New York City Noir

Riverside Park

The day after I returned from Japan, I did a shoot here in NYC with Jasmine, who was visiting from Boston.  On Jasmine's suggestion, we did a shoot in Riverside Park where the trees were just going into bloom.  I got some great photos using the spring foliage as a background.

In processing the pics afterward, I made the lighting more dramatic through the use of third-party Photoshop plug-in filters (see below).  On the other hand, in the pic above, I created a composite effect by selecting the model's face and figure (which had been greatly underexposed) and making a number of lighting changes to the selection while leaving the background, which had been correctly exposed, intact.

Brooklyn Photoshoot

On Friday evening, I did a photoshoot in the Bushwick and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn with model Jasmine.

Brooklyn offers what Manhattan no longer does -- great location backdrops.  In particular, there are murals on the walls that have not yet been painted over by developers and worn graffiti-coverered industrial backgrounds on the walls and doorways of warehouses not yet coverted to condos.

Vanishing New York

The New York Times reported that two NYC landmarks from an earlier, non-gentrified era are about to disappear from Manhattan.  The first is Cafe La Fortuna, famous as the former hangout of John Lennon who, at the time, lived around the corner in The Dakota.  The other is Off Track Betting, or OTB, that throwback to a tougher and more desperate Damon Runyon version of NYC. 

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

I was in Williamsburg (the first stop across the East River on the L train) yesterday.  I was there to meet with an Asian model for my project.  Afterwards, I wandered around the neighborhood to take some location shots. 

Williamsburg is an old warehouse district that became popular with artists who were forced out of Manhattan by rising rents.  In the old days, it was a rundown Irish neighborhood.  Both my father and grandfather were born there.  Unlike Manhattan, there are still a lot of gritty street scenes in Williamsburg, as well as a fun arts scene that's reminiscent of what Soho and the East Village used to be like.  Hopefully, the NYC real estate market will crash before the scene there becomes overly gentrified.

The model I met with was named Anais Sin and was a really cool person -- a conceptual artist who's both Japanese and Brazilian and also works as a burlesque dancer.  She had great style in her clothes -- very downtown -- and a lot of attitude, which is exactly what I'm looking for.  We talked over coffee at a cafe named Fabiano's on Beford Avenue.  Anais was really interested in my project since here in NYC she's had to endure not only hurtful Asian stereotypes, but equally stupid stereotypes that consider all Brazilian women to be nothing but oversexed sluts.  Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth, but that doesn't stop American men from acting like complete idiots.  Anais even told me on one man who, when she politely declined to go to bed with him, quickly offered her money on the assumption that Brazilian women are always ready to whore for a few dollars.  Anais (not a shy woman by any means) told me how forcefully she had set him straight.  I would have loved to have been there to have heard the dressing down she gave him.

Both the photographs in this post were shot several years ago on a Sony Cybershot and were heavily manipulated in Photoshop.

Fashion Week: Couture Show

I'm not a commercial photographer, but I did go Friday evening to the Westin Hotel to photo my friend Jasmine at a couture show in the Westin Hotel on 43rd Street. 

Of course, my name did not appear on the guest list, even though Jasmine had requested it.  But I was in luck.  The two women at the registration desk, not knowing what to do, finally said, "Well, if you're a photographer, I guess you should just go in and set up."  Without waiting for them to change their minds, I went into the ballroom and joined the other photographers at the end of the runway. 

The photographer next to me told me she was "totally bitched out" after having shot in a tent for the last week and having had her camera stolen in California.  But she was really very helpful in giving information about ISO settings and what spots on the runway the models would pause long enough to shoot.  (Flash, though not forbidden, is not used because the light can blind a model as she's walking.  ISO's higher than 640 -- I went with 400 -- create too much noise in the digital images.  Accordingly, in order to get a reasonably sharp photo, it's necessary to photo the models while they pause to give the audience a better look at the clothes.)

"You've really never shot one of these shows?" the photographer asked.

"Lady, I've never even been to one of these shows," I answered.

As for the show itself, I thought the European designer showed too many outfits. There were definitely a few great pieces, some of them very sexy, but just as many failures.  I thought of the photographers' old rule of favoring quality over quantity when showing a portfolio.  There was also something too ornate, perhaps the use of flesh colored fabric to cover bare skin, and overdone to be really glamorous. 

Aside from Jasmine, the models were all caucasian blondes and brunettes.  Jasmine later told me many were Russian.  They were all the right height, but some seemed much too wide in the hips to be working runway.

Fashion Week

Fashion Week is once again taking place in Bryant Park and models and photographers are gathering in NYC for the event.  I'm not a commercial photographer myself and won't be working there, but I am looking forward to meeting dear friends. 

Where's NYC's grit gone?

As I was doing research for my novel, I came across an article that appeared last spring in The New York Times and that captures perfectly the problem many New Yorkers have with gentrification.

April 8, 2007

With a Cafe’s Evolution, a City With a Little Less Grit

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

During a recent afternoon at a place called Alt Coffee, on Avenue A, a young woman on a couch read a book called “Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha.” Sitting nearby, another young woman, with dreadlocks and a nose ring, gazed at a laptop computer. A gray-haired man dozed in a chair as Beatles music played through speakers.

In other words, it was a typical scene at Alt, one of the first cybercafes in Manhattan that for over a decade has been known as a bastion of punk-rock grime and grunge and a snug fit for the East Village.

Sheets of paper reading “bus your own table” were taped to the tables, and a sign with a bold red slash through the image of a cellphone was taped to the door. Newer messages were also on display. They read: “Alt Coffee Is Dead” and included an invitation to a party held yesterday: “Join us to mark the passing of consistently good coffee, occasionally cranky computers, and possibly the scariest bathroom currently on Avenue A.”

In the next week or so the cafe is going to close. But not forever. After renovations, Alt Coffee will reopen as Hopscotch, a coffeehouse with a new name and a new look meant to keep it in step with the evolution of a neighborhood where stroller-bound children and their parents have drained away some of the East Village’s grit.

The cafe’s owner, Nick Bodor, 38, said that for years he was able to clear enough money from Alt to live on. But times have changed on Avenue A, where new boutiques now face a cleaned-up version of Tompkins Square Park that includes several playgrounds.

Before Mr. Bodor rented the storefront in 1995, he said, it had been shuttered for 14 years. The first furniture he installed came from Dumpsters, and some of the early patrons included a man who read palms and people who lingered all day over a single cup of coffee.

But rents have risen in the neighborhood, including Mr. Bodor’s. He said that since 2001 his insurance costs have tripled and that it recently became more expensive to rent computer equipment, leaving him little choice but to accommodate the changing times.

Although he said that the neighborhood would be well served by a cafe that caters to children and thought he could preserve much of the vitality that made the place appealing, Mr. Bodor acknowledged that he was saddened by the economic necessities that forced the change.

“The variety is going,” he said of the area. “It’s becoming more sterile.”

And Alt was certainly not sterile. Many in the East Village consider the cafe one of the last remnants and reminders of a raffish past that is not distant chronologically, but that appears nowadays to be all but vanished. The clientele has included students, squatters, Lower East Side artists and a certain kind of traveler whose preferred means of transport is on board an empty freight train.

The cafe has been the site of art exhibitions and avant-garde musical performances. It was where novels and screenplays were written, Mr. Bodor said, and where people met their future wives or husbands.

“This became the neighborhood’s living room,” he said.

Life at Alt was not uniformly idyllic. Over the years Mr. Bodor has barred several visitors because of disorderly conduct. In the earlier days of the cafe, he sometimes rousted heroin users from the bathroom, where words scrawled on a wall read “No OD’s Allowed.”

That graffiti-filled lavatory, which has been the site of a fashion magazine photo shoot and a broadcast on Japanese television, is sometimes compared to the bathroom inside CBGB, the defunct monument of punk that closed down last October after nearly 33 years on the Bowery. The one permanent art installation inside the Alt cafe is the stack of dozens of old computer monitors and hard drives piled inside a cast-iron claw foot tub next to the toilet.

It is just that sort of sensibility that Kate McGrew, 28, an actress from Crown Heights, who was sitting near the cafe’s front door, said she savored.

“I’m so sad,” she said of the impending change. “This is what I love about New York, the grittiness of it.”

At a nearby table, a 37-year-old artist from Brooklyn, who said he goes by the name Normal Bob Smith, said that he travels to Alt each day from Williamsburg. “The first time I came here I thought I was walking into somebody’s home by mistake,” he said. “It’s always seemed too good to be true.”

Manhattan was once a cool city where those who enjoyed an alternative lifestyle could find any number of fun places to hang and enjoy themselves.  There was a sense of community.  Now it's all Disney-fied and family-friendly.  Clubs are closed because there's too much noise and drugs.  Undercover cops bust anyone who lights up a joint.  The only stores left are the big chain stores.  While no one wants to see crime rise again, the stock market tumble or city services cut back, there's a sense among many that those things might  have to happen to keep NYC from turning into a giant shopping mall with no heart or soul.  To those who've lived here all their lives, Manhattan is fast becoming a parody of itself.

Noir and Economic Recession

The bad financial news keeps pouring in. It’s not even noon, and the market today is down by over 200 points on news that Citibank is writing down another $18 billion and laying off employees while selling more of itself to overseas investors.

This blog doesn’t really have anything to do with the economy as such. The financial news is not its subject. But in any work of fiction there has to be a background noise, a sense that the story takes place at a definite point in time.

At the base of noir fiction is a sense of bleakness. And nothing adds to this sense as much as harsh economic realities. I don’t think it’s an accident that the classic noir tradition began in the 1930's during the Great Depression. The sense of doom that hung over pulp characters was reflected in the pervasive hard times and massive unemployment that threatened so many.

While it’s often noted that many Depression-era Hollywood films, especially the musicals, were produced as escapist fare and were totally cut off from the grim realities of the period, it’s equally true that the pulp noir fiction of the period was grounded in the harsh reality of everyday life. People in noir lived in a gritty world where the rent was always past due and jobs were hard to come by and even harder to hold onto.

Noir is about the fear experienced by an ordinary person as he or she is threatened by unseen enemies. The more nebulous the menace is, the greater the fear becomes. Noir is almost always set at night during the hours when nightmares crowd so densely that it’s impossible to distinguish them from waking life. Escape routes are closed off and characters are boxed in by entities too formless to be confronted in daylight. What makes the evil bearing down on the character so sinister is that it is so impersonal. There are no means by which the character can reason with his enemies or placate them. Often, the threatened character seems to have been chosen at random. His ordeal is not brought on by his own actions but by forces over which he has no control. In this sense, a pulp noir story shares common ground with a Kafka novel. There is the chance that an innocent person can be singled out by seemingly omnipotent powers and made to endure a frightening ordeal through no fault of his own. A falling economy sparks this same fear of destruction by overwhelming forces. Economic instability inevitably creates unease and panic.

Manhattan Stabbing

Robbery of Transit Worker Turns Into Knife Fight, Killing One

By AL BAKER

A New York City Transit worker walking home after a late shift, three suspected muggers armed with a curved knife and a bystander whose role was unclear converged on a rainy street in Upper Manhattan late Thursday in a blood-soaked encounter that left the bystander stabbed to death and two others — including the transit worker — hospitalized.

Hours after the midnight attack at 139th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, detectives were still trying to reconstruct what had happened.

As of late Friday, investigators said, one thing was clear: It appeared that the transit worker, Maurice Parks, 39, a subway motorman, was a victim who decided to fight back. He told investigators he was attacked in 1994, and fought back that time, too.

Police officials said it appeared that the bystander, Flonarza M. Byas, 28, who died less than an hour after the attack, had either tried to help Mr. Parks or had inadvertently gotten in the way of the mugging. But they also said he might have witnessed the mugging and joined in, or thought that Mr. Parks was the attacker and then unintentionally sought to help the real criminals.

Mr. Parks was attacked from behind, hit on the side of the head and knocked to the ground after he emerged from the subway at 135th Street and walked a few blocks, the police said. Once he was down, the assailants started beating Mr. Parks and took a denim bag packed with clothes and a $200 money order. One of the muggers pulled a knife, and Mr. Parks pulled one too, the police said.

The conductor apparently carried the knife — a straight blade held in a sheath — for just this reason, so he could defend himself, one law enforcement official said. Who stabbed whom first remained unclear Friday, though Mr. Parks told investigators that he was wounded first. Mr. Parks, who lives in that neighborhood, was stabbed in the abdomen and slashed in the hands; Mr. Byas was stabbed in the chest, back and leg; and one other man involved, Hector Cruz, 21, was stabbed twice in the abdomen, the police said.

Investigators said that it remained unclear who had stabbed Mr. Parks — a suspect in the mugging, Leandro Ventura, 15, and Mr. Cruz blame each other — but that it appeared that Mr. Parks stabbed Mr. Cruz and Mr. Byas.

The police said that they believed Mr. Byas was a drifter with no fixed address and that he received a summons 20 minutes before the attack on a trespassing charge in a nearby park. But Mr. Byas’s brother and fiancée said he was not homeless and was employed as an accountant at a Manhattan wig store.

“He was a really good person, a person I really loved a lot,” said the fiancée, Stephanie C. Diaz, 22, who said she and Mr. Byas became engaged last year. “We had a lot of plans for us; it’s just hard to see that go away.”

The law enforcement official said Mr. Byas “wandered into the middle of it, unbeknownst to the victim, Parks.” The official said that Mr. Parks appeared to believe Mr. Byas was an assailant — so he stabbed him. “That is what it looks like,” the official said.

A second official said another possibility was that Mr. Byas might have mistaken Mr. Parks for a criminal.

“He probably stepped in to help, but it might have been difficult to tell who was the aggressor and who was the victim,” the second official said. “He could have been stabbed by both of them, for all we know.”

When police officers arrived on the street in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood, Mr. Cruz, who was bleeding, and Mr. Ventura, flagged them down.

Mr. Parks and Mr. Byas were lying on the ground next to each other less than a block to the west. Mr. Parks identified Mr. Ventura as one of his assailants, the police said, and the three wounded men were taken by ambulance to Harlem Hospital Center, where Mr. Byas was pronounced dead at 12:46 a.m. ...

The above is from today's New York Times.  It's interesting to watch, amidst all the gentrification, the real NYC suddenly reappear with all its violence intact.