A self portrait I took while waiting for an elevator in a parking garage at Harborview Sleep Clinic with my iPhone 4.

It was just this great macro image of an eyeball silkscreened onto a huge piece of glass. It sat on top of a pony wall as a divider.

I love how graphic and eye-conic the image is. ; ) Just thought it was a great self portrait opportunity and had to take it.

Should I stay … or should I go.

It was the question I asked before the fateful trip. The Asbury excursion. The one to reunite the three.

In my heart I was waiting for this moment. I couldn’t be in attendance last year. But this year I WANTED to be there. I hadn’t seen any of them since the mid-nineteen-eighties. For argument’s sake and our love of round numbers I’ll call it twenty-five. Had it been that long? Maybe. Maybe more. Even our collective (failing) brains could not arrive at an accurate accounting. At this age … what’s a few years give or take.

After trading eMails with Geoff … and his kind offer of plane fare … I was able to come up with the money to buy my own round-trip ticket on Continental. If I went for two weeks the fare was reduced to $400.00. Time I had. Money. Not so much. Friends like these? Not enough!

It was set. Asbury Park, August 11th and leave for my family in south Jersey on the morning of the 16th. But on August 14th … The Hoover Hootenanny!

Geoff’s lovely wife Tatiana picked me up from Newark Airport the evening of my arrival. Like most New York City transplants Geoff never learned to drive. Good thing Tatiana did! “Yo Hoov! How will I know your wife? Will she have a sign?” “Oh. She’ll have a sign!.” Continue Reading > > >

Here I am. Back where it all started. It’s amazing. It’s amusing. It’s a place I’ve iconized in my minds eye. It was a place of growth and a place of rebirth. For me. For many. Part of something bigger than all of us. Youth. Art. Music. Lust. Passion. A culmination of time, talent, opportunity, and friendships, crystallizing into the stuff dreams are made of. But at what point do we wake up?

It’s now 2010 some 25 years later. Time has taken a toll, on memories and conditions. Asbury is still a town in transition. A town possibly on the verge of rebirth, but still a slow and painful one. As I walked the streets with my friends Geoff Hoover & Dorothy Orant Morrison, ghosts of days past shown themselves and at times were laid to rest. Places that were once dead were now gentrified. For better or worse. Time marches on. And so did we. Continue Reading > > >

And so we did. On so many levels.

It was the summer of 1982. At least the beginning of it. I had graduated from CW Post Center of Long Island University. I had already seen all three Asbury Park Clash shows and my friend Charlie (also a Post toasty) and I were about to embark on a month long trip to England and France.

Charlie and I were both photographers. Me having hot new photos of the Clash plus my other photos from Bonds and The Palladium shows, and Charlie had his more social documentary black and white portfolio. Our first week there would be a mix of business and pleasure.

Before it all started there was a ton of preparation to get ready. I went out and bought 40 rolls of Kodachrome. This was going to be the biggest trip of my life, thus far, and it certainly needed to be documented in all its Kodachrome glory.

If documentation was in order I also needed at least three new thin red journals and red Flair pens to go along. On some level I have to thank Dorothy for getting me into journaling. I had started journaling shortly after we met. It’s especially wild to look back on any of those journals so many years later. It sure helps to fill in some of my memory gaps, but also sometimes stirs up feeling I had long since put behind me.

I have to admit, that as I post excerpts from my journals, they will be heavily edited. Never adding unless [indicated] and way more “removal” than anything else. More to protect the innocent, and at times, the not so innocent. As verbose and telling as they were, sometimes they were just the rantings of a 20-something year old man-boy-child groping his way through the world in the process of “coming out of the cupboard” / closet … literally.

Continue Reading > > >

The question is … but is it art! It’s something I use to ask/say to my other “arty” friends back in Jr High back in the glorious(?) 70′s(?) … OMG! And so the question is raised today. I’m not trying to rekindle the age old battle about clay Art vs Craft. No! I’m saying it more tongue in cheek this time around.

I have to give a big shout out to Diana Fayt for turning me onto a very cool app called Hipstamatic for iPhone. She published a photo yesterday which I knew came from her iPhone, so I tweeted her asking what app. I knew there were billions an billions of apps it could have been. She was kind enough to tweet me back a reply. So of course I fire up iTunes and spent a whopping $1.99 and purchased a copy for myself. All I can say is WOW! It’s like my 1st gen iPhone dropped orange sunshine!

After meeting a downtown client this morning, (my day job is being a Mac computer consultant) I decided to take my new toy.app and re-explore the Pike Place Market. It’s been a long time since I had been or was inclined to take photos. One of the pitfalls of living in Seattle for so long is becoming apathetic to the innate beauty of the market. Tourists or not!
Continue Reading > > >

Crazy Janey and her mission man were back in the alley tradin’ hands
‘long came Wild Billy with his friend G-man all duded up for Saturday night
Well Billy slammed on his coaster brakes and said anybody wanna go on up to Greasy Lake
It’s about a mile down on the dark side of route eighty-eight I got a bottle of rose so let’s try it
We’ll pick up Hazy Davy and Killer Joe and I’ll take you all out to where the gypsy angels go
They’re built like light and they dance like spirits in the night …

Bruce Springsteen . Spirits In The Night

New Jersey September 1974. I had just started my first semester as a photography major at Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in wonderful New York, New York … just like I pictured it … skyscrapers and everything. I was living in an apartment with my sister Diane in Rahway, NJ and commuting every day to the fashion district of NYC. Walk a few blocks. Hop a train at the Rahway station … four stops later … Linden, Elizabeth, Newark … arriving at New York Penn Station. It was an amazing time of learning and spreading my newly found seventeen-year-old wings to fly. Continue Reading > > >

If you lived in or around New York City you knew of the legendary Bottom Line. Located at at 15 West Fourth Street between Broadway and Washington Square Park, the venerable music venue, owned by Allan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky, opened its doors February 12, 1974. One of the premier music clubs in Manhattan, was the birthplace of many music acts. Shows by Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, The New York Dolls, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, The Ramones, Hall & Oates, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, Toots and the Maytals … and of course The A’s.

The Bottom Line also “introduced” many acts via showcases. You just got a record contract? You were courting the major labels? You probably played a showcase at the Bottom Line. Many a career was launched from this stage. The Bottom Line seated 400 people and had a no smoking policy long before that restriction became New York City law. It was one of the most intimate places to see music in NYC. No matter where you sat, or stood, you had a great view of the stage and the band.

Following are photos of Richard, Rocco, Terry, Rick, and Mikey from the stage of the Bottom Line June 9, 1981. Enjoy! Continue Reading > > >