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NYC Fire Museum (SoHo)

12.04.2009 | 02:10 AM •
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Brooklyn Navy Yard

04.01.2009 | 12:18 PM •
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Park Slope Rabbi Slaughters Nazis in "Call of Duty"

03.08.2009 | 12:36 PM •
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The Forward has a piece by a rabbi on the therapeutic benefit of playing the uber-violent videogame World at War: Call of Duty. He found the game a “safe place” to relive the horrors wrought by the Nazis because he could be victorious--after all, you get unlimited lives. Still, he concludes that the multiplayer game lacks complexity and reality, calling its realism “an aesthetic in the service of entertainment.” Makes me wonder how many cronies of Mengele are playing from the jungles of the Amazon. Hmm... This might make a good story...
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The Kiss that Ends the War

01.29.2009 | 03:10 PM •
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This iconic photograph of a jubilant sailor kissing a nurse near Times Square has always held a special place in my personal history. To an aspiring photojournalist, it was a benchmark of great news photography. That it bordered on the contrived and was compositionally simple (yet satisfying), only added to its greatness for me. Behind the joy was Japan’s defeat, but it was the optimism so perfectly captured in this photograph that led my father to leave Tokyo in 1956 to do his medical internship in New York.

Anyway, yesterday I stumbled upon an interesting postscript to Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph in the archives of Life magazine. While I knew that Eisenstaedt had been anxious to get a great kissing image, shooting at least a half-dozen frames of other kisses in the crowds, I didn’t know that another Life photographer, William C. Shrout, captured Eisenstaedt, seen below with his shouldered Leica M3, getting a taste of the decisive moment himself.
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For photographers, who are basically voyeurs at heart, there’s often a tension between bearing witness and participating in the drama unfolding before your eyes. On August 14, 1945, Eisenstaedt had his cake and ate it. For more about the famous photograph go here.
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Necchi Sewing Machine Ad (Chelsea)

10.08.2008 | 11:09 PM •
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WTC 7th Anniversary

09.11.2008 | 11:00 PM •
The view of the lights from Flatbush and Bergen, a very similar view I had of the towers when I left for a photoshoot and the first plane had just hit the north tower...
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First History Lesson

09.08.2008 | 02:08 PM •
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A Nose Is a Nose Is a Nose?

06.24.2008 | 03:22 PM •
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In a kind of Borgesian rewriting of history, United Artists has apparently doctored old photographs of Claus von Stauffenberg, the attempted assassin of Hitler, so they resemble better Tom Cruise who is playing the German hero in a film called Valkyrie slated to open in February of 2009. Read about the controversy and how it ties in to Scientology here.
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The Empires Strike Back: Big Oil Is Back in Iraq

06.19.2008 | 08:11 PM •
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According to this article in the NYT,The Iraq Petroleum Company is back! Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, and BP will return to Kirkuk, Mosul, and other petroleum-rich areas, starting June 30th. The British, Dutch, French, and U.S. companies are returning to what was once part of the Ottoman Empire, after 47 years of being locked out in 1961 when General Qassem nationalized Iraq's oil, a program completed by our man, Saddam Hussein in 1971. The foreign oil companies were given very nice no-bid contracts to begin extraction, almost certainly giving them a nice position to pump out a lot more when the contracts end in two years. With oil at $140 a barrel, the price of war is cheap in comparison. With the leveraged investment of 4100 dead U. S. soldiers, tens of thousands wounded, about 100K dead Iraqis, and a half trillion dollars of taxpayers' money, big oil should be poised to make some very nice profits.
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Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: Chalk Project

03.23.2008 | 11:19 PM •
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Ruth Sergel's Chalk Project 2008 memorializes the 146 victims (mostly women) who died in the March 25, 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, one of the worst fires in NYC history and the start of modern labor safety law movement. For the last couple of years, she has recruited volunteers to fan out over the city to chalk the names of the victims in front of the houses where they lived. Most of the young women lived in tenements on the Lower East Side, but four lived near my apartment in Prospect Heights, so Julie, me, and my friend Ranbir headed on a walk from Park Slope, through Columbia Terrace and onto Red Hook to chalk their names on the sidewalk.
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