One of my favorite photographers on the web is Mark Powell, aka Locaburg or Location Iceberg. He has several photos up in the Brooklyn Institute of Contemporary Art's Living for the City Exhibition. If you are in town this weekend check it out. Mark is from Detroit, but lives in Mexico City. His images of both cities are a surreal fever dream grounded in a sunbathed reality that will leave you amazed and delighted. You can check out Mark's images on flickr ( I'd start here), and on fotolog (in that case start here). He has a book coming out this fall.

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And while you are looking at photography check out yamasaki ko-ji, a Japanese photoblog that never fails to knock me out.

Jenn's sister Becky is taking care of the baby. Jenn hears her from the other room repeating, "If a bear can do it, so can you. If a a bear can do it so can you." Curious, Jenn walks into the room and finds Becky holding the baby over a large blue ball trying to get him to roll it with his feet like a circus bear. Jenn, unnoticed, says nothing and retreats. "If a bear can do it, so can you," is repeated for a good long time followed by an "oh well...", a sigh, and then silence.

First of all I hate the name. Freedom Tower sounds so Orwellian and jingoistic. Perhaps it is the constant repetition of the word "freedom" by President Bush as he makes war that had inverted the meaning for me...

But on to the new design. My first impression is that it is bland. David Childs the architect has a knack at big bland projects that ultimately end up looking like generic malls. Think Time Warner Center. This design for the tower says Dallas or Detroit rather than New York. All the renderings show it from a distance where, as would virtually any tower that height, it looks impressive compared to the surrounding buildings. My guess is the architects are trying to obfuscate the fact that the building feautures a 200 foot high fortified concrete base without windows. Yikes! While the base might be clad in metal, this will not obscure the fact that from the ground, ie in the multiacre plaza that will surround it, individuals will be faced with a massive windowless block of steel and concrete. Have you ever been around big buildings sans windows? They are awful (Think of the much hated 2 Columbus Circle. Or go back and look at German architecture circa 1939.). The Freedom Tower design sends absolutely the wrong message managing to be both cowardly & embarrassing. How can a tower named Freedom be built on a massive bunker? My suggestion: If the bureaucrats are so worried about terrorism via truck bomb, they should save the money on the base and spend it on submerging all nearby roads creating more parkland. Go back to the Libeskind design. While it was not perfect it had an ounce of wit, lightness, and grace. A win win for all.

Right here: http://mentalhygiene.com/index.php/2005/06/04/post-it-mosaic-howto/

Since my wife's pregnancy last year I've read my fair share of baby books--all the standard titles and a few not so standard ones. I remember my panic right after the initial "it's a baby!" news. "What do I know about infants.... NOTHING!" So I started reading, but the more I read the more convinced I became we are still in the dark ages of understanding of infant development.

There is so much that is simply unknown. Do infants dream? What do infants actually see? What is there perception of the world? Why do they cry sometimes seemingly at random? etc. Most of what we do know centers around obvious external developmental milestones (tracking a person across a room, responding to noise, sticking out a tongue, sitting up etc), but the actual reality of how they perceive world is little known. Infant sleep, a topic, most new parents can talk about ad nauseam is a vast empty sea of speculation and conjecture. Most of the books that deal with this subject are are organized like fad diet books and have "systems" to get a child to sleep through the night or in his own bed. There are competing theories often at odds with each other (in an extreme example: some recommend "extinction" which means just leaving the baby alone night after night until he cries it out, others say the calm that follows that kind of hysterical crying is a trauma shutdown mechanism and leads to emotional problems...). And then there are the differences between kids themselves. We know several babies born within a week of our son. All of them have unique behaviors so distinct that an alien researcher might conclude they were different species all together. It is easy to conclude we know very little...

So what is the point of this post? The point is that tonight as I was holding the kid in the dark rocking him back to sleep after an 11pm wakeup I realized that none of that stack of books had prepared me for that particular moment and that none of those theories or sleep formulas mattered. I just held him tight and told him a pretty good story about bear that lives in a forest on the far side of the moon and before I knew it he was asleep in my arms, soft breath on my shoulder. Somehow despite everything that is unknown, I had known exactly what to do.

Once again I am bone tired. Jenn's cousins Esther and Lauren were here for the weekend to take in New York. Apparently we did a pretty good job as hosts. According to Esther, Friday was the best day of her life. "Seriously." Jenn and Becky deserve most of the credit. They are excellent elder cousins.

Saturday I followed around Jolly and the East Village Mir-maids documenting their day from East 3rd Street to the Mermaid Festival on Coney Island. Thanks Jolly for allowing me to snap away all day and congrats to your crew of ladies on finishing 2nd.

The parade was literally infested with phtographers and perhaps because of this I ran into a couple of fellow photobloggers who recognized me from my photoblog. As usual the conversations were a bit awkward, but it's awfully nice for strangers to say hello. So hi there Kurt (and girlfriend) from Toronto, Jacinda from Adelaide, Stephanie from New Jersey and the tall guy from Queens. If you send me your urls I'll definately check out your sites...

With the scores and scores of phtoographers around (and subjects who were all exhibitionists on some level vamping for the cameras) I found myself thinking about photo cliché's and how to avoid them. Perhaps in a situation like this it is impossible, but I found myself constantly trying to step back a few steps from everyone else, and seeing out small moments on the periphery. I haven't seen my film yet so i don't know if I succeeded. Probably not. There were probably as many photographers as there were mermaids and mermen. I was thinking next year I should ditch the camera and don a costume along with the wife and baby. Raul Andres would make an awfully cute octopus or lobster.

Jenn's sister Becky lost her car. Or it was stolen. We're not sure yet.

My brain is on slo-mo. Time to sleep.

I have no idea where you would find this book in the US, but if collect photobooks and find yourself in Monterrey, pick up a copy of Nuevo Leon, Imagenes de Nuestra Memoria. It is chock full of images that will knock you out. As a side benefit you get a several pictures from "La Nevada", ie the day it snowed for the first time in recorded memory, otherwise known as the day I was born.

Unfortunately I won't be visiting Shanghai on my upcoming China trip, but at least someone has posted a blog entry about the museum complete with a gallery of posters. I had never seen this one before. Super cool.
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In browsing around the web, I discovered this decent Beijing city guide website. Too bad I will miss an event called Punk World.

My circadian rhythms are a mess.

Giant Robot New York is opening this weekend. I've always thought of GR as an LA thing so it will be interesting to see how it does here.

Land of the the Lost is now on DVD. Does anyone else remember the sleestacks? They always freaked me out. Apparently other people too. More info (and the theme song) at Landofthelost.com.

I am up in the attic engrossed on my computer working out some arcane css issue and I feel something skitter across my toes. A cockroach. No too big. A rat. Chills, then terror. I let out a man scream while simultaneously rolling back in chair and jumping in the air.

Cut to my wife in her underwear rolling on the ground with screams of laughter under my desk with a piece of string that she had run across my food. Cracking up so hard she can't breath. Tears.

Then Becky, Jenn's sister, runs up (she thought I had fallen down the stairs) and Jenn (still hysterical with laughter), mocks me "Who am I? Who am I?" as she mimics my inelegant scream.

She got me.

But this is an ongoing war I will have my revenge.

1. Work on project late. Get to sleep 3:30am.
2. Wake up and tend to morning baby wakeup 5:20am.
3. Sleep 7:15am-8:45am.
4. Work. Work. Work.
5. 3:30pm take car from Jenn to fill it up with gas and park it (I had told Jenn to fill it up with gas before her errands). Car runs out of gas in the middle of Court street.
6. 3:35 Raul pushing car with 2 homeless guys to the side of the road and running to buy a slurpee cup full of gasoline.
7. 5:00 turn in one web project.
8. 5:15 start another web project.
9. 5:30 decide I'm not ready for project #2 and need a nap. Snap this picture:

10. 10:08pm Back to work.

can't be good:

Fort Greene:

they are asking a million for this fire damaged ratrap of an SRO (with a rent control tenant!):

Can we say bubble?