New York June NYC Meet-Up

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Calzone

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June is almost upon us, and Sunday June 30th is the Gay Pride Parade.

Sunday June 9th is the Westchester Mountain Bike Festival.

Cal
 
Save the date: October 24th-October 26th PhotoPlusExpo at the Javit's Center NYC.

Free registration to begin June 6th.

For me the release of the SL2 was suppose to be in June, but now it is delayed. I expect the new SL2 to be in time for this event, but in past years Leica USA has maned a booth at Photoville and bypassed PhotoPlusExpo.

Cal
 
Looks like another Paul Smith sample sale in SoHo.

Not for the unmodest because basically there are no dressing rooms to try on jeans. Basically you kinda undress in public. Not uncommon to see that some women wearing G-strings.

Ends the 26th and I'm a bit late. Time to load up on $300.00 jeans that might be selling for $50.00-$60.00 a pair.

I should be going to the "Play It Loud" show at the MET tonight. About 130 historically important guitars from rock and roll history. A Hendrix guitar, an Les Paul Gold Top that is Pete Townstead's...

The Pete Townstead Gold Top I am told has credit given to my friend Chris Mirabella for a repair. Cris is the guy who will replace John Monteleon as the best arch top builder in the world.

WOW. I have been doing lots of name dropping lately. I guess I know mucho people somehow and perhaps I'm widely known. All I'm saying is "I'm just trying to mind my own business," and I don't want to be a celeb. I see what "Maggie" goes through, and it is a real hassle being a celeb. People don't leave you alone.

Cal
 
I'm cleaning out my apartment . I can give away "Leica Compendium" 3rd edition (2011), 600 pages of Leica goodness by Erwin Puts. Its a heavy book. I believe there's a digital version of it floating around the Internet but its nice to have a hardcopy. You can also take "Camera: A History of Photography" by Todd Gustavson George Eastman Press.
For pick up only , in Financial District.
Also a lot of other non-photography books if interested.
 
lamefrog said:
I'm cleaning out my apartment . I can give away "Leica Compendium" 3rd edition (2011), 600 pages of Leica goodness by Erwin Puts. Its a heavy book. I believe there's a digital version of it floating around the Internet but its nice to have a hardcopy. You can also take "Camera: A History of Photography" by Todd Gustavson George Eastman Press.
For pick up only , in Financial District.
Also a lot of other non-photography books if interested.
Click to expand...

Philippe,

I'll PM you with my Cell.

I have a hand truck, recycling is good, and I'm sure I will get these books into new homes.

I could bring them to a Meet-Up.

National Book Day is coming up for Spain. Instead of Saint Jorde perhaps I will add to my legacy by adding to my reputation as a recycler.

Now big a stack of books?

Know that when you were gone Chris donated mucho cameras and gear for our annual beauty contest. I forgot who was awarded your Pen-F.

Cal
 
Philippe called me at work. He figures there will be about 3 cartons of photography books to recycle.

Have hand-truck will travel.

Looks like we will have a book fest coming up.

Cal
 
Today I hope the storms hold out because I'll be picking up three cases of books to recycle. Joe called dibs on the Putz book at the May Meet-Up. I will honor this as Philippe put this offer initially out there, but since I have breed a heard of lazy slackers all the rest of the books will be available on a first come first serve basis at the June Meet-Up.

Cal
 
At the Paul Smith sample sale I did good. For $275.00, the "full boat" price of just one pair of PS Jeans I bought three pairs of jeans, two button down shirts, and a felt hat made in Italy that emulates Luis Mendez style. This hat makes me look mucho Japanese. LOL.

So in this week's episode of "I Love Maggie," Maggie irons one of My Calvin Klien t-shirts and melts the "I" and the "N" in "Calvin" one of my three shirts where I co-opt the brand. Basically I claim that I'm the original "Calvin" but basically I'm wearing a disguise where I'm hiding in plain sight.

In the second half of "I Love Maggie" she grabs my Leica SL while I try on jeans, stripping down in public. When I take my camera back from her I see that it is missing the $82.00 lens cap. I am acutely aware that lens caps are easy to loose, and because of the replacement cost you have to understand that it is highly unlikely or probable that I lost the lens cap. A search proved futile.

So I decide that since Leica follows Maggie's blog and branding is important that I will buy a Leica replacement and take the $82.00 hit, but the moral of the story in this week's episode is don't let Maggie touch any of your stuff, or else it gets lost or destroyed.

We went to the Leica Store in Soho. Craig the Store Manager checked the store's stock, and they had no 82 mm lens caps available, but he gifted me one from a display model. Pretty much got the VIP treatment.

At the sample sale a handful of people said hello to Maggie (her followers), and on the street some passerby yells, "I love your Instagram."

We also stopped at Bloomingdales to buy me a pair of Calvin Klein jeans for a shoot where basically we riff off the Calvin Klein ads. Mike the Skinny Hipster was our photographer for Monday's shoot. Pretty much I play it up as a tough guy from Brooklyn wearing one of my "Calvin disguises" back in one of my former ghetto's "Greenpoint."

So there is a world of difference in quality between the Paul Smith and Calvin Klein jeans. The tailoring on the PS is for a skinny bitch like me, and the size 30 Calvin Klein fit me ghetto style with a drop crotch and so low on my hips that I have a Fred Flintstone like torso. Understand that the Patagonia rock climbing knickers I wear are a size 28 waist, and I can use these comfortably for a 5 hour bike ride.

No doubt that I'm a skinny bitch, but even so some flab does get exposed when sitting down in some of Mike's shots. Pretty much as muscular as I am I can't pass for a contestant for "Canadian Ninja Warrior" due to a small paunch.

Meanwhile by Paul Smith measures I'm a 30 inch waist, a 38 inch suit size, and if I expand my chest I'm a 39 inch chest which is a nine inch drop chest to waist like on a Greek statue.

Friday I went to the MET to see the "Play It Loud" show. On one hand it connected some of the dots I had never considered in rock history, but also it left out and downplayed a lot leaving some vast holes. The history and development of amplifiers was minimized to the extent I felt cheated. How do you play guitars loud without an amplifier? To me pretty much only half a show.

Lots of cool stuff and history, so it is a show still worth seeing, just not complete enough for my liking. I would have thought that the show would of been more extensive, and I felt like the show was more of a tease and designed for gathering tourists rather than N-Thooze-E-ists. Pretty much just another NYC tourist attraction no different than say the "Vessel" in Hudson Yards. Impressive on one hand, but lame on an other.

Pretty much the world is full of mediocraty, so why do anything at all if half baked. What is the point? Use to be in NYC they did interesting and crazy things. Now we just perform recipes for tourists.

Cal
 
I missed the storms yesterday when doing my book pick-up.

Joe is a lucky guy. That Leica nerd book looks to be very obsessive.

I ended up with 4 boxes of books and chemicals. I have a bottle of Photo Flow that I will bring to the Meet-Up to gift someone.

Joe remarked how my negatives lacked water marks and what wetting agent I used. Basically I use 18.2 megaohm HPLC chemically pure water for diluting my developer, my fixer and for a stop-bath, but I use NYC tap water for rinsing, and I make clean negatives without any wetting agent.

Perhaps my chemistry involves fewer trace chemicals and leaves less of a film and promotes a low surface tension. The water I use is so chemically pure and reactive as a universal solvent, that it is not safe to drink: the reactiveness damages living tissues by leaching. I believe that this chemical purity makes my water a great stop bath.

I culled through the books and two boxes worth were dropped off at the Upper Eastside Housing Works this morning on my way to work for a good cause. A bag of books went into my book locker at work as reading fodder for when I'm bored.

I have Joe's coffee table trophy book and some other photography books to recycle. There are a few books published by Aperture I will thumb through and then recycle at the Meet-Up.

One book called "Art Gangs" covers some artist collectives and collaborations that are part of NYC history where artists kinda grouped up to fight the gatekeepers that were the critics, museums and the galleries. All kinda had a political agenda of sorts that was feminist, people of color, GLBT, or other marginalized groups.

Although too marginalized to be mentioned I was part of that NYC history when I was a performance artist and part of the collective known as "Peeling The Banana." A while back NYU via their Asian Studies Program started an archive to record some groundbreaking work that was performed by us. Back then we were somewhat social activists and community builders.

Kinda timely and perhaps another sign of "divine intervention" because this book I began reading last night reveals to me my part in this history, although still unsaid in this book.

I remember going the the Asian American Writers' Workshop for my first meeting. I stood near Second Avenue on Saint Marks by back then was a GAP Store and could not find the place. Some passerby pointed to a basement entrence to a tiny space where there was a bookstore of all Asian American literature.

So small and marginalized, there really were not so many books, and pretty much the books ocupied about the space of a bedroom, and this small space really demonstrated how underrepresented we were, and today is a very different story.

I was involved with this important work and inadvertantly I now understand how I was both a role model and leader. Pretty much all the gangs represented in this book spoke out about the gatekeeping. This is how they gained a voice.

Interesting to note when I got out of the Subway near the World Trade Center I asked some passerby for directions to get oriented, but this man and his wife were tourists from Dublin. I inquired about the population of Dublin and was told about a million people, and I asked, "What do you think of NYC?"

The response was they were surprised by how run down it is. Pretty revealing because now I find that to kinda be the truth despite all the redevelopment. Pretty much as things get built up the city also becomes more run down and less livable. The truth is NYC is a tale of two very different cities.

Maggie jumps on a plane today. I think I will see her tomorrow night. How-Weird will be on vacation tomorrow, so bonus vacation for me. Friday I'm taking off because my vacation bank is almost full and it I don't use it I loose it. Also Friday Maggie will be upstate in Westchester babysitting Baby-Girl the 5 year old.

I will try to shoot some more film and develop Friday. Saturday might be a trip out to Long Island to visit Cris and my guitar nerd friends.

Pretty much a simple and happy life. Know that I was about a half hour late for work and there pretty much was no schedule on the whiteboard until about 15 minutes ago.

Cal
 
lamefrog said:
I'm cleaning out my apartment . I can give away "Leica Compendium" 3rd edition (2011), 600 pages of Leica goodness by Erwin Puts. Its a heavy book. I believe there's a digital version of it floating around the Internet but its nice to have a hardcopy. You can also take "Camera: A History of Photography" by Todd Gustavson George Eastman Press.
For pick up only , in Financial District.
Also a lot of other non-photography books if interested.
Click to expand...
https://www.amazon.com/Leica-Compen...59174875&s=gateway&sprefix=leica+compe&sr=8-1

That “Leica Compendium” is a very valuable book!
 
John,

The Amazon sale is for a 2011 limited "Second Edition." I'll check tonight to see if its possibly a "First Edition."

Cal
 
I wonder what is the right thing to do?

I will PM Philippe. I want him to know that he might want to change his mind and keep this book.

Cal

POSTSCRIPT: This is like an episode of Antiques Roadshow.
 
Apologies and thanks to everyone . Yes , good idea, I'll give Joe something when I'm back in the U.S., probably in Sept - Oct .
 
jsrockit said:
That was the right thing to do and someones owes jwlee a beer or a coffee or something. Or maybe a camera... :eek:
Click to expand...

John,

I feel great that a mistake could easily be unwound.

BTW Philippe's book is a third printing.

I read through the lens reviews. Kinda handy to have them all in one place, but after reading and confirming my own experiencs with the Putz reviews pretty much don't have much use for it.

What was verified was that my 28 Cron is a remarkable lens and that the 50 Lux-R "E60" is a special lens.

I was also reminded of my 50 Lux ASPH of how the OOF and bokeh could be harsh. As great as this lens was I don't really miss it.

Cal
 
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