Art
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Idea: nets from the Nets for Brooklyn’s schools and playgrounds
Here is a simple idea for the Brooklyn Nets that will do a world of good for their borough and their team: provide new nets for every net-less basketball hoop in every school and playground. The cost of few thousand team color (black and white) nets probably wouldn’t be more than the cost of one… Continue reading
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Finally, maybe, getting a podcast rolling
Hi, Liveblog fans. This post continues (or plays jazz with) this liveblog post, following my podcast learnings, live. As an old radio guy and an inveterate talker, I think I should be good at podcasting. Or at least that it’s worth trying. Which I have, many times. The results, so far, appear at here, at… Continue reading
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The Most Spectacular Place You’ll Never See
Unless you look out the window. When I did that on 4 November 2007, halfway between London and Denver, I saw this: Best I could tell at the time, this was Greenland. That’s how I labeled it in this album on Flickr. For years after that, I kept looking at Greenland maps, trying to find… Continue reading
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#10books that changed my life
There’s a challenge going around Facebook: to name ten books that have changed your life. So I’ve thought about my own, and kept a running list here in draft form. Now that it’s close enough to publish, methinks, here they are, in no order, and not limited to ten (or to Facebook) — War and… Continue reading
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A visit to the old ‘hood
A couple weeks ago I took a walk around the historic neighborhood in Fort Lee where my extended family had a home — 2063 Hoyt Avenue — from the turn of the last century into the 1950s. It’s where my parents lived when I was born, and where my aunt and grandmother sat for my sister and… Continue reading
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Rediscovering Junkie John, Tim Dawe and Penrod after 40 years
I used to have an open reel tape of song I recorded off some New York FM station in 1970 or so. It’s long lost now. I didn’t know the artist or the title. It was was half talked, half sung, about a loser in Greenwich Village, “Junkie John,” coming down in a fleabag hotel.… Continue reading
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Snow on the Water
I’ve been intrigued by Fotopedia since it showed up in ’09, especially since I do a shitload of travel photography. But I never posted anything there, because I was afraid it would die. And now, says here, it will. In seven days. The reason: As of August 10, 2014, Fotopedia.com will close and our iOS… Continue reading
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Urban originals
It would have been great to visit the Egyptian Spice Market in Istanbul with my old friend Stephen Lewis, whose knowledge that city runs deep and long. But I was just passing through the Old City by chance, waylaid en route from Sydney to Tel Aviv, and Stephen was still in Sofia, which he also… Continue reading
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Shooting a stand-still pano
I’ve been having fun shooting panos — panoramas — with my phone. While the one above isn’t especially artful, it does show off what can be done if you let the subject move while you stand still. In this one I’m looking toward the opposite platform in a New York subway station. This has to… Continue reading
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Reframing the news
…all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end… — Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Ulysses Here’s how dull that pause — that end we call the front page — has become: And yet every… Continue reading
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On promise lost
I was digging around for links toward a post on Brian Knappenberger‘s crowdsourced Aaron Swartz documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy, when I learned that Malik Bendjelloul, the documentary filmmaker who won an Oscar last year for Searching for Sugar Man, was also dead — like Aaron, a suicide. I would guess that readers of this blog are more familiar with… Continue reading
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Spying on your ass
Quantified toilets. Seems to be a project out of @CHI2014, going on now in Toronto. Continue reading
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Ash tray snowbank
Spent some time this morning wondering whether the butts in the melting snow by the A Train station at Dyckman Street migrated there from elsewhere, or if the former snowbank served as an ashtray for smoking passengers. Either way, it’s an impressive collection. Continue reading
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Getting into my header
Since I’ve been maturing while my blog header has not, I’ve been thinking that soon is a good time to change it. The old headshot, or art-from-a-headshot, dates from the last Millennium, when I still wore granny glasses and had hair. And it never looked much like me in the first place. This was it:… Continue reading
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Into the dark
The power will be out for a while. That’s what the guys in the hard hats tell me, down where they’re working, at the intersection where our dead-end street is born. Many trucks are gathered there, with bright night-work lights illuminating whatever went wrong with the day’s power pole replacement job. The notices they left… Continue reading
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Something beyond perfection
I last visited Barcelona more than twenty years ago. Back then the Sagrada Família was already impressive, but also incomplete. All that stood were the nativity façade and some small number (four? eight?) of the Sagrada’s eventual eighteen towers. I recall nothing of the interior, perhaps because there was none. In many ways, in fact,… Continue reading
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The Holy Mountain of Montserrat
To an window-sitter accustomed to flying over the American West, Catalonia from altitude looks like Utah. On the northern horizon the Pyrenees, like the Uintahs, run east-west above a dry landscape of settled alluvium, much of it reddish as the San Rafael desert. While the shapes of the ancient towns below are clearly old world in… Continue reading
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Seeing Deeply
Cities aren’t simple, especially mature ones. They are deep and complicated places that require equally deep attention to appreciate fully. That’s what I get from Stephen Lewis‘ insights about the particulars of present and past urban scenes and characters in Sofia, New York, Istanbul and other cities he knows well. His latest post, titled The Women’s… Continue reading
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Grace Apgar, 1912-2013
Aunt Grace — my father’s younger sister — died yesterday at her home in Maine. She was 101 years old, and in good health until just a couple days ago. Last month, in fact, she flew to San Diego to visit one of her granddaughters. Grace often said she wanted to live to 108, like… Continue reading
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Loving the Alps of Los Angeles
I orient by landmarks. When I was growing up in New Jersey, the skyline of New York raked the eastern sky. To the west were the Watchung “Mountains“: hills roughly half the height of Manhattan’s ranking skyscrapers. But they gave me practice for my favorite indulgence here in Los Angeles: multi-angulating my ass in respect to… Continue reading