Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Think of the possibilities!


No matter what happens in the world for me 59th and 5th Avenue is one of those places were very little changes. When I was a kid most of my business was done above 57th street. I can't remember the times I went downtown on my own before the 9th grade. Downtown was not at all what it is today of course. It was very "After Hours". Lots of neon lights on the blink. People had cous cous partys in their lofts, it was hard to get a cab, the streets were deserted at night. It was a disorienting place but at the same time mysterious and full of possibility. When I finally pulled my head out of Park Avenue and actually went downtown I never really came back. But it's funny because very little remains the same downtown. Its completely different. At times unrecognizable. But - East 59th street is a diffrent matter altogether. It looks and at times feels exactly as it did 30 years ago to me when I was a kid cutting across the GM lobby from Madison to 5th to meet my girlfriend at her mothers office at 745. Or stumbling out of Trader Vics where I could drink underage and get someone else to pick up the check. Or buy a hot dog from a vendor with my last dollar... The GM building - a big stripey jewel in the city's crown that maintains a reliable classic chic that to me is full of possibility. The feeling that something really great could happen there. A side door to style and inspiration. A landmark of possibility. Perhaps just imagined in my mind but isn't that all possibility is in the end? One's sustained imagination? I suppose that this post, in a very abstract way sums up why I started this blog. To illustrate through photographs the idea that things, things that are carved and molded and shaped or woven, dyed and cut. Things that are printed and sketched, mapped and drawn or laid out and built - That these things say something about us, or to us, they hold memories for us, they define us, they inspire us with their possibility. That the colors we choose for the walls, or the stones we lay in our garden are a reflection of our memories, or influences. Defining us with each choice we make bit by bit. Making our imagined possibilities into real ones.

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