03.30.2010 | 01:23 PM • Filed in:
Tech:News
The New York Times has an
article about how amateurs
have been flooding the professional photography
market. This isn’t news for somebody like me.
This is what I’ve been calling the Craigslist
phenomenon. The shitty economy has forced
everybody to get more creative about how they
earn money. And many photo hobbyists are
discovering that they’d happily take photos for
next to nothing, thus the undercutting of prices
and the devaluing of pro quality. Wedding
photography for $3-500 is now commonplace.
Headshots for $75. When you’re an amateur, time
is not money. The complication of course is that
there’s often little that distinguishes amateur
from pro work. This is often the case in the
arts. But technology-based jobs have been
getting outsourced to cheaper competition—India,
China, etc.—for years. Professional
photographers now either have to pursue the
high-end or compete against the lowest-common
denominator. Of course journalism and
photojournalism are dying professions anyway.
Twitter and blogs now deliver the news and
flickr allows anyone to enter the stock photo
business. Competition is healthy of course and
as Cocteau said, a medium only really becomes an
art form when it is affordable by the masses.
So, while I love the increasingly visually
saturated world, I’m preparing for my full
retreat into another non-lucrative passion,
fiction writing.
03.29.2010 | 11:14 PM • Filed in:
Brooklyn:Sports
Above is Joe Nocella holding my early 90s vintage
Bianchi Premio frame with a new set of wheels and
drivetrain. Joe runs
718 Cyclery, a one-man shop
on the edge of Park Slope which specializes in
refurbishing old bikes and fixed-gear
conversions. He’s unique in that he calls his
upgrades collaborations, which they truly are.
All aspects of the conversion were discussed,
and though I wanted to go exclusively fixed
gear, I knew that since I’d probably be riding
with Max occasionally, it was better to opt for
a flip-flop hub, with fixed gear on one side and
a singlespeed freewheel on the other. I highly
recommend Joe if you’re in the area and tired of
the attitude and incompetence at local bike
shops. Joe is honest and fair and he stands
behind his work. If you’re into bike porn and
want to see his blog posting on my conversion,
go
here. And of course the most
important thing to report is that the bike rides
great--smooth, silently, and with total harmony.
I’m very happy.
03.28.2010 | 11:28 PM • Filed in:
Brooklyn
03.25.2010 | 12:54 AM • Filed in:
Pic of the
Day:Art:Light
An image rediscovered from 5 years ago when testing
out Adobe’s new
Lightroom 3 beta, which is
fantastic btw.
03.24.2010 | 11:49 PM • Filed in:
Art:Tech
I discovered a neat little
program which records your
mouse movement (clicks, pauses, trails) as you
work on your computer. Above is 3 hours of mouse
activity around my desktop. Below is 7.4 minutes
of mousing without the background. Looks pretty,
means nothing, but is very fun.
03.21.2010 | 10:52 PM • Filed in:
Art:Friends
03.20.2010 | 11:27 PM • Filed in:
Street
Photography:Brooklyn
03.20.2010 | 10:47 PM • Filed in:
Writing:Friends
John Talbird, one of my
fellow residents at Lower Manhattan Cultural
Council, gave a fun reading at the subterranean
bar, Jimmy’s No. 43, an event sponsored by
Essays and Fictions literary
journal.
03.18.2010 | 02:45 PM • Filed in:
Brooklyn:Pic
of the Day:Light
It’s spring and the sun is once again pouring through
the skylights!

03.16.2010 | 11:39 PM • Filed in:
Brooklyn
03.16.2010 | 11:39 PM • Filed in:
Brooklyn
03.16.2010 | 05:59 PM • Filed in:
Animals:Pic
of the Day:Brooklyn
03.11.2010 | 10:12 PM • Filed in:
Brooklyn:News:Politics
In two years, we will have this glorious building
down the street from us. This afternoon, Bruce
Ratner’s ratpack of politicians, Paterson, Bloomberg,
Schumer, Markowitz, etc. pushed their ceremonial
shovels into some ceremonial dirt.
Thanks to taxpayer subsidies, Ratner’s pockets are
very deep, deep enough to buy almost everyone out.
Most likely there will be a few eminent domain fights
before Forest City Ratner can claim the last few
pockets of privately owned land, but the Supreme
Court has already spoken about that. Like the
Republican Convention held in NYC in 2004, protestors
were forced a block away from the ceremony. The Times
reported
this, but the story was
mostly buried, strange given the scale of the
Atlantic Yards project. (Could it have something
to do with the NYT’s
cozy relationship with Forest
City Ratner?).
While I’m all for jobs and the expansion of
affordable housing, this plan will do little good for
the borough except help the construction industry and
possibly build some borough pride with the Nets.
Aside from real estate speculators, I do not know a
single person who is in favor of this enormous
project. It is totally out of character with the
neighborhood, in scale and design. The traffic will
be a nightmare. There aren’t enough schools, the
subway and LIRR will be overburdened. And then there
will be the loss of neighborhood businesses as
anonymous mall life invades the borough. We live in
Brooklyn because we like the brownstone scale of
life. We like trees and parks and peace and quiet. We
like owner-occupied small structures. There’s a
reason we didn’t want to live in Manhattan. This is a
very sad day for Brooklyn.
03.10.2010 | 09:50 PM • Filed in:
Brooklyn:Sports
03.06.2010 | 09:49 PM • Filed in:
Family
03.04.2010 | 09:15 AM • Filed in:
Writing:News
I had the privilege of spending a week with Barry
Hannah in 2007, at a summer workshop at Amherst
College. Though his love of storytelling was still
richly evident, it was clear his failing health was
most on his mind. Drink and cancer had ravaged him,
and the financial fallout was terrible. Like Orson
Welles, who needed to pontificate about cheap
domestic wines to pay the rent, Hannah joked that he
only did these workshops for the money. Still, I was
charmed by his raucous sense of humor and his
reverence for his literary forbears. After enjoying
brief monologues on the craft of fiction, I got to
lunch with him and talk about Faulkner and John
Grisham and Larry Brown, and Donna Tartt, his hatred
of the label
southern writing. He
had an amazing, playful way with words. His sentences
and characters were wild and fun and irreverent. I
have never encountered voices like those in
Airships or
Geronimo Rex. The horror and
grotesque humor of
Yonder Stands Your Orphan
still haunts me. On Monday, America lost a truly
original voice. Read the NYT obit
here and an
appreciation at Vanity Fair.
03.02.2010 | 03:10 PM • Filed in:
News:Brooklyn:Landscape
The EPA did the right thing, naming the polluted
Gowanus a SuperFund site. According to this NYT
article, the cleanup could
take 10-12 years and cost $300-500 million.
Bloomberg and company were very disappointed, no
doubt upset about the prospects for crony real
estate development. Next up should be the
Superfund labeling of
the terrible oil spill under
Greenpoint, one of the worst domestic oil
spills (even bigger than the Exxon Valdez).
03.01.2010 | 09:58 AM • Filed in:
Animals
He was a very, very special cat, but his cancer had
gotten so bad he’d stopped eating and was too weak
even to seek affection. Clearly he was in pain. With
the expert help of our vet Helen from Animal Kind,
Mochi was euthanized around 4pm. We will really miss
his unique, loving sentience.