Color My Missives

Though I’m not sure if I’ll ever eat there, the Ninja Restaurant and Sushi Bar might be my favorite restaurant and sushi bar in New Orleans. It certainly has the best name and sign combination imaginable.

And while I’m back up to my old tricks again photo-wise, it’s nice to be reminded that the folks who subscribe to the “gun control means using both hands” theory are up to theirs as well.

The plan is to leave the colors of the city behind for a few weeks. Look forward to different kinds of noise in this space.

Joe told me he was a former intern in photojournalism programs at the Washington Post and George Washington University. His main gig’s with the Navy now: intelligence, counter-terrorism. With the olympics coming to New York this year, the field is in demand, you know? A lot of people ask him about the stylish beard. Two years old, he says. “Hey, you’ve got to work with what you got.”

This and some others come from an early morning shoot last week at the Brooklyn piers.

For every part of me that lives and dies with line, shape, and form — the part that obsesses first over the composition of the frame, then its re-composition (if necessary) in photoshop and color correction — there is the soft voice that grumbles that there is no person to look at, no story. This irreconcilable cleft between formal image-making and narrative is where I have planted myself squarely for reasons not altogether clear. For that, the zen of capturing an image like this is partly therapeutic, partly maddening.

A man came up to me that morning. He, like the group of men he was in, was dressed in a blue zip-up worksuit and headed into an adjacent garage area. Apart from the others, he carried a dustpan — the kind that hangs and swings from a broomstick.

“Put it here,” he said. I did not understand. His accent was heavy, Mexican probably. His skin was a caramel brown and oiled, textured and not without a history. The other men in the group were black mostly and spoke in the gravelly voices of the morning. In the second that I reassessed the man apart from his coworkers, the arroyos of his accent were just beginning to flatten themselves into english I understood. I realized that I was holding a banana peel.

“Put it here, ” he repeated. This time he pointed to the dustpan. I dropped the peel in it and thanked him. My next thought was that his skin glowed in the morning light, that it would look good in a photograph.

I could hear the sound of gravel under the boots of men as they assembled on the other side of the gate.

Intentional cultural poaching or no, ODB Liquors on Mission Hill in Boston might be the most keenly named individual business I’ve come across. I can think of no better tribute to the man and his work.
 

 
The name has to be intentional, right?
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[1] I’ve just spent the past half-hour recapping ODB’s career on youtube. If NSFW street language isn’t a problem, you might want to check out the linked Pryor-esque clip of Ol’ Dirty monologizing onstage. Among many Barron’s-level gems, we hear the nearly-quotable aphorism, “Before drugs was illegal, b----, it was LEGAL!”
[2] Hip-hop’s cultural fluidity as spoiler of youth reigns as ever (vocal lines on the song sampled from ODB). Stunner shades for all.

ed note: also posted over at desedo.