On Bleeker Street

New York is a city filled with key locations from pop culture - at least the pop culture I was familiar with in my formative years. If there was an Usborne Spotters Guide to New York References in 20th Century Music, Film & Literature I would have managed to tick off a few as I went around. Bleeker Street was one of the first I wanted to see - it was much nicer than I'd been expecting, but maybe that's what a Simon & Garfunkel song does to a place.

I also stood outside Kurt Vonnegut's brownstone for a few minutes (I thought about Rabo Karabekian's studio in Bluebeard, though I looked like I was stalking a dead writer), stuck my head in the door of the Algonquin Hotel (where many writers have hung around, and where I looked shifty and hurried out again) and I wandered around New York Public Library (where I imagined a flooded, frozen world, and wondered which books I'd burn first to keep warm. Then I looked shifty and headed back out onto 5th Avenue). Dancing up and down 42nd St and waltzing in Grand Central station didn't make me look odd at all.

The heart in this picture was on the base of the post, as I recall, and though the city is filled with photographers selling 8x10s of famous street signs, I was pleased to at least get something nicely up and angular with this one. I was particularly pleased with the edges, where the lines come in and go out, and the shapes made by things. It only took a second to line up, but it fitted with the way I was viewing the city.

The map will show you where I took it - quite a way from the east river bank, so possibly explaining why I saw no fog and no sad cafe. I did note the distance to Canaan, however. A long way...

I vote for Knish

Back to the Big Apple: Knish are a rather tasty sounding yiddish dumpling style snack, and clearly a thing to be loved. I've never tried one, but I'm going to seek them out next time I'm in reach of Jewish food. Every lamp post was adorned with sticker graffiti in this patch of New York, and this caught my eye and made me think. One of the many things in the city that I felt familiar with through film and TV were the fire escapes covering the fronts, sides and backsides of buildings - so I was pleased to be able to incorporate them here. I tried to persuade my travelling companion Rachel to run up and down some with me in a cop-style chase, but to no avail. Next time, I'll chase myself, eating Knish.

Map: here

Oh - knish is prononunced with the k, much like knight, knickers and knugget. These things matter.

The Kids Are Alright

A small interruption to my postings of pictures taken in New York - the news of research by Barnardo's prompted this one. Read the BBC report for a fuller view of their findings, but essentially they polled adults on their attiotudes towards children and found that more than half of adults regarded children as 'dangerous', and believed that children were roaming the streets behaving like animals. Hugely upsetting stuff, and I'm going to have a rant about it:

Children learn their behavious from somewhere, and that somewhere is the world around them, controlled by adults. By blindly projecting (mostly) groundless fears onto young people, adults themselves are creating a negative environment for childhood development. We brand children as hooded hooligans, vandals and criminals and some reward us by behaving in the way they are expected to. Respect for children (as for each and every generation) is vital if we want their respect in return, and respect breeds empathy which in turn breeds good behaviour.

It isn't children who send men to fight wars, perpetrate terrorist acts or cause environmental ruin. And just to point out the obvious: children are naturally idealists until put down by the adults around them. Listen to childrens ideas about the world and they point out the things that we should never allow - homelessness, hunger, war, pollution, animal abuse, economic disparity, all the human-made ills that blight the world. To children the solutions are often simple, while adults allow themselves to become convinced that the solutions are too complicated to comprehend, and so they watch a soap opera and forget about it.

If we can maintain our childish idealsim we can beat these things: Homelessness? Fill the empty houses. Hunger? Share our food. War? Talk it over. Pollution? Use better technology. Animal abuse? Go vegetarian. Economic disparity? Share the money out more fairly! All simple stuff, all stuff that can easily be poo-poohed by adults, but think about it... why not? Call it communism if you like, but ask yourself "what would Jesus do?" and it's not so dumb.

So. A quick solution for those 50%+ who are so scared of children they'd like to see them locked up after dark:

1 - Go home and lock all the doors

2 - Cancel your subscription to the Daily Mail / Express

3 - Stay away from the rest of us until you feel better - without all that tabloid nonsense in your head, it really won't take long.

Postscript: this picture was taken in a park in Bournemouth last week, and fits the theme of childhood well, I think. The graffiti is negative, I suppose, but the love is wholly positive.

The map is here.

A glorious wall I felt awkward about

Considering graffiti is art placed illegally in a public place, some people get very defensive about the right of other artists to appropriate it. Fair enough, sometimes, I suppose, when you get things like traders on the streets of London selling postcards and posters of Banksy pieces, where they are literally reproducing it. There's little art in that. Then again, I've never spoken to them about it. Maybe they're conceptual artists playing the same one-line prank that Sherrie Levine pulled of to great effect in the eighties, or the even wittier www.aftersherrielevine.com which really is worth a look.

I say this because when I rounded the corner from the giant Banksy rat, I came across this lovely wall. I've found the same on a couple of websites when I was looking the big rat up. The same map will do too. When I rounded the corner I started looking closely at the wall for tiny hearts like the one here, then noticed that I was being watched by a lady with a Leica who was also eying up the wall. I wandered over to say hello, and it turned out she was a photographer, of portraits previously, having had a studio on Canal St nearby. She'd turned her hand to photographing walls of graffiti, she said, to some commercial success. Good stuff. But she didn't tell me her name, and hinted heavilly that she was worried about people copying her work. I gave her my card - the clearest hint of all that I was very happy with my own style and not in the least bit interested in adopting anybody elses. Then I said I'd leave her to her wall, having already spotted this little loveheart and made a note to come back later.

It was a peculiar encounter, all the more so because here we were, two artists doiung our own things no doubt in our own styles, but both appropriating the scrawl, sticker and stencil of other artists (though more often the point of my work is to be about the loves of ordinary people and the places they express them rather than just documenting the professional graffitists). I spent the afternoon wondering about this, and I hope she's checked out this blog and gets in touch, as I'd love to see what she does with her images, if only to nick a few ideas...

All Human Life is Here - I Love NY #3

Looking down from high places puts things in perspective. Here we can see the nests built by humans, and the spaces between where they scuttle around, gathering food, hunting for something to wear.

From up here, the cars look like ants and the people look like tiny mites, little parasites that sap the cars of their energy. The ants look like microscopic bacteria, impossible to see with the human eye. I wonder if the ants ever look up at us, at the tops of high buildings, and what simile they'd use to describe us. Maybe they're more literal - "look at that human up there, fellow ants," they might say, "they look just like what they are, and they appear to be smaller because they are far away". Maybe the world would make sense like that, but wouldn't it be boring.

"Look out!" cries the tiny ant, "A shoe as big as a house is about to..."

Universal Soldier, Forgotten War

I was trying to do something here about camouflage.

This is the memorial to veterans of the Korean War, the forgotten war that sits between the defeat of Japan in WWII and the lunacy of Vietnam. Probably the only reason this war figures in my consciousness is because of the TV series MASH, and later (for me, though it came first) from the film which had fed on the anti-Vietnam sentiment of the time. So I, like many others, tend to forget Korea, and lump it in with the other proxy wars of the 50's, 60's and 70's, when the Cold War was effectively hot.

I'm posting this the day after Remembrance Sunday and the night before Armistice Day, and on my coat is my white poppy, which I wear out of respect for the suffering of the men sent to fight and the women and children so often killed in the process. I know it's controversial, but I can't bring myself to wear a red poppy because to do so would give me the same badge as the armed men in uniform who march in remembrance of past war and preparation for the next and the criminally hypocritical politicians who line up to place their blood-soaked wreaths on memorials around the world, even as they order the deaths of civilians in countries far away. My great grandfather was a decorated hero of WWI, both my grandfathers were conscripted and played their parts in WWII, and both lost men of their generation in battle, brothers, family and friends. I don't know if they'd understand my reasoning.

I watched a few minutes of the Festival of Remembrance on TV. Military men marched around the stage, cannons were fired, guns were held with pride. Switch to an interview with the commander of 2 Para in Iraq, sat in front of a large machine gun. I just can't see how that is remembering the dead in any way other than to celebrate war. After all, if I can be allowed an extreme example, we wouldn't remember the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by saluting a flypast of bombers and a display of tiny parachutes before exploding a firework in the shape of a decorative mushroom cloud. The whole thing upsets me. War is awful, and we should be ashamed.

Anyhoo, here's the map.

Pavement Heart & Socks & Sandals

Socks and sandals - I love them. I'm wearing them now - comfy worn in Birkenstocks and Brasher walking socks. Almost perfection. I'm glad to see that they're the rage in Soho, New York too.

I saw loads of hearts after dark, but this was the only one worth wedging myself against a lamp post to be steady enough for. It's probably an old advert for something as it was right outside a CVS Pharmacy and opposite Kenny's Castaways (which by the power of Google I've just realised I missed a treat at), but I like to think it might be street art. Lots of people were walking by and on it, and so I went for moving feet. I wanted something like that famous surrealist photograph of a single foot walking by (the name of who took it escapes me, but I'll look it up and get back to you), but I'm happy with a blue-toed sock in a sandal. It really was very dark, and if you look closely you'll see the digital noise in the areas of shadow. Noise is good, and it suits the sound of the city.

It's difficult in a much-photographed city not to resort to cliche, and so I did. The white-light man on the crossing display was too lovely to miss, and he's accompanied us arround the city so far, so I took his picture.

Click here for the map

I Love NY #2

From the top of the Empire State Building, it feels as if you can see the world. There are notices around the outside of the observatory which say 'We welcome you, We do not welcome your graffiti'... but of course it's there anyway.

I love the fact that people need to say who or what they love at every honeypot destination you can think of - perhaps it's the honey that does it. Needless to say, I expected to find hearts way up here, and find them I did, by the dozen. I didn't photograph them all, the crowds pressed against the wall saw to that, but I probably photographed most. There was a view too.

Click here for the map - while you're there, have a look at the street view. Quite amazing!

I love NY, I really do.

Two new things: firstly, I'm going to try and post daily (or daily on the days when I should be sat here working, so probably not every day daily) and secondly, I'm going to start including a google map for each image. Partly to remind me where I took it, and partly to give you the opportunity to see where I took it.

This was in Soho, on the corner of Grand and Wooster, and as you can see, it's huge. Unfortunately, it's a Banksy piece, so it's a mural and not really graffiti, and was painted by a signwriter working for a commercial media company (see http://gothamist.com/2008/09/27/banksy_mural_going_up_right_now_in.php and then http://gothamist.com/2008/09/28/banksy_loves_new_york_the_completed.php to see the work in progress and then the completed image).

So this presents me with a dilemma. If it isn't graffiti, should it be part of my series? If it's painted with permission, and is a (very) commercial artist's design, it just doesn't fit with my agenda. I aim to display hearts left seruptitiously in places they probably shouldn't be, and so while this is a spectacular and entertaining piece of street art, I can only include it here as an example of street art including hearts and not real graffiti at all. It also shows how all supposedly anarchic and revolutionary artists become signwriters eventually. I'm amused by Banksy, but I'm not a fan.

Click here for the map

Almost Witnessing History

I flew home from New York yeaterday, a day too soon to witness one of the greatest days in US history, the election of Barack Obama as President. The feeling the day before the Election, in New York at least, was one of huge anticipation. I felt the urge to wear an Obama button, and I often had to stop and shake hands with other supporters, mostly black guys who seemed impressed to see a puny white man wearing the badge of the man who embodied their hopes and dreams. Most white people I met and spoke to were Obama supporters too (the one or two who weren't were good natured enough to laugh about it) but I think it's important to stress that the excitement was not just about his colour - he is a truly inspirational speaker and an intelligent and thoughtful human being. Unlike his predecessor.

I should warn you now that I will probably go on about New York for some time - I'll be trying hard not to be a travel bore around my friends, and this blog will allow me the space. I also took hundreds of photographs and will be working through the love landscape images over the coming days and weeks...

The picture above is unusual for me as it includes a self portrait - or a lapel, at least. It seemed relevent here, and there, as I was wearing the Obama button. This was on the Brooklyn Bridge, a place where there were so many hearts I was running short of parts of the bridge and views of the bridge to shoot to place alongside them. So I thought 'what shows the place and time that is relevent to here and now', and the Obama button was it. It was taken in an instant, and I liked the random composition, so here it is... the relevence of the word Jesus in the heart is entirely unrelated to the man Obama, though, I'm sure.