Around Here

Tayor Mead lived in the building next door to the one Bill and I shared on Ludlow Street. We'd see him once in a while in the courtyard in back feeding a stray cat. Observing classic New York sensibilities, we mostly ignored him, but we did meet at a party once. I was with my friend Dennis . We recognized him immediately of course and I took the opportunity to introduce myself. "Hi, Taylor, " I said, "I'm Joe..." Before I could finish, and wagging that great sleepy head, he said in the exact dour tone of voice that Jerry Seinfeld used decades later when greeting Newman, "Hello... Joseph." Dennis cracked up. I went to get a drink.

I lensed a series of photographs of several defunct piers in Greenwich Village in the late 1970s, early 1980s. They were a kind of Death in Venice on the Hudson River, and each year Pier 51, the hangout and hookup favorite on the north edge of the Village, sank deeper into the drink. Ruins are sexy. With each new lurch it became more dangerous, more exotic, more alluring. The interior, a vast dark cavern, was pierced with dusty light where gashes in its corrugated walls were opened by each new twist in its grotesque but romantic demise. At one point an unknown artist had hack sawed a handful of geometric-shaped perforations in the corrugated steel walls. The most compelling of these was a moon-like crescent cut high up in the far wall of the main warehouse's three-story cavern; the sky-light which it emitted gave the huge darkling "moon room" a cultic atmosphere that would have stirred the heart of a Mayan priest. By the summer of 1980, the floor inside the huge space was...

Bill was my roommate for a large swath of my two decade romp in New York City. We shared the loft in Tribeca, the floor on Ludlow Street, the little apartment on Little Jones Street. Our boyfriends and girlfriends came and went, but Bill and I always found ourselves in one another's company after the dust had settled, after the love had gone. He was one of the brightest people I've ever known, a Loyola graduate, erudite and agreeably flawed. He pretended to never forgive me for reneging on the hair cut (he liked my hair cuts) that he won, after emptying my pockets, in one of our fiercely contested poker games. I have photographs of Bill somewhere, which I don’t feel like digging out. Suffice to say he looked a little like John Casavettes and a little like Soupy Sales. An erudite Soupy Sales with a snarl. An actor and director, his heart was in the theater but like many others like him, he often found employment elsewhere. We met, through friends, at an art gallery in Soho that ...

One day in the summer after I graduated from high school, several friends, Walter & Joseph among them, piled into Billy's van in Ann Arbor Michigan and set out for New York City. We had a sublet lined up and were going to stay for the summer; I wanted to check out a couple of schools. W & J wanted a break from country life. I ended up staying for two decades. photo:amazingnewyorkcity.blogspot.com As we drew near the city, we were playing Judy Garland's legendary Carnegie Hall concert. Then, suddenly the city was rising before us... just as Judy launched into Chicago, her fourth encore after 25 songs and two and a half hours on stage in the Big Apple. So that was the soundtrack for our first ever sighting of Manhattan, those three decades ago. Chicago. But somehow, instead of producing a cognitive dissonance, it seemed to fit. Sometimes in a dream I find myself in an idealized and synthesized metropolis, colossal and romantic, in the throb of a dawning adventure.

Central Park, with its granite outcroppings, its pond, its brown grass, and wet black ginkos was, in late January, a charcoal sketch. An occasional red scarf, a yellow nylon parka, was the only color that winter afternoon. The rest was pale gray, sandpaper black, and cola-stained snow. But it was a pleasant little hike through the park's south end to the west side. It must have been past three o’clock by then. The sun was in the latticed branches, spoking the brindled lawns with quick black strokes. I didn’t want to look at my watch. Far away, on the unseen perimeters of the landscape, a closely woven tapestry of tiny voices, kids released from school, was unraveling; bright threads of giggles, shouts, broke loose and drifted through the park. I stopped at a bench near the pond. There a boy under the fond gaze, and watchful shadow, of his young mother, stood throwing little clots of snow into the brightly cold and rippling water. With each splash, the boy’s excitement grew, his mo...

I awoke to a morning padded with a feline-scented fog, mute, and drawn intimately close. I thought of Sandburg's famous near-haiku...

Anhinga are tropical and subtropical waterfowl of the darter family; you can see them near freshwater streams, lakes, and wetlands, perched on branches and rocks, endlessly drying their wings in the breeze. With very little oil in their feathers, their buoyancy is reduced, allowing them to dive fast and deep in pursuit of fish. They can swim underwater on extended hunts. They spear fish with their beaks, then bring them to the surface where they toss them in the air and catch them. I found these at Lakes Park in Fort Myers. I've seen them on Sanibel and Captiva. The coloring of their lower beak and throat reminds me of the carnivorous pitcher plant . Like their cormorant cousins, they strike me as more decorative than beautiful, a subject perhaps for a Japanese painting.

I decided to make pea soup from the ham bone left from my brother's roast Christmas ham. Pea soup and toasted corn muffins slathered with unsalted butter - oh yeah. So I was walking home from the grocery store, talking to myself as usual... shut up, it's a sign of GOOD mental health. I was reviewing the contents of my shopping bag. "Ok, I got split peas, shallots, carrots, corn muffins, butter..." when the boy passing me on the sidewalk chimed in with "...potato chips and grass." Impudent monkey. When I got home I checked the bag, just to be sure, for potato chips and grass. There wasn't any. :o(

I was interviewed by the local news yesterday. If I can track down a clip I'll try and post it. My 90 seconds of fame (the bandwidth is a little more congested these days) on the arts and entertainment segment boosts my exhibit at the municipal gallery, all portraits, the gist of which can be seen below. The show is a salad of portraits - local shapers, friends, and a few celebs. It runs for the month of January. I enjoy doing portraits. Every face is a narrative, every body a landmark. The best are a collaboration between subject and photographer, a journey of discovery.

I took all of three photographs in Fort Lauderdale, and no notes. In fact, I was generally only marginally conscious. In other words, I had a nice time. Christmas was all about quaffing mulled wine and singing Christmas carols, Rogers & Hart, and the Beatles around a baby grand. Yes, it was that gay. The rest of my holiday outing was about the beach, and a club or three. Here's one of the few photos that I got up enough willpower to raise the camera to my eye to take. I think it caught the prevailing mood... Miami beach is a half hour, a twenty-mile drive, south of Fort Lauderdale. I got hauled down to Haulover beach, the north end of which is a nude beach. I learned something important at Haulover beach. Nobody looks good in the nude on the beach. Sex appeal, apparently, takes art. But among the fittest, hottest, best put-together specimens the girls, in my opinion, had the edge. One lass, lying on her back on a towell, legs bent at the knees, feet flat on the ground, little p...