If You Love Me Let Me Go

I have been SO slack with my blog updates - to my reader, I apologise!

Another from New York. I want to go back so much - especially now it's OK to love America again! The plan at the moment is to go back in a year or so, once both my kids are old enough to appreciate it, but any excuse in the meantime and I'll be there!

This was down on West 3rd St, just off Broadway, and spookily you can see the big tag on Google maps at this link - it was just around the corner from a shop where my friend Rachel was spending some time choosing a pair of boots. I was in trouble because I had no opinion on the pair she chose... apparantly 'no opinion' is not an acceptable answer when it comes to women's shoes.

There's something lovely about graffiti like this - it tells all sorts of stories, the truth of which we can only guess at. The story I want it to tell is of a relationship that one partner is so desperate to leave that they are willing to cut the spokes on their wheel in order to get away - so either one partner is a bike, or that's just an awkward and painful metaphor.

Carry On Twitching

I love the natural British sense of 'ooh-er Mrs'. This is a diary left in a hide at Studland (near the naturist area, of course) and it was filled with classic British humour. Smut, self-deprecation, sarcasm and smattering of satire. Lovely light in the hide too, though no birds to be seen, as we were with three children and a dog.

The hide is roughly here - well hidden of course.

Love and Death

Some things you don't notice til much later, especially when you're forced to work quickly by a frustrated marathon runner with tendon issues. It was only when I looked at the photos back in Swanage that I could see the death's head in the heart on this Central Park tree. And the tree had been alongside this chess garden. And I instantly thought of Woody Allen, not because I was transposing the Seventh Seal Bergman reference onto a Manhattan setting, but because I'm essentially shallow and I get my high culture references from pop culture sources.

Now I'll have to get the Bergman film on DVD and pretend that I was referring to that all along, except i've given away my true working method here... d'oh!

OK, so I'm still posting pictures of New York, which i shot back in October/November, but I'm slowly working towards more recent stuff. I'm still campaigning (successfully, me thinks) to save my sons' school, so work is a little behind... more soon!

This pic was shot here

Happy New Year!

Not the most original post title, but it's what I want to say!

I'm continuing with some newer pictures and am in the process of writing some press releases based on my New York trip.

This I love: I love people on pavements anyway, but it's also a little tribute to my good friend and colleague Richard Jeffery, who photographs a lot of them! Not sure this is grafiti, but it definately isn't a standard part of any road signs I know of!

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.