Yeah, this is a lot of blog writing of late. You know my large blog reading public, let’s not question this. Your hero has not abandoned you. Rather, she has to dwell in the world in which she makes money to keep this little bloggy blog going.

So I’m going to write about New York and my rather complex relationship with that town. In a deviation from my usual gloomy musings, this will be a funny entry. I mean I hope this will be a funny entry. I’m doing my best here.

I recently met up with a friend who recently moved to New York from Spain. We had a great conversation about my hometown, in that I even have one of those. As I have written a myriad of entries about, I have a complicated relationship with the city of New York. Oh no, I am not writing “New York City.” That always smacks of being a non native. So with my friend, we discussed the major points about living in New York — the subway, the perpetually angry people and well, you know, food. Food plays a major part in any discussion of any place. My friend told me he really liked the pastrami at Katz’s Deli, so I know he’s got his priorities straight.

We also got onto the topic of where I grew up in Manhattan. I keep a lid on these sorts of things, but now, now I can openly admit this. I grew up on the Upper East Side. Yes. THAT Upper East Side. No, we weren’t rich. Believe me. I was there. I don’t mean weren’t “weren’t rich” in the way that our summer house was smaller than our neighbors in the Hamptons and our private jet was bought used. We weren’t poor per se but we got to live there because of the giant brain at the center of our story of coming to America. When I told my friend about my well hidden past, semi heading towards New Yorker-dom, goes — you are a Gossip Girl!!!!! Gossip Girl. Look I love a good headband, I try to keep my fashions on point when I’m not wearing sweatpants and I have severe Serena Vander Woodsen hair envy. There, I said it. When my friend and I got onto the topic of Gossip Girl, I told him the biggest secret — he needed to become familiar with this absolutely genius column that ran in New York Magazine for the entirety of the show that started as a simple recap but evolved into something totally, totally genius. It was called the Fantasy-Reality index where the in house NYMag experts evaluated whether or not the things in the weekly Gossip Girl episodes were realistic in New York or were they some kind of fantasy.

Now lemme digress here for a second. Fantasy New York has a good side and a bad side. The good side is when you see the beautiful side of the city, night shots, the remnants of the old New York. And yes, the subway is as bad as people make it out to be. I wouldn’t board unless you are up to date on all of your immunizations. People do randomly yell things at no one in particular in the city. In Coming to America, where African prince Hakeem chooses to live in Queens to find his queen, he opens his windows to greet the city dwellers in the morning and he is met by a native screaming some not family friendly language. Ok that is not fantasy.

Now the bad side. Ok, so out of town trains go to Pennsylvania station, not Grand Central. For some reason, every television and cinematic production feels the need to have people arriving from Ohio de-train in Grand Central Station. So did they switch trains and take Metro North from Wassaic or New Haven? Pennsylvania Station is an ugly little rabbit warren and I get why movies don’t want to film there. But could they put in a disclaimer saying that no Amtrak trains go to Grand Central? Next, people who work regular people jobs usually live in apartments that may have bathtubs or showers in the kitchen. It is not possible to live in a palatial apartment with an amazing view of the city on an intern’s salary, never mind the salary of a person who does something like work in media. I mean it’s possible to live in an apartment in New York on a very small salary if you aren’t really stuck on having an in unit bathroom. I’m not joking. That was a recent headline in The New York Times, when discussing the residential life situation in New York — how important is an in-unit bathroom to you? Next, you don’t meet-cute a guy in the grocery store. Or anywhere else for that matter. Oh and my personal favorite. You DO NOT cross the Queensborough Bridge when entering the city from wherever. For some reason, everyone needs to cross that bridge, whether they are coming from that direction or not.

Ok, enough. Let’s get back to our main point, thesis statement, whatever. So eventually around season 2, possibly three I started watching Gossip Girl exclusively to be able to trace the week’s New York inaccuracies. Then I would compare my list with what was on the NYMag fantasy-reality index. Oh and they called the program “The Greatest Show of Our Time.” Now you gotta understand something. To quote some guy in a funny hat I saw one time in a documentary, everyone in New York, whether you are geographically there or just there in spirit, everyone in that city is some kind of an animal. Nothing much unites us, but the fantasy-reality index united us in a way nothing ever did before. Is this hyperbole? Yeah, maybe.

Now sadly the show went off the air in 2012, and Dan Humphrey was Gossip Girl the whole time, even if a lot of the show’s plot lines wouldn’t have made sense if that were true. But I mean was I really watching the show for the plot lines? No, as is obvious from the paragraphs above. I was watching it so I could read the fantasy reality index the next day. Like a normal person.

Thankfully, the fantasy-reality index lives on in digital form and no word of a lie here, I am surprised that the thing didn’t win a Pulitzer or at the least the Nobel Prize for Literature, which can be awarded for an overall body of work. The fantasy-reality index was an absolute work of genius. NYMag is a total scream but I gotta tell you NYMag if you happen upon this blog one day, about 90% of the reason I even have a subscription to your magazine is so I can re-read the fantasy-realities indexes. After the last episode of the Greatest Show of Our Time, the writers of the index got some quotes from the actors and background people on the show. These quotes describe the index better than I ever could.

Blair had a Polish maid named Dorota and I have a bone to pick with the producers of the show about their depiction of Polish people on the show but Dorota got some choice lines, got to scheme, yelled at Blair in Polish occasionally and was played by an actual Polish person. The actress Zuzanna Sadowski had this to say about the greatest index of the Greatest Show of Our Time — I have actually been known to get to the NYMag site too early on a Tuesday and to have to refresh, refresh, refresh until the recap comes up. I know perfection can’t be rushed. In one episode of the aforementioned greatest show, Serena wore this odd dress that featured a rhombus framing her décolletage. The fantasy-reality index called it a “cleavage rhombus” and yes, I have stolen this and repurposed it for humorous possibilities.

A personal favorite of mine was an episode of Gossip Girl, where Bart Bass, who was you know, dead for a while, suddenly returns and goes to a brothel in Briarcliff. Now those of you in my reading public, Briarcliff is a tidy hamlet in an area called Westchester, where cruel fate deposited me for a rather unremarkable stint as a surly teenager. I played field hockey in Briarcliff and I will tell you this much. I saw no brothels there when I was there swinging a field hockey stick. This was a personal small laugh for me, as my time in Westchester is long over, consigned to the same trash heap as my Trapper Keeper and those Guess jeans I thought were so cool as an eighth grader. I have met in the past 20 or so years, fewer than five people from Westchester so jokes about Briarcliff, field hockey and brothels, well, I had to keep them to myself. Alas though, the fantasy-reality index was good enough to mention the Briarcliff reference and I for a second felt less alone. See, again, truly great literature has the power to unite all of us.

Well anyway, you’ve read down to here and seriously, I commend you because I have gone on for a while. As a reward, here are some fantasy looking pictures I took on a recent trip to the more realistic than fantasy town so nice they named it twice:

It’s almost funny to write this on March 927, 2020, I mean January 4, 2023, that my return to film has now lasted a few years. At first, the return to film was just kinda a way to pass the time during the pandemic where there was absolutely nothing to do.

Now for me, it’s turned into this new way to be creative. Digital is all about the post production. I call my digital camera “the mother ship.” It’s the central part of my camera ecosystem. It’s the one where the good image is guaranteed. No questions about what is coming out of it. I know what will happen when I press the button. And the digital camera is excellent for a lot of things. The night image is perfect, the moving image is beyond. There is no greater way to deliver a moving image than using a digital SLR. It is superior.

But the film cameras also fit into this ecosystem too. As is true with a lot of things in my life, I like the high and the low. You have your super powerful digital camera. Then, you have a camera that costs all of $35. That’s where the film cameras come in. A lot of them specifically have certain effects. Some just make fisheye images. Other ones split the images. Others produce cool looking squares. There are more expensive versions of these cameras, but this is really not the point. The challenge is to take the pure world around you and to distort it in one way or another. It’s not about dragging this camera to the ends of the earth. It’s all about interpreting your regular world in a new or interesting way.

A couple of months ago, I got my hands on this little camera called an Ektar 35mm half frame. Half frame cameras are interesting, as they split a 35mm frame in half, hence half frame. Yeah, that’s a dumb sentence I just wrote. But splitting a 35mm frame in half does a couple of things. First, it gives you 72 pictures on a 36 picture roll. I put a 36 roll into the half frame at the beginning of last summer and finally finished at the end of the summer. It was a really fun record of my entire summer, start to finish. It was a really cool record of my summer. Film photography is also really intentional. You have to decide to take the photo because it will cost you to develop it and it will cost you to buy your next roll. You forget you took certain images and then you get to see them later.

The most interesting, most remarkable thing though about the half frame is that it creates this old fashioned fuzzy kind of an image. It creates these stretched out, old fashioned looking image. It gives you this faded look that is really interesting. I like to read a lot about memory, how we actually memorize things and how we remember things. The thing is that those pictures do fade in our mind right after we experience things. Faded pictures of things gone by. The half frame really makes this come through clearly.

Here’s some fun from off the Ektar 35mm:

Sorry to have abandoned you, my blog reading public. I didn’t mean to. Getting photos back is a bit longer of a process these days, as I have partially returned to film. And my life has become four square miles. My work commute is short. I’m not wandering around as much as I used to, I guess. I go to work. I come home. Then on the weekends, I hang out in my neighborhood. Pathetic. LOLOLOLOLOL

Me becoming a townie is connected with this entry. I’ve become close friends with this wonderful pair named Amy and Steven Castello. They lead the church in the neighborhood I belong to. Amy grew up in Alaska and Steven in Alabama and let’s say we cannot be more different if we tried. Both of them are stellar people and they’ve changed my mind about a lot of things. I’m a part of a social class that believes that travel is key to development as a human being and people who haven’t traveled, they remain ignorant to the world. But here’s the thing about traveling, I guess the dark side of it. It can also turn into a massive pissing contest about who has been where and for how long. I’ve been to 15 different countries. I have friends who have been to 50 different countries. Are they better than me? I don’t know but I don’t think so but I’ve had it lorded over me at times that I’ve “only” been to 15 countries. “Only.” Steven and Amy though have not had the same kinds of opportunities to travel as I have but they are definitely, definitely, not ignorant of the world.

Once a week we meet for this thing called community group. It’s ostensibly a meeting to discuss the Bible, but really we just sit and talk about food. Church is one endless conversation about food. That’s all it is. I’m only half joking. This whole bible thing is relatively new for me and I’m still learning a lot of things. Recently we were reading about John the Baptist and how he preached in the wilderness. I said to Amy that it reminded me of me wandering in the wilderness. I asked Amy if there were other people wandering around in the wilderness in the Bible looking for answers and Amy goes — OF COURSE THERE ARE. I don’t know why but somehow that was comforting.

Maybe this entry is a bit about this church thing that has gradually taken over my life, which is a good thing. The more I read the Bible, the more I read about people who were lost, who experienced pain and trauma and in a way, I feel less alone in the things I went through. At our community group, I started talking about my wilderness years, my years spend wandering Europe in search of something. Was it answers to what I should do with my life? Partially yes. Was it trying to figure out where I was supposed to live? Also partially yes.

At the same community group night, I was talking about those trips I took during the wilderness years, where I’d basically disappear to Europe, Denmark, Estonia, Russia but Poland mostly for months on end and my parents really didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. At the time, I did not appreciate how unique this was. To me at the time, it just felt like something I had to do and nothing was really going to stand in my way doing it. Now I am grateful that they let me do this. To me it was absolutely not at all glamourous. I would stay with my uncle, sleeping in the bedrooms of his kids who had long moved out. It was him, my aunt and his cat, Bulwa, whose favorite spot was on his keyboard when he was trying to type. I’d go on these trips around Poland with my cousin and her then boyfriend, where we slept in the upstairs of a woman’s house, whose shower was basically a garden hose. Also unforgettable was the time we slept in a utility closet. I don’t remember it being glamorous at all.

Amy though at the community group that night, where I per usual took over with my insane stories, said that sounded really glamourous. She was raising her children while I was getting lost on the streets of Moscow or wandering the docks in Gdansk, Poland. I was also struck by the fact that my stories weren’t met with disdain and oneupmanship. There’s an appreciation amongst those people of other people’s experiences and no need to outdo them or dismiss them, which I really appreciate. And I guess we’re all wandering around looking for answers in a way and people have done this for ages, since biblical times it seems.

There would be no great meandering post like this without pictures. There are always pictures, of course. These are a lot of pictures of Poland that I took in bright color. These are my scans of my pictures from 20 plus years ago. I hate how that end of Europe, CENTRAL Europe is somehow always portrayed in gray tones. Enjoy the splash of color or the prose, or both. Your choice as you also wander the earth in search of answers.

I recently went to the Museum of Fine Arts again, for the first time since the covid burst onto our shores. The place is much the same but somewhat different, which I guess is sorta the pandemic world now.

I grew up going to museums and I have always liked them. Doing photography the way I do, I’m always looking for new ideas for composition and color story. There’s also something great about just being around so much beauty, like we find in a place like the Museum of Fine Arts.

Walking through the museum though I had kinda a funny thought. What if I was looking at a forgery? What if some of these paintings weren’t actually painted by the old master it said they had been painted by? I wonder why I had this thought.

Years ago, I happened upon a piece on 60 Minutes about a man named Wolfgang Beltracchi. As Bob Simon says in the piece, the name isn’t familiar. Beltracchi??? Well, you get the meet the man in the piece and he is, well, interesting. And kinda an evil genius, if you really want to get precise about it. On the screen, you see this sorta aging hippie with some pretty long hair giving the funniest interview you have ever heard with what is in essence a criminal. Now you see Beltracchi was an art forger. Well, I guess more of an artist inspired by other artists? I’m not sure. But he sure had a lot of fun doing what he did.

What Beltracchi did was to look for historically accurate materials to make paintings out of, like canvases and paints. Then he figured out what great painters would paint if they had the time and had felt like it. Oh and he made up a story with his wife that the paintings belonged to her grandfather and that he hid them during World War II from the Nazis. I mean genius.

I mean you can look at this as a conventional sort of crime story, were it not for Beltracchi’s hilarious demeanor throughout the whole thing. He could not care less about what the art experts and the museums thought of him, before he was caught. More on that later. Yeah, my paintings are in all those museums. Ya ya. And then he just laughs slyly to himself. The best scene, my favorite scene though is with his wife, Helene, when the interviewer says — you were really the Bonnie and Clyde of the art world. Beltracchi responds by saying — oh yes, Bonnie and Clyde but without weapons, only with pencils. You can tell at that moment, you can really tell Beltracchi is extremely impressed with himself being able to pull this one over on the stuffy art world. It seems that it’s Beltracchi’s world and we’re just living in it.

One day though, Beltracchi was tripped up by a pigment in one of his paints. It seems the titanium white in one of his paintings wasn’t made when the actual artist would have painted and Beltracchi was caught. He was thrown in prison and lost all of his money. But the funniest part of all of it is that he doesn’t seem sorry or to care about what he did. Yeah, he’s a criminal but you have to love him for this.

Wandering through the Museum of Fine Arts, I really thought — these are beautiful works of art, but am I maybe looking at a real life Beltracchi? Those Dutch masters so precise in all of their details, the ruffled collars so precisely drawn and filled in, but maybe those were forgeries. Was I there looking at a Beltracchi or was I just looking for Beltracchi? I guess only that evil genius really knows for sure.

Some of the beauties I saw at the Museum of Fine Arts:

I saw this line as a book title once, and I thought it really fit how I’ve felt so many times in my life. It all seemed important at the time. It’s not really important now, but it did really seem important at the time.

I think about that line a lot when I think about my college. Not my graduate experiences, which were each great but also extremely difficult at the same time. Now that I teach graduate students, I tell the students that if they don’t cry at least once a semester during graduate school, they’re not doing it right.

Undergraduate was a different story. I saw this list recently that asked what marks you as an American, and one of the things was that you say the words “college experience.” I mean that is drummed into you from the youngest age. College experience. College is the best four years of your life. The friends you make in college are the best ones you’ll ever make in your life. After that four years of college, nothing will ever top that. I mean that’s what we’re sold after all. Is that actually true? I’m sure it is for some people for at least a little bit of time after college but eventually the real life sets in and everything changes and flips around a million times.

At 18 though, you’ve been sold this and told this a million times. It all seemed important at the time. I worked extremely hard in high school at getting good grades but I didn’t end up going to the college I wanted to go to. I now work as an instructor at the college I had wanted to go to. But that’s all for another entry.

I graduated from the University at Albany in Upstate New York. I met the person who has been an extremely dear friend to me for almost 27 years at college but no one else in my life currently is from that time in my life. With very few exceptions, the people in my life are people I’ve met in the last 10 to 15 years and in the past five years, I’ve made some very close friends. When I mention where I went to college, if I ever even mention this to people, I say I went to college in Upstate New York. I hardly know anyone from New York, so this is usually sufficient.

Last weekend I went to visit another very dear friend who lives near Albany. I had taken the train through Albany and had wanted to poke around to my old haunts from 25+ years earlier. My friend was game, so off we went.

I always had a strange relationship with Albany, the university and the town. I had to live there for college but I wouldn’t have chosen to be there if it really had been up to me. I so thoroughly hated where we lived when I was in high school that the only solution I saw for that was to leave and any place was better than that place. Valhalla, New York, best seen in the dark or in the rear view mirror of your car.

I was ready to leave at 18. I mean I was ready to leave Valhalla five minutes after I started junior high school, so I was REALLY ready to leave when I was 18. The whole time I thought — I hate where we live and Albany doesn’t seem a whole lot better but at least it’s not HERE.

I remember the day it was time to leave for college really vividly. I don’t remember the drive up but I remember getting to this dorm I would be living and us just wanting to get my stuff up there and the people there saying that no, we’d have to wait a few hours. Finally we got everything up there and I met my roommate. I’m not going to write her name up here and I’m sure she’s gone off to have a new life but we were total opposites. No friendship really sprung up, but we were two strangers put in this room by some random system. She though already seemed to have a big group of friends up there. I didn’t really know anyone yet. Us sharing a room never really stopped being awkward.

That first night in the dorm was particularly hard. I remember that the phones in our dorm room had gotten hooked up incorrectly and we had to get extra long cords to correct the whole situation. I remember going to whatever Kmart or whatever large kinda box store retailer to get these phone cords. I remember going back to that dorm room really upset.

It was that time when wanting to be with your family wasn’t cool and wanting your parents to help you with things really wasn’t cool either. I guess that became my attitude too and was my attitude for a long time. Who needs your family for anything, anyway? I was 18. I had it all figured out.

Or maybe I didn’t. Certainly the people around me did. I was in a lot of ways still a child but I had a definite plan for myself and I really knew what I wanted out of life, what I wanted my life to look like.

Now if I’m really honest, I really did need my parents. The other thing that was always dragged was returning home from college. You went to college and stayed there. You didn’t wimp out and go back home. Only weak people do that.

Again, if I’m really honest with myself, I really would have just left or gone back to my parents if that had been a safe place, where they lived, if that place were even safe. I did not like having to share space. And I needed my parents a lot of the time. That made me seem weak at the time, but now I think asking for help is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do in your life.

College for me though was a tough couple of years. Academically, I was taught by some fantastic people, professors who really set me on the course that I’m on now and was after I graduated from college. But socially, I had an extremely hard time. My first year, I kinda fell in with a group of people who weren’t like me and kinda turned on me after a while. They were doing their own thing and I was alone. I inherently felt like I had really done something wrong in my life or that there was something wrong with me. My first year, my dad was paying my college tuition and he would toss me a few bucks to live on, that averaged out to about $7 a day. The people I fell in with got this strange idea that I was rich and I was ridiculed for this. It fed into how I felt, that life had just screwed me. I was cursed. My parents had too much money for me to get any kind of merit based financial aid at the colleges I had wanted to go to but here, I was much too rich. That was the great irony of it. I went to college with a radio and a not very fancy laptop. I didn’t even have a television until I was a senior in college.

I never really felt comfortable in that college culture, if I’m really honest with myself. To me it seemed really strange to party constantly and not to pay attention to your studies. One of the first times I took the bus home to see my parents from college, a woman on the bus said that the college experience would go by so quickly and it felt like an instant later, I was getting my diploma. All the partying and the drama seemed important at the time. To me though, it didn’t resemble real life in any way. No one in their real life abandons their responsibility to get drunk and party all day and then shames people who actually do care about their studies. No one does that. Engaging in that kind of behavior outside of college marks you as having really severe problems. I never understood why it was acceptable in college.

I spent a lot of college feeling like I was the only one who was lonely and confused and who really had nothing figured out yet and it would probably take me a long time to figure anything out. The message is always that you have to have it all figured out by your 20s. Once you hit 30, everything becomes impossible and forget your 40s. If you don’t have it all figured out by age 40, you may as well crawl into a hole and die.

No one tells you that the “college experience” is kinda just marketing hype and even if you have an “amazing” college experience, you will be confronted with the reality of having to go out into the world and having to manage all of that. Those friends you make in college, they may not be your friends five years later and you are probably not even going to live in the same city after college. Life is long with a lot of chapters and college, when it’s all said and done can be just this four year addition to high school if you go when you are 18, like I did. Through a lot of it, it felt like high school without parents.

Now getting back to Albany. I remember being truly intrigued by the place. It seemed to have a lot of history in it and some of places truly did look interesting. There were all of these signs of the old Albany, when it had been an industrial hub of sorts, when the city had been at its peak. There were all of these things around that said “Empire State” and had all of these plaques on it. It did seem like a place worth checking out or exploring. But at that age, at that time, going to downtown Albany to look at architecture just wasn’t done. I remember going to this noisy, smelly rock club in Albany called QE2, at the behest of a friend’s boyfriend at the time. I hadn’t yet picked up a camera or learned how to use it and I remember up the street where the club was, I saw a moderately tall building in the nighttime and I thought — that looks like such an amazing photograph. My friend’s boyfriend and his little friends were talking about some band being on MTV at midnight and how they had “sold out” and I was off staring at a building. I remember Bill Cunningham saying that he would go to church on Sunday and look at women’s hats. I was off kind of staring at photos I might take one day.

Right in downtown Albany, there’s this sort of manifestation of I guess you’d call it governmental hubris. New York’s governor in the 1960s was a telegenic fellow by the name of Nelson Rockefeller, of the oil baron/philanthropy/banking/world order controlling Rockefellers. Rocky, as he was called, had a lot of grand visions for the Empire State. He built the uptown campus of the college I went to, this sort of 1960s version of a futuristic space craft that looks sorta weird and dated now. Rocky’s first big project though was the Empire State plaza, a cluster of state office buildings in any area in Albany formerly known as “the Gut.” Rocky had cleared it out through imminent domain after a Dutch royal had visited the area. It’s kind of a sad story about what happened to that area, the old residents kicked out for this concrete bit of governmental hubris.

Again, I didn’t go to college with many people who would have wanted to discuss 1960s New York State politics with me.

Last weekend though, I finally got to poke around the plaza a bit, the entire town for that matter. I visited my freshman dorm and my dorm for the rest of college. It all looks exactly the same.

So you’ve stuck with me this far. Congratulations. Here are some pictures to reward you. I made Albany pretty. Thank me later.

I’ve realized lately that there are just times when I need to be alone and creative. It sounds corny or pretentious or whatever, but it’s really true.

When I have moments like this, sometimes I put on this documentary I watched about New York City by Ken Burns, from about twenty years ago. The documentary has this quiet, somber tone to it, with this gentle music and these sepia toned pictures of the city.

The entire last episode is about the World Trade Center, which had unfortunately met its sad fate a few months after the documentary had gotten made. In the documentary, they interview Philippe Petit, who I have written about before on this blog.

Petit is a guy who probably could use an entire documentary all to his own. A person who would just hang a tightrope between two towers or buildings and just walk between them, for fun, well, this is definitely a person who is worth getting to know, at least in my book. In the documentary, they trace the history of the construction of the World Trade Center. A man named Guy Tozzoli appears in the documentary. He’d spearheaded the building of the trade center and was a character all his own. He talked about having to fill 2 million square feet of office space when the towers were built and a guy with a French accent who kept visiting him, posing as a journalist, who asked him how much the towers swayed in the wind. Tozzoli recounts how he got a call on his police radio that a man, who turned out to be Petit, was walking between the two towers one day in 1974. “If he doesn’t fall off, don’t arrest him.” That’s my favorite quote from Tozzoli.

Petit speaks in the documentary in this absolutely incredible way, recounting his experiences during his walk. He intellectualizes what he experienced but in an understandable way. He married the two towers. It was an intimate performance between him and the towers. The elements were getting annoyed at his persistent vagabondage. Whenever other worlds invite us, whenever we are balancing on the boundaries of our limited human condition, that’s where life starts. I absolutely love those words.

My friends always say that I am adventurous. I don’t agree. I don’t jump out of airplanes but Petit’s quote sticks in my head all the time. They are almost words I live by. Other worlds invite us. We are frequently balancing on the boundaries of our limited human condition. When we enter these other worlds, life starts. I think about this a lot when I’m skiing. Skiing is this complete other world. Complete. We are as humans bound by gravity. We seek reasonable temperatures. We do try not to hurtle ourselves down sloped ice surfaces, attempting to as fast as we possibly can. But this other world invites us and while I’m skiing, I do feel like I am balancing on the limits of my limited human condition. I’ve said many times that I have a relationship with each of the mountains I ski at. I really do feel like I’m married to some of those places.

Last weekend I attended an event that I consider one of the most sublime things that a person could ever attend. The Red Bull Cliff diving tour is back in Boston after a nine year absence. The divers dive off of an eight story building into the water below, doing flips and twists along the way. Heady stuff. I looked at the divers during the event and thought — you really are balancing at the boundaries of your limited human condition. You really have accepted an invitation from another world. Do you feel like you actually marry the places you are diving off of? Those people absolutely amaze me. I often wonder if the diving really is an intimate performance between them and the thing they are diving off of, in this case the Institute of Contemporary Art. How do we all respond when other worlds invite us? Do we go or do we remain in our limited human condition. I’ll say one thing. I would go and I’d do some flips on the way down.

The brave diving souls from cliff diving. Enjoy:

There will be philosophizing and then pictures. If you aren’t here for the prose, or aren’t in the mood for it, scroll down for my myriad of 2021 Boston Marathon images. If you are in the mood for some choice prose, simply look downwards.

Here is where the prose will begin. So in September, it will be 13 years of living here in Boston. I mean I guess 13 isn’t a momentous number. I guess 15 or 20 or another multiple of 5 would be more noteworthy. But for me, 13 is a big number because it’s the number of years I spent in and around New York City. I lived there from age 5 to age 18 so I guess that was the place I had spent the most time in before this. I’m at the point now in Boston where I remember when this place was here and that store used to be here but it’s gone now. What’s crazy is that the school I worked in for almost seven years, the original building it was in is gone, not even a speck of it left and the school is out of business. It’s really sad to think it isn’t there anymore, even though when it happened, I already hadn’t worked there for four years.

The bigger thing here though is that when you live in a place for so long, it’s almost like everyone knows everyone. I was watching this documentary about the robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and one of the people said — in Boston, everyone knows everyone. That part is true. I have this sort of odd friendship with this guy who helps me with rides to places. This cantankerous individual picks me up at 4am to get on my ski bus in the winter. Pronouncing Rs??? Yeah. Forget about that. That doesn’t exist. Don’t even get him started on our new lady mayah. Don’t even go there. But what’s so incredible about him is that not only does he know everyone in this city, I’m talking both Bulgers, the comedic, autocratic little Irishman from Southie and the crime lord, but his uncle worked the Green Monster at Fenway in the 1940s and met Ted Williams. Insane.

That’s the thing about this city. No matter what, you are near friends and never really alone. Case in point. I went to the marathon on Monday. I didn’t feel like roping any friends into it. I mean I was there, festooned in camera equipment, photographing the proceedings all day. I had my mega sonic digital firing cannon and my Holga, a tiny film wonder that has no electronics in it and is light on the wallet, $35 a pop. I’m usually there with my mom or a friend but this year I just went alone.

First, there’s the atmosphere. Everyone is cheering everyone on. Everyone. A guy is running and his shirt says “Bob” on it??? Well, everyone is ringing their marathon bells and cheering on “Bob” on his last mile in marathon. People are out with their dogs. Random people strike up conversations with you. That’s how my marathon day went. I was there with my giant camera and I ran into one of my students from my amazing summer class at Boston University, where we discussed such deeply academic topics as where to get the best cannoli in the city and the curse of the Bambino. We had a fun catchup. Two women from the Mormon church approached me to ask about my Holga. We chatted for a bit and I told them I am good for the God, having joined up with my local Baptists recently.

No matter if you don’t even know the people, you are among friends. They aren’t strangers. And the city keeps you company.

Oh and it was amazing to have marathon day back after three years of not having the marathon on Marathon Monday. A dose of normalcy in a couple of years that have been anything but normal.

Ok enough prose. Here are my ton of pictures from Monday. Enjoy:

Bill Cunningham gets quoted a lot on this blog and it’s not by accident. Obviously he’s my favorite photographer but really the man had my dream job. He people watched all day long and took pictures for a living. I do that, but just for fun, for the diary/chronicling aspect of things.

Cunningham said famously that clothes, fashion are the armor that we all wear against every day life. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. We are all blank canvases and we paint ourselves before we go outside to interact with the world. Recently when I went skiing, on one of those four hour interminable bus rides, I realized I was wearing plaid sweats, my BU sweatshirt with my Killington Mountain sort of Grateful Dead hybrid t-shirt and LL Bean boots. I was struck by how New England preppie I looked. New England preppie is basically the style I identify with the most. I love those knitted sweaters and the boat shoes. I love that kind of varsity stitching on things. I started thinking too that I don’t consider myself to be a fashionista but I do choose what I wear every day really carefully. I have an array of t-shirts from ski resorts, all of my weird animal and Godzilla t-shirts and just my general tendency to use my simple clothes to say things. We all make choices in that category, whether we admit to it or not. For me too, it’s kind of funny to walk into class at the university wearing some ski resort t-shirt with an animal on it. Yeah, usually the t-shirt is underneath a pricey preppie looking sweater or sweatshirt. I do work at a university after all. I don’t have one of those tweed blazers with the leather elbow patches. Yet.

I’ve done my fair share of street style photography. I guess that’s the best way to put it. I spent years running from one side of Boston to the other and I saw A LOT of people. Now I’ve switched gears a bit, and I carry my Holga camera with me and I snap what I think would look good in black and white or if I turn the camera upside down. That’s kinda where I am with things. But I know I’ll get back to shooting street style again. The best fashion show is definitely on the street, always has been always will be, as Bill would say.

Here are some of my favorite street style moments from over the years, from my COMPREHENSIVE archive:

I’ve been stuck inside of late. Well, of the past few days. I had a suspicious cough that I thought might turn into a cold or worse, the dreaded covid. It turned out to be a side effect from a medication I take for one of my middle aged person ailments. I’m negative for covid as well, thank the lord.

Well I did kinda think I was a disease vector and I had a bit of extra time, so I decided to cocoon myself at home and watch a bunch of things. One thing I watched was about Andy Warhol, an artist who had a major impact on me.

I guess it’s easy to say you have been inspired by Andy Warhol. I think anyone who has ever attempted to create art has said this. He’s a mass pop artist and in a way, the creator of the world we live in now. I bet that’s a dash of overstatement, but not by much. Warhol obsessively documented his life with films, painting, photography, all manner of things. Now you just open up that lighted rectangle in your hand and boom, your image goes out to a billion of your closest friends.

The other thing that always happens when I watch something about an artist, I want to create something. Yeah, I steal ideas a lot. A LOT. I have a book at home about my beloved Bill Cunningham that I keep at the ready all the time but I barely ever open because I get the biggest photography envy of all time when I do that.

Warhol also stuck in my mind because we crossed over in New York. Sure, he was in his 50s when I was about eight years old but we were around New York at the same time in the 1980s. He was a huge celebrity by then. I was using my allowance to buy Hello Kitty things at Bloomingdales and concerned about keeping my gymnastics leotard neat for my classes at Sokol, but yeah, I mean basically we were the same.

I was watching this documentary on Warhol and one of the participants said that New York was amazing in the 1980s and absolutely it was. It was everything people said it was. As I’ve mentioned up here before, I’m an only child and we didn’t have a lot of money then. We lived this nice contended life, my dad working at his university on York Avenue, us living across the street and my school across the street from that. My parents didn’t have money for a babysitter, so off I went with the adults. There was this insane electricity about the city then. I remember seeing guys in those Adidas jackets with the gold chains and the boom boxes walking around. You’d see these yuppies in these pin striped suits with red handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. The city just pulsated with this insane energy. Something was happening. Some kind of cultural shift was taking place.

You also saw vestiges of the old city. B. Altman was still open as a department store and that was roaring 20s New York, ladies mile New York, Mad Men New York. Finger sandwiches. The time when department stores sold everything, from food to stereos. There are still things in my parents house bought at B. Altman in my parents house, including an intact in the box selection of Christmas ornaments that still has the B. Altman price tag on them and were made in West Germany. Interestingly, B. Altman and West Germany went out of business about a year apart, some 30 years ago. But the ornaments remain.

Checker cabs still ran in the city and it was a thrill to ride in them. It was like riding in a horse drawn carriage. My favorite thing was these weird little stools inside the cab that were meant to fit more people into it. Again, I’m a tiny child in this cab. This would never be allowed now.

Even as a little kid, I remember wanting to see all of this, experience all of it. My parents are kinda proper and formal. I just found this world utterly fascinating but again, being a little kid, running away really would not have been in my best interest. But even then I remember wishing I had a camera to capture it all.

Most of all, I remember wanting to document all of it, like Warhol did. Oh and I forgot to mention. We used to run into him on the street. There were a lot of those famous people around then but Warhol was probably the most famous at the time. He loomed large in the city. He passed away in 1987 at New York Hospital, when we were still living in the city. New York Hospital was right behind where my parents worked. I also remember going to Sotheby’s auction house after he died where they had this huge display of his person effects. There was a ton of stuff but what I remember the most were the unopened cookie jars. There were hundreds of them. He was eccentric. That’s for sure.

We left Manhattan in 1989 to live in this rather mediocre place in this rather mediocre area north of the city, just north, a place better seen in the rear view mirror of your car. I remember when we moved there thinking — what are we even doing here? I mean we’d been at the center of the universe and now we’d moved to this hole, this mediocre hole. I remember thinking — people escape places like this to move to Manhattan. Why had we gone in reverse? We’d go to Manhattan most weekends almost in a way to go home, back to what we really knew. Even now when I’m in New York and I start walking towards the East River, I think “I’m on my way home.” If I see movies that show the Queensborough bridge, or as we call it our family, our bridge, I slow it down to try to find our old building. In my mind, we’re still that family living in that apartment in New York.

After we left in 1989, I felt like the city lost some of its energy. In the 1990s, the city got cleaner, safer but also the energy died down. I mean you could actually go to Times Square because it wasn’t full of porn theaters anymore but the place wasn’t the same. I still see the vestiges of the old city when I’m there, periodically but more and more of them are disappearing. To me now the city is way too corporate with those giant, cold, anonymous condo towers. I do still miss the dollar slices, good bagels and the very efficient yellow cabs but I’m a Bostonian now, clam chowder, extensive sports opinions, lobster and the occasional dropped R. I’ve lived here as long as I lived in Manhattan and in that hole so I’m equally both places now. Up until I moved to Boston though, Manhattan was the place where I had lived the longest in my life and therefore, it was my home. In as much as I actually had one.

Anyway, most of you come here for the photos. I’m done with my Fran Lebowitz/Isak Dinesen type of memoir thing. As I searched for the proper images to illustrate this entry with, I thought — I’ve photographed a lot of people over the years in the city. I think they’d be perfect to illustrate this entry. I mean of course I would love to have a big record of what I saw as a kid in the 1980s, but I guess that just has to live in my head. But as soon as I was old enough, I started documenting the people of the city, August Sander or Bill Cunningham or a general love of sticking my camera in people’s faces. Take your pick. Most of these images have never been seen on this blog, so this is a premiere, of sorts.

I guess that is a rather strong title for a blog entry, but it is what it is.

I’ve had this blog for almost 16 years and it’s gone through a number of iterations. I’ve been a photographer for 25 years, in that I really started taking pictures with an all manual camera that year. As any story of a photographer starts, I borrowed my dad’s Canon AE-1. “Borrowed” in that I kept the camera for over 15 years, dragging it across continents and into any place that I wouldn’t get kicked out of for carrying it. And some I was kicked out of.

I know this is going to sound profoundly self important and pompous, but I’ve recently started to think about my “work,” my body of work as a photographer. What defines the photographs I take? I think two things profoundly affected me. The first was growing up in New York in the 1980s and seeing all of it. I saw the rise of rap and hip hop culture, the yuppies on Wall Street and that arts scene in New York. I would walk around New York with my parents and we’d see Andy Warhol. That stays with you. The other thing was going to museums growing up. A lot of museums. I’m an only child and babysitters were expensive, so I went where the adults went. Even as a kid, I remember going to those museums and thinking — I want to go create something. I want to be a part of this, but here’s the thing. I am absolutely terrible at drawing or painting. I just seemed so far away to be able to create the way those people created.

I was drawn to photography way before I ever picked up a camera. Way before. I absolutely had a vision of what I wanted to photograph but the technical skill to actually do this??? That was way off in the future. I never actually took a photography class. People always asked me if I did, but I never did. I did though take a class called “History of Photography,” which I absolutely loved. I mean LOVED. It had nothing to do with the good looks of the instructor and his luxurious head of hair. LOL. But in all seriousness, it was comprehensive look at a century and a half of photography, from Nadar to Cartier Bresson to the present day. I remember one day, the instructor asked us how many of us thought of ourselves as photographers. At the time, I had a point and shoot Ricoh camera that I took a lot of out of focus pictures with. I wasn’t going frighten Richard Avedon with my photography talent. A lot of people raised their hands. I remember thinking that I just love looking at those images and just getting inspiration. I also had no idea how to make any of them. Another thing the instructor said was that a lot of photographers start by imitating other people and then come up with their own style. Maybe that’s the way I would go. Imitate, then innovate.

I went through a whole period where I would try to imitate what I had seen other photographers had done. Slowly though I did start to develop a style of my own. I always want the photographs to be infused with a lot of life and excitement. I always loved a huge sense of movement in my photos. This is crazy to admit, but I watch old gymnastics routines for inspiration on how to photograph movement. I mentioned in these entries before that I always had this need to document my life. I kept diaries growing up, but photographs were so much more immediate and interesting. For a long time and still to some degree, I still seek out opportunities where I’ll be able to see interesting things but for a long time, the idea of photographing the same place over and over interested me. When I started working in Downtown Crossing in Boston, I photographed my path to work incessantly and what went on in that area. And A LOT went on. A LOT.

I guess I would boil it down to, my photographic manifesto is the following. Carry your camera with you everywhere. You never know what kind of crazy things you are going to see in a day. Photograph, document, infuse the images with life but at the same time, transmit how you felt when you were photographing that particular scene. Amazement, excitement, sadness, heartbreak, put it all in the photograph. Chase every possible opportunity to take pictures. Stick your camera in the faces of every unsuspecting person, famous or not. And always remember, the best photograph you ever take is always the next one. If you hit a creative block, go sharpen pencils until you come up with an idea. Well for me, it was to pick up the film camera after having put it down for 15 years. Thanks Covid. I can never thank you for all the fantastic opportunities you have presented me. Nah, I’m kidding. Just leave already. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

So here’s a carefully curated selection of my body of work. And by that I mean I randomly searched by insane archive. They’ve been taken in such exotic places as Sweden, the Cayman Islands, Florence, Venice, Copenhagen and of course, Albany, New York and Providence, Rhode Island. Some of these pictures, I have published before and others, they’ve never seen the light of day, so this is a premiere of sorts.