i have not let a new picture book into my life for a while but i just got a copy of “bound for glory,“ a series of color kodachrome photos from 1939-1943. best $25 i‘ve spent lately. i wish that among my thousands of slides i had anything even remotely approaching the quality of these shots. of course my slides have a tougher row to hoe before they might rise to the level of art, a thicker cloud of everyday ambivalence from which to rise up.
i thought fleet week started today. maybe it does, but i expected boats, ships, aircraft carriers and bombers to clog the hudson river. all i saw was a damn circle line cruise boat. i was in the area anyway, so no great inconvenience, but still… i was scouting out certain types of payphones for a turkish phone company in a friendly exchange of exotic payphone pictures. i am so on point when i have meaningful direction, or just general direction. insurrection. resurrection.
i had othernonse to vomit forth. i had a grilled cheese&bacon at an amazingly empty noontime diner on the west side. i have been there before, but rarely. that stretch of west 57th street is where i first first landed in new york, pre-Parc Lincoln, while shuttling between here and Philadelphia for a couple of months before landing at the fabled hell hole. i stayed with a college acquaintance for a week. it was he who, at Juilliard, said “welcome to New York.“ which was actually kinda nice. we would lose contact but years later he tried to hook me up with a job at Carnegie Hall. i already knew that place to be a portal of misery for those who work in the upstairs tower so i let the correspondence slip away.
the upstairs of carnegie hall is still a starchy mystery to me. i have never risen up into that tower. a photographer friend had a darkroom there for some years, and he played coltrane‘s Love Supreme repeatedly while doing his photo work in that tiny rented room. but the mystery of the stage has been vanquished from my imagination. i used to go to concerts at carnegie but today i can‘t go to the trouble.
it may have been the Earl Wild concert in late 1990 where i had a memorable encounter with an aggressive street panhandler. addressing the fur coat crowd that assembled outside the hall he intruded on conversations and inserted himself into gatherings of a half-dozen wealthy carnegie hall peeps, demanding a sandwich or a $10 bill. i unwittingly made eye contact with him as he poked his finger into the chest of a tuxedo-clad man who patiently attempted to swat him away like a mosquito. when he saw that i was looking at him he changed direction, leaving the tuxedo dude and turning to me, asking what the fuck i was looking at, and if i didn‘t want to give him a sandwich then i should mind my own fucking business.
ah, carnegie hall.
that is not really my main memory of the place. i gave up on the concert series and packages because they were just so fucking boring to me. i think it was the carnegie hall bathrooms where i came up with the “MEN IN SUITS ARE PISSING!“ encomium which has rattled only in my mind ever since. i connected the rich men relieving themselves at carnegie hall to the rich men pictured in the annual reports i found in the basement garbage of the parc lincoln, those faces of the unassailably, impenetrably wealthy which originally populated my face server.
