We stumbled on a so-this-city scene when we found these FDNY firefighters training in the middle of the street. One of the older guys was encouraging a younger recruit (“it ain’t easy”), before a dude on a bike and two dogs strapped like babies showed up to chit chat. The very last slide isn’t from this street, but it seemed like it capped off the set nicely. x x x
I’ve been listening to @catpowerofficial for years and years, ever since @aliciammmm first introduced her to me a lifetime ago, but I never got the chance to see her perform live—there’s a whole era of artists that shaped me from afar when I lived in places they never ventured, and I’d long resigned myself to keeping it that way. But when I heard that Chan was playing at @kingcountychomp this year, and for free (!!!), I knew I had to be there. What I didn’t expect, though, is how moved I’d be. From the first notes of ‘The Greatest,’ my … Continue reading “Cat Power at CHOMP!” →
On the morning of my birthday, we went to visit the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine bright and early, so we were two of a handful of people there. I was amused when the very cool and very bored person at the counter asked what the nature of my visit was—this was early in our trip, and I wasn’t yet used to these buildings being seen as tourist traps, plus his question was giving “border control”—and even more amused when he tripped over my reply: prayer. After a beat, he made sure I knew that photography isn’t allowed if … Continue reading “St John the Divine” →
I’d planned to get an aura photo taken upon my solar return and was pleased to see that @magicjewelrynyc did that sort of thing in a convenient location in Chinatown. Drop-ins welcome too! Alas, the only woo-woo that was to ensue was our circling the block a dozen times in the scorching heat before realizing that the location had disappeared off the face of the earth. Grand rising! We had a good laugh about that and greatly enjoyed the insanity that is Canal Street and its Canal Street bling. We also seemed to stumble upon some police raid that was confiscating merchandise, … Continue reading “New York Aura” →
The one place we prioritized once we found a coin locker for our suitcase and sat down for lunch at the station was @nyan_nyanji, the Cat Temple on the outskirts of town. As millennials from the internet, it just felt like that had to be the one religious site of the many religious sites in Kyoto we couldn’t miss, if we could only see one. It would be more than an hour by bus and back, and it did not disappoint. I’ll post a fever dream of a Reel about it shortly. #japanonfilm #streetphotography #nikonlitetouch #35mmphotography #analogphoto #kyotogram #kyotographie x … Continue reading “Far Away (Ground Zero)” →
Back to our regularly scheduled programming with more travel spam that the same 10-15 people care about. I’d wanted to lean into the “nonlinear” in my bio by mixing up photos from the two visits to NYC that bookended our trip, but found it harder to find the plot than I expected. So, to get me back into the flow, here’s the quintessential New York experience: the Metro now OMNY. Twenty years ago, I was such a greenhorn to big cities shaped like grids that I had no concept of stations having many entrances or trains having different directions of … Continue reading “Travel Spam and Transport Geographies” →
“OPERATION” by @benirito at ORGANIC INTELLIGENCE at @slip_belltown I made a friend on Monday. We’d first met at an art show, so it seemed fitting that we’d meet up again at another. But first, we pretended to be elsewhere for a while, somewhere far from this city we’ve both adopted. We sat at a sidewalk cafe, performing aperitivo under a Seattle sun turned a Mediterranean orange by the smoke of Spokane’s hellfires, and we talked about what it meant to think and feel and relate in this part of the world. Our backgrounds were vastly different, and yet, the resonances … Continue reading “Organic Intelligence at Slip Belltown” →
“The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” That’s what Mark Rothko said in 1965 about the colorfield work he’s most famous for, an insistence on a “meaning” behind the “abstraction” that his son, Christopher, has reiterated in interviews about the major exhibit he co-curated in Florence this year: “He wanted those who looked at his paintings to experience the same religious experience that he had while creating them.” I’m no art historian and had no sense of his intentions when I encountered a Rothko in real life for … Continue reading “Rothko, Sontag, and a Book Called Fotografare” →
I’ve been seeing some chatter on here about “overtourism,” a phenomenon that’s viscerally obvious in a city like Florence. And while I’m not above grumbling about the crowds myself, every time the discourse veers into a quasi-actionable register (that proverbial “what is to be done”), I flinch. What is there to be done, really? Because the grumbles never come from people who have not stepped foot on whatever sacred ground is in question; it’s always people who want to be there just as badly as everyone else. And while my heart always goes out to the people who actually live … Continue reading “Overtourism, and Cory Doctorow’s Reverse Centaurs” →
Last frames from the Uffizi. x It’s interesting to think about the outsized role that Florence has played in shaping Italy’s language and national identity. It keeps coming up in the books I’m reading. The “questione della lingua,” which took on new urgency after unification, unfolded along two lines of tension. One looked backward, seeking authority in the literary language of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, treating the Florentine of the Trecento as the standard to be preserved through careful study of the classics. The other looked forward, asking whether a modern nation should instead build its common language from the … Continue reading “The Questione Della Lingua (Last Frames from the Uffizi)” →