Here’s Charles Ebbets at work. The picture he took in 1932 is famous:
I get dizzy just looking at it.
Room with a View. Shhh.
Picture from Blue Pueblo via the consistently vibrant site, This Isn’t Happiness.
Gothamist gives the 12 best movie theaters in New York. Nice to see the Ziegfeld made the list.
I have some good movie memories at that theater: Gandhi, with my grandmother–oh, the agony for an 11-year-old kid; Karate Kid, a few years later, revved up to kick ass when it was over; Roxanne, in high school, sitting next to a beautiful woman who I followed out of the theater and then walked to the Upper West Side with–she worked in music videos and said she’d try to cast me on her next job, gave me her card, then I never heard from her; The Last Temptation of Christ, around the same time, first showing on opening day, with my friend Matt, making fun of all the protesters; Twelve Monkeys, seven years later with a German girl I was trying to get with (and when I did, came to regret it); Star Wars Episode II, Attack of the Clones, with friends and The Wife in the afternoon before we went to see the Yanks that night–the game where Giambi hit the game-ending grand slam in the rain in extra innings.
[Photo Credit: Joel Zimmer]
Enter light. And it was nice out this weekend as the clocks changed.
This morning I heard two women on the subway talking about the weather. One, in a Rosie Perez accent, said, “It’s supposed to rain tomorrow. They say it will be in the ’40s and chilly but I find it chilly today, dammit.”
[Photo Credit: Jamel Shabazz]
I see this guy selling papers every day when I come out of the subway on my way to the office. We nod our heads and smile hello, though he doesn’t always smile. I bought a paper from him only once–when the President was re-elected–and he seemed so happy that ever since he makes more of an effort to smile back.
It’s snowing in New York this morning and here he is, undeterred, doing his job. Hard-workin’, money-earnin.
Because I can’t get enough of Saul Leiter:
“There are certain people who like to be in the swing of things, but I think I’ve been out of the loop a lot of the time. When Bonnard died, one critic accused him of not participating in the great adventures of Modernism. And Matisse wrote a letter in which he defended Bonnard, saying that when he saw the Bonnards in the Phillips collection, he told Mr. Phillips, ‘Bonnard was the strongest of us all.’
I’m not like those photographers who went up to the top of the mountain and hung over and took a picture that everyone said was impossible and then went home and printed it and sold 4,000 copies of it and then went on and on with one great achievement after another.
Max Kozloff said to me one day, ‘You’re not really a photographer. You do photography, but you do it for your own purposes – your purposes are not the same as others’. I’m not quite sure what he meant, but I like that. I like the way he put it.”