Based On A True Story...: Validated

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Validated

All Photos: © S. Banos

I was on a mission- find the bar I had accidentally encountered one long hot summer's day in Greenpoint on a rather prolonged walk from Williamsburg (Brooklyn) to LIC (Queens) via the Pulaski Bridge. I knew the approximate area but...

Anyway, long story short, I was walking about taking note of all the latest tributes to gentrification writ large and small, when from a distance I saw the most surreal stone visage lording over its marbled domain. Hoping to get close enough take a decent photo, I noticed there were actually two imposing colossi of classical yet seemingly alien hybridization, and that the gates were wide open- I apparently had the entire area to roam free and unmolested (more like tentatively squeeze through the giant stone slabs, hoping they didn't collapse unnoticed upon me and become my own marble tombstone)! If only gentrification was a guarantee of such splendid surprises- instead of the monied banality it usually yields...

Much thanks to Dave Reichert for the tough love in editing, the first photo proved particularly problematic- considering my admittedly limited color/software skills. My "original" version proved an exercise in embarrassment of world class proportion!

It was a most magical interlude on my sojourn to reconnect with what I would soon come to know as The Achilles Heel, a place I could readily visit every day of the year. Within it's Depression Era, unfinished wood interior (unlike so many a newly minted "authentic Irish Pub" with multiple 90in TV screens), one could easily imagine oneself in any of the first four decades of the century past. Beer in belly, I continued unto LIC for a very nice (and free) encounter with PS 1, currently celebrating it's 40th anniversary with free admission to all NYC residents (still got me NY Driver's License). I hadn't been there in a good decade, and it was certainly good to see it still retained it's playful yet challenging attitude toward art in general. A most validating end to a most validating day in NY indeed...

@ the foot of the Pulaski Bridge

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Grandmaster Flash- A child is born with no state of mind, blind to the ways of mankind.

Goethe- The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.

African Proverb- The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.

Ann Landers- Keep in mind that the true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.

Edward Snowden- I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act.

Mohandas Gandhi- Poverty is the worst form of violence.

Zapata- La tierra es de quien la trabaja con sus manos.

Milan Kundera- The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Voltaire- Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Chris Hedges- Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality.

Christopher Hitchens- I have always found it quaint, and rather touching, that there is a movement in the US (Libertarians) that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Claude Chabrol- Intelligence has its limits while stupidity has none.

Carl T. Rowan- It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home.

African Proverb- The foreigner sees only what he knows.

George Orwell- The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Elliott Erwitt- I don't believe that photography can change the world, but it can show the world changing.

Gilles Peress- I don't care so much anymore about 'good photography.' I am gathering evidence for history.

Yogi Berra- You can observe a lot just by watching.

Dorothea Lange- A camera is an instrument that teaches us how to see without a camera.

George Bernard Shaw- A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.
Henry David Thoreau- It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
Robert Dosineau- If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

Pentti Sammallahti- Everything I've photographed exists regardless of me, my role is only to be receptive. The most important thing is the luck... behind every good image there is the good luck too. Sometimes when you are in a right place in the right moment, you'll feel that the image is a gift and even that it doesn't matter who's behind the camera.

Duane Michals- Never trust any photograph so large it can only fit inside a museum.

Lisette Model- Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest.

Paul Watson- A person without regrets is a person who has not lived a life of diversity of interests and cause.

MLK- Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Prof. Ivan King- Can we really claim to know anything about the nature of the universe if we don't know the properties, or even the nature, of 90% of its material?

Dr. Wernher von Braun- It is as impossible to confirm them (UFOs) in the present as it will be to deny them in the future.