Blog About Photography

Jon Stew­art on the “The Fac­tor,” which is truly remark­able television.

I’m sure by now you’ve all seen at least part of this but it’s worth watch­ing the whole thing. Every minute is pure joy.

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I don’t know how it hap­pened, but I’m feel­ing pretty lucky to have stum­bled onto this lit­tle his­tory les­son from Lib­er­ace on the prove­nance of Beethoven’s Moon­light Sonata. Play it below or fol­low this link.

Beethoven’s Moon­light Sonata -…

View of Penn Sta­tion from the North­east, ca. 1911.

On read­ing my prior Penn Sta­tion post, my sis­ter in law told me about a pro­fes­sor she had who spoke of Penn Sta­tion this way:

You used to stroll through it like a Roman and now you scut­tle below it like a rat. That’s it, I can’t speak of this more today.

I’m para­phras­ing, but I that’s pretty much the idea, I would say. What was his name again?

Also, just gen­er­ally on the topic of real estate devel­op­ers. I’ve been read­ing Gotham, which is the his­tory of New York City, which is, more or less, the his­tory of real estate devel­op­ers. I’m not switch­ing sides on this issue, but they’re more impor­tant to our eco­nomic eco-​​system than I think we give them credit for. Not that don’t totally destroy some pretty price­less stuff.

One of my co-​​workers was quite a busy dig­i­tal tech before the crash and we were talk­ing about how it got pro­gres­sively more dif­fi­cult after Novem­ber ’08 to sus­tain a free­lance sit­u­a­tion. She sort of won­dered aloud why it was that some peo­ple worked straight through it and, in fact, are still work­ing in the indus­try despite the fact that so many peo­ple, includ­ing the two of us, more or less dropped out for the time being for a less rel­e­vant (if not more sta­ble) pur­suit. I’ve been watch­ing a lot of doc­u­men­taries on the mil­i­tary chan­nel lately, and it struck me that there’s some­thing of a par­al­lel in the ran­dom­ness of it all.

“It’s kind of like war,” I said. “A lot of peo­ple get shot, but some don’t.”

Now that I’ve writ­ten that down and re-​​read it, I real­ize that it’s actu­ally a wildly offen­sive claim for me to make. War is the only thing like war with Haiti com­ing in a not-​​too-​​distant sec­ond. Any­thing even approach­ing such an excru­ci­at­ing real­ity is unfath­omable, espe­cially given that I have a job and it’s pretty great. Not to men­tion that, in my case, cos­mic ran­dom­ness played merely a sup­port­ing role to irre­spon­si­bil­ity when it comes to my will­ful (and hope­fully tem­po­rary) exile from the photo scene.

But tak­ing my own stu­pid sit­u­a­tion out of it, the unem­ploy­ment stakes are a bit like the trenches in the sense that there’s not nec­es­sar­ily a rea­son why one per­son works and another per­son doesn’t when they’ve both gone about things in more or less the same way.

Any­way, these are the things I think of when I spend my evenings dig­ging though the Library of Con­gress online stacks with the War in Europe rag­ing over my shoulder.