These photos are from my first visit back to New Orelans since 2002, when I moved out of the city after nearly three years of being dragged across the shark-skin rug of Big Easy living and, in retrospect, loving it.
New Orleans: Where color is king
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Picket line outside Chinatown restaurant
A representative of the restaurant workers union, Tony Tsai, said that the demonstration was a response to punitive actions taken against employees following Golden Bridge Restaurant’s official conversion to a union shop. That’s all I got. I know, I know. Where’s the response from the owner? Where are the details of the alleged mistreatment? Where’s the … Read more
Exquisite Spam: Threatening e-mail to myself
Unbeknownst to myself, I am promising to kill me. Bring it!
Looking for home on a Chinatown wall
WordPress upgrade slayed this pic.
Worth a watch: ‘Battle for Haditha’
This documentary-style film follows a unit of U.S. Marines that kills 24 people in revenge following the death of a soldier by an I.E.D. hidden in a street of Haditha, Iraq. There are two reasons I recommend watching this: For 98% of the film, it truly has the feel of a documentary, which enhances the … Read more
History spotted at the Brooklyn Flea Market
This photo, of a newspaper at a Brooklyn flea market with a front page story about Nixon’s resignation, was lost in a WordPress upgrade. More about the Brooklyn Flea Market. Other newspaper accounts of Nixon’s resignation.
Escaping the Screen
There was one purpose for my journey to the Brooklyn Flea Market: to escape my computer screen.
But breaking the grip of a MacBook Pro’s 2-D, 17″ window onto the world takes a lot more than hauling a Web worker’s chair-sculpted ass up and out the door.
That glowing rectangle is not just a thing that can be walked away from. Not when you spend roughly 80 percent of your day in front of it.
At some point — about 3,000 hours in — the window hops off the table and nails itself to the wall of your perception.
What you once saw, you now watch. What you once felt, you now record.
Where there was the flow and music of nature’s complex, sensual software of human interaction, there is now a control panel stopping and going your heart with a click.
Come as you like. Leave when you want. Reboot, replace, copy, paste.
Repeat and you’ll see: Through this window, relationships are Web sites.
Drop by any hour. Refresh and scour for what you want. No costly, messy exchanges of fragile curiosity and glass hopes.
It is seek, find, click, scrape, escape. Risk-free. Cost-free. Scar-free.
Lifeless.
It is superbly ironic that I attempt to alleviate the isolating voyeurism intrinsic to a wired world by using the very device I rail against for conditioning us more and more every day to watch life rather than live it.
But that’s what I did on a sunny Sunday in New York.
Counterfeit bills pay a visit to a Little Italy bike shop
Bicycle Habitat has seen an increase in the number of counterfeit bills brought into its shop, according to an employee. A man recently attempted to buy a tire patch kit with a $50 bill that was proven fake after getting the magic pen treatment. When the employee returned the bill after noting it was counterfeit, … Read more
Edited audio for nytimes.com feature on Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing
Plotting the Questions, Strategizing the Defense I worked on the clips from Senators Graham and Specter. Here is some more work from the feature’s producer, Elisabeth Goodridge. I used Final Cut Pro (News Videographer writing about the program here) and Soundtrack Pro (Mindy McAdams writing about the program here).