Category: Short form

Short-form posts

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Image from Lost New York by Nathan Silver.

The caption reads “Some typical speculative row houses near Lenox Ave on West 133rd Street, about 1882.

A good friend of mine from the homeland (NYC) just sent me this book and it’s a goldmine.

This image in particular struck me as familiar but also so foreign. I feel like we’re all familiar with such a picture of a “development”: the lone house on freshly razed earth, sort of a harbinger (or hope) of future density. But I’m used to this as a suburban scene.

To think this is a picture of West Harlem blows my mind for its expanse and lack of density. More and more I repeat the mantra “New York is always changing” (and I don’t even live there anymore), always trying to believe it’s cyclical and not vectorial. In other words, that the changes of New York now are not terminal, that there will be a swing again (some day) back to people living in NYC because they want to be NY’ers not because it’s where the money is. But I worry it is an arrow and not a circle.

And then I see this picture. Just over a hundred years ago 133rd St was so empty. Perhaps my vision is too narrow to be thinking in terms of decades not centuries.

But of course, these houses can barely be found anymore as the skyscrapers seep out from Wall Street and Midtown–but that’s for another post, another time.

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I was just catching up on my viewing with the “B” disc of the Criterion DVD release of Jean Vigo’s visionary film L’Atalante when I came across this stellar quote from its cinematographer, Boris Kaufman:

“…everything was used: sun, fog, snow, night.  Instead of fighting unfavorable conditions, we incorporated them.  If there was fog, we added smoke to make it denser.  If it rained, we added lighting to accentuate it.”

He’s talking about the improvisatory nature of the film here but I started to think of it in terms of landscape photography.  A lot of shooting landscapes is waiting for the right moment when “conditions are right.”  Why not choose the moment for its technical difficulty and amp it up?  The thought of them trying to shoot through fog and then just saying, no, let’s use a smoke machine to create an even thicker cloud is a total lightbulb.

The obstacle becomes transformed from hindrance to a stepping stone that leads towards a work that would otherwise not be possible.  Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” can then become proactive not reactive.  Not waiting for right conditions but choosing present conditions as right, one is freed from the waiting and just starts doing.

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I’m happy to report that brokt.net is now live!

The main site will house my imagery and sounds. It will be mainly static, with new content being added as it becomes available. Speaking of which, more songs and a new project, EMOTE, should be up quite soon.

The brokt.net/newsfeed space will be a more immediate space with updates as well as notes of all forms: imagistic, sonic, and word-based.  It will be a combination telephone pole (if you’ve walked around Portland you know that the telephone pole is still a very viable method of conveying information!) and sketchbook.

It will also in turn fan out to the @broktdotnet twitter handle to get you the skinny that way if you prefer.