummus, and potato chips (I know!), while I got the lamb meatloaf (above) with chipotle tomato sauce, hard-boiled eggs, and fresh mozzarella. Both were pretty spectacular, especially since they were consumed under sunny, barely-autumn skies in Madison Square Park — on a weekday, no less — and were so filling that we each finished half our sandwiches and haphazardly re-wrapped the rest for later. And later — well, maybe the bread didn’t have the same crunchy-soft contrast as before, but my goodness, the flavors still shone through. They’ve got a General Tso’s Tofu sandwich on the menu, which I’m told is quite tasty, so that’s on my to-do (to-eat?) list for October. Anyone care to join me?
m & m & m with m.
My friend Mark and I went to MoMA on Sunday, where we failed to get into the Matisse exhibit but caught a nice video piece by Dinh Q. Le, and meandered through the permanent collection for a while before hunger kicked in and our stomachs growled for ramen (more on that in a post to come). On Friday night we somehow ended up at Marco Polo, a red sauce Italian-American place on Court Street that failed to impress, despite what I had read about it a couple of weeks earlier. Saturday brunch at Maialino more than made up for it: we gilded the lily with some cocktails and creme-filled bomboloni. Oh yes!
The only truly unfortunate part of this weekend was my decision to use a roll of regular Kodak Gold 200 from the drugstore, since I’d run out of proper film and B & H is still closed for the Jewish holidays. The graininess is a little appalling, but well, sometimes, them’s the breaks.
1999.
The view through the screen at Brendan and his sister Jessica’s old apartment on Columbia Street in Brooklyn. I miss this view, in more ways than one.
hong-an tran 