Showing posts with label Ming the Merciless. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ming the Merciless. Show all posts

Sunday, July 6, 2008

On the Island Where I Was Born

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A long day in Manhattan, that unique island where I arrived into the world, with my wife, my nephew Michael and the incomparable Ming the Merciless of NYC City Daily Photoblog. We started the day at South Street Seaport for a half-hour boat tour of the New York City Waterfalls Project, more about which later.

Then a hike past City Hall and the NYC Municipal Building into Chinatown for dim sum brunch at the huge, crazy and delicious Jing Fong Restaurant. More walking up Mulberry Street into through Little Italy, NoLiTa, SoHo and into the East Village.
We walked through the Union Square Greenmarket where we met Joseph Ades, pictured above, who sits at the northwest corner of the square selling stainless steel, Swiss-made vegetable peelers. This English gentlemen slices and dices with more aplomb than Ron Popeil could ever manage. He's a New York institution.

From there we took the subway uptown to Central Park after visiting the Apple Cube at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. The striking entrance leads to a cavernous underground store. The young man in the second photo, standing outside the entrance, may be examining his new iPhone. The group trekked through the park to Bethesda Fountain and on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we nearly collapsed with exhaustion. It was a wonderful day plunging back into the places I loved as a boy and adolescent. Ming could not have been more generous with his time.

TOMORROW: One last picture from New York - the other side

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Thursday Arch Series

I like this Arch photo because of of its sense of monumentality. It makes me think of a gigantic steel hammer thrust into the ground from the sky. Note the tiny people at the lower left. I just wish &#%@$! Blogger didn't compress the life out of the pictures we upload. Mitch from Minneapolis taught me to oversaturate the colors before posting an image. This still has much less richness of color than I want, particularly the tans and greens at the bottom. Any other suggestions?

Flying to Newark today to spend the holiday weekend with my family in the New Jersey suburbs of NYC. Big plans for Saturday: New York blogger extraordinaire Ming the Merciless and I are meeting to see the New York City Waterfalls project by boat and shoot them until they dry up, followed by an aimless photo trek around Manhattan. There is an amazing connection between me and Ming. In a city of eight million people, he lives on the very same block in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Queens where I grew up. Like Humphrey Bogart said to Claude Rains at the end of Casablanca, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

TOMORROW: How to increase your photoblog traffic.