NYC: 5th Ave. At Central Park

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Consensus disciplines perception

Perception focuses judgment

Judgment triggers conviction

Conviction colors streets nasty.

Found on July 12th 2012 as I walked along 5th Avenue.

Canon 7D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6), PS4: Topaz Adjustment, Custom texture, AlienSkinExposure 4: Color Films – Polaroid/faded-darkened, Snap Art Blow Up 3 (300% enlargement). Custom spot-applied color shift adjustment layers, original created to be printed at 27" X 36".

Crayon New York City °1

In high July color

Bubbles and melts.

Like flamed-plastic toys.

Like feeling-seared film.

I walked through New York’s mid-day tropics… Storing stuff in my memory-bin that’s marked Summer In The City. I found new image puddles – left out in the noon-day sun – that melted right over those I’d stored in that bin before. These new ones were like casings to harden around stacked feelings that burble and glow when I poke around for memories of city summer.

Crayoned Impressionism: Canon 7D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6), PS4: Two square details carved from a 3 panel vertical pano, Topaz Adjustment, AlienSkinExposure 4: Color Films - Polaroid/faded-darkened, Snap Art3: Crayon. Custom spot-applied color shift adjustment layers, original created to be printed at 30" X 60".

Peach Spa

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We look
For hooks
To which
We Can
Hang an
Order,
A map,
An under
Standing.

NYNY
Canon 7D

Canon 7D, NYNY

Swatch

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Imagination opens a big door
And shows us what's
Inside.

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NYNY
Canon G10
PS4/Topaz/AlienSkin-SnapArt2-Oil/Custom Brushes

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Summer Drummer

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Summer in the city... THE BIG CITY! It's a Tuesday during business hours. Central Park's an office... a BIG OFFICE. And it's close to millions of customers. Just a phone call away. If you're good on the phone, Central Park's a good place to work. Especially if your shoes are shined laser bright.

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Used my Canon G10 last week. It's small, inconspicuous, and quiet. Good thing, since I'm none of those things.

Box PIle

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Jay Maissel - "Black and white is an inside joke with no reference to reality. Color approximates reality, gets more of the feeling of what's there."

Arthur Miller - "Create the poem from the evidence."

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New York, New York
Canon G10
PS4 & Topaz & touches of Alien Skin Snap Art 2: Oil Paint

NYC Chic

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So I'm thinking something like this..... Wuddaya think?






Or howzabout ...

Quartet

Perkins, Cash, Elvis, & Jerry Lee

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Tuesday was our 42nd anniversary. I took Rita to NYC to see The MillionDollar Quartet. It's the romanticized story of the legendary 1956 reunion night in Sam Phillip's Sun Records. Apparently it really happened and the tape's finally been made into an album of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis jamming in front of the live mics. The story goes that it was the evening when Cash and Perkins told Phillips they were not going to renew their contracts.

The story's a thin reed to showcase actually five featured musicians and two backup players. How good is it? They made Rita scream when they whipped the audience into leaping frenzy. This is Broadway where America's very best theatrical talent work. If these people want to ignite a frenzy over a floor sweep... that audience will frenzy.

The five principals: Levi Kreis (Jerry Lee), Robert Britton Lyons (Carl Perkins), Lance Guest (Johnny Cash), Elizabeth Stanley (a fictional PC correct female edition) - and to a lesser extent Eddie Clendening (Elvis) are more electric than their amplifiers. Imagine the best concert you've seen - but stage it by top broadway directors, producers, lighters, sound engineers, and designers. Put it into a relatively small theater where every sight line is perfect... And you will get a sense of this thing.

Some months ago we enjoyed Jersey Boys on Broadway. This is its equal. It does not matter whether you like or hate rock-a-billy music. The theatricality of all of this is designed to slam you breathless. In fact, the last quarter of the show happens as a reprise. At a certain point, they drop all pretense of a drama, turn the stage into a concert hall, face the audience, and crank up the energy level to 11.

It is full frontal Broadway. BTW, the audience seemed to be wildly intergenerational. We were not the oldest couple and way far from the youngest. Its worth a trip to NYC. And, oh yeah. I booked the entire trip (except for Amtrak) through Broadway.com. We stayed at the Times Square Hilton, ate at Maison, and got center section, second row mezzanine seats (my favorite place to watch) from the company which I've used before and will exclusively use again.

It was a wonderful anniversary. Don't wait for your 42nd... call Broadway.com now (an unpaid testimonial). :-)

We've Been Walloped!

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Watched the vital signs today. Saw the world's financial markets wobbling. Watched the Euro's value reflect the astonishing amount of sovereign debt that EU countries will have to refinance over the next three months (who's left to buy?). Winced when the May US employment figures came in at disastrous levels and the unemployment rates declined only because large lumps of the American workers became so discouraged that they abandoned seeking work. Yeah, the way BP keeps pissing into the Gulf, and how Obama's "taking charge" by talking tough about that company's advertising and dividend payments - tough about things that will do nothing about the gunk vomiting up under the sea. Yeah, that's melancholic static.

But this is small stuff. The reeeely scary news came earlier in the week and the word's only just digesting the kernel of universal instability it revealed. Forget the trembling Middle East, pirates off of Africa, or the sabers rattling in Iran and North Korea. No... no... ultimately the most unsettling announcement... The one that makes us wonder if we can believe in any human decision... That news hit us with real wallop when we learned of the breakup between Al and Tipper.

Is there nothing solid left? Is it all dissolving?

Hangin In Manhattan

Guess where I was last night... K?
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Pretty Enough?

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In BigTown pretty is just a spiked-heel in the door.

After The Times Square

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I'm re-studying expressionism. It demands complex, well planned images with parts that are worked by the artist to the point of distortion in order to communicate the feelings of the moment.

Here's Broadway, an explosion at night. Blasting color over every part of you... Throbbing with shocking energy. Noisy, fast, a cacophony of sheen. Too much to compute.. Too big to focus. Too massive to step back far enough. Neck hurting high and needling its way into the black curtain up there.... Puncturing it.

Broadway's a vertical thing at Times Square after the Times stupidly left the party.

Vanishing Point

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I'm wondering whether many of the artists I admire have a novel way of seeing, or whether they see novel things. Of course, that makes me wonder just what novelty is. There are people who say that novelty is indivisible from creativity, and that creativity is indistinguishable from art.

Now we know that things get complicated by the simultaneous combination of gargantuan and tiny things together in cities. Look, take a picture of say, a majestic mountain and you limit what you present to us to the mountain, a sky, and perhaps some framing foreground. Whatever... the image is about mountain.

Now, walk around New York City and you just don't see a single mountain sitting there. It's the complexity of things that tumble into the vanishing point which make cities improbably novel. Their order comes from a disorderly jumble of stuff. I guess the pattern of a city comes from a kind of lack of pattern of objects plopped together over years by individuals.

Cities are a blurred tapestry of egos.

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As requested: Here's the virgin image direct from my FlashCard. Comments anyone?

BTW: To browse my entire blog just click here.

Angels Play

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Perhaps someday I'll be able to find "WOW!" in another mountain vista. Michael Kimmelmen in The Accidental Masterpiece writes, "We are programmed now to expect awe in certain circumstances, and are therefore doomed to be disappointed when, invitably, we don't feel it."

I grow agape not at wind swept rocky peaks, but ones built by us. And New York City is all about what America once was about... BIG. It is large, robust, and muscular. It's buildings are comic-book brawny. When I think of Manhattan I think of structures which seem to hit their vanishing points before they get to their roofs. They puncture the sky, and sometimes even make it storm. And yet, people who live in cities like Lancaster, or New York... we don't look up. What happens to us, happens at street level. We have to be reminded about what's up there. Reminded to look at our vertical histories. And when we do, like tourists - we find a "WOW!" in the eye-poppingly, almost unnaturally gorgeous things that soar unsettling above our heads. Things which reach where angels play.

Prying Into Oysters

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Michael Kimmelman in his book, "The Accidental Masterpiece" argues that art has a higher purpose than just satisfying the senses. What he's tossing about is the idea that the philosopher David Hume proposed that beauty in art, as opposed to finding beauty naturally in a radiant vista, is dependent on reasoning and critical analysis. People may come around to seeing beauty in art through reasoned argument.

See, if you just look at something, these guys are thinking, and you go, "WOW!" well... you might be seeing something that's just stuck to the surface and it might be shallow. Beauty in art they figure is not solely decorative, nor is it there because the colors of the painting go with the couch. It should have a higher rational for being in art. Beauty in art has a function. A reason for being there. And we frequently have to work to pull it out. Coming at art without thinking is like going after the oyster without tools to tear at the shell.

So, thinking all those deep thoughts... I created this image from my trip to NYC last month. I wasn't after grandeur, or might. I just wanted to see if I could describe what people did to this spot of land. What I feel that people did to it. And since I am the world's greatest expert on my opinion about anything. Well here it is. Y'goddaproblem widdat?

Grim? Nuh-Uh!

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Last Wednesday (January 24th) I said I'd bring you inside of The Barclay at 11 East 48th St., um... then I didn't. Okay... so here's the payoff. Now you see why, on their visits to Metropolis, four generations of Byrnes have hoteled at the Barclay. Questions?

Fantasy V. Beauty

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Walking along Macy's windows, each an evocative piece of art, each setting off some sort of fashion statement. And when you add them together, well something nagged at me. You know when you enter a familiar room, and something's out of place, but you can't quite?? Um... You know how you cannot really overcome a sensation that things seem off kilter? And then on that chilly and breezy afternoon I saw her, and FWOOP! The fantasy fashion became as inconsequential as PR hacks proclaiming Angela Jolie, the new Mother Theresa.

2007 Award Winner: Limit-less

Note: Accepted as one of theworld's finest Urban Images of 2007 for Canon POTN Book to be published in the Fall of 2008.

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The cabs in this image look as if they are skittering about a living room. Everything seems to be reduced to scale. Yet, NYC is beyond any scale. There are two cities in the U.S. that have such a massive presence that it's impossible to back away far enough to capture them with even the widest lens. Every image seems to grab just a detail. The first is this place, the other is Vegas. The difference is that you can dash quickly to Vegas's city limits. Here, there are no limits - if y'know what I'm sayin'?
And yes, this is a rather straight wide-angle shot (about 10mm). Until January 20, the city was increasingly windy and frigid. On January 23, the winds and arctic weather blew back. But for just two days, there was this hole in winter's severity... everywhere except up there... in the sky.

New York State Of Mind

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Dye your hair, you become a blonde. Someone knocks off your hat and you wonder, "Why did he hit me?" Collide your bike and you say, "I ran into a pole!" But these are all things... hair coloring, wigs, implanted boobs, bikes, dentures, hats, suits, heels... wuddever. Still, wear them and you extend yourself, right? Okay... okay... heavy stuff.
My point is that the line between who we feel we are and our immediate environment blurs. Get into a tank,or a big SUV... and we feel stronger, bigger, muscular, lethal!
So the question for the day, boys and girls, is... If you live in NYC, if you are a New Yorker (as opposed to a blonde), are these pictures in any sense - WHO you are? And isn't that different from say the folks who live in E. Dennis on Cape Cod Bay? Or in Lancaster? Waco? Or... well you get the point. So, like, what's the answer? Do these streets make these people different? How?Hmmmm....

Crammed

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So how to get a feel for a typical street in Manhattan? Well, maybe there's no one 'typical' street, but at least, how about a grab of a scene that would resonate with a New Yorker? I've tried that a bunch of times. And one of the first things I noticed was overload. Details are everywhere. There's so much, in such sharp focus, in so many colors that the jumble actually becomes... Well, you know how your mind is hard wired to find patterns? New York at first fights that, and then it just imposes a different sense of pattern atop whatever you're used to. Here... look at this image. Do I have it? is that 'typical'? Can you hear the horn section?