Posts Tagged: postaday2011
Documenting the Streetscape
Test Shot for Streetscape Series
Yesterday’s post had me opening my big fat mouth about the sorry state of Albany’s commercial streetscapes. The rant led up to my mention of a project to photograph the retail zones in Albany in their entirety. Once one starts talking like that, one becomes committed to undertaking the project. And if I don’t, I know somebody else will.
Today, I took a couple test shots, and here’s how my approach is shaping up. I want to have a consistent scale across all the shots, so I am going to try to do it entirely with the 35mmf/1.8 and shoot from across the street. On my D300s this ends up being a 50mm angle of view. I will at least start out using a tripod to get the sharpest and most consistent results possible.While I admit I have an axe to grind, I don’t want to intrude too much into the frame, so I hope to take a kind of documentarian “just the facts, ma’am” approach.
I plan to shoot all of San Pablo Ave from the El Cerrito border to the Berkeley Border, and Solano Ave from San Pablo to the Berkeley border. I’m going to try to shoot at regular intervals, about 12 to 14 paces, so that’s going to be a lot of photographs.
It would be nice if it were overcast for that nice even light. Not likely to get that for awhile, at least not without rain. I’ll shoot the west side of the street in the morning hours, and the east side in the late afternoon. Mutatis mutandis for Solano.
Wasn’t there an artist who did a piece where he photographed all of Sunset Blvd.? This is like that, only quainter and more family-friendly.
Over 50 Years Later
Today is my mother’s birthday. She is 92 years old, we think. Happy birthday mom. I love you. I wish you didn’t have to live there at the γηροκομειο. I wish a lot of things were different.
Here she is on her wedding day, more than half a century ago. She was 41 and my dad was 61. She never expected to be married at all, by that time, and he didn’t really expect to get married again after being widowed. But there it is. And here I am.
I feel a confessional coming on, but I’m not in the mood for it, and I’ll bet you’re not either. So, I’ll just leave it at that.
Found Rant
"Shopping Cart" / © Neo Serafimidis 2009
Here’s a funny idea: what if took my ranty responses to stories and reader comments on albany.patch that I wrote and never posted, and instead posted them as out-of-any-context blog entries?
“Come on. I don’t believe for a freaking second we have a “unique 50’s street ambiance” on San Pablo. The “main street ambiance,” such as it is, is dingy and uninteresting–a retarded mess of new and old architecture, endless hair and nail salons, mediocre restaurants that last a few months, car repair shops, some old storefront buildings too small and moldy to hold a sustainable business of any kind, and a couple bars that we seem to be trying to drive out of business. And shockingly few actual pedestrians. From Livermore to Santa Rosa, other cities have much, much nicer and more vibrant “1950’s” main streets, including Solano. If you think this shit is special, I feel sorry for you. You need to get out of town more.
If one is so deluded about how precious Albany’s commercial street-scape is, I suppose it is easy to put down Bay Street as being a grotesquely inferior fake. I thought of it as corporate and fake too. But quite honestly, I was at Bay Street a couple times recently and had a realization. Each time, there was a band playing in the courtyard area, lots of people sitting around listening and enjoying the sun, eating ice cream or food, children running around playing, shoppers shopping. It was like a community of people congregated and enjoying the public square. Is it fake? What’s fake about it? IT WORKS.
And then we came home to Albany through the Solano-San Pablo intersection. There was a boarded up cafe on the corner, no one really hanging around except the angry homeless guy with the dog, a big ugly billboard peeling off, and a bunch of passing-through traffic. I had to admit to myself that the corporate fake was actually infinitely more attractive and functioning far better as a gathering place for people than anything in Albany. I’d trade a couple blocks of San Pablo for a couple blocks of Bay Street in a heartbeat. I’ll bet the City budget would, too.
Three years spent balancing quality of life with attracting development? What development has occurred? Another doomed restaurant went in next to Ivy Room? How many businesses have closed and not been replaced in that time?
I don’t blame the Adams/Kains neighbors one bit for opposing rezoning. I did too at the time. But if every proposal is successfully put down by those who don’t want it in their backyard, then we will have what we have now, family-oriented stagnation.”
Do I hold to all this? Maybe not all. But it does suggest a photo essay on Albany’s commercial street-scape. I’ll get right on that.
Location, Location, Location
"XXX" From the "Where in Albany" series. Albany CA. January, 2011
It was a spooky evening for photography in Eastbania last night when I went out to shoot for the “Where in Albany” game feature on albany.patch.com.
The current obsession in Albany is the locating of a marijuana dispensary somewhere in our little town. The current application to open a dispensary was coming before the City Council again tonight, and it was expected that the applicants’ appeal would be rejected. It would locate it in a largely residential neighborhood on Solano Ave. But there is another application right behind that one that locates a dispensary down in the light industrial edge of town next to the train tracks.
With all that in mind last night, I set out to photograph the locations under consideration. The Solano location results weren’t all that interesting. But the fog helped produce something of interest down by the tracks.
"Light Silhouette" / © 2011 Neo Serafimidis
I suppose that all in all, this looks more like where expects to find one’s pot than a row of quaint storefronts surrounded by suburban-style homes.
Vegetarian Duck Fat Burger
Veggie Burger Mix
We needed a quick and simple dinner. Digging around in the pantry produced a box of veggie burger mix. It wasn’t too exciting but it would meet the criteria, along with the added benefit of reducing the number of forgotten boxes in the pantry by one.
The only question was how much of this stuff to make. The directions gave amounts for making three patties, or six patties. I needed four patties. To hell with it. I’ll mix up the whole thing and just make four big patties.
Once the patties were made, I set about getting ready to fry them up. Got out the pan. Got out the olive oil. Got out the, hey! Wait a minute… Why use olive oil when you can use something magical?
Duck Fat
Yes, that’s right. Duck fat!
I started with a couple of tablespoons of that and threw some onions in. Then I fried the patties in there.
To be perfectly honest, the burgers did not turn out all that great. Making four big patties probably had a lot to do with it. The patties were about 3/4 inch thick, which meant that the outside was getting pretty dark by the time the middle was approaching done. But the real problem I think, is that one can really only eat so much of this dried and reconstituted grainy mix. Even though a 3-inch patty as directed on the box seemed too small in theory, the bigger patties we ended up with were too much in practice.
On a side note, another problem here was the arugula for the burgers. I have basically written off all Trader Joe’s produce, but every once in a while I give in and try again with something like the bags of arugula. This is absolutely the blandest arugula I have ever come across. You may as well just use iceberg lettuce. Really. Not only that, but it only lasts a couple-three days after you get it home, and then it’s on its way to becoming arugula soup, right in the bag.
So, ummm, yeah, the duck fat was about the best thing about it. I should’ve used more.
Family Heirloom Project: Sewing Kit
Mom's Sewing Kit / © Neo Serafimidis 2009
Another of the photos I took while preparing to move my mother out of her apartment and into a board and care facility. That was almost exactly two years ago. Somehow it seems like decades ago, so much has changed since then: she went through surgeries and medical emergencies, and is so much more out of it; I went through job changes; we lost a few people; Theo has grown so much.
Anyway, my mother kept a lot of her sewing stuff in an old tin. It probably had butter cookies or something like that it in it originally. The holiday design caused me to associate holly with sewing rather than Christmas for years. At least they have sharp pointy things in common.
Family Heirloom Project: Flowered Print Dress
From the Family Heirloom Project. My mom made all her own clothes the entire time I was growing up. It had been awhile since I had seen her wear this one. I can’t even remember when I saw her in it. But it is typical of the kind of fabric she would buy. She did sew some some elegant things. But curtains and the occasional dress got the gaudy treatment with outlandish prints, usually with lots of blues and greens.
Everyone’s Dead
Tommy and Parents
That’s a terribly morbid title for a blog post, and I don’t really mean to be morbid. But it just struck me that everyone in this picture is gone now. My Thea Sophia passed away from cancer in about 2002. Then her boy, Tommy killed himself in 2008. Then my Uncle Peter, Theo Pano, passed away a year ago. So now it is just Tommy’s sister, Aglaia, and their brother George, who has down’s syndrome.
Today is Tommy’s birthday. He would be 54 years old. It has been over three years since he passed away, and I still miss him. A lot. And I still feel guilty and think about what more I should have done to try to prevent such a thing from happening. It’s not like a think about it all the time. But when I do think of it, it’s the same ton bricks it was when I first got the phone call. Why didn’t I take his melodramatic pronouncements more seriously? Why wasn’t I more insistent about what was not his business to worry about? I know that there’s no answering such questions.
Sometimes I think about these things I’ll never have again, or the people I”ll never see or hug again. It is like each loss is a loss of a little part of my own self, my history, my story, my being. Of course, the life process goes on incorporating new things into the story, making new meanings from our of day-t0-day lives. But these just get us by. Their deeper value now lies in their being the raw material of certain other’s lives, of the next generation. Children live in the present; they burn right through it. So, there is no way to see at this moment how this present is being incorporated into the memories that will form their consciousness. But it is happening. And someday, 30 years from now, my son may wonder in turn about how to hold to what’s left of the people and things that are his story, his memory. I only hope he has fewer regrets.
Long Day
Shot at MacArthur BART while wait for Sarah to pick me up and go into the CIty.
Well, It’s been a long day. I think I’m too tired to write much tonight. But here’s some outlines.
I left for work about 8:15 and took the BART to my work at the Oakland Federal Building.
Two interesting things happened at work. First, one of the high-ranking respondents to a request for feedback on a draft business process guide I have been working on editing for months and months finally sent his response today, the very last day of the response period. He basically said this will not fly (contains unauthorized methods) and to stop the development process immediately. And that he’ll get back to us. Thanks.
The second thing that happened was that from my cubicle up on the seventh floor I heard what sounded like a car alarm going off down in the street below, along with some strange, pre-recorded muffled talking. After trying to ignore it for about 10 minutes by turning up the music in my earbuds, I finally got up to make a snide comment about it to a co-worker. After another five minutes of group snarkiness, the security officer came back through and told us to evacuate the building immediately. Oops. And don’t take the elevators. I walked down to about the fifth floor when I got word that the “drill” was over. Not sure but, I think we have failed the drill. Good thing it wasn’t one of those fertilizer bombs or I’d be in deep shit.
The day at the office was followed by two art openings. The first was a small show in a small cafe a block from my office in the street level shops of the Tribune building. I have one piece in the show. Thanks Sarah Filley! So, I walked over after work. I saw friend Paula Wirth, who curated the previous show I had some pieces in, and which led to one being in this one. And I had good time talking to Paula’s friend Will, a jazz vocalist and a photographer. After a couple glasses of champagne it was back on the BART to MacArthur Station where my Sarah picked me up to go into the City for more festivities.
The second art opening was friend Seth Dickerman’s show at Muse Gallery in SF. The show is great. I really like his dreamy layering of motion anyway, but here the technique is used with multiple panoramic-style shooting that is rendered with distinct frames or panels rather than stitched into a single frame. This gives it a motion-picture-film-strip quality. Nice. Afterward, a bunch of us went to dinner at a taqueria on Valencia in the Mission. Overstuffed, mildly buzzed, and exhausted, I arrived back home 14.5 hours after leaving this morning.
Now, I’m really too tired to write another word.
Update: and judging by the typos I had to correct this morning, I was too tired to write the words I did write.
Disaffected Youth
Theo on Telegraph / © 2011 neo serafimidis
Is a picture really worth a thousand words? If so, which thousand? Who determines which thousand words it is, the author, or the viewer? Or someone else?
The day before Halloween we went down to the vintage stores on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley to find costume material. The first store we went into was having a closing sale and all items were $5. I scored a complete costume for $10. I figured I’d saved about $30. We were out in a jiffy, and afterwards, Theo and I waited outside while Sarah fought the lines in the hat store.
We goofed around and took pictures. I asked him to go stand by the wall. He walked over and turned around. I don’t know where he learned to put on this look of teenaged disaffection already. He constantly walks around with his jacket hanging off his left shoulder like this. It drives me absolutely crazy, but no amount of my pulling it up and zipping it up, and telling him to straighten up has any lasting effect beyond about about three minutes.
But appearances can be deceiving, as we all know. Beyond this obliviousness to his own appearance, and genuine stubbornness–thanks mom, for passing the genes along–he’s actually still very affectionate, concerned with fairness, and does not like cursing.
While we were taking our pictures and waiting for Sarah, our meter expired just a hundred feet away. As Theo and I walked up to the car to sit down and wait still more for Sarah to come out of the hat store, I saw the envelope. We had a $40 ticket, quite literally within 2 minutes of the meter expiring. How? Where had they come from? Did they sneak up? Did they get an alarm when the minute passed?
Immediately, the disaffection ran upstream from the son to the father. I dropped f-bombs in disbelief.
And just as quickly, I was chastised, “Hey! You said bad words, Daddy!” I looked at him with his jacket hanging down, and an expression at once concerned and mischievous, and I said, “I’m sorry, Theo.”
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