At about 2am last night I took a cab from Manhattan to Brooklyn. It was my fifth cab of the day and this driver and like all the other drivers today wanted to talk about the election. The drivers were a diverse lot ranging from a Bangladeshi immigrant to a man who moved to New York from New Orleans after the flood, but all the conversations had a common theme. They men started by asking me who I was voting for and when I said Barack Obama, they would say they were so glad and that they hoped he would win too. Then they enumerated their reasons for supporting him but all ended with a variation of "They won't let him win."

The election stealing conspiracies varied from computer fraud, to hidden racism, to vote fraud, but despite my protestations none would allow themselves to believe that Obama could actually win, almost as if the disappointment of losing would be to great. I'll spare you a long oratory (I suspect blog audiences are largely self selecting and the vast majority of you are already in the Obama column). But I wanted to say, let's prove the fears of these men unfounded. Get out there and do this thing right.

One of the special thrills in photography is coming across a photographer who has travelled some of the same roads you have travelled, looking at their images, and saying 'I have stood right there, I have seen those things.'

I know nothing about Chinese photographer Eris Yo's life, but I know we've walked some of the same paths, and I love the way she's seen things along the way.

If navigating her website is too abstruse, you can find more of her work on flickr, and on her blog (written in Chinese).

'Emergency Mind' as in "We are all so worried about her, we all have emergency mind."

-From my Korean mother in law (apparently a literal translation of a Korean phrase).

I was thumbing through a months old copy of the NY Times Magazine in a doctor's office this morning and happened upon Sara Stolfa's project titled The Regulars which documents the patrons of McGlinchey's tavern in Philadelphia (where she worked as a bartender). It's a fascinating study in loneliness.

Stolfa was also in the band The Delta 72 (now defunct). She played organ. How cool is that?

Related: NY Times Article

Overheard at Gray's Papaya yesterday afternoon and transcribed practically verbatim:

"I keep having these dreams about Abraham Lincoln. He's sitting on the couch in his top hat and everything and we are talking about my problems with Susan. He keeps telling me not to worry, "Mary was worse, you know." And then after he gives me some real wisdom on the female mind, I start thinking about everything going on in the world, and I think, 'Holy shit why don't I ask Abe what to do'. And it's like he's reading my mind... he turns to me and says, "Don't worry we've been through worse." And then he hugs me and I think, 'Abe Lincoln hugged me. He smells like Old Spice.' I ask him who he supports in the election, and he smiles and says, "Believe it or not you're the first person who's asked me that this year; of course I support Barack. These so called Republicans remind me of Copperheads." And then he laughed sort of sad a deep ha ha ha laugh and I woke up. This dream had me so jacked up I couldn't sleep. I just kept beta-ing it over and over. I literally couldn't sleep. I saw him. I smelled him, he felt real. His jacket was scratchy. His hat had a worn rim. It was the middle of the night and I was pumped up and freaking out so I Wikipediaed the Gettysburg Address and recorded a version of it to a beat and then, get this, I REMIXED IT. I remixed the freakin' Gettysburg Address. This is either the greatest thing I've ever done or a total fucking disaster. I can't tell yet."

Dave Jordano's project documenting storefront African American churches titled Articles of Faith, just made made my otherwise blah Friday. Storefront churches have long been a source of fascination for me. (found via Andrew Sullivan who also links to this super interview)

The scene from My Dinner With André below is one of my favorites:

"I mean, André, let's say—I mean, if I get a fortune cooke in a Chinese restaurant, I mean, of course even I have a tendency—I mean, you know, I would hardly throw it out—I mean, I read it, I read it, and I—I just instinctively sort of—if it says something like-uh-a conversation with a dark-hared man will be very important for you, I mean, I just instinctively think, Well, who do I know who has dark hair, and did we have a conversation, and what did we talk about? In other words, I mean, I do tend to read it— but it's a joke, in my mind. I mean, in other words there's something in me that makes me read it, and I instinctively interpret it as if it really were an omen of the future. But in my conscious opinion, which is so fundamental to my whole view of life—I mean, I would have to change totally, I think, to not have this opinion—in my conscious opinion, this is simply something that was written in the cookie factory several years ago and in no way refers tome. I mean, the fact that I got it—the man who wrote it did not know anything about me, couldn't have known anything about me There's no way that this cookie could actually have anything to do with me. The fact that I've gotten it is basically a joke. And I mean, if I were planning to go on a trip on an airplane, and I got a fortune cookie that said, "Don't go," I mean I admit I might feel a bit nervous for about one second, but in fact I would go, because I mean, that trip is going to be successful or unsuccessful based on the state of the airplane and the state of the pilot. And the cookie is in no position to know..."

I mention it because I just stumbled across this little New Yorker piece on the actual man in the cookie factory.

More links: The obligatory wikipedia article, lots of youtube clips (all great), and my own personal train ride with André.

Also related: you can now find Andy Kaufman's parody My Breakfast with Blassie on youtube (!): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.

An hour or two ago my 3 year old and I were walking down a dark and narrow road in Yosemite National Park at night under an almost full moon.

him: Dad?

me: Yes.

him: Is this a garden or a park or a forest?

me: It's a forest, but it's also a National Park.

(silence)

him: It took a very very long time to plant all these trees. The trees are big and old.

(silence)

him: Wow.

(silence)

him: When we sleep in the forest will bears come and try to eat us?

me: No.

him: If we see a bear will you hold me very very tight.

me: Yes.

(silence)

him: This is a very very big park. In Brooklyn the parks are very small.

me: Yes indeed.

him: And there are no bears in Brooklyn.

me: No. Not any more.

him: That's sad.

(silence)

him: Can I plant a tree when we go home? Maybe a lot of them?

me: Let's plant lots of them

Related: Olafur Eliasson

I recently saw the Beate Gütschow image above in person. She creates large scale idealized collage landscapes from scores of electronically grafted together images. The results are both seemless and unreal. For me the images evoke classic landscape painting more than they do other photographs and in thinking about this I realized that her process is probably not much different than tradtional landscape painters who generally either sit out in nature and take in a scene going from detail to detail or they sit in a studio culling details from memory. EIther way the result is idealized nature in which each element recieves more scrutiny than it would normally... These images are part of show/monograph by Aperture titled LS/S which features pastorals like the one above as well as similarly artifical black and white cityscapes. I haven't seen the book yet so I'm curious to see how the seemingly very different bodies of work work together.

More on Gütschow's work can be found on 52 photographers.

Raul Andres Jump3 from raul gutierrez on Vimeo.

Related: Bounce

sometimes,

nothing can save a collection of words

from reading like bad poetry.