Driving into the sun with kerouac

it’s a slow process recovering from rotator cuff surgery but hey i had nothing else planned for these past weeks so why not experience something new? but today as the rain beats against my window and i struggle with my creativity why not remember, memory is so frail and ephemeral, or at least try to some of the more comic events in my life.

this won’t be about pictures although as minor white says ‘i am always mentally photographing every thing as practice.’ just the pictures in my memory or what is left of it, everything degrades with time, becomes warped with the heat of thought. as if a passing thought somehow warps another in its passing by.

this is about a long long time ago, the summer of  1964 in northport on long island new york. i guess it relates to robert franks ‘the americans’ as franks say ‘you can photograph anything.’ but this is a photographic memory without a camera.

that summer i had the job as stage manager/ lighting designer/ driver and a few other jobs i’ve probably forgotten. the theater was the red barn, the show the fantasticks, the town northport ny and the car a 1956 blue and white ford station wagon.

that’s where and why i met jack kerouac . there wasn’t much for me to do after the show  which is unusual for a summer stock playhouse. the show ran for 6 weeks or so with my only duties being running the show and picking up people either in the new york city or the train station. i don’t do ‘having time on my hands well’, at least in those days.

my first form of entertainment was drinking or at least hanging around bar rooms. that was how i got a lot of jobs in those days from my bar room friends but this one was actually gotten through a trade magazine.  after work with nothing else to do usually found me wandering around the town looking for something. that’s where i met kerouac we were both looking for something.

there is a much more informative account of the life and times of jack kerouac in nortport naming people, places and times. maybe not the same people i knew nor who jack knew but more respectable ones with addresses. the thing i liked about nortport was the harbor which was part of the hunginton, centerport and nortport harbors. this is primaraly a fishing working class village.

how i got involved with these people i am not sure, maybe a self-image problem of mine but at a bar with drinks flowing everyone is equal. there was this guy quite charming even drunk as a skunk who wore these checkered 5 and dime shirts. jack was quite a handsome man before the booze bloated him up as he looked now.

there never was a problem of finding something to do when the bars were open, the problem came after the bars  closed. what to do before unconsciousness overcame us? the clamer’s usually had to get up early in the morning to haul their catches into the wholesaler at a reasonable time of day. they had a airstream trailer secured to a floating raft in the harbor outfitted with double bunk beds and a small kitchen.

jack and i would sometimes hitch a ride with them to the trailer or out to a tent they had across the harbor. it was pretty neat screaming across the harbor full speed ahead towards the tent with a couple of drunks. some fun with harbor and land lights whizzing by into the darkness winding up beaching the boat at 25 mph or whatever, being thrown onto the sand laughing.

or jack would convince me to go into the city with him to see some friends, maybe score some weed. driving the hour or so wasn’t too bad, of course we were probably drunk at least by the legal definition of it. i remember one night jacks friends didn’t answer the buzzer and i had to help boost jack up to the firescape while he climbed up to their windows.

this was in soho before there was such a thing. there were no people on the street, no nothings except maybe a few rats running across the street darting under a few parked trucks. there i was asleep in the front seat of a 1956 blue and white ford station wagon. sometimes i was invited in to share in the booty.

but it was the drive home that i remember so well. we drove against rush-hour traffic then but i am sure now it’s everywhere. the long island expressway goes straight east from new york, most of the times right into the raising blazing red sun. it’s a wonder in those days we didn’t kill ourselves not for us not trying but maybe we were watched over for some reason or worst yet to kill some innocent being with our stupidity.

i liked jack but felt sorry for him as his mother controled his life but someone had to as he didn’t seem to be able to. there were a lot of good people in my life that summer. i’ve been lucky in life. that fall jack moved to florida or paris or somewhere he later wrote the esquire magazine article which i bought and read. them he died in 1969, i was sad for he touched me with his humanity.

these thoughts filled my head seeing robert franks work. the freedom of driving across america, europe, panama or anywhere. being an american, cars have played an important part in my life, having them or not having them has always been important. i’ve driven this country alone or with my family staking out a new life.

i could spend hours seeing the sun set across the smooth cool pacific ocean as i am not a morning person. there are times in my life when i wish i had a camera and other times when i do i do nothing. it’s enough just to be there. photography is about the past not the present.

the american’s, robert frank

a friend was in town the other week whom i don’t usually get to spend time with but he had a day to kill so we decided to try and see la danse the weisman dance film of the paris opera’s dance company. both his daughters are ballerinas in a european company so we thought that might be fun.

we showed up to the theater to be met with a very long line half way down the block , oh well i don’t like crowded theaters nor crowds in general. so kenny suggested we go up to the metropolitan museum of art and see the robert frank exhibit ‘the americans.’

on the way up on the subway kenny told me why he had an interest in robert franks work. kenny used to work at baldwin pottery on la guardia place a long long time ago. i knew it from my chip monck days because he had a loft  in the building down the alley behind baldwin pottery. kenny worked as a potter before we met working at the filmore east. i met chip as a daily hire for his rolling stones tour of europe in 1970 to take care of the follow spots. long story…….

the owner suggested kenny to mary frank’s who was looking for someone to mix and kneed her clay as she spent many years as a sculpture artist. kenny said she had given him a schetch which now hung in his mothers house. really odd how these connections happen.

what i learned abotut the show is totally different than what kenny walked away with. see the link for pics etc. no they are not mine as pictures are forbidden in traveling shows besides i didn’t have my camera with me, we were going to the movies.

seeing the actual first prints, working prints etc in a way is pretty neat, but what struck me is how far we, photographers, have come with printing. this is also true of a show earlier this year with fred steins work. the new archival prints are so much better than the originals.

now i’ve never seen any ansel adams prints that were created under his supervision, but think they too would show their age now. everything paper, well actually everything is decaying right before our decaying eyes.

but i guess what’s interesting to most people is seeing the originals. the show was certainly crowded enough but lots of tourist wander through new york on any given day. there was a quotation from jack kerouac on the wall which caused me to smile because i knew jack when he was living in northport, ny. i don’t remember the quote but i do remember drinking and closing many a bar with jack and friends.

i remember driving into the sun with jack in the seat besides me, more on that later.

breast cancer study

we, mary and i are working with a breast cancer patient trying to document her journey. mary has started a blog on facebook http://laboroflovepix.blogspot.com/which is receiving some fantastic responses. her writing says so much more than i could possibly say, maybe because she’s a woman or maybe because both her parents were victims of cancer.

what ever the case her writing touchs one’s soul.

and for something a bit more fun one can help in the fight of breast cancer just by clicking on pink glove dance created by Emily (MacInnes) Somers, who created, directed and choreographed this in Portland last week for her Medline glove division as a fundraiser for breast cancer awareness. This was all her idea to help promote their new pink gloves. I don’t know how she got so many employees, doctors and patients to participate, but it started to really catch on and they all had a lot of fun doing it.

When the video gets 1 million hits, Medline will be making a huge contribution to the hospital, as well as offering free mammograms for the community. Please check it out. It’s an easy and great way to donate to a wonderful cause, and who hasn’t been touched by breast cancer?

So long Soho Photo

i’ve decided to move on from Soho Photo as they were not meeting my expectations or needs in a gallery. as Susan Sontag said “In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.”

i found very few inventive photographic artists involved with the gallery. that’s not to say that there aren’t some very good photographers involved with the gallery. but some of the exhibits show a total lack of creativity, in my opinon.maybe it’s an age thing as the members seem to be much older than i but they aren’t really.

how one gets into the gallery is to submit a portfolio on their portfolio review day to the Booking Committee made up of members of the gallery who then reviews the submitted portfolio. the guidelines aren’t very specific other than saying ‘No books’ but a selection of your best work is suggested. what is not said i believe, is they want to see a portfolio of work that is ready to go on the walls.

i was rejected my first time as have been some friends of mine for having a too wide a range of subjects in my portfolio. by not giving specific instructions it gives the committee wiggle room to reject anything they so choose on any grounds. what may play an important role in acceptance to the gallery is who you know.some get accepted on their fist try while other very strong photogs are turned away.

i have been rejected three times by the gallery so far, once in the beginning and twice for a membership upgrade. once i was told the Committee reviewing my portfolio ‘didn’t feel like dancing’ after see my work to which Mary replied ‘because they are too old!’

in the two years i was involved with the gallery it seemed more a social club than a serious gallery. Soho Photo seems to have evolved into a vanity gallery with no serious press coverage or outside critical review.

i am sure i didn’t endear myself to the members when i asked at a business meeting ‘why would i want to be a member of Soho Photo?’ i think that’s a valid question. it’s a place to show your work only if the booking committee accepts your submission. they can reject your work on any grounds even after you become a member so there is a group censorship.they call it protecting other members.

with exhibit space at a premium in New York City it’s so hard for artist/photographer to be seen much less reviewed in the press that finding a clean lighted place to show your work can be critical in ones career, but so can association.

i have found in my life when one door closes another opens and it’s usually a better place as life is progressive. so it’s time to move one. where i don’t know but that’s not important. i have love in my life and i truly love what i do as well as the people around me.

i can now concentrate on the challenges at hand. working with a woman documenting her breast cancer journey.

All i want to do is make art or color management gone wild again.

i never wanted to learn how to type on a typewriter because of my phonetic poor spelling.i wanted to draw.

i wasn’t sure i wanted to learn how to use a computer but it did help my spelling. so i bought an Apple CI computer.  but now i am being held hostage along with a few other thousand of people by code writers. i am not talking about the Navaho  peoples who helped this country during WW ll but the whizz kids writing computer code.

at photo expo 2009 i talked with the HP printer people trying to learn how to not have their printers color manage my pictures.it seems turning ‘off ‘color management on their printers isn’t easy. the salesman showing the HP 9100 products had a hard time finding the right places to look, so it’s really not intuitive because they hide it in the print dialog box- copies & pages> paper type> color>  application managed color. now why couldn’t they just say ‘no color management?’ well Epson says that.

i did have a nice exchange with another photographer wanting to learn exactly the same thing as i as we waited for the salesperson to learn how to educate us. he showed me some of his B&W prints to which i asked if he’d ever had them printed on Kodak’s metallic paper, i suggested Adorama prints whom i’ve always found quality work from. i also suggested he try the silver edition B&W prints they carry.one of my  shameless plugs for a friends company PTS who carries Fuji Frontier printers and off topic.

Ok but this is the least of the printing problems i have now under  Tiger OS. now we move onto the big cat Snow Leopard and that gets really strange. i come from using Epson printers since they were the only company that was producing fine art printers, well the only one i could afford, Roland was way out of my league.i learned how to make my own color profiles, well after i huddled in the corner for years at the mention of color management, i found print fix pro from Datacolor way cool and made my prints better.did i mention a free upgrade to my software, now how many companies do that?

so i go out and buy a new Apple quad core 2.93  with  Snow Leopard but thinking i am gonna keep my old G4 as a print server just in case there are printing issues. i am getting smarter in my old age. seems everyone is having printing issues with  Snow Leopard. my yahoo Epson printing group are all a buzz with issues and few soultions.

there is one web site i know of, remember my knowledge is limited, the Luminous Landscape has a work around posted at http://luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/solving.shtml. but why? how to print a no color managed print or you select the color management and not have it turn out some other color. this is the first they’ve heard of it? what planet do they live on?

don’t these people from Apple, Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung ever talk to each other? why can’t we have some standard to go by in printer drivers. is it such a dog eat dog world out there that we the user can’t have a dependable work tool.

has greed and fear taken over the entire world? i thought it might have subsided a bit, with our newly elected president, so we could believe in creation again, and building a better world.

but old habits are slow to die off. one of the reasons i keep old computers around, remembering when i was young i’d get into all kinds of troubles loading some new software on my computer and being asked by customer support ‘why’d you do that?’ and not having a good answer for them.

oh well

 

 

 

Hell’s Kitchen Artist Studio Tour Nov 7-8 2009

well for those of you who would like to meet me i’ll be opening my studio during this event located at

Youtt, 427 51st Street, 3A, New York, NY, 10019 between 9th & 10th Ave., 212 664 1039

the tour actually begins on Nov 6 with an opening party at Bar 9 on Tenth Ave but i’ll be at Emmanuel’s opening that night.

as this is the first event of this kind in the neighborhood i am hoping to meet some of my fellow artists whom i pass on the street anonymously. so far i’ve met a few very talented artists, one woman had a postcard of one of her watercolors which i recognized immediately as the lobby of the Paris Opera house. how cool is that?

maps will be available at Fountain Gallery, 702 9 Ave, NYC on the corner of 9th Ave & 48th Street. beginning Nov 6, 2009.see www.artistinthekitchen.org for more information.

i am hoping mary will baby sit a bit so i can visit some other studios.

so if you’d like to meet me and say hello or better yet buy one of my prints, actual SALE of some odd sized prints returned from a show i had in Kyoto, Japan do stop by.

i had suggested we buy balloons to display aiding location for the visitors. if lost give a call.

see you then.

jene

Thomas Barbey exhibit

hi guy & gals

a friend and curator Emmanuel Fremin at his gallery of the same name is having an opening of Thomas Barbey’s work on November 6 thru 26 2009 at his gallery at 546 Broadway, PH 5B , NYC, NY opening reception 6-8p.

emmanuel always has interesting artists and it’s a pleasure to see him back on the boards in new york city again. especially with pictures from our favorite city.

welcome

jene

canon cameras believing their own press releases

canon camera counters were jammed at last weeks photo expo. to look at the crowd one would have thought they were giving away cameras.

i am sure they didn’t like my conversation about the delay in writing software update for the 5D Mll so that it can shoot at 24 fps. they said it wouldn’t be available on the web until after the first of the year. my response was swift calling then jerks or was it assholes. i am not sure but i was pissed.
they been going around releasing cameras left and right with better software than the 5D Mll.

so what is the big deal? why the delay? if you think this is wrong as a consumer write to the company. it’s first on my list of to do’s.

will report on photo expo when i get time. don”t think i am just upset with canon hp is right in there as well.

lost another point of light in photography, John Daido Loori Roshi

this month October we, the world at large, lost another great photographer and teacher. John Daido Loori 1931-2009.

it was my priviledge to have a few conversations with John Daido Loori Roshi zen priest , teacher, photographer and human being.

I’ve only met him a few times in a casual setting, once at a Change Your Mind day sponsored by Tricycle magazine where he was speaking about his Mountains and Rivers order to the assembled buddhist group sitting on the grassy field in central park. i found him to be a very generous man.

i had asked him a question about reincarnation which other buddhist traditions teach and had been brought up earlier that day. as i recall he said that as far as our atoms being released back into the primordial soup to begin again as some other entity that was about all one could expect.i think he respected all creation and i know he fought hard to preserve his sanctuary and woodland around zen mountain for all beings. his art reflected his spiritual life.

john was an artist/photographer who had studied with Minor White i had always wanted to do a workshop at Zen Mountain Monastery with john. but you know how life is, there was always something getting in the way of taking the time for myself either be it work or money but it never came to be. that is one of my regrets in life.

i have all two of his photography books which if you ever get the chance to do buy. they are still in print at the Monastery Store and the one on creativity.

Making Love With Light is a wonderful study of John’s photography, Zen poems and essays.

Hearing With the Eye are photos from Point , California, makes one remember wandering all sorts of beaches

The Zen of Creativity is about John’s insight on creativity and life. not so much about color photography but more on the creative process as a whole.

i’ve linked these to the monastery store because i believe in supporting the teachings that have helped me. i am sure they can be had from amazon books but i’ve never looked for them there.

I’ve never sat at the monastery nor with john. i do belong to other Buddhist groups namely the Insight Meditation Society and New York Insight but Zen teachers have had a large influence on me beginning with Alan Watts and a non buddhist teacher J.Krishnamurti whom i did see give talks in new york way back when. all of their teachings are still available on-line and in printed form.

i have a very good friend who is a member of the Mountains and Rivers sangha whom i talked to as soon as i learned of john’s illness which even though it’s a big part of the teachings imperemance of this world and time his passing did make me sad. it gives me some comfort to know there are good people in the world even though i don’t know them nor see them regularly it’s just nice to realize they are there.

it’s a big part of metta practice and teachings, to know there are other people in this world wishing me happiness and a good life, even though i don’t know them, they are there. i can be connected to then and this world, even though it’s just a ball of mud and water waiting for its time to evaporate and us along with it. we might as well have some fun and laughs along the way and know that we are loved for who we are.

i just wanted to acknowledge my special feelings about john and other people i’ve come across on my path. yes i felt the loss of this lost point of light, but life goes on until it doesn’t.

wasting time is my pastime

i just spent hours changing the password on my wireless dlink network, first logging in, configuring the software, then after not doing this for a number of years, i suggest if one is security consensus to do this more often as one forgets how to or take concise notes. need to really learn to listen more closely as tech support isn’t located in this country so the accents are sometimes hard to understand, i am sure they feel the same way.

getting the wireless router configured  i lost my computer ip address. thank goodness for assistants and apple software. i don’t know how windows people survive especially the ones on high floors.so now onto the business at hand.

i bought a hp 9180 printer which so far has reminded me of a sherman tank running into a wall. i’ve never had a printer shake the table so violently as this one does as it moves the carriage side to side. whoo nelly. but they say this is a good printer so i’ve got a learning curve for sure, especially after all these years using epson printers.

hey what’s life without some sort of challenge. did i think i could just sit down at my desk and create. where did the simplicity of pencil and paper in hand go? tonight i go look see at all the wonderful changes snow leopard has even though my new computer is still in the box with nowhere to go,  because i’ve been wasting my time with security issues. but this is tekserve’s schedule and what the heck it’s only an hour presentation.

meat loaf for dinner is all i can think of right now, guess i must be hungry.