Yearly Archives: 2011

My Years in New York – 1980-1987

Bio

The center of the world.

These pieces generally run annually in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.

“Move on, bud.”

It was like a quote form a cheesy Bogart gangster movie from the ’40s. Yes, I was in the center of the world, 6th and 54th in Noo Yawk City, on an exploratory trip during my Years in Alaska, before finally moving there in October, 1980. I had asked the cop for directions to my equally cheesy hotel and those were the first words I heard spoken in Manhattan. Just like the movies said. And, yes, the hotel when I finally found it, unaided, was crawling with cockroaches. Just like New York.

Yet there was no way on this earth that one could call life complete without trying to compete and survive in this strivers’ paradise. Much of my personal fortune would soon be deposited on a luxury high rise at West 56th Street. That luxury high rise took the guise of an L-shaped studio co-op on the 14th floor of a Hell’s Kitchen place, all 450 square feet of it, which had three singular appeals.

One, I could see Carnegie Hall from the window.

Two, Lincoln Center was two blocks away.

Three, you could get mugged outside the front door, while the doorman watched, by the nice Puerto Rican boys from 9th Avenue, one block west. Steinberg was right. And yes, I was mugged right there.

But, heck, those boys were just forecasting today, when a handful control most of America’s wealth. I gave them the $30 I had in my pocket, wiped the spit off my glasses, and praised the powers that be that my Leica M3 survived the assault. Until you have been mugged in New York you can not claim to have lived there, though I confess that my Paul Stuart shorts and knee-high white socks may have been a bit of a provocation.

This was, truth be told, a tough time in the city. Street crime was common, chain snatchings were the order of the day and the subway had no air conditioning, the cars’ windows totally obscured with graffiti, like in some dystopian movie. At least if you lived, like I did, on the West side, a sensibility which suited my pocket book as much as it did my soul. You see, payola came from the East side, so their subway lines got the spotless, stainless steel Mitsubishi cars with the graffiti resistant exteriors and quiet wheels long before the West side did. We got fans in cages, seized as often as not. So by the time I arrived at work, 1 New York Plaza, at Salomon Brothers, the perfect crease in my pants and the beautifully laundered shirt were so much of a Louisiana-swamp-National-Geographic-Explorer Real Man sweaty mess. Sheer hell.

But I cannot complain too much about the RR subway or the lack of cool. Because the West side, in the years I lived in NYC, was the epitome of cool. 1980 thorugh 1986 saw me there and while I have no desire to return, I recommend the experience highly. Sinatra was right. “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere”. And believe me, you will never feel sorry for yourself again after a couple of years in Manhattan. You survive or you run away. A rite of passage.

As luck would have it, I was blessed with a wonderful girlfriend during my New York years. Nancy, a distant relative of the Canadian Bronfman family, which owned Seagrams at the time, was just a joy to be with. There was simply no subject under the sky where she would not claim complete expertise, meaning she loved to debate everything. A lovely, bubbly, at times eccentric personality, who made human an otherwise tough time. Once, when she lost a bet, the prize being dinner for two at a restaurant of the winner’s choosing, I soaked her well and truly at La Grenouille which to this day makes its home, and the best French food in America, at 3 East 52nd Street. Of course, she had to argue with the waiter over the bill which, recalling its size, I would have argued also. After dinner she showed me some snaps of her Aunt Sadie’s place in Toronto and I remarked on the lovely Degas reproductions visible on the walls. “Thomas”, Nancy rebuked me, “those are the real thing”. Many years later, on a trip to Manhattan, I popped in for a concert at Carnegie Hall, as was my habit, and who should I meet in the crowd at the intermission but Nancy! We parted at 3am at a dive in Greenwich Village. She remained as committed to NYC as ever and it gave me confirmation that New York would remain in my past. I missed Nancy, but not the city.

So what were some of the greatest memories, as a photographer, of these six wonderful years?

More visual memories than photographs, for I was too busy trying to survive than wanting to take snaps.

There was that magic moment walking up Broadway. I would do this at weekends, fighting the Black Dog, en route to Zabars, the quintessential NY deli. Not only was my goal the coffee beans, it was equally a visit to the upper level where I rejoiced in trying to determine the use of the strange implements for sale. A tool seemingly for everything. Have you seen asparagus steamer cones?

And this is what I saw on one such walk:

Broadway, Upper West Side, Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

I caught the M50 bus home, only to find myself seated in front of one of the more beautiful women this earth has yet produced. Unknown to me, this was a cross-town bus and by the time I stopped gaping I was at the United Nations on the East side, far from home. Yes, she has a gap in her teeth. Superstar Lauren Hutton took the bus ….

America had a new president then, one of the two or three competent or lucky ones in the twentieth century, so naturally that played to New York’s counter culture.

Reagan’s teeth. Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

Only in New York can you find so many professed liberals looking to rip their fellow man off to make a quick million.

And the beautiful women were everywhere. Shop girl or model, it was all the same.

Madison Avenue, Tourneau. Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

New York City is the cultural center of the world. It has the three essential ingredients – immigrants, capital and greed. Let no one tell you otherwise. Cecil Beaton knew it when he moved there in the 1930s to work for Vogue and it’s true today. Where there’s money you will find culture. Sorry, it’s not to be found in south central Vladivostok, Neasden, Lyon, or anywhere between America’s coasts, with the honorable exception of Chicago.

And cultural activities peaked, for this resident of the center of the world, in October 1982, when Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic came to town. Yes, the Jews boycotted it (deNazifiation does that to your audience, much as they might love your music) and yes, the lines for tickets were long, and yes, only the Vienna Philharmonic played better back then, but if you were into Brahms and Mahler, you bought tickets. They gave four concerts, on October 21, 22, 24, and 25 and there I was, seat 6F at Carnegie Hall, to soak it up. The last was Mahler’s Ninth, and you can hear the live repeat from Berlin on CD/iTunes. I ceased going to live symphonic performance after that one. You should quit at the top. We were all still wildly cheering when only von K was taking bows, and the lights were dimming. A small man with a big passion for perfect sound. And awful political judgement.

Von Karajan and the BPO, sold out. Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

Returning two hours later from a favorite upper Broadway hang out, I passed by Carnegie Hall on the way home, only to see the workers dutifully packing the Stradivarii and Guarnerii, each in individually numbered boxes, in the BPO’s van. The nation that gave us the Holocaust still believed in alles in ordnung. Instruments numbered and arrayed as neatly as death camp corpses. So, appropriately, when I think of death, it’s von Karajan’s rendition of Mahler’s Ninth I turn to. Probably not a good idea for you to go there.

In many ways, these New York years were a failure photographically. I was too busy doing the striving, so to speak. Little time was afforded my passion. And I never really ‘got’ the brutality, the crassness, the crude grasping of the place. The City has some sort of machismo desire to prove itself through the rudeness of its inhabitants.

And, naturally, I had to take all the cliché snaps:

Frank Lloyd Wright’s execrable Guggenheim Museum, 5th Avenue. Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, Central Park West. Pentax ME Super, 28mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

Architecture meets structural engineering. Woolworth and the WTC. Pentax ME Super, 135mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

At the Natural History Museum, Upper West Side. Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

Bergdorf Goodman. Pentax ME Super, 40mm Takumar.

Carnegie Hall. Pentax ME Super, 85mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

So it was with a distinct lack of regret that I left the Center of the World in January 1987. But before leaving, the musical experience peaked in the guise of Strauss’s ‘Die Fledermaus’ at the Met, with Kiri Te Kanawa no less. It was de rigeur to smuggle in a bottle of Moèt’s best with a couple of flutes in my genuine English-style raincoat, to be popped at the champagne scene in the third act, only to find that 1,000 other concertgoers had the same idea. New York was a genuinely tolerant town back then, before the depredations of the right were visited upon it by subsequent mayors. The corks popping in the audience drowned out those on the stage.

As we walked the two blocks home to my hovel on West 56th Street, a torrential downpour and howling wind conspired to rip my superb, double ribbed doorman’s umbrella from my hand. Big bugger. It shot across Columbus Avenue at a rate of knots and was immediately crushed by a Checker cab, made in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yes, there really is a Kalamazooo. Or there really was.

That seemed right. New York was history for me, as much as the Checker would be, soon enough. And I would not need an umbrella where I was going.

Gorgeous, sunny Los Angeles. This young man was going West where the weather was real and the breasts were not.

Looking back, I realized I no longer wanted to live in a city where my two closest friends in the world were the doorman in my co-op with the methadone habit, and the Russian chauffeur with whom I argued in Polish/Russian about the Russian classics. Life surely had more to offer?

* * * * *

Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.

BikeCam is no more!

Photographs

Gone to a happy home. Maybe.

My first thought was that senility had kicked in prematurely. That I had simply forgotten where I left it.

Returning to my appointed municipally-provided bike rack, courtesy of no less than the City of San Francisco, even the least observant would have remarked that BikeCamâ„¢ was not in its appointed place.

Nah!, thought I. Must be on the wrong block. But, no, Market and Fremont. I’m sure that’s where I left it. Then I looked closer. And this is all that was left of BikeCamâ„¢:

The remains of BikeCam

Yes, my bike had been pinched. A pro with wire cutters had done his thing on my admittedly limp locking cable and made off with it, leaving me with a long trek to the Caltrain station and another from my destination to home on the Peninsula.

Now the rational reaction would be four letter words in abundance, a red face, and general street performance. But all you could see on my face was a smile of joy. You see, BikeCamâ„¢ had delivered me to the location of no more than 2,000+ ‘keepers’ over the past two years in the City, and at that rate with its all in cost of $100, I reckoned that 5 cents a snap was a really good deal. Kodachrome and TriX cost more back in the day. I had truly realized value. Anger would have been the meanest expression of ingratitude and, let’s face it, the bike had gone to a needier home.

Still, by the time I had made the trek back to the Caltrain on Shanks’s Pony and then added a like trek at the other end, I was feeling a tad less forgiving. Then I loaded up today’s ‘roll’ into Lightroom and all was sweetness and light.

All snapped on the Panasonic G3 with the kit lens.

So, Mr. Thief With Wire Cutters, enjoy my bike and I hope you take some good pictures using it.

But the former owner of BikeCam is prepared. (For the lawyers reading this, bikes are like bearer bonds. Ownership and possession are synonymous). Like with most things, he has a back up, and BikeCamâ„¢.BAK will be in service soon. The cobwebs are coming off, new tires are on order, a gel saddle to soothe the nether regions, and BikeCam will soon be in business.

And I’m just on my fourth. That model for all us bicycling street snappers, Bill Cunningham, is on Number 27 ….

* * * * *

I managed to order two new smooth road tires using the iPhone on my (bikeless) trip home and just installed these on the back-up bike, and old Giant made in Korea. I recycled the knobblies which are awfully unstable on roads and sidewalks, waste energy owing to high rolling resistance and are noisy to boot. I bought this bike well used from a cycle tour operator in San Diego some 13 years ago and now it will see action again. A gel saddle is on order and all should be sweetness and light soon.

The massive lock visible on the downtube came with it and I even found the key! This one has a steel frame rather than the alloy one on the Raleigh predecessor, which experts assure me absorbs shocks better at the expense of added weight, and has no front shocks meaning less energy wasted. Or so I tell myself. And it even has a CatEye cyclometer so I can record the miles ridden up to the point it’s stolen.

You can’t keep us cyclists off the bike for long!

BikeCamâ„¢ is back.

In the spirit of the season

Photographs

The truth will out.

Only a truly arrogant and culturally blind institution could bring you this Christmas display, reminiscent of so many skulls, snapped in San Francisco’s business district today:

Skulls. G3, kit lens @16mm, 1/400, f/5,6, ISO1600.

Brought to you by your friends at J P Morgan/Chase.

Bluetooth ruminations

Hardware

No such thing as a standard.

One of the challenges of controlling the Hack Mini from ten feet away is finding a wireless mouse which actually works. The challenge was identical with the MacMini predecessor, and while there are many variations on the theme, I’ll share my experiences below in the hope that they prove useful to others using a Mac or Hack as a home theater computer. I would guess this applies equally to PCs.

I’m not going to focus on Apple wireless mice here, because Apple seems genetically incapable of making a proper mouse. The original BT mouse had but two buttons, the next had that ridiculous little scroll ball which would eventually cause the device’s demise owing to ingress of dirt and grease, and the current Magic Mouse belongs in the MOMA design section, not causing you carpal tunnel at your workstation. I have used all three extensively. If the tech world offered gaol sentences for bad ergonomic design, the designer of the Magic Mouse would be a lifer. I got rid of both mine after a few months of desperately trying to get them to work properly, with all sorts of aftermarket drivers to enable broader functionality, but there’s simply no way to improve the frightful low profile design or handgrip, both inspired by Torquemada’s torture chambers. Other than design fetishists, the only people who like this mouse are surgeons in the carpal tunnel business. The only thing the MagicMouse does well is super smooth scrolling, making them much like many beautful women I have known. Strictly one purpose devices.

There are three kinds of wireless mice.

Bluetooth:

Probably the oldest technology, Bluetooth receivers are built in to many desktops, laptops, and nearly all modern cell phones and tablets. They use a 2.4gHz frequency and claims for reliable operation over ranges up to 30 feet are pure rot, in my experience. With several bluetooth adapters tested, I have found that unless the mouse is no more than 2-3 feet from the bluetooth receiver, or ‘dongle’, erratic operation results. Place metal between mouse and receiver and things get worse quickly. It’s not predictable nor is it clear to me why erratic operation comes and goes, but once I moved my bluetooth dongles from the rear of computer cases to the front or to the keyboard (if equipped with a USB socket) the erratic behavior ceased. This has been the case with any number of computers I have used. I doubt it’s interference from other 2.4gHz devices (like cordless phones) as we have none in the house and the neighbors are too far away.

‘Pairing’ of the mouse with a computer using BT is notoriously unreliable and generational differences abound. Try pairing an early white Apple bluetooth keyboard with current computers. I could never get it to work, and Apple even admits that the older keyboards will not work. That’s a shame because the early white keyboards were head and shoulders superior ergonomically to the atrocious current ‘chiclet’ key offerings from Apple.

Battery life of BT mice is poor. You will see claims of up to 3 months but that is also pure rot. Reckon on 1-2 months with alkaline AA batteries, 30% less with rechargeables. The AAA variants are worse still. Most also suffer from very poor vertical scrolling, owing to the coarsely stepped design of the teeth driven by the scroll wheel.

On my two HackPros I use ancient Logitech MX900 BT mice, recommended by a reader. Long discontinued, these use two AA rechargeable batteries which last 4-5 days at most. There is no on-off switch. But the superior ergonomics (right handed only) make that minor inconvenience worthwhile. So much so that I prefer these for outlining tasks in Photoshop to a Wacom tablet. Junk the charger and use rechargeable AA cells, which take seconds to swap. This mouse is large, heavy and has a plethora of programmable buttons which, once you get used to them, you will miss in other designs. They crop up on eBay regulary. Don’t pay more than $20.

RF:

Increasingly the thing in wireless mice. Indeed, I have read that Windows 7 no longer includes BT drivers so BT mice may not work with Win 7 unless you download and install these. Microsoft actually makes an outstanding range of mice, most ergonomically solid, and uses this technology in its wireless offerings. I have a couple of their Wireless Mobile Mouse 6000 models, one black, the other white, and each comes with a paired, minuscule dongle, unique to the mouse in question, so interference is not an issue if you use more than one in proximity. They have additional programmable side buttons, very useful, and include a sideways tilt function on the scroll wheel for lateral scrolling. The BlueTrack technology does what it claims and this mouse will track on just about anything, most importantly on the sofa whence the HackMini is controlled. This design also uses the 2.4gHz frequency but, unlike a BT mouse, is ‘instant on’, with no pairing required. I have never known either of mine not to be instantly recognized with any number of Macs or Hacks.

Battery life is stellar, even though only a single AA battery is used. Not the 8 months claimed but easily 3-4 if left on, and if you use the on-off switch it’s far greater.

But the mouse suffers from the same defect found in the BT designs I have used. Unless the mouse and receiver are no more than 2-3 feet apart, response becomes erratic and random, with sufficient cursor jerkiness guaranteed to have you check in to the local looney bin. As with BT mice I have used, scrolling is coarse for the reason stated above.

Wifi:

This seems like the ideal solution. Pretty much all computers have wifi receivers. These offer huge range, with low power consumption, but the wifi mice I know of work only with special drivers and current Windows operating systems. There are alternatives such as the MobileMouse app for iPhones and iPads, which make these into wireless touchpads, but it’s far easier to select things on a TV screen using a mouse than a touch pad. Cost of entry is very low if you already own an iDevice.

Receivers:

Both BT and RF mice require a receiver in the computer. Macs have BT receivers built-in but Hacks need to add them. You can either use remaindered parts from a Mac and install internally (use a 3.3 volts power supply. 5 volts will fry the receiver), or use any one of the many dongles on the market, ranging in price from $2-60. The dongles have the advantage that the receiver is external, and is not shielded by the computer’s case. I have traditionally used the IOGear one. It’s small, cheap and works well at short distances though mouse movement will not wake a sleeping Hack; a touch on the keyboard is needed for that. With the HackMini I simply had no luck, getting erratic behavior using this BT dongle or the RF one for the MSFT wireless mouse at my 10 foot range.

Targus ACB10US BT dongle in the Hack Mini. The Mini is usually used with this aluminum flap closed, which does not help with BT reception.

A spot of checking on chat boards disclosed that many were having better luck with the Targus ACB10US dongle. I procured one and still had occasional cursor jerkiness at a 10 foot range using the Logitech MX900. Then I thought I would try a different BT mouse and opted for the Verbatim BT wireless notebook mouse. This has looks only a mother could love, but has several offsetting advantages. The ergonomics are good, it’s symmetrical so my left-handed son can use it easily, it uses two AA batteries, the top rear switch chooses between three cursor speeds, it tracks on just about anything and it has an on-off switch. Now the latter fills me with dread as you would think regaining pairing would be fraught with problems, yet I have found pairing is reliably restored when switching on in just 3 seconds. That’s not the instantaneous ‘on’ you get with RF mice, but it’s pretty solid and, with a mouse on the sofa, you really want an on-off switch as movement on the sofa will bring the cursor to life and interfere with the movie watching experience. My 9 year old, who is the main operator of the HackMini, has made this abundantly clear to me! Movement of the mouse when used with the Targus dongle will wake a sleeping screen, which is just as well as the Hack Mini has no keyboard!

But, best of all, the connectivity and stability are superb. I have the Targus BT dongle behind the closed aluminum flap on the front of the Silverlake enclosure used for the Hack Mini, and the mouse has no issues communicating with the dongle over ten feet and an intervening cocktail table. The batteries are AA (avoid short lived AAA at all costs) and add nice heft. There is a paucity of buttons – just left and right click, scroll, lateral scroll, scroll press and the sequential three speed one mentioned before. The latter glows red when the batteries are dying. This lack of buttons is not an issue for use with a TV screen. Unlike other non-Apple BT mice, the scroll wheel moves the screen in small increments, not as smoothly as the Apple designs, but it will do. The color is a ghastly metallic powder blue. Mine cost $27.

Verbatim Bluetooth mouse. Function trumps looks and finish.

Driver software:

With all my mice, whether RF, BT or wired, I use the SteerMouse app which installs as a preference pane and permits saving of multiple profiles. I make sure all mouse drivers in the preference pane, other than the stock Apple one, are disabled, and find that tuning the cursor ‘speed’ and ‘sensitivity’ settings is a vital part of the goal, which is to deliver smooth cursor movement. One key advantage of SteerMouse is that you can use it to enable all the buttons on older mice whose makers never provided Apple drivers, like the excellent Logitech MX900. Those on my two MX900s are all enabled, and most useful. One payment covers all the Macs in your home, so it’s not like it costs a lot.

These are my cursor settings for the old Logitech MX900. For the Verbatim BT mouse I use 0.7/600. If the sensitivity is too high (and the speed too low), jerkiness results.

In closing, the Verbatim mouse is the polar opposite of Apple’s MagicMouse. It’s ugly and comfortable, where the MagicMouse is beautiful but useless. And one final note on the Targus ACB10US BT dongle. It does not support the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP), meaning that BT headphones like the excellent Arctic Sound P311 ‘phones will not work. By contrast the IOGear dongle does support A2DP. So much for standards.