long island city & eternal return

10th street & 44th road. Long Island City, 2010.

upon a recent rescreening of Joe Versus the Volcano, i realize that i may have been fated to work in this most centrally located neighborhood. lic first factored into my life at some point in the 90s, when i saw this movie as an impressionable youth. one moment always stuck in my brain as a very sad, albeit very literal metaphor for urban and office life. in the very first scene, as joe makes his way to work he sees a single daisy growing from the concrete. a moment of hope soon dashed, as one of his drone-like collegues unknowingly trounces it in the long march to the office.


now, twenty years later: i work there. a stepping stone between brooklyn & manhattan that i precariously balance upon day after day. just like joe.

tivoli 2010

i am trying to make sense of the sense i make. something about 'uninhabited' landscape, language & representation. how images stand-in for 'the real' of experience, memory, place, desire. not necessarily that which is known, rather what is felt. like reading a great novel - the prison - the liberation of interiority. "tell me a story" - use photographs. text is directive, too directive. allow me to tell a story about myself.

NOSTALGIA: the comparative space between now & then. in photos, the then of history. in literature, the then of the fictive. in mind, the then yet to be. & the now? only the earth moving - each individual breath.

thanks, New York Times

you sure do know how to illustrate the obvious. seriously, this is journalism?