May Day, May Day!!! Occupy Albany...

May 1, 2012,  Albany, New York

                                                                           

May Day!!!  Day one of the 2012 season of occupying in Albany.  61 degrees, overcast, breezy, and the ground still quite wet and soggy in spots after a fairly steady rain last night.  After an almost non-existent opening day parade scheduled to begin at 12 noon, the afternoon rally and "teach in" beginning around 1 pm in Academy Park was also poorly attended.  Maybe 150 Occupiers, and and almost equal number of state and local police (I exaggerate, but not by much) and members of the press hoping for some action.  They were sorely disappointed, as were the rally organizers who had hoped for a larger and more enthusiastic turn out.  Fair weather anarchists???  Short attention span???  Apathy???  Hope this is not a barometer of things to come and that the warm weather will bring out the crowds as they have been reported to have turned out in other cities.  There does not seem to be the sense of inner city urban desperation here as elsewhere, and the turn out from the suburban "activists" was sparse.  Maybe if it was a Saturday...  Disinterest set in quickly and "the center did not hold" in spite of fervent calls to action by facilitators.  Photographically, it was a slow day as well.

                                                                         

                                David

                               George

                               A guy from the gay and lesbian group

Came home for a while for lunch, and will return to Academy Park for the hoped for big rally at 5 pm.   Everything is in place for a real protest. Will report back then.

Then:
Got back to the park at about 5:50.  58 degrees, overcast and there was a darkness of the spirit in the air.  Same 150 or less people were there.  Fewer cops and reporters.  Even they realized the air was out of the balloon.  Hung around for a few hours, till I couldn't take it any more and went home.  Got the feeling that this might be a last gasp for the Occupy Albany people.  Wasn't even thinking about them any more till I turned on the local news showing live shots of the last stragglers being arrested for refusing to leave the park after the 11:00 curfew.  A pathetic display of negative attention seeking behavior as PR stunt.   Civil disobedience for its own sake, or rather as a last gasp of relevance, an unmistakable sign of capitulation.  They were lucky that the local media had nothing better to do at the moment and aided and abetted the "movement" in perpetrating the perception that they went out with a bang rather than a whimper.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Hope the coming of warm weather and summer vacation will bring out the fair weather friends of Occupy, and prove me wrong.

                                                                     

                                                                     Sadly,  Pablo

MOMAfreefriday....

Friday afternoons between 4-8pm, the Museum of Modern Art is free!!!  And there was a lineup all the way down 54th Street  to 5th Avenue and around the corner till I could no longer see all of my fellow free loading art lovers.   It was an unseasonable warm late March NYC afternoon, sunny,  in the mid 60s, and perfect for having to stand on a long line.   The crowd was mostly young and NY artsy,  and the special exhibits were alluring... Diego Rivera murals painted for MOMA 80 years ago, exhibited at the time and then stored away, to be "lost" or forgotten or disregarded or whatever, but were "found" and here they were, on exhibit seeing the light of day for the first time in 80 years and we were there to see them.  Big, beautiful flowing rivers of color and texture,  political, urgent and engulfing beyond words.  Rivera is the most important and under appreciated artist of the last hundred years, but he is Mexican after all, and an unapologetic socialist, so what should you expect from the culturally effete critics who we depend on to define our tastes.   But no photos allowed.

There was an Atget exhibit on the 3rd floor.  An old friend who is always nice and reassuring to see again, quiet, understated, and workmanlike, someone who never even considered himself an artist, and always an inspiration to an old photographer who is finding it increasingly hard to find the energy to get back in the dark room.  Someone who reaffirms my belief that photography is not so much art, as the process of documenting reality artistically.

And then there was the Cindy Sherman retrospective mentioned in the last entry.  A Long Island girl who has made it bigger than big.  375 photographs of herself in various guises and costumes and personas.  Creative early in her career, but one who becomes increasingly/irritatingly tedious, repetitive, and trite after a while, in spite of the many greatly oversized and overwrought later images that dominated the show, but she is described by some as one of the most important artists of the 20th century.  HUH????  One tepid photograph of herself, nothing I would want on my wall, recently sold at auction for 3.1 million dollars!!!  For a mundane photograph by contemporary artist???  Somehow I kind of understood it when a Gursky photo sold for 1 million a few years ago.  Just a photo, but it was spectacular.  But a Cindy Sherman image of herself???  I don't get it.  Was talking to the director of photography at an auction house in NYC recently and asked her about the 3.1 mil sale.  She said it was Cindy Sherman after all, did not seem perplexed, and looked at me like there was something wrong with me for not getting it.  Sorry for going on about it, but..

MOMA for free...But no photos allowed in the exhibits, so here is my take on free Fridays...Pretty cutting edge, huh???

I like it, but I didn't know how interesting it was till I got home.  The idea is good, but the execution could be a bit better.  I need another MOMAfreefriday soon.

                                                                  Pablo

Where has our love gone???

 
                                                         (Oh)
                                               To be young again
                                          and wallow in the squalor
                                             of my lost New York.

I know, I've said it a thousand times before, but my love/hate relationship with NYC remains unresolved, in spite of my continued efforts to reconcile our irreconcilable differences.  I loved it the way it was, damaged, slutty, piss stained, obscene, broken, dangerous, abandoned and hungry, but its changed.    Cleaned up its act,  gone legit,  left me for some younger guys.  And I keep coming back for more, and leaving unhappy and unsatisfied swearing I'm finished and I'll never be back, but how do you ever get over your first love.  The danger, the thrill, the mystery of unspeakably warm,  rain soaked summer nights of riding the subways to Washington Heights,  Chinatown,  the Village, Coney Island full of promise, dark eyed Puerto Rican girls and teenage possibility.  Vito, Hannah, Dolly, Irma???

Now, you've had work done,  you're all cute and safe, sterile and predictable, and Rudy Giuliani and the Disney people have conspired to turn you into some neutered unrecognizable monster!!!  An urban amusement park full of (east) Indians selling American icons made in China to polyglot busloads of gawking tourists.  I hate you...

                                                                               

But your beauty still lures me with false promise that things will be different this time, but they're not!!#%&@@

The battle for Manhattan has been lost.  I don't live here anymore and you won't let me forget it.  I search in vain for memories of from the past, but you've trashed them and still you tempt me with the hope that things will be different. 

And all that's left are dreams, and the long lonely bus ride home far away from the home that is no longer mine.  By the way, I hate the new wallpaper, paint job and window treatments, and the crown molding, the art work, all of it!!##@$&>  Saw the Cindy Sherman retrospective exhibit at MOMA and left wondering what people meant when they said she might be the most important artist of our generation.  375 pictures of herself in drag and masquerading as someone else.  If that makes her so important, then egocentric self denial is the new black (and white).  What more can I say????

                                           It's all been said

                                           a hundred times before,

                                           by some literary basket case

                                           or reminiscent whore,

                                           who's bled beneath a hundred men

                                           and bled until she died,

                                           its all been said a thousand times

                                           so now just say good bye. 

                                                       Pablo

                                 

                                                                    

                                                                               

                               

Elegy for a city....

                                                        Hudson Street at Lark

Albany, NY continues to exist, albeit in a much diminished state, no thanks to the benign and at times malicious neglect of politicians from Rockefeller to Corning to Jennings who have all conspired to bring our poor city to its knees.   The poor stewardship of our city's historical legacy, its buildings, has been a disgrace, marked by a criminal neglect that has led to the decay, implosion and ultimately the demolition of the few important historical structures left standing, most recently Trinity Church, built in the 1830's by hard working Irish immigrants and later, abandoned by the diocese and left to rot, implode, and die.  Entire blocks of homes and business buildings that were the fabric of the dynamic bee hive of inter-related interests that defined our city for much of the earlier part of the last few centuries were left to rot and over the past few years have been bulldozed wholesale, leaving block after block of empty lots, carrying on a tradition that has marked the destruction of our 400 year old city over the past 50 years or so.  Our mayor has been aided and abetted by his mournful, hand wringing partner in crime, the director of our "historical society", Susan Holland  who has conspired to perpetuate this physical and moral decay to justify her existence and paycheck.  She lacks passion but not pathos.  She is the mourner in chief of our not so fair city to whom this elegy is dedicated...


                                  I know I should be thankful
                                  for the small shreds and tantalizing tastes
                                  of old Albany they've left behind,
                                  reminding us of what we once were
                                  before they sold our souls and
                                  left us a shadow of our former selves
                                  gaping, gap toothed rows of derelict homes
                                  yet to be burned and bulldozed,
                                  a city cut off at the knees,
                                  dying, one building at a time
                                  wretched from the waters who gave birth
                                  and nurtured this withered old woman
                                  gasping for life and grasping at dreams.

                                  As I sit here on this warm winter
                                  Hudson Street afternoon,
                                  looking, thinking, filling my eyes
                                  with the miracle of this unbroken row of homes,
                                  I know I should be thankful,
                                  but it is hard.

Whenever I visit Portland Maine, a small city like ours, that slopes gently in an almost poetic and unbroken manner down to the water, unimpeded by a highway that obliterated half of our city and cut us off from the water, I am painfully reminded what we might have been were it not for the political embodiments of evil that literally sold us down the river.

                                              Pablo

                                                    

Lady Gaga and me....

I'm not particularly interested in celebrity photography.  For one thing I don't care all that much about them, and living here in Albany, NY, there's little if any opportunity.  But circumstance did allow for a chance encounter with Lady Gaga a few weeks ago when I wandered into the last, and I do mean last, retail "record store" in Albany by the name of FYE.  I'm pretty sure my niece, Leslie, worked there during high school.  Its the last store of its kind around here because downloaders don't seem to need them anymore, and there was a depressing feeling of morbidity in the place.  There was a dark somewhat gloomy feel in the air, one of neglect, resignation, and irrelevance that gave the place the appearance of a dusty flea market for music, DVDs and whatever else.  Everything seemed old and used.  The staff looked like they were in a daze, wandering, and wondering what they were doing there, and the smell of death was in the air.  It was no longer a pleasure in browsing through the sparse, depleted racks of CDs, and even I felt like a relic in doing so.

I saw this display and was sure that Lady Gaga was screaming loudly the despair I felt inside,  looking around at an institution I grew up with and knowing it would soon be dead.  I was sure Lady Gaga felt my pain.

                                                                     Pablo

C'est Moi

       

                                                                         
                                                                       
So many people have told me they've been on the blog and were disappointed when they went onto the profile section and found nothing.  I have tried to rectify this by putting in a picture and a few words of explanation about myself, but the image was quite small, and they only allow you space for one.  How can they expect a photographer to explain himself within such limiting constraints.

So this is me, on the road.  During this time, Jackie  (who took the two above pictures and the bottom one) and I were working our way along a section of Route 66 around the area of Oatman, Arizona, not too far from Needles, on the California border,  close to the beginning of the Mojave desert we were soon to enter.

As I have said before, the Interstate Highway system is a wonderful innovation.  It allows you to travel throughout the United States and never get to see America.  We almost always take the back roads, and these days the quintessential back road through the USA has to be Route 66.  The end of a good day of taking pictures, and I am dry, dusty, and ready for a beer or three.

So that's what I like to think I look like. 

But who am I.  

My grandmother had three sisters, the youngest one, and sadly, the first to die was Mildred, wife of Uncle Artie and mother of Martin and Martha, paragons of virtue and good behavior, not to mention academic excellence against whom I was often measured.  They were the bane of my existence with my mother often musing aloud about why her ADD son couldn't be more like them.  As it turns out, its just as well that I didn't, but that's another story for another time.

My Aunt Mildred was a school teacher in the NYC school system, and in addition to passing along hand me down underwear and things from Martin, she gave us old school books, mostly elementary school reading books for English class.  The books mostly dated from the 1930's and 40's and by the 50's, they were antiquated and were being retired and disposed of.  Not being much of a reader, I thumbed through the books, amused by the old fashioned pictures, but little else.

But what did catch my eye and excite my imagination were the stamped imprints on the back of the front cover of the books, where the annual recipient would write the date, Sept. 1938, their name, James Dolan, and their classroom.  I found myself mesmerized by the names and dates and penmanship and wondering who those kids were and what happened to them.  I would return over and over to the lists of names  and dates, trying to conjure up an image and context for these early inhabitants of dingy Manhattan apartments, inhabiting stoops and sidewalks, playing stickball and hopscotch, running wild in the back streets of my imagination.  I still search them out in abandoned buildings, in the smells of old apartment houses and among the old overcoats huddled on park benches in forgotten parks along 11th avenue. But they are becoming harder to find.

This was not what Aunt Mildred had in mind when she passed the books along, but all was not lost.  My first foray into the world of urban archeology that later became a passion I continue to pursue, collecting data and artifacts with my camera.  So begins a profile...

                                               

                                           There is a balding fag I know

                                           with nothing but a bulging

                                           paper  shopping bag between him

                                           and a life of undistinguished

                                           dereliction...

                                           Sometimes I stop

                                           and look through that

                                           sack of memories I carry

                                           and remember the distain

                                           I once felt

                                           for the schmattta ladies who

                                           blossomed like potted plants

                                           along Fifth Avenue.

                                                                    Pablo 

Addendum 7/10/15:

Bought a good scanner a few weeks ago and have started going through the archives and scanning this and that and some old photos of me here and there and this seems to be as good a place as any to put them.  The first two seem to be from my earlier hobo days when I was still riding the rails.

Boxcar Pablo somewhere near Stowe, Vermont.  After all there years, I can still remember this photo being taken.

Me and Nora racing for the train from Ottawa to Moncton N.B. where we would make our way to Cape Tormentine to catch the ferry to PEI.

Me, taken by Jackie somewhere in New Mexico during my Edward Weston/Signs of Life in Death Valley and the American Southwest phase, and yes, that is a light meter hanging around my neck.  Don't really know why, since I never use one.

                                                                     Pablo

                        

                                                                               

                                                       

Room with a view...

                                                                     

In the magazine, Conde Nast Traveller,  they devote the last page to a feature they called room with a view in which regular people would send in interesting photos taken from hotel rooms that they had stayed in with an unusual and interesting view with hopes of being published.  Those selected were interesting, unusual,  often quite good, and generally international.  So, prompted by Jackie, I began to take photos from rooms with views and finally came up with a winner (so says I).  The above photo was taken from room 407 of the Russell Hotel on Park Ave and 39th St, a few blocks south of Grand Central Station.  The hotel itself was a small gem of turn of the century architecture, plush, warm, wood paneled, and welcoming, a home away from home for the carriage trade stopping over in NYC for a few days between here and there back in the day when traveling by train was the only way to go and had taken on a life of its own.  To enter the hotel these days was to be transported back in time and elevated in one's station in life, a character in an Edith Wharton novel maybe, maybe  House of Mirth.

We loved the Russell and often stayed there, so I was eager to return to put the finishing touches on the details I would need for the entry.  Jackie went on line to make reservations, but to no avail.  The web connection was disconnected.  Phone disconnected as well.  On our next trip to NYC, we went over and indeed found the hotel closed and in a state of disrepair inside that seemed to indicate a major renovation was in progress, but why, the place was perfect as it was.  A few months later we returned and got the news.  The Russell had been demolished and in its place they were building a modern metal and glass condominium building, out of place in the neighborhood, cold and impersonal with no architecturally redeeming qualities.   Another piece of NYC history joins the old Penn Station in the scrap heap of of horribly poor decisions made those rich people who have been granted the privilege of rebuilding NYC in their own image.  Bland and characterless with an eye on the bottom line and no commitment to posterity.

This is my most recent photo in the room with a view series.  It is from a room on the 5th floor of a generic Radisson hotel in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada,  grey, gloomy and gothic, just as I remember it.  A lively and exciting city in spring and summer, but the winters are cold, very snowy, and deadly, if you are prone to depression.

                                                                              Pablo