Drip... Drip... DRIP!!!

Opening The 7D Box!

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Early Saturday morning it arrived. A decent sized brown box with a good feel to it. I was just finishing a workout, so I left it vibrating on the living room coffee table while I sweated out the last super sets. Yeah - vibrate - I could feel the things inside of that package ... their aura was buzzing me right through the wrappings.

Okay, showered, dressed, I Xacto-knifed the thing open in my studio. It was crammed with another box, two 8 gig storage cards, a spare battery with charger, and an envelope with B&H's three year warranty. Okay... okay... then inside of that Canon box were all sorts of cables, CDs, instruction manuals, a strap, another batter with its charger and a bubble wrapped white pouch.

And in the pouch? Heh... heh.... My brand new, black Canon 7D body. And just a tad of disappointment!

"Huh?" you wonder. Disappointment? Well, just the slightest amount. See, when I traded up from my Canon 20D to the 40D, the body was different. Not enormously, but more than subtly. The 7D though is 90% of the 40D body. The LCD is larger, and the buttons are arranged slightly differently. But the real changes are in the processors, the increase by 50% in the megapixels, and the button just above the lens mount... the button that turns this machine into a HDTV quality video camera. I kinda wish though that they'd restyled it a bit differently from the other D-Series cameras, perhaps a tad more like the Mark-series. Canon could use a good Italian or Macintosh designer.

And now for the learning curve. Canon's played a bunch with the firmwear of this baby. And I have to customize it for the different sort of shooting conditions I do. And there were a ton of chores to do today (Sunday) which left me with not too much time to read the new manual. And now it's late and I've gotta be up at 4:55AM for the gym tomorrow, so it's bed time. And the workweek looms full since we are trying to get a bunch of stuff finished before I leave for two weeks next month on the Peru trip. Plus I'm giving a big speech on the regional economy next week, and leading an executive webinar the last week of the month. So with the large feature piece for the February edition I'm writing on the changes in legal and accounting business law for 2010... things are mucho busy.

So... when to get out with this new thing? Will it be before next weekend? Darn, dunno... even though it's vibrating while I sit here and type this. Why is it the world intrudes upon our play? Sigh.... Stay tuned... I'll keep ya posted.

Florence 5: Andreas And The Duomo

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Pisa, Sienna, Rome, & Florence seemed to quite hate one another throughout the history of the Italian states. They were rivals both on the battlefields and in their architecture with each vying to build the grandest cathedral, or duomo. By the mid 1200s, Sienna and Pisa had won - a fact that grated at the increasingly prosperous Florence. It motivated them to replace their crumbling nine hundred year old church of Santa Reparata with what for centuries was to become the grandest cathedral ever seen - the Basillica di Santa Maria del Flore: Il Duomo. Designed in 1296 the last touches to its facade were completed in 1897 - some six hundred years later! Its massive shape, capped by the largest masonry dome ever constructed, looms over Florence.

While Andreas Manessinger had visited Florence before this morning of October 7 it was my first full day in the city. As you may recall, we agreed to meet at Il Duomo for a picture shoot at dawn. Beginning there, we then decided to work our way down some five blocks to the Uffizi Gallery and to the wonderful Ponte Vecchio bridge which sits just beyond it. As you can see, Andreas works with a tripod while I prefer handheld shooting. Consequently I tend to move much more swiftly and travelled through the ancient streets ahead of my friend.

BTW: See those doors to the left of Andreas in the lower picture? Those are the famed Gates Of Paradise entry to the Duomo's baptistry which were originally made from gold in 1440 by Lorenzo Ghiberti..

And The Meet Goes On

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As you’re herded through the Vatican Museum you pass shelves of senatorial busts. Look at enough of them and you begin to see people you think you’ve met. Yeah, really. They’ve captured the tiny muscles that fit our faces into our passions. These guys were, no – are - real. You can hear the senators saying senatorial stuff at each other. Or past one another just like today.

As I realized their reality the din all around me seemed to echo those debates that never engage. You know where neither party listens to the other? Their arguments don’t take, they are like flash fads – the junk food of policy making – empty calories with no governmental legacy.

Didja ever notice how some wonderings resemble cement that never gets solid enough to build upon? They get debated and your head hurts because each side seems so right that finally we decide not to decide, and choose today over tomorrow. And at that instant of opting to do nothing, well from there on debate gets replaced with drama.

The Romans had a lot of those disagreements until around 471 AD they ended.

Perspective

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Yesterday I worried over how difficult it is to establish the dimensions of St. Peter's. Regardless of how often you've seen images of this space, you can't buy a wide enough angled lens to get the impression that happens when you walk through the door and look up! As you can see from these pictures, the room dwarfs people.

And I mentioned the size of these two angels that are part of this water fount. Still, even with folks next to all of these things... can you understand the heft of the sculpture? There must be a way to communicate the massiveness. Any ideas? There's gotta be some angle, lens, effect... whatever... that will do it, right? I just lack the imagination. Help!

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.

Thrills Through The Night

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You never know the end of a sentence you speak until it is over. You're listening right along with your audience. Meantime you're assessing reaction. You look at body language, listen for telltale sounds, and wait for interaction to shape your next sentence, even before it's spoken... or heard by anyone - including you. Well, a lot of art's like that. The process is mysterious.

I captured this retro car made from stiff paper from its perch on a child's antique bedlamp. The boy inside of me loves this guy. And as I listen and read what I write about him, I'm finding out why. What I feel about the time he is supposed to be from... About messages that mold our dreams. About color and fantasy and how my eyes still pop wide at things that are charming and sweet.

And I recall as a boy dreaming about driving, and piloting, and doing other super things. Right, "super" because to me driving and flying were indistinguishable from the stuff that superheroes did all the time in my comics and in my books and of course in the movies. At night, as I drifted off, they'd blur together with things that the grownups could do. I'd fly, I'd hit home runs, I'd leap tall buildings, I'd run touchdowns, I'd lighting-draw my six-guns, I'd drive like the wind through the night - in a hot rod that was round and strong and the sort of thing that hard-boiled detectives drove to foil the bad guys... and... and...

"Foil?" Does anyone say foil anymore? And do any adults have lamps with fantasy tough cars which are the last things they see before the room goes dark? And... and... We should. We should foil the bad guys and drive sweet works of art... If only in our dreams.

And that's the end of my sentence about that.

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?

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....

Secret Forgotten Passageway

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Took a hike with my buddy today. In 1927, Lancaster finally threw the Pennsylvania Railroad out of its center city and opened a new "grand" station on what was the city's far border. From the 1850's at least, tracks and trains cut a wide swath across the town, creating intolerable noise, congestion, wild vibrations, and just plain danger to commerce and pedestrians alike. So, how did these tracks wander through neighborhoods, and what did the city's front door look like to those hundreds of thousands who arrived over the years by might Pennsylvania Rail Road train? Rocco and I followed the clues and discovered the hidden passageway into this colonial brick and shutter town.

Judgmental? Uh-Huh.

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Why not judge? So much of Pittsburgh is grim. Look at this street. The homes are maintained in the sense that they are generally clean, the siding is rugged, and the sidewalks are swept. The owners can afford reasonably new cars and satellite dishes. So why are they aggressively insensitive to the dingy, depressing discordancy of the way their residences look like so much architectural litter? Don't they get the Home & Garden channel on those ugly dishes? Here're private property rights gone carcinogenic. There's no way to make an uplifting image of this urban flotsam. I know... I know... I am being judgmental. But maybe judgments are what's needed to keep civilization from fraying around the edges. Like here in Pittsburgh.

Suite Moments

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Deadlines day is, like, synonymous with the last minutes of an NBA game. There's a blast of frenzy you can smell. My space at the magazines is NOT a paperless office. Note that you cannot even see the monitor on my desktop Apple. Fact is, should any of this cargo shift, limbs could snap. It takes me the best part of the morning-after-deadline, to file, clean and repack the stuff each month that gets flung around in those last moments. It is simultaneously a way hot job... and a way cool way to make a living.
Careful where you tread in here, you could splash through a puddle of adrenalin. And that's a suite thing.

Rotogravure

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Visited an antique dealer recently. She had a collection of newspapers from the 1950s. The society section was in a strange sort of color that was called Rotogravure, I think. Don't know much about the process, but the colors were peculiar. So when I stood atop Mount Troy overlooking Pittsburgh today, I had those slightly fading, slightly out of register, slightly off colors in mind. They seemed right to capture this aging city's vision of itself. Can you feel the mood?

Crow Storm

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So the city has a new party in power and, well, just look. It's like Hitchock came to town with these people and pooped all over everything. Okay... now I'm not saying that the Mayor is personally responsible. But I have been listening to Al Gore, and he makes a lot of sense. And he says that The President and his Congress are causing hurricanes, and making it warmer and all. But I figure that The President can't just diddle into every state, county, township, or city, right? I mean, like, he's busy screwing up the entire world. So, well, who's left to diddle with little places like here? Which makes me wonder what the new City Council has been doing since January. After all, I've parked my car in this spot for thirty years and... And... Well, I'm just sayin'... You know? It do make you wonder... You think I oughta walk on down to city hall? Huh? Huh?