Beached whales

Date: August, 1981
Place: Central Park West, NYC
Modus operandi: Wandering the streets
Weather: Overcast
Time: 2 pm
Gear: Leica M3
Medium: Kodachrome 64
Me: Gotcha!
My age: 29

What’s that old joke about the two American tourists in Venice, torn between catching the plane home and seeing yet another priceless cathedral? “OK, honey, you take the outside and I’ll do the inside”.

I imagine these two whales were visiting from some place it’s good to be from, in W C Fields’s words, like Arkansas or Mississippi. They had just ‘done’ the Natural History Museum (the same one in which Woody Allen wanted to “…. make interstellar perversion ….” with Diane Keaton in his fabulous movie ‘Manhattan‘) and simply had to take the weight off their tortured feet.

Wrapped Heads

Date: 1996
Place: Hong Kong, HK
Modus operandi: Jet lagged
Weather: Muggy
Time: 3 pm
Gear: Olympus Stylus Quartz
Medium: Kodachrome 64
Me: Awed by the electricity of this special place
My age: 45

There’s nothing good about the flight from LA to Hong Kong, unless you include the lovely Singapore Airlines stewardess waking you with a warm meal and a smile. You arrive so zonked out on jet lag that for the first day or two eveything is strange. Sorround that strangeness with the frenetic pace of the world’s most crowded place and you have a prescription for strangeness. And fun.

These statues were patiently awaiting probably illegal export to some loony collector in New York; long live free trade!

As this really was meant to be a business trip, I restricted my gear to the small, clamshell Olympus Stylus, as sweet a piece as Olympus ever made. When not in use the built-in cover slid over the wide angle lens and the whole thing slipped nicely into a pocket. Or suit. The lens may not have been the greatest – barely better than the one on its predecessor, the Rollei 35 – but it was adequate for little memorabilia like this. And how could anyone resist the wild surrealism of this scene?

Sunday paper

Date: 1984
Place: Greenwich Village, NYC
Modus operandi: Getting some air
Weather: Gorgeous
Time: 1 am
Gear: Pentax ME Super
Medium: Kodachrome 64
Me: See. Click. move on.
My age: 33

Mindlessly long work days on Wall Street would always drive me out on the streets of New York for some walk-about pictures at the weekend, not to mention the ever present risk of a good mugging. I adopted rough clothes and my ‘don’t mess with me’ tough guy walk (OK, actually looking over my shoulder, ready to run) – such was early ’80s Manhattan. The world’s richest city with no proper policing or law and order. On Wall Street or off.

Greenwich Village was still trying to be hip and trendy then, though the reality was that it was overexposed in the media and $1mm wouldn’t get you very much in the shape of decent real estate. Still, it was fun for its squiggly streets and outrageous personalities.

Here’s one of those wealthy Manhattanites grabbing the Sunday paper in his megabucks co-op downtown.