New York/LES

The Bowery Mission and New Museum

Yesterday, the temperature soared into the 60s, so I took the opportunity to do more Lower East Side pictures. I left my apartment/office on Stanton Street and began walking down the Bowery stopping to do a photograph of the Bowery Mission adjacent to the New Museum. There are few facilities ministering to the homeless and addicted left in the neighborhood, but this is one of the oldest, and it continues to provide meals and other services even as the flophouses and bars have vanished.


The Bowery and Hester Street

I walked through the lighting district to the south of Delancey/Kenmare Street. There used to be many such unofficial markets in Manhattan--the flower district in the West 20s, the radio district obliterated by the World Trade Center, the restaurant supply area of the Bowery hanging by a thread--but gradually they've been dispersed at a loss to the diversity of the city. At Grand Street, the Bowery has been subsumed into the ever expanding Chinatown, which has grown north and east further into the Lower East Side. On the corner of Hester a large site has been cleared for new construction, a tacky glass tower pictured on a sign on the construction fence. I did a series of shots here with the 4x5 camera.


Eldridge Street Synogogue

I then walked east on Hester and then downtown on Eldridge to the Eldridge Street Synogogue that I visited a few weeks ago. The late 19th century structure has been restored and functions now in part as a museum. It is surrounded by the visual cacophany of Chinatown, a scene I've been trying, with mixed success, to get into a photograph. Today, I tried again, timing my arrival for the low winter sun raking just above the nearby Manhattan Bridge. I got up on a rather high stoop of a tenement opposite the synagogue and did two wide views of the synogogue showing adjacent buildings. I also did a photograph looking north through layers of signs with Chinese lettering.


Eldridge Street

A tourist came by holding a Time Out guide gazing up at the building. As we chatted, it struck me how much this scene was an echo of the old Lower East Side when people jammed the streets and sidewalks, commerce of every description was carried out in the open, and when there was a density of sights, noises and smells that filled the senses.


East Broadway and Pike Street

I walked around several blocks in this area photographing various storefronts as the light began to fade. At Canal and Eldridge a large 19th century building was being demolished--another development site.

The project continues. Today I sent out 200 postcards to galleries, museums, and individuals. Book? Exhibit? Website for now.

New York/I'm Not There

Film Forum, Houston Street

On Saturday I finally got to see I’m Not There, the non-documentary film circumscribing the figure of Bob Dylan by Todd Haynes. It’s a stunning movie, one that explores the myths, clichés, and even lies that form the persona of the man born as Robert Zimmerman. Six actors play different aspects, or different periods, of Dylan’s life, including an 11 year old black boy as Dylan’s Woody Guthrie doppelgänger, and Cate Blanchett as the acerbic Don’t Look Back Dylan.


Don't Look Back, Allen Ginsburg in background

The latter, of course, refers to the ground breaking direct cinema film by D.A. Pennebaker (who was a teacher of mine at Cooper Union). Pennebaker’s masterpiece, while presumably a fly on the wall peek at Dylan on the road, probably furthers the mythology of Bob Dylan more than any other film. It’s a knowing collaboration between two ambitious artists, each with a profound understanding of the power of the camera to document and manipulate.


Cate Blanchett on screen in Film Forum

All of the six visions of Dylan are effective, but Cate Blanchett’s performance as the wild-haired skinny-legged black and white Dylan of the mid-sixties is amazing and has to be seen to be believed. Her sly smiling gaze at the camera as the film ends, is brilliant—Dylan, as the ultimate joker, however much he may have been victimized by celebrity, the press, and the insatiable blood lust of his fans. There’s lots of humor in I’m Not There, despite the art film gravity—Dylan and the mop-topped Beatles rolling down a hill, and Allen Ginsburg (another great joker) riding alongside Dylan’s limo. The obvious reference is to the wonderful Beatles mock documentary A Hard Day’s Night, while Ginsburg, way back then, made a cameo appearance in Don’t Look Back.

Although Haynes is dealing with an American icon through and through, I’m Not There is a film suffused with the spirit of the French New Wave, particularly Jean Luc Godard’s Masculin Feminin another film that veers between a verité style and a deconstruction of the conceits of cinematic storytelling. There are also Felliniesque moments with costumes and freaks, and the outlaw segment with Richard Gere is all McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the early Robert Altman film. The references go on and on, and the the bones of the film will undoubtedly be picked clean by film buffs and Dylanologists.


Walking through Soho after the film. Numerous scenes in the film
were set in the streets near Film Forum in Greenwich Village.

The one persona, however, that’s not there in I’m Not There, is the latest incarnation of Bob Dylan, the grizzled veteran whose last few albums have plumbed the depths of American music with songs as strange and enigmatic as those from his Basement Tapes era. The story is not over as Dylan writes—songs and memoirs—and continues to tour and tour as if there’s nothing else left to do. It may not be Woody Guthrie’s hobo boxcar that Dylan rides from town to town, but its a long train curling into the night, nevertheless.

New York/New Year

Happy New Year!

My family has survived its first year together in New York. For the past 15 years I've been traveling back and forth between here and Amsterdam, but for my wife and son, this was a new, and potentially challenging experience. Brendan has thrived at PS 3, the elementary school in the West Village, and Renée has worked a half year for Community Board 4, one of the citizen advisory bodies involved in the official decision making process for the city. CB 4 covers Hell's Kitchen (west Midtown) and Chelsea where many important urban projects are in the works--the Highline, the west side rail yards, and the rebuilding of Penn Station to name a few.

We look forward to new adventures this year, photographic and otherwise, and I plan to keep this blog going through it all. Thanks to all who have been following it.