a day in the life with mike.
My very good friend Mike D came into town last month for a three week holiday. Whenever he visits, my meat and whiskey intake increases dramatically, as does the number of times I find myself bursting into loud, rollicking laughter. Last week, on the tail end of his vacation, we met up with our friend Fred for breakfast at M. Wells, a recently opened restaurant inside an old diner car in Long Island City. The food was spectacular, as was the company. Afterwards, Mike and I headed into the city to catch a matinee showing of The American (erm, not so good), and then went down to Savoy in Soho, to check out their lunch-only burger. Sweet jesus, I haven’t had a burger that good in ages. Definitely in my top five NYC burgers. We also shared a great plate of creamy burrata with wee, sweet cherry tomatoes that, on the Friday before Labor Day, was a perfect end to the summer.
Mike’s back in Seattle now, finishing up his last year of nursing school. Then, hopefully, he’ll be back in NYC for good. We’re keeping our fingers crossed. Meat consumption here in the city just isn’t the same without him. Laughter too.
my favorite photograph, ever.
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Yup. This is it. Taken 8 years ago with NoName the Nikon, out in San Francisco. This is my baby brother, carrying my red vintage suitcase to his *very* collegiate apartment over in the Richmond. He’d just graduated from college — art school, in fact; or rather, architecture school within the art school — and I was sticking around for a few days after graduation, after our parents had taken their proud photos and left town. I look back on a lot of the photos I took around this time, and wish in hindsight that I’d never started giving a shit about what sorts of film I was using, what sort of grain I had to take into consideration, and all of that. I think there was a very sweet-spot sort of moment when I just had a camera, with whatever film loaded up inside of it, and just snapped away. I’d have to double check, but I’m pretty sure this is just your standard issue Kodak Gold 200, purchased from a random drugstore, without a second thought. It’s just so simple, this photo, and yet there are still all of these random little things that still get to me: the leaves scattered on the ground, but weirdly only in the foreground; my brother’s then (and now) very upright gait; the solidity of color and tone; and maybe, just at the end of the day, the way that my just-graduated baby brother lugged my suitcase with such lovely panache.
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manhattan – three views, one day.
It’s been an impossibly long week at work. I took today (Friday) off, but I wanted to leave the office on Thursday on a good note, so I snapped the top photo after slipping unnoticed into one of the empty conference rooms with my Spotmatic. The next two shots were taken on a boat, during a hilarious and wonderful three-hour cruise down the Hudson River and past the Statue of Liberty. On the boat, but sadly not pictured: Built to Spill. No joke. It was a concert unlike any other, and the best possible way to leave the week’s insanity behind and usher in a nice, leisurely, long holiday weekend.
the latest addition.
Nearly two years ago, I bought a Yashica Mat 124 on Ebay. It’s a lovely medium format, twin lens reflex camera that takes the 6×6, square format photos I’ve posted elsewhere on this site. When it finally got delivered to me, I took a look at it and promptly decided that I would call it Pony. Never mind that I had given that name to a Fender Mustang reissue guitar I bought about a decade earlier — Pony it would be. I realized, though, that I’d never given a name to my Nikon FE, my old standby. It soon became NoName. as in: “Oh yeah, I’m going out today — should I take Pony or NoName?” The (no)name stuck, and it clearly hasn’t at all diminished my love or use of the Nikon.
I just got a new camera — a Pentax Spotmatic SP, from the mid-60s (NoName dates from around the late 70s), with a Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4 lens. This shouldn’t mean anything to anyone reading this blog casually, but for me, a 1.4 aperture opening means the possibility of even greater shallow depth of field shots, and even closer food photo insanity. I’m still playing around with it, but it occurs to me that I haven’t yet stumbled upon a name for this fellow, either. Spotty? Takky? In any case, I’m looking forward to the fall, and to using the new really-no-named camera. I’ve even got some Kodachrome loaded up into the thing — we’ll see how that goes.
I’d like to have a fun punchline/endline/whathaveyou at this point, but I’m just so happy with how these first shots from the Spotmatic turned out that I’ll leave things here. Any name suggestions? Let me know.
soon.
The view from my bedroom window, autumn. Every autumn. Can’t wait.
1994.
I recently got my hair chopped off — long locks on the salon floor and a new pixie cut affixed quite firmly to my head. I’m pretty fond of it, though I have moments where I find myself reaching behind my head for a phantom ponytail. It made me think back to the first time I’d done this: July, 1994. It was the summer after my sophomore year in college, and I’d just broken up with my boyfriend of two years. The desire for a post-breakup haircut was as cliched as these sorts of things come. It was, unfortunately, a terrible haircut; the fellow I went to was someone I’d been to my entire life, which in hindsight probably meant that he had no idea how to do anything to my hair other than to trim it back into a neat little, shoulder-length Asian bob: feminine but not particularly memorable. My shorn hair made me look like an androgynous Maoist. Perhaps more memorable than before, but not in any way remotely flattering. It would be another year before I discovered the palliative wonders of whiskey.
MZ, with whom I had been friends for a few years, was living in LA that summer. I was back home as well, staying with my parents and not doing much of anything at all. We started dating, and took a roadtrip up to the Pacific Northwest, mostly along the coast, and then back down Interstate 5 in California, where it seemed like the mountains stretched on for days. I remembering driving through Yreka, CA, and stopping at the Yreka Bakery. Palindrome! And then, maybe on the same day, we stopped again, this time for a wee hike, where I took the photograph above. I love the picture for many reasons, but it’s his wonderful, scruffy, non-Maoist hair that kills me the most.
ektachrome.
I shot my first roll of expired Kodak Ektachrome 64 a few years ago, and what I discovered, rather delightfully and unexpectedly after getting that first roll back from the lab, is that if you underexpose the film ever so slightly as the light starts to fade, your images will look like this: violet-blue, with bright whites popping out from the frame. Most lovely.
Update / Addendum: One more photo, from a different roll but around the same time of day:
At 64 speed, Ektachrome doesn’t give you much latitude, and will most certainly frustrate you if you’re trying to shoot indoors, but when you’re outside and the light is just-so — my goodness.
summertime.
A confession: the closest I’ve been to the beach — any beach — this summer has been the Coney Island boardwalk. Another confession: I’m a little beach-hesitant these days. (“These days” has apparently lasted for the past 30 years or so.) My parents tell me that when they took me to the beach outside Saigon when I was a wee baby, I loved it, crawling out to the water’s edge with brash aplomb. I’m assuming that a subsequent childhood and teenage life in Southern California and all of its attendant bikini madness ebbed away whatever nascent love I had developed for the shore. While I was in graduate school, my parents sold their suburban home and moved out to a rented house down in Playa Del Rey; whenever I came home to visit, I never made use of the surf and sand, but instead ran on the extensive bike paths that wound around the shore, and gawked at all of the sun-loving Angelenos, beach-volleyballing their days away. I often wondered if Walter Benjamin made it out to any European shores; I suspected that he was just as crowd-averse. That suspicion made my own aversion more acceptable, or so I reasoned to myself.
That said, I *have* been out to Fort Tilden in years past, before it was overrun with just about every last hip young person in search of uncrowded summertimeness. I was the bespectacled lady with the pinhole and SLR cameras, sunning awkwardly in her bikini, waiting for the sun to fade a bit, so that the light would be ever so better for a photograph. Some people toss around a football or frisbee, or dive into the sand after a volleyball. I’m ok with these photos as evidence of my own version of basking in the sun.
hazmat guy.
Back in 1997, when I lived on 33rd between 2nd and 3rd avenues, there was some sort of underground explosion one night off 2nd avenue, just down my block. This guy was part of the crew making sure that asbestos hadn’t been kicked up into the air. He let me take a photograph of him, but insisted that he had to hide his cigarette from view. The city bus blurring into the frame was completely, wonderfully fortuitous.
It’s so disorienting to look at this photo and remember a time when I had the wherewithal to just up and ask a complete stranger if I could take their picture. In these paranoid times, I can’t imagine asking a city worker — much less a guy in a hazmat suit — if I could snap their pic. And I certainly can’t imagine them obliging me. That said, I’m quite glad that I’m no longer 23, and that we’re no longer living in the 90s. Ooof, the 90s.
the elephant in the room.*
This wee blog has been around for what, five days now? And I haven’t posted a single food photo until now? Amazing. Way back when, I waxed, in my characteristically muddled-but-no-I-have-a-point-just-listen fashion, about why I photograph what I eat. You can read it here, though the bit about “[a]nd it’s partly out of sheer technological ease: I probably wouldn’t do this with a regular film camera” is clearly, well, not true anymore. The ongoing recovery from a darker, less healthy moment remains true, though the impetus to photograph food has taken on an added dimension, one that I suppose has always been there, but is truer, and more significant now: the joy of sharing said food with friends. Schmaltzy? Maybe. I’m getting old and sentimental! You cried during Up? Whatever! I cry whenever I watch The English Patient! (Er…..) But it’s quite true: my desire to document what I eat is also a desire to remember the fact of having said meal with [insert very indispensable, very patient friend — and I’m amazed sometimes that I have so many of you — here]. Food tastes better when the person across the table from you is also grunting rapturously; terrible food is made all that more inedible (and hilarious) when your dining companion likens it to gnawing on pan-fried dog collar.
Of course, sometimes I photograph food because really, no one would believe me if I told them that at Keflavik Airport outside Reykjavik, Iceland, I ate “Cool American” flavored Doritos.
* For the record, I don’t eat elephant(s).
hong-an tran 