unbillable hours

Weegee the Famous

"His name became synonymous with chiaroscuro night scenes of murdered corpses, crashed automobiles, and tenement fires and, as often, shocked onlookers in moments of touching humanity - the police officer with the mournful expression of a priest or the young woman swooning over a sidewalk murder. Weegee's style became the essence of film noir and it helped define the age.

Weegee's legend was partly his own eccentric creation. He playfully attributed his knack for arriving first at crime and accident scenes to premonitory powers, when in fact his 1938 Chevy carried a police dispatch radio. He stamped his prints on the back with the circular legend 'Weegee the Famous,' and introduced himself with those words, long before he had become well-known."

Art Access, Weegee the Famous

Cycle Lords

2004 Tattoo Show
Meadowlands Expo Center
Secaucus, New Jersey

World Toy Camera Day

From the Photoblogs.org blog, news of World Toy Camera Day:

The folks at toycamera.com has declared this Saturday, October 23rd 2004 as World Toy Camera Day so on that day dust off your toy cameras, load it with film and go take lots of pictures. Afterwards select the best picture from that day and submit it to toycamera@gmail.com by November 6th, 2004. Prizes include a new holgamod that hasn't even been released yet!

Guess I need to break out my Holga and LCA and get to work....

Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an attentive eye.

(Herman Melville, Moby Dick, at 475)
2004 Tattoo Show
Meadowlands Expo Show
Secaucus, New Jersey

It's a cold and it’s a broken alleluia

It's quite a little experience, going in for surgery. I went in yesterday, and the whole process took 1.5 hours.

In lawyer time, that is one and one half billable units. The surgeon did his job.

I tried to come in to work today. Everyone said I was nuts for doing it, and everyone was right. I left after six hours. I went home and slept through most of the day, awaking in the late evening. I talked to my friend Hugh about the surgery late tonight. Last year, he had gone in for an operation of his own. He described it best when he responded to my comment about feeling so tired. Hugh said there were times after his surgery that he felt like he was barely able to get up in the morning, and then there were times that he felt like he was able to fly. But, those latter times, he cautioned, only lasted for about forty-five minutes.

I tried to work these little details into a story, but gave up after about that long. I don't know what's going to happen yet, as I don't get the final okay from the surgeon until Friday. I know, as of right now, that he believes that I have a twenty percent chance of having another one of these. I'm not content with such long odds. Long odds are the story of my life. I suppose, then, it's a matter of waiting.

Again, I want to thank everyone that sent kind words. It's a good feeling, seeing that others notice and look out for you. I'm an independent sort, and don't often like or indicate my appreciate that sort of concern, but I do hope that I can convey my gratitude here.

I'm tired, and it is late. Tomorrow, I'm going to try to go to work again. Friday brings a hearing before the Superior Court. I'm looking forward to things getting back to normal.

Well, What Do You Think?

2004 Tattoo Show
Meadowlands Expo Center
Secaucus, New Jersey

A Real Cut Up

I'm going to be out of action for a while, as I've just discovered that I've got some sort of cyst on my spine. Tomorrow, I go in for exploratory surgery - my first day off from work since 2002 - and hopefully will find out that it's either just infected spinal fluid or something equally benign. Yes, I recognize the pun on benign there. Yes, I know it's a cheesy pun. I'm on percoset, though, so I could care less if I made puns about monkeys for the next two weeks straight. Similarly, I could also care less if you hit me with bricks. This is why I hate percoset. I hate being dulled in this fashion.

I hate doctors. I don't trust them one bit. They do too much guesswork. So, I'm really not looking forward to this surgery. When I was hit by a drunk driver in 2000, I had doctors working on my shoulder and upper back (my cyst is on or near the base of my spine), and I generally got the impression that "science isn't really an exact science for these science types," to paraphrase Twelve Monkeys.

Great....

I have two goals with this surgery. (1) I do not want to end up sitting on a goddamned rubber doughnut because some poindexter screwed something up; and (2) I want to continue to deal with this as if it were an annoyance and not something more serious. Point one is probably self-explanatory. Who would want a rubber doughnut? Not me, Dr. Jones. The second point... I just want this to be a one-shot deal. I go in, I get the thing fixed, I leave. Done. Nothing extreme. No "we think this is an indicia of..." sort of crap. I don't want to find out I have a goddamned tumor.

So anyway - I have no idea where I'm going with this - if you email or comment and don't hear back from me for a week longer than usual, please don't take it personally.

In fact, maybe I'll sneak the camera into the hospital and annoy the hell out of the staff.

Raise your hand if you want to see photos of TPB in his hospital gown.

Actually, I like the Sting

2004 Tattoo Show
Meadowlands Expo Center
Secaucus, New Jersey

Instruments of Change

2004 Tattoo Show
Meadowlands Expo Center
Secaucus, New Jersey

By Way Of Explanation

This is the first of six posts from my trip to the 2004 Tattoo Show at the Meadowlands Expo. As I said in Looking For Inspiration Elsewhere, I needed something to spur on my interest in taking pictures. I had been shooting the same thing for far too long.

Shooting at the tattoo show was good fun. The exhibitors – which, in a psychological sense, would be a term that included everyone there because of the necessarily exhibitionist qualities behind tattooing – were good sports about me leaning over their shoulders, taking pictures as they jabbed tiny needles full of ink into people. The people getting the tattoos were equally good sports about my intrusion.

There's a few shots that I wish I could include with this, but won't out of concern that they are a bit… risky, really. Unless you're really into seeing a middle-aged Japanese man in a thong with a body suit of traditional tattoos.

Abstract Landscapes

I've been saving these three links for a while now. The first of these, comes from the photoblog entitled I do what I can, Snap, Snap. It's a great demonstration of how you can take a photograph of a landmark and focus on the image in such a fashion that it takes on abstract qualities. In a certain sense, this seems paradoxical; it's a natural landmark, so to call it abstract defies the fact that the image represents the object as it, in some sense, is. Still, the brain doesn't recognize it as entirely normal (much like the fact that Korn still has a career), as natural in the sense that an image of a bay and mountains would be considered normal and non-abstract.

Both images are worthwhile and beautiful. What struck me was how differently they affected me. There's no theoretical nonsense that I can bring up about the Rule of Thirds or something like that because there's only so much of that dogma to which I've paid attention. Moreso, I'm intrigued by the different ways that images can be used to grab the viewer.