Yesterday, I got a Lumix DMC-FX30 digital camera from B&H (an insane Hasidic camera and electronics juggernaut, here in NYC, complete with conveyor belts and free kosher cola) in preparation for my impending trip to Hawaii. I’m loving this gadget. It’s more than small enough to fit in my pocket, at 7.2 megapixels with Leica lenses, it takes some bad-ass photos. My last camera was circa 2001, so this thing is a huge step forward from the pretty crappy quality I was used to putting up with. There’s a big mess of presets for different photo-taking scenarios built in to the camera and last night, I was trying them out on my uber-tubby cat, George. I noticed that the “Pet” preset wasn’t really working out with him, but I had much greater success and quality photographing him with the “Baby” preset. Read into that what you will.

I think this is just about the coolest thing ever. A man in Germany rigged a digital camera with a timer and attached it around his cat’s neck, setting it to take photos at set intervals throughout the day. The result is so fucking awesome. Life, seen from the perspective of a cat, tooling around, doing what cats do. Check the gallery that’s up so far.

Unfortunately for me, the setup for the project is far above my engineering and electrical craft skills (which are nonexistent to be truthful) and both my cats, while neat and fun to look at, are both indoor pets, since I live in Brooklyn. It’d be a pretty boring and repetitive photo collection.

I’ve been bed-ridden, sick as fuck all day long. After sleeping for far too much, I started going through some old archive discs from years ago as I sweated out a fever. Most of them were damaged or corrupted, but I did find some shit I’d pretty much forgotten about.

One of the discs I found was an archive of photographs I’d taken of the World Trade Center area on September 27th, 2001. Some of the photos had been corrupted, but I was able to recover the majority of them and post them to my flickr account.

It was still a complete and total fuck-zone went I first went down there and I remember walking around with my camera, everything around me covered with a thick layer of ash and feeling like I was walking through a ghost town in winter only in reality it was September and the “snow” was actually pulverized concrete and God knows what fucking else. It’s disturbing to think I inhaled some of that stuff.

All kinds of items, hats, shoes, umbrellas, briefcases and other sorts of things were lying around, neatly stacked and out of the way, in case someone might return to reclaim them. Messages were written in the dust on the walls and everywhere possible were notes scribbled on paper, photos and desperate pleas for information on missing people. It was an extremely surreal experience.

When the planes had hit the towers, I was working on 28th Street. After watching from the roof of my building, I’d headed straight down there, mainly because I had nothing to do and didn’t know how to get home, having lived in New York for only a couple of months, but I was turned back at Canal Street by the police. I was living in Williamsburg at the time, but aside from the fact that it was located in Brooklyn, that was about as much as I knew. It took me six hours to walk home. I crossed the Manhattan bridge on foot with thousands of other people. I was hot, tired and hungry. I had no money and could find no working ATM. My cell phone didn’t work. Nothing fucking worked except my feet.

I’ve been back there several times since but I’d almost forgotten that first visit, alone and pretty fucking bewildered. There was this one jewelry store, completely abandoned and trashed. The doors must have been open when all the shit went down, because inside the place everything was covered with almost two inches of ash. Peering through the store window made me feel like I was looking into a crypt.

Anyway, here’s the link to the images:

World Trade Center photo set

Have a peek.

This morning, I had a nasty encounter with one of the countless sketchy, lunatic assholes that float the edges of society here in Manhattan (like yours truly). Every day after leaving the station at Park and 28th, I hit up the nearby Scarfucks for coffee. I hate Scarfucks, but everything else available in the immediate vicinity tastes like colored water so fuck it.

Anyway, as I walked up Park Avenue, pretty much tuned out with German death metal blasting my eardrums, I noticed a scuzzy middle aged guy, dressed sloppily and holding an odd looking camera. He seemed to be taking photos of people walking down the street, without their permission and he was trying to be sneaky about it. Looking at him I figured a couple things were going on. He was either a crazy homeless person with a camera that may or may not have actually had film in it or one of those sleazy scumfucks that use those special lenses that let you take psuedo “X-Ray” photos by filtering the light and causing the resulting photo to look like it’s possibly seeing through clothing in a lame kind of way. There’s sleazebags riding the subway, holding their cameras by the waist, using these filters all the time. In short, I immediately wanted to pummel this guy into a twitching bloody pulp, but this is New York and you never fuck with the crazy people unless there’s no choice. He snapped a couple photos of me, but I kept walking, crossed the street and went inside the Scarfucks. After I had secured some coffee, I stepped outside the building to find the guy right in my face taking photos of me. I made to push the camera away and said something to the effect of “Get that fucking camera out of my face, you fucking asshole.” He stepped back, smiled and I kept walking.

Now, that German death metal I was blasting was about as loud as my mp3 player would allow, but I could clearly hear him bellowing at the top of his lungs, “Go home and fuck your fucking whore, you fucking asshole!!! Fuck you and you fucking blah…blah…blah”. I and everyone else on Park Avenue this morning could hear him screaming all the way to my office which is three blocks away. It was a great way to start the morning. I should have dumped my coffee on him. Then, the over-roasted crap Scarfucks tries to pass off as good coffee would actually have some worth.