doubletake.
The film-advancing mechanism on Pony, my Yashica Mat 124, has always been a little sticky on the very first exposure of every roll of film. Sometimes this proves fortuitous.
islay.
Back in 1997, when I visited Edinburgh, I also spent a week out on Islay, a wee island off the western coast of Scotland, and source of my favorite single malts — the smoky, peaty varieties that do wonders on a chilly December evening. It was perhaps the best week of my life, just traipsing around the moors and wandering through the island’s tiny towns. One day, with time to kill because of a delayed bus, I rented a bike and went up and down the island’s southern coast, sharing the road with just a handful of cars and stumbling upon the Islay Historical Society’s museum of sorts: a one-room house on a hill overlooking the sea, filled with knick-knacks and run by a kind older woman who was a bit astounded to discover that I spoke English.
My most memorable moment, however, was on the second or third day of the trip. One rainy weekend morning, I found myself waiting for the bus in tiny Port Ellen to take me to the island’s wee capital, Bowmore. Soon, a bespectacled gentleman also took shelter at the covered bus stop, and after introducing himself to the obvious out of towner, we struck up a conversation.
Ian: What are you waiting for?
Me: The bus to Bowmore.
Ian. Ah.
Me: What are you waiting for?
Ian: Eleven o’clock.
Me: What happens at eleven?
Ian: [points down the street] Pub opens.
The next thing I knew, Ian had convinced me to take the 12:30 bus and in the meanwhile join him and his cousin Jimmy at the local pub. There, at eleven in the morning, about a dozen men were already sitting at little tables drinking wee glasses of vodka+lemonade. Ian ordered me a whisky. I protested, pointing out that it was, well, before noon. Ian’s response: Ah, it’ll set you straight for the day!
The three of us clinked our whiskey glasses, and Ian and Jimmy very sweetly posed for the photograph above. An hour later, I climbed aboard the rickety bus, my belly warmed with whiskey.
llewy.
Ithaca, summer 2002. One of my favorite portraits.
the car around the corner.
On my way to the subway nearly every morning, I see this hulking monstrosity of green. It’s always parked either down my block, or just around the corner, and I’ve long wondered who owns it. For one thing, it’s in pretty amazing condition; this is clearly someone’s baby. And for another thing, this is a most unnatural shade of green — I noticed the color long before I noticed the fact of the car itself. Someone must really believe in this car, to be seen driving around enveloped in the equivalent of a peppermint candy foil wrapper. (Then again, it looks like Ford Granadas have had color issues across the board.)
I took this photo on my way to work some time last week; it had rained a wee bit the night before. I’m hoping one day I’ll see someone opening the door of the car to get in, or even better, the car actually out and about. I’m really curious as to what kind of music emanates from a car like this.
(Oh, and thanks to flickr contact slowbicycler for identifying the make of the car. Everyone ought to check out his flickr page — it’s pretty incredible.)
wyoming.
Just outside Yellowstone National Park, 1996. This place touted itself as the last gas station before you hit Yellowstone on its eastern border, which basically meant that the gas prices were insane.
last weekend.
This past weekend = early autumn in all its lovely glory: corn pizza at Company, gravied brunch, more brunch, drinks with (er … near) the Fashion Week douches at the Maritime Hotel, roasted greenmarket tomatoes, lazy peaches, the angry — ANGRY! — Sunday crossword, and then a lovely dinner at AQT’s place in Lefferts Garden. And sherry, OH SHERRY!, to close out a most perfect weekend. How do you top this? Aha! You don’t.
33.
I can’t believe my little brother is 33 today. I can’t believe he’s the married father of two children — two absolutely gorgeous children, the younger of whom was born just a month ago. This was taken last year, at his son Eli’s first birthday party. Wow. I can’t believe my little brother is all grown up. Wasn’t he just graduating from architecture school, living in a shlubby apartment out in San Francisco? And now he’s in Asia, helping to design a new world, and teaching his wee ones how to live in it. Happy birthday, sweets. Miss you tons.
midtown lunch (over rice!).
If I had to live on one kind of food for the rest of my life, it would probably be Saucy Things Over Rice. No, really. I seriously can’t imagine a world in which such foods didn’t exist. Curries over rice! Claypot rice! Gumbo! Other dishes I’m not going to describe because you’d be horrified that I’d consider combining such things, over rice!
So when I realized on Monday morning that the NYC Cravings truck would be parked relatively close to my office, I knew I had to act. Their Taiwanese fried chicken with pork sauce (ground pork and soured cabbage) — over rice! — makes me incredibly happy, even though I usually forget to check their Twitter feed to see if they’re gonna be nearby. So with my pal Tony and his friend Trevor in tow, we left our respective offices, made our way to 46th street, got our food, and chomped away. I have no idea how “authentic” this stuff is, or if I should ever even think about authenticity as a necessary or productive framework for anything (the answer is no, I know), but man, this was great. Tony and Trevor got the half-chicken, half-pork combo, while I went for the straight-up chicken platter. So much food! Over rice! I saved half for Tuesday’s lunch.
I had the Spotmatic in tow, so of course there was going to be documentation (unlike many of my weekday lunches, which involve a spectacularly unspectacular soup chain and my windowless office). Felt a little goofy and conspicuous, sitting in one of those generic public plazas, amongst all of the midtown office drones (of which I am one), pausing between bites to take photos of my most perfect, grubby, over-riced lunch. But no matter: gastronomic pleasure in midtown, midday, is pretty hard to come by.
highline.
The renovated, reopened Highline is new enough that I still sometimes feel like a tourist walking on it; it’s probably one of the few places in the city where I willingly and happily find myself amongst actual out-of-towners, all of us marveling at views of the city that hadn’t been available to us until just last year. Although I’m always quite moved whenever I walk along the underpass and the sun hits that bit of stained glass just so, it’s the random bits of flora that get me the most, especially later in the day as the light begins to fade. And of course, from this height, and before night and the crowds have completed descended on the west side, the Meatpacking District almost — almost — looks manageable.
the handball courts, lower east side.
Looking over my last couple of posts, it occurred to me that I sound like I have no idea what I’m doing, photographically-speaking*. That everything is just some sort of strange happenstance and/or serendipity. To some extent, that’s what photography is, I suppose: you open a shutter, light floods in, and abracadabra, you’ve captured a moment. But I have some idea of what goes on, and how I fit into the process. How 400 speed film on an overcast day will at once make the greys more … grey, and in doing so, make the other colors pop just a bit more. How if you’re patient enough with your subject matter, even if it’s a harried, fast-moving game like handball, you’ll know when to click the shutter. How sometimes watching other people watch the game is just as interesting, and just as telling about the game, as the game itself.
There’s such a great hodgepodge of folks that converge upon Sara Roosevelt Park on the weekends to play (and watch) handball, a much more mixed crowd than the soccer or basketball games that take place just south of the handball courts. It’s not as sexy as the soccer guys, or as sweaty and physical as the basketball dudes. But there’s something there that makes those handball courts so intriguing — an impromptu, not-exactly-nerdy-but-certainly-not-your-high-school-jocks community of sorts, jostling on the courts or watching intently on the sidelines, all eyes on a tiny bouncing blue ball. It’s a New York City that I ought to photograph and document much more regularly, methinks.
*I have no idea what I’m doing in a larger, more metaphysical sense, but that’s for another blog entirely. (Or for my very patient therapist to sort out. )
hong-an tran 