Lotta Good Brass: The Defending Champions

Here are just a few from a shoot with the Defending Champions.  Can't beat a 3 piece horn section in a group like this.  All of their musicians are individually extremely talented, yet play together as one to get your ass to wiggle and feet to jiggle.  The Defending Champions are playing from their latest album, "Of the Legend of Convention", which you can download from Itunes.  If you aren't sure, listen to a few previews to get a sample of their ska/funk/reggae feel, and don't miss "Hot Fever" or "Jesus Wants You to Dance".

One thing I forgot I missed...

Detector

 For the entire summer I am away from the east coast, lucky enough to be traveling for work, but there is one thing I miss dearly in those sweltering weeks.  All summer I am landlocked, with no chance to see the beach or the oceans.  I am enchanted by the sea.  To get there, some friends and I went down, to the end of the A, further out than Coney Island and many other of the City shore points, to the Rockaways. 

Sandcastle

We walked and found native foods, walked along the ebb and flow of the tide coming in.  I let the water flow up and over the seams of my boots, bringing some of the ocean home with me (hopefully tonight, when I get home, I can reduce the water, and make seasalt I thought to myself).  It was a reassuring feeling to see the place where ocean meets land.  I have always been enchanted by the sea, and in a way that I cannot explain, it helps me to confirm that I am not walking in a dream.  Science has not fully been able to explain the mind or consciousness, but somehow the ocean does it for me. 

Sunbather

The end of summer, last of the street festivals

It was a sausage fest

 "It was basically a sausage fest," my brother, Nicholas later said.  And that was true.  It was one of the better days I have had in a long time.  I always do enjoy when all of us men get together, for my brothers are at least starting to look like men, and somehow we often manage an adventure out of each afternoon.  Gene, my father, was given a rude awakening when the police asked him to toss his open container.  "Aahh, the old days are gone," he said, or something to that effect.  I use to remember walking around the prospect park area with him, beer in paper bag. I think he enjoyed a cold one out in the park.

The Parade

These pictures are from a few weeks ago, but hey, sometimes I get to them right away, and sometimes I don't.

In the San Genarro Festival, you can see that many things change, while others stay the same.  Little Italy is not what it use to be.  I live in an apartment that was at one time an Italian neighborhood.  This tenement building, well south of Canal, has long been a predominantly Chinese neighborhood.  At San Genarro they did extend the festival from Canal to just short of Houston on Mulberry, but normally Little Italy is much more compact in its reach.  It was a great day, walking from the dumpling festival, through the Lower East Side, and then back again to Mulberry.  The warmth felt like an extension of summer.  There is no better way to end the season of the street fairs by having Zeppolis, Sausage, Dumplings, Belgian fries, Empanadas, and sliders in your stomach all at once, and a long walk to burn the food off!

Local

Ants!

 As the weeks go by, I am still working on a lot of photos from my summer in the parks.  In Grand Canyon one night, I noticed a tree covered in ants.  It seemed as though two rival colonies were attacking each other, and so we watched for the better part of an hour. 

 These ants were tiny, most could fit on the tip of a pencil.  Chuck, Federico and I took turns with a special macro lens, the MPE-65, to take such detailed shots.  We also lit the scene with flash units.  The ants went on all night, and when I woke up in the morning, you could see little curled carcasses still stuck to the tree!

 

Dividing bodies of water

Newtown Creek Barge Sep 2010

 Had a theme to put together, a kind of preview of more to come.  Here is the Newtown Creek, which I explored with a couple of friends.  As you can see below, the creek is horribly polluted.  Slow leeching of oil and raw sewage has built up to an estimated total of 30 million gallons.  Only a week ago, the creek has been designated as a Superfund site.  Just as we sat photographing by this bridge, a trickle of oil trailed out of a nearby pipe. 

Displayed on bottom is the Gowanus Canal, a small body of water along Red Hook and several other Brooklyn neighborhoods.  For a long time the Gowanus has been a site of environmental cleanup, where oxygen levels remain too low to sustain life.

Newtown Creek Oil Slick Sep 2010

Gowanus Canal March 2010