LS gathering this week New York

yo, sister, drop by TO :))

b

would love to, will keep an eye out to see if there is something formal or we could try to arrange a time to say hi..terrific work, really, first time i have been to your site.

I am new to LS community so it would be great to meet LS members in New York.

Hmmm…ok…name the bar and when.

i’d love to meet fellow new york LSers, i’ll be on the lookout for the where & when.

erica, i was hoping to meet you at the last oct LS new york meeting. i love your portraits. anybody have any recommendations? I have not been to new york in ages. good bar? good day? from tuesday on my schedule is pretty flexible. how about you guys?

I’ll be in the city on Friday for sure, around 8:30pm in Chelsea, perhaps that area/time is one option for all? If we aren’t a rowdy bunch maybe we could do a restaurant/bar? Lots of them in Chelsea.
(thanks Tanya!)

erica, you have to take over and declare a place and time. PM Tanya and work it out. Then announce it. That’s the only way!

as my 17 year old friend says “a…ight” some contemporary version of alright!

I would love to meet all of you. Can I come?

hey all, here’s my thought..What say ye?

David Alan Harvey is having a fiesta//slideshow of the week’s work from his students/workshop. He has graciously extended the invite to our LS meet..

details:

This Friday, October 12 at his loft in Brooklyn.
Doors locked at 9pm sharp for a quiet respectful show before the fiesta…be here no later than 8:30 pm so you can get a beer and find a seat…

475 kent ave…buzz 407 or 402…..

JMZ to Marcy Avenue, walk down B’way toward the river. Left on Kent (10 min walk)

of course, J-F, hope you can come, all are invited..

Shit…way cool…good going E.

I hope he has a strong floor. This could be a big gathering.

sounds PERFECT. yay to erica. and of course, david. i am in.

too far for me :-(

I’ll be there. Thanks for the leg work Erica & to David for the invite.

bump

rebump (is that actually a word, I wonder?)

i’ll be there, glad i caught the post!!!

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it even though I wanted to meet you all.
:-(

I’ve decided to get out of Dodge and check out the colors upstate and get some work done. ;-)

In any case, I hope that all of you attending will have a good time.

I may have to give it a miss too as I will be out of town for a week on assignment at the end of the month and I’ve got this book dummy idea that I just need to print up or I’ll go completely nuts. Competition season is coming up fast and this is the first year in ages that I feel really competitive. Unicef, European Publishers Award and much more besides. No time to party at the mo as there’s much work to be done. As I type this I’m furiously burning disks to send out.

Hopefully I’ll make it to some of the Christmas parties round abouts.

This is part 2 of why I dont go anywhere.

I’ve been living with this for a long time and just thinking about it makes me red with shame, but in my youth I was a mule. That’s right, a mule, a bearer of illegal substances from Europe to America. I didn’t want to be a mule; I fought against it for as long as I could, but in the end I went along with the nefarious plans of the evil cabal I had fallen in with. I know that this does not excuse my complicity with these evil people; I, like Dostoevsky’s hero Raskolnikov, could have gone to the Haymarket in St. Petersburg and kissed the good Russian earth and then gone to the police station and confessed my crime as he did, but in the end I did not; I wasn’t anywhere near the Haymarket, had no immediate plans to go there, the good Russian earth of the Haymarket has probably been paved several times over since Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment back in the 1860’s, and I don’t speak Russian. I realize now I could’ve gone to some other, preferably English-speaking, police agency, maybe in Florida or Hawaii or someplace else with nice weather all year round, and bared my soul; I could have copped a plea or offered to turn state’s evidence, but in the end I did nothing; I smuggled and I only hope that I will be forgiven for the evil deed I committed.

The smugglers’ first approach was subtle. I hadn’t been to Sicily for a few years and I was planning on returning to Catania for a few days and walk up Mount Etna again, not realizing that Etna was, at the time, erupting. In fact, everyplace I’d been on Etna on my previous trip to Sicily was now under several feet of molten lava. As I was making my plans a “friend” of my brother’s asked if I’d bring something back from Sicily for him. I said sure, what was it? And he just smiled and said, don’t worry about that now, guy, I just need to know that you’ll do it. I said sure thing again, not realizing what I’d just done. I should have known better, but I was a poor unsuspecting naïf then, unaware of the dark forces beginning to swirl around me.

I flew off to Sicily, hoping to avoid the influenza that darkened my first trip there, which I’ve already described here so I won’t bother going into the details again. The flight to Rome went fairly well and the connecting flight from Rome to Catania was without incident of any kind and in the end the flying beer foam injured only three German tourists, a Spanish flamenco dancer and his band, if you can call one guitar player and his girlfriend with the tambourine a band, and one of the stewardesses.

My brother picked me up at the airport and we launched that very day into a long series of sightseeing tours designed to keep my uncle, who was also visiting my brother, distracted from the main business at hand. We visited Agrigento to see the Valley of the Temples and the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, where the cream of 18th and 19th century Sicilian society, the same people that di Lampedusa writes of in his classic novel, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), do not rest in peace like the common run of people, but rather hang from the walls like freshly washed laundry. I am sure if some of these people knew how out of fashion their clothes are they’d kill themselves. We saw the great Greek theatres at Taormina and Syracuse, where I explained the workings of Greek tragedy to my uncle, and Waxey O’Connor’s Irish Pub, where I actually went to the men’s room and applied my bare backside to a toilet seat on a busy Friday night. Yes, I realize this was an act of either incredible bravery or irredeemable folly on my part, but I had to go and the rash cleared up in just three months.

Yes, I spent the days enjoying the warm Sicilian sunshine, the nights going out and eating at expensive restaurants and letting the uncle pick up the tab. But he only stayed a week; he had to return to New York; my second cousin had just had a baby and he had to go back for the christening. It was then, when there were no witnesses from back home to stay his hand, that my brother began to enmesh me in the dark and illegal world of oil smuggling.

The day after my uncle left my brother suggested that we go meet his girlfriend’s family and then we could go eat at a restaurant near the palazzo at the city’s center. This seemed a good idea at the time and so I agreed. The girlfriend’s family, several generations of them, in fact, all lived in one apartment building at the end of a badly lit dead end street. From the outside, the apartment building looked as though the United States Army Air Forces bombed the place during the invasion of Sicily in 1943 and nobody had bothered to fix the damage in the intervening decades. The inside, however, was rich marble and beautiful furniture, ancient Roman statuary actually made by ancient Romans, a place where Italian good taste and wads of cash had produced a masterpiece of interior design. “Why don’t they fix the outside too,” I naively asked my brother.
“Fixing the outside means the tax man will know they have money,” my brother replied. “Everyone in Italy does the same thing. The outside of the building almost always looks like crap. Some of the richest people in this country live in buildings you wouldn’t keep a pig in, at least from the outside.” Of course, if everyone in Italy does this then one must ask how the tax authorities are fooled by such an obvious trick, since they must be doing the same thing themselves, but at that moment the door to one of the apartments opened.

The apartment belonged to my brother’s former girlfriend; they are still on very good terms; and he wanted me to meet her family, especially her grandfather. We went out to the restaurant, where the staff regarded my request for spaghetti with the sausage on the pasta as American asininity at its very worse. They were all very nice people and the party went on into the wee hours. The food was wonderful and I stuffed myself silly. It was early in the morning of the next day that Nonno, or so he was called by everyone, leaned over to me and said, “You do something for me?” In the spirit of bonhomie I agreed. “Sure thing,” I said. “Anything you want.” The old man smiled and starting talking to my brother in Italian. I had no idea what they were talking about; my grasp of Italian vocabulary is limited to words describing food. Then the old man patted me on the back. “Good man,” he said in English. “Good man.”

As we walked back to the hotel I asked my brother what the conversation was all about. “Oh, nothing really,” my brother said. “We were talking about ways of hiding something.” “Why,” I asked. “Because we don’t want to get you into trouble.” “Why would I get into trouble,” I said. “Because you just agreed to bring two gallons of fresh olive oil with you to the States.” At that moment I felt the sidewalk giving way under my feet. Before you decide that I should not use such a hackneyed literary metaphor, and it is, really; I could probably come up with something a lot better if I had the time; you should know that I am not using the phrase metaphorically or as a description of some sudden change in my emotional state, but rather as a description of the effects of gravity upon my small area of the space-time continuum. In short, I fell off the sidewalk, which is what happens when you don’t look where you are going.

It was not, my brother told me later, an elegant fall. Apparently I went down with all the aerodynamic grace of a side of beef chucked out a fifth story window; I pitched, I rolled, I yawed, I yelled all at the same time, like a test pilot who’s pushing the outside of the envelope only to have the envelope break open and an embarrassing love letter from a woman who is not his wife fall on the floor in front of the woman who is his wife, and I did all of this without the benefit of an ejection seat. Upon landing, if multipoint sprawling impact with the street counts as landing, I split open the knees of a brand new pair of trousers that I hadn’t even paid for yet. I rose from the gutter bloodied and thoroughly bowed, my knees scraped raw by the impact, blood filling the hole I’d made in the street. It was the beginning of a bad few days.

The thing of it was, of course, and as you already know, I did not want to smuggle fresh olive oil, or anything else, for that matter, into the United States; I would just as soon not find out what twenty years in the big house in Leavenworth is like. I pleaded with my brother to help me find some way out of this situation, but it soon became clear that he had thrown his lot in with this vicious gang of olive oil smugglers and then he was as anxious as they for me to deliver my illegal cargo. So it was the greatest of trepidation that I started home, home to America, home with two gallons of fresh green olive oil concealed in the legs of the pair of trousers I had ripped and had not yet paid for.

The first part of the trip was not so bad; the movie was Miss Congeniality, and while this is not Sandra Bullock’s greatest work, anything with her in it is a welcome relief, letting those of us caught up in the tense world of international olive oil smuggling to pass a couple of hours without reflecting on the dark and dangerous row we hoe. As the plane reached Newfoundland the flight attendants handed out customs declarations and pens and asked us to please fill them out. I read the document carefully, looking around casually to make sure no one noticed my intense interest in the section about not bringing foreign agricultural products into the United States. I played it cool, just in case someone was watching. Someone was watching: I noticed the guy two seats back looking around as well; that’s when I knew I was in trouble. The Feds, they’d been on to me all along, just waiting for the chance to catch a mule with olive oil in his trousers. My blood pressure skyrocketed and I began sweating profusely. I had to escape, which is not an easy thing to do from a Boeing 747 cruising along at 45,000 feet at 500 miles an hour, especially when you’re flying over the North Atlantic without a parachute. And even if I managed to solve all these problems, I still can’t swim.

Since the problems involved in escaping from my immediate circumstances proved more or less insurmountable, I had to find another way of escaping the calm, cool, but otherwise not terribly competent customs agent who’d so casually blown his cover. He probably thought he had me trapped, but those of us in international olive oil smuggling have a trick or two up our sleeves as well; it’s just that I didn’t know what any of those tricks were. So I filled out the customs declaration, perjuring myself when I reached the part about not bringing agricultural products into the United States.

The plane landed at Kennedy International Airport and my trip through a world of intimidating fear, paranoia, and formless dread began, but first I looked for a McDonald’s. There were none; you may have missed this, but I have noticed that the departures areas of international airports are packed with every fast food outlet, bookstore, coffee shop, and duty free liquor store known to humanity; the arrivals areas are devoid of economic life, the reason being, I suppose, that the people who run the airports want you to go away, get lost, vamoose, buzz off, scram already, and to do all of these things immediately, if not sooner. Damn, I thought to myself. I would not be able to put off my confrontation with U. S. Customs. I marched down the halls to the baggage carousel with all the determination of a thief trying to brass his way out of a botched bank job. At the carousel I waited. I waited some more. Then I waited some more. The baggage handlers, sick sadistic fiends that they are, did not want me to get on with it, but to stay in this miserable friendless place surrounded by watchful eyes ready to pounce on the hapless olive oil smuggler.

At excruciating length my bags appeared and I picked them up; a sudden feeling of doom came over me. It occurred to me that I could have left the bags and fled for the hills and no one would ever know my guilty secret. But if I had, then the cold and ruthless men who had lured me into a life of crime would hunt me down and terminate my employment with extreme prejudice. Hung on the horns of a dilemma, I took the bags and headed for Customs.

I got on the line for American citizens and waited as the line drew ever closer to the inspector. When my turn came I marched forward, prepared to lie, cheat, steal, and kill in order to get my olive oil (I’d started to think of the oil in my trousers as mine, even though it would never be, in any meaningful sense) into the United States. The inspector, a cheerful young woman, welcomed me back to the United States and looked at my passport. She ran it under some kind of optical device and then handed it back to me. The tension stretched my nerves to their limit as I expected momentarily the sudden arrival of Customs agents the size of linebackers who would escort me to a back room of the airport, where they would beat the truth about my smuggling out of me. I picked up my bags and said, “Thank you.” I walked away, the sweat running down my back in marathons, staining my shirt. I headed for the exit, my muscles straining as I awaited the tackle by Treasury agents that would end my life of crime before it’d really gotten off the ground and send me to federal prison for life. I thought that I might crack under the strain and go mad then and there. I passed through the doors and a man said, “Taxi, mister?”
“No,” I screamed, “don’t beat me, I confess.”
“Okay, mister, you confess, but you need taxi? Is thirty dollars into city.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

So I will not be going down to the city to see the show, but like I said above, I encourage everyone who can to go and see it; it’s great stuff. And the olive oil was wonderful, too.

wow…has the makings for blockbuster summer movie

Not bad Akaky. to think I got held up in Customs for two hours (which included a thorough sniffing of the car) because I was accused of smuggling meatballs that I purchased at Ikea in Burlington Ontario. Meatballs that were originally made and USDA inspected in the good ole US of A.

Hi all, for anyone coming to David’s..if you are able, please bring something in the form of a drink or snack to share. I asked and David concurred he would appreciate the additions from our clan. See you manana, and sorry to those who can’t make it.

You know, it occurs to me now as I go through the posts here again that I put the long rant about olive oil in the wrong thread. I was going to put it in the Seen/Unseen thread. Well, the two threads are vaguely similar, I guess, and if you’re in the city and you have the time you might want to go to the Bubble Lounge and see their presentation. The details are in the Seen/Unseen thread. As for those of you going to DAH’s loft for his students’ show, enjoy and do not to go there with one arm as long as the other, as my mother says. Buy a bottle and bring it along. I wish I could come but that would deny me the pleasure of watching this moron trying to make a u-turn in the middle of Main Street right now with traffic coming both ways. And so it goes.

Dang it’s a week too early for me. I, too, am too far away, but without and most interesting story. I was on the edge of my seat reading your story Akaky. Wow. FWIW I will be in the city for photoplusexpo on the 18th. Oh, and Harvey’s giving a talk there at some point just as an fyi.

An incredible gathering last night at the close of David Alan Harvey’s workshop. Some great work was shown by his students, Elliot Erwitt opened the show (amazing!), other Magnum folks on hand. The conversations and good humor continued well into the wee hours. Thanks for inviting the LS contingent along, David. Anyone else got pics from the night?

!!

Tanya Habjouqa and Lance Rosenfield in the foreground.

Indeed..so many lovely folks, including David!!, Eliot Erwitt, Larry Towell (good chap, and a highlight of my eve to be able to spend time with him) and Nat’l Geo photog Gerd Ludwig (all smiles).

Thanks to the students for having us.

Steve McCurry too and another Magnum person (Chung?) I didn’t have the chance to meet, as well as loads of wonderful folks from the community.

Was especially nice to see so many women photographers there and to be able to talk a spell.

Thank you David and Marie for having us.

Sounds like everyone had a great time

erwitt and company at harvey’s:

miss all of you… it look you had great time at David’s place.. cheers from Alaska!

aga we missed you at the show! hope you’re having a wonderful time in alaska! best, lance

Lance.. i have to say that firsth time in my life i love to stay at home… outside is raining all the time… it’s how Ketchikan on Alaska looks most of the time during a year

Miss all of you, too…. melancholy is taking over. Did Gerd go wild again? http://www.flickr.com/photos/bocchieri/1535491446/

hehe.. Daniel… you went wild, too :-P

Alright so how about a LS Benelux(Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) meeting? ;)

hi Lance, seems we sat next to each other, with Tanya in between. (that’s me and then Caroline, the Elliot – nice blue-grey tones on everyone) Sorry not to have said hello.

Rutgher, what about Ibiza? later we could quote the words from the ones who are famous :) enough famous ones around here.

bump

No, I dont have anything to add to this thread, really. It’s just that the olive oil story is one I love to tell and retell, now that the statute of limitations has run out, to the point where waiters in restaurants won’t give me olive oil for fear I’ll start retelling the story again. They enjoyed it the first forty times I told it, but now it’s tiresome and they have other customers to deal with, so I am constantly on the lookout for new victims to spring it on.

Aga-lol-I was in Alaska (Fairbanks) during the big party, too. Dang. Gettin cold.

John.. yes i see now your location! you should come to Ketchikan :) it’s litle bit more on south :)
here is not cold, but rainy

Hey Aga, NOW enroute to NYC. Yeah, a week late for all the fun. It was 9F one morning in Fairbanks. Starting to chill off a bit. ‘Loved Fairbanks, btw.

JRF – looks like we missed each other again… and your name came up – Aga and I hung out with Justin from Utah/Brooks.. said he’s been talking to you… small world we have here!