Deliberately Outdated

My daughter is reaching the end of the formerly extensive back-stock of Polaroid film (long past the sell-buy date). As the film deteriorates, the pictures that get taken with it become all the more themselves. For now, the ritual Polaroids of my granddaughter continue to come  into the world at regular uninterrupted intervals as they have done since baby-days.

These new ones begin in the last week of January and conclude at the beginning of March (the same period when spring arrived this year in our part of Northern California).

Track Bike

Track Bike

Frederick Seidel

The bicycle messenger who nearly knocked you over
Was me trying to.
That was me circling Columbus Circle
On a track bike, the kind with one gear and no brakes.
Look out! No brakes with a message!
I flashed around the velodrome
Of my life, clinging to your steeply banked curves,
And discovered the New World.

It's as if your body were itself a person
And the person wasn't you.
It's as if I were a flesh-eating flower,
Whereas actually I'm originally from St. Louis.
The performing self opens the stage door,
I start my act.
I feel like running for office.
I feel like riding a fixed-wheel track bike for the simplicity.

You'll play the viola
And I'll play myself.
Komm, süsser Tod
Comes out of my mouth
Like a tail coming out of a dog.
Take my hand and we'll wag down Fifth Avenue.
We'll walk into the first church we see,
Which is to say the Apple Store.

I'm walking west on Central Park South
With my iPhone out.
I am calling you, oo oo oo, oo oo oo,
With a love that's true, oo oo oo, oo oo oo.
We take the Time Warner Building
Escalators up the four floors to the top.
Something about how incredible it all is
Tells me to stand back from the edge of the vertiginous view.

I get dizzy imagining I'm on the balcony
That runs around the torch of the Statue of Liberty
Looking down on Columbus Circle.
The handlebars are in my hands,
I ride without brakes around and around.
I walk around the torch blazing.
I see you thirty blocks uptown
In my bed, light pouring in.

And we have tickets for the Bach at Lincoln Center.
And let's check out
The Upper West Side Apple Store next door.
It's one more crystal-clear Apple cathedral
For Saint Steve Jobs, who discovered America,
Where the deer and the antelope play
With the herds of touchscreens on display,
Not far from Columbus Circle and pancreatic cancer.

– London Review of Books

On The Street

Earlier this year Richard Press released a diverting documentary about Bill Cunningham, now in his early eighties and still crisscrossing Manhattan every day on a red bicycle to photograph street fashion for the New York Times.



The first prototype of his On The Street column ran (in black and white) December 30, 1978, including candid glimpses of Greta Garbo, Paloma Picasso, Patricia Kennedy Lawford and Gloria Vanderbilt (below).



Cunningham still shoots everything in 35 mm (we see him packing dozens of rolls into his camera bag for one day's work). My favorite sections in the documentary are late nights in the otherwise deserted Times offices with Cunningham and his young jokey techie-colleague patching together scans of recent photographs into the standard half-page template (as seen below) which has evolved and solidified since 1978.






In one important way this man is my hero. Not that I aspire to take photographs of fashionable strangers, not at all. What I would like to imitate is the freshness of his gaze and his knack of staying current with the visual pulse of the culture.

Monochrome Rome

Piazza di Spagna

Trevi Fountain

Local Pedestrians

St. Peter's

Bernini's Colonnade

Image source is here

Halloween Research

Seems as if I succeeded last week (as described here) in discouraging my trainer from the idea of a Fixie Boy Halloween costume this year. Too bland and predictable, it seemed to me, as I looked at images like the one above.

Now he has come up with some spin-off alternatives. What about a Fixie-Girl? Since these are relatively rare in real life, there would be more freedom to elaborate – plus all the natural costume-advantages of doing drag.

The internet predictably failed to yield much in the way of female fixie riders.



So I broadened the search out to girls-in-general riding bikes-in-general, rather than one specific type of girl on one specific type of bike.




I got quite a few retro-fashion girls on bike with brakes.


And a great wealth of "babes-on-bikes" – but nothing that seemed to be channeling any Halloween messages. Even the bumble-bee arm-warmers failed to emit any creative sparks.

So I moved on to the second possibility that had been opened up for discussion: Female Roller Derby.




But my trainer was already thinking far beyond run-of-the-mill Roller Derby drag. What about Eighties Roller Derby drag?

Now at last, fortune began to smile. It turns out that just last month photos were disseminated around the world from the streets of New York where shooting is presently ongoing for the second Sex and the City movie. And it contains an Eighties fashion sequence that was clearly conceived with drag queens in mind.




So now all we have to do is merge the Roller Derby pictures with the Sex and the City pictures and that version of the costume will just sort of magically make itself.

Fixie Boy

Because I sew, and people know it, October is the month when conversations tend to morph into costume consultations. The first one this year happened yesterday at the gym. Somebody had printed up a little flier with little photos of the trainers wearing their LAST year's Halloween costumes and when my trainer asked me to pick him out of the group I made several wrong guesses (the Gladiator? the Spider Man?) before he triumphantly pointed to the cheerleader with the yellow pageboy and pleated skirt.

And for THIS year he wants to be a Fixie Boy, like the thousands who fan out from the Mission to endanger the city daily on their stripped-down bikes with no brakes. (Fixies are illegal in some of the larger European cities because of the accident rate.)





Unfortunately I could not be very encouraging on this occasion. What are the elements of the Fixie Boy look? Stovepipe jeans. Rumpled tee. Neon shades. Funny hat. Geeky plaids. Since the look has already been pushed to its ironic limit, how can you push it any farther and carry it into the realm of Costume? A parody of a parody. Hard to pull that off.

Plus, Fixie Boys have to be skinny, and no way can my trainer pretend to be skinny. "Why don't you just be Tarzan?" I suggested. But we always want what we cannot have.

Mission Bicycle

Several times this summer I have walked past a new bicycle store at 733 Valencia and gazed admiringly through the window without actually understanding what I was looking at. Each time I would walk on by and then forget about it, since there is always something else to look at in the Mission. Then this morning, searching online for something quite different, I stumbled across a July 2009 feature on the store in Dezeen, a London-based design magazine. And that is where all these pictures come from.










Mission Bicycle (according to my London source about the shop down the street) sells custom, fixed-gear bicycles. San Francisco design collective Grayscaled created the space, "giving physical presence to a brand previously only available online."

"The designers have tried to correlate the design of the interior with the digital design of the Mission Bicycle website through the use of text, layout resembling step-by-step assembly and computer interfaces."

Prices for a custom-built bike start at $750.