A major thunderstorm strikes midway through about every afternoon during the Summer in New Orleans. It’s almost impossible to see skies this wide, or clouds this low in most northeastern cities.
Regular readers of the Dot Com may be perplexed, disturbed even, but these images are real. Do not [attempt to] adjust your television sets.
The above text was originally intended to accompany photos of a great meal that I cooked, but the pictures didn’t come out as good as the food. So here are some pictures of sneakers. Three items:
a) Marc Johnson’s eponymous sneaker by Lakai ranks among my all-time favorites — here modified with purple laces. Johnson is also the only professional skateboarder known to have graduated from Yale.
b) The apartment I’m subletting has the exact same table as the one I have back in Brooklyn, only without my undone tax shit all over it.
c) Blogger/technologist Lynne Johnson is the person who brought my attention to the Supra Skytop Floral — the most consistently complimented garment I have ever owned. My favorite sneaker dap happened in DC close to 3 a.m. one night a couple months ago.
Guy: “Ay cuz, where’d you get they?”
I felt like Bobbito.
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.