People Come By And They Look At Your Face…

And they say it’s the fairest of all…

bicycle at dumbo

I’ve just added some pictures to my photography site, under the Minolta X700 section. Highlights include black and white pictures from Jersey City and the Renegade Craft Fair at McCarren Park Pool, as well as color pictures from a bike ride to DUMBO.

And while we’re on the topic of photography, of late I’ve been curious about a couple of Japanese photographers whose work I saw at the Met last weekend.

Polar Bear (1976) - Sugimoto Hiroshi

When Sugimoto Hiroshi first arrived in New York City in 1974, he visited the American Museum of Natural History where he discovered “the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. [He'd] found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”

Containers At A Chinese Port (Honjo Naoki)

Honjo Naoki, Sugimoto’s younger colleague, explores the same theme of reality/illusion in his work by using a tilt-shift technique to achieve a shallow depth of field with selected areas of focus, making his real-life gargantuan subject(s) look like little toys in a miniature world.

Certainly not news (Honjo and other photographers have been doing this for a while) but definitely captivating and appeals to my love for architectural types and miniature things. These pictures also inspire me to bake a huge cupcake and photograph it to make it look like a miniature dollop of deliciousness and frosting.

And next time I see you I’ll be pleased to see you
I hope you’ll be pleased to see me
I’ll visit your picture I won’t have the nerve
To tell them that they’ve got you all wrong

But – What If They Like It?

… and lock us in a cannery with your accordion,
Until we canned our love?

A while ago I had a lot to write about – I had planned to write posts on Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut “Synecdoche, New York“, the 2008 elections, a trip out to Flushing, my Metropolitan Museum day with D., as well as random little bits and blurbs about daily revelations and hmm-moments I’ve been having. But somehow, in the middle of being busy yet not, I haven’t been able to sit down and meander at the computer.

The days and their meanings are beginning to string themselves so closely together, calendrical milestones flitting by with one significant event after the other – Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas and the New Year before we know it – another champagne toast, another countdown, another midnight kiss pregnant with hope of a better string of milestones ahead. The more things change, the more they stay the same? I’m approaching the next month or so with the very slightest of anxiety and caution towards reality and my self – at the back of my mind, I wonder if this season, which I love in my own quiet way, is just repetition this year and I’m just moving along, bobbing up and down like a leaf on the surface of a pond.

Maybe it’s just because the days are getting so dark. I’m finding ways to light them up somehow, and reconnect my little world with the universe.

I tried and tried and tried and tried
and tried and tried to keep the crowds away

And it’s so cold

so cold baby I’m an old soul old soul inside.

beta.beta on fearless music from Parixit Dave on Vimeo.

We made it to Fox’s Fearless Music!