Soho 9-11 2008

god bless

what's not to love about that?

re-created keith haring mural - houston & bowery

busted in a moment of sentimentality

"With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken - formerly it was only the prominent; and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same - so that we shall only need one portrait."

Kierkegaard (1854)

(who said the Danes don't have a sense of humor?  sk)

"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images.  It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex.  And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.  The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them.  Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).  The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology.  Social change is replaced by a change in images.  The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself.  The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images."

Susan Sontag

The Image-World

i discovered several blocks along Lavalle taken up by mannequin stores - some of the freakiest window displays i've ever seen

security latin-style

i've been doing battle with a flaky internet connection the past few days and despite the fact that my current life provides little in the way of frustrations it's infuriating (and somewhat belittling) to discover to what great degree i've come to depend on the internet.  was there life before it? was it a happier, more contented one?

once or twice every decade i'm grateful for a restless sleep followed by an ass-crack-of-dawn stroll down the backstreets of a neighborhood - for reasons such as this

below, a series of images taken in mid-january in toronto & montreal. despite my affinity for two of canada's best cities, my hasty departure to the summer climes of south america shortly thereafter caused me little to no anguish. national pride is perhaps a dying art.  sk