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Waiting In Vain (I Don't Want To)

On the way home from seeing Dean and Britta at the super-plush National Arts Club last night (more on that tomorrow, but check out Lorenzo’s pics here), I was delighted to come upon my favorite subway musician, Corey Frye, on the platform of the Union Square stop on the L. I’d first seen him last summer, on a Sunday afternoon in August when I’d been out too late the night before and the relentless summer heat had ceased to be something you could reckon with. It was the 14^th street stop on the Downtown F that day, and Frye was perched on a little stool, strumming his guitar and singing in a voice both plaintive and consoling, joyful and tremulous. It was that rare occasion where you’re glad the train takes forever to arrive. I can't quite recall the songs, but I think it was Van Morrison, Marley, the kind of things that sound nice around a campfire. He sang ‘Waiting In Vain’ that day, and the unfettered tenderness in his delivery caught the six or so of us standing around a little off guard. A lovely young woman with already-reddened eyes sitting alone on a bench began crying quietly.

I checked out Frye’s MySpace page and while his original compositions are sweet, on first listen they didn’t capture my imagination. However, I don’t think it’s his songwriting that lacks. Frye needs an audience to connect with, and even the harried, disinterested iPodded drones of the subway seem to respond to him, and he in turn opens up. A current is passed, and exchange completed. Like James Baldwin said about jazz music in a nightclub, ‘it was made and used on the spot’.

I saw him on one particularly raw day in early February and he looked sad and lost, as did everyone else. But last night he turned his face upwards when he sang, and his eyes radiated kindness, and his feet twisted and turned as he navigated the chords. I thought of the Joni Mitchell line:

Kids with the jitters in their legs
And those wide, wide open stares

Perhaps I was particularly attuned to such magic after the show I'd just seen, but as the Brooklyn-bound L and the 8^th Avenue-bound L both pulled in on opposite sides of the platform I could barely hear them, and Frye kept right on singing.

The Riddle of Convergence, or: The Seductive Nokia N93

As I ran alongside the coastline of Key West listening to The Bends and watched the colors along the horizon as a storm system blew in, changing the ocean from pale green along the horizon to milky blue to an angry grey break against the shore I wished, for the thousandth time, that my iPod contained a camera to capture all the amazing things I see on my runs but that I never, really, even begin to remember to return to later, camera in hand. It’s the hunger for ceaseless, universal connectivity, perpetual all-encompassing high grade music and the ability to always document the moment. 

As they say, be careful what you wish for, because you will surely get it. While it’s doesn’t quite solve the iPod/camera quandary the Nokia N93 addresses a related convergence flashpoint, the cell phone/camera question. Nokia’s previous hat-toss into this slice of the multi-use pie, the N90, produced some undeniably gorgeous pictures for something made on a phone-sorry, Nokia, a device. But while the Carl Zeiss lens on the N90 yielded admittedly soft, fuzzy, pleasing results like this:

Lovely image quality, but with only 2 megapixels this is about as big as you can get the image before it starts to break up and lose its virtue.

The shot below, taken with the Nokia N93, shows that the bump up in megpaixels (to 3.2) yields the startling clarity and fine detail of this:

and this shot of sunset over White Street Pier

Suddenly there's this precise clarity and rich depth of field. You're first reaction is one of delirious excitement: now the phone really can function as a proper camera, and  But wait. Because after a few days of playing with the N93 you may realize that as long as you have the phone on you you’re never really off duty from putting thought and care into taking good pictures, from being concious of your surroundings and the possibilty of making a rich, eloquent photograph. Except at night because the flash is painfully weak. But believe me, the daytime pressure can be crushing. I've spent a month with the N93, and if you'll allow me, I'd like to share some insights into how to maximize the strengths and bypass the weaknesses of the device.

Ollie

Fri 10/13/2006 18:01 Image245-001

Backyard at dusk

Tue 10/10/2006 17:55 Image204

November Rain, Key West Style

Caught in this masquerade

The Masquearade Parade, where locals let their collective freak flag fly. I saw most everyone I knew in town along the way. I shot all of these with the Nokia N93 which they’ve given me to try out. My first pass assessment: the trigger's a little sluggish, but as you can see the images are amazingly crisp and rich for something shot with a phone. All images are un-retouched.

Robert and Alex