Here’s a few more photos from Manhattan, followed by some pictures from my backlog.

One of the best deals in the city is the East River Ferry, which runs from 34th St. to Wall St. stopping in four or fives Brooklyn docks on the way. Takes about half an hour, great views and fresh air, uncrowded, $4.

Near Union Square. I love the ever-changing kaleidoscope of people, signs, and machines in the big city. The sign vaguely sinister here, like Big Sister is Watching You. Fashion police?

Cool wall painting near Wall St. This part of town is the oldest, going back to colonial days. I like poking around here. And you see genuine financiers.

We were resting on a bench and two ambulances pulled up—a regular one and a Jewish one. Some bond-trader type guy had had a heart attack or maybe just a panic attack, and after fifteen minutes he came walking out, a little shaky. He went for the Jewish ambulance.

The big new world trade center building is done, they call it One World Trade Center or Freedom Tower. Very cool to see it suddenly there amid the streets down around Wall St.

We made our way there, and it’s really awesome. I felt this surge of patriotism and gladness. We’re back! In your face! Bigger and better. That thing made of fins is a glorified subway stop, like for suburban trains as well.

There’s this little old colonial church by the World Trade Center, it’s St. Pauls Episcopal Church, and it has an ancient graveyard, you can go in there and sit on a shady bench. Kind of dizzying to sit there and imagine a fast-forward movie of the neighborhood as seen from the once-peaceful graveyard—the growth of the city, the rise and collapse of the first towers, the construction of the new ones…and then what?

Such gorgeous ornamentation and elaborations on those 40s buildings. Fractal. When will the long desert of flat glass end?

We made our way over to the South Street Seaport, kind of an urban mall, with cobblestones. Not plastic, exactly, but a bit chainy. Had some great crab cakes amid numerous colorful locals on lunch break. The good part there is a pier with old ships. It was a trip to look at the old ships’ rigging against the Wall St. towers.

I always dig taking high-speed photos of water in motion. It’s all a matter of time-scale. A lot of things in ordinary life can be thought of as slow-motion fluid flow. Our bodies, our cities, out landscapes.

Gotta have a least one photo of a big-ass NY truck. This one’s near Union Square, which is always a good spot to visit. Lots of benches, good people-watching. I bought some new walking shoes near here, New Balance 990s—I got the idea from seeing an article in the Sunday Times, some guy swearing by them. The salesman was great, urban gay, with that tired kind of voice, he observed that he’d sold a lot of this model that day, and I told him about the Times article and he looked it up. On a trip, you’re happy if you manage to have a conversation with anyone.

I always love how the sidewalk scenes are mirrored in the windows.

We got together with our old friend Eddie Marritz for dinner at cool West Village place he recommended, Mary’s Fish Camp. We’ve known Eddie since 1968, when he showed up at Rutgers U. in New Brunswick, New Jersey as a freshman. Sylvia and I were in grad school there—we’d gone to college with Eddie’s older brother Don. Just about fifty years ago. Half a frikkin’ century. Eddie’s a very successful cinematographer now, he gets work shooting a lot of documentary films. It’s so relaxing to talk to a very old friend, the complete trust, the sensitivity to subtle allusions. Sylvia took this photo with her iPhone.

I love the rich architectural details in Manhattan. Like this “awning” over the door in a mid-down.

I’ve got some more NY photos, but I’ll post them another day.

For now, I’m noticing that I have quite of backlog of older photos, so I’ll go ahead a post some of them today. On the shell theme, here’s some of those nice, crisp black scallop (?) shells that Sylvia collected at the Outer Banks. Sitting on a glass table, hovering in space.

What would American photography be without neon signs amid window reflections?

A “Rudy” photo of the pool skimmer at our OBX McMansion-cottage. I dig these kinds of collage / angles / shades photos.

An iPhone photo of my car’s windshield below a palm in Los Gatos a couple of months ago. The thing about iPhones, they basically suck in terms of photo quality, but sometimes they’re all you’ve got. That old saying, “The best camera is the one you have with you.”

I kind of wonder about that recent Apple ad campaign, with high-art black-and-white full-page magazine photos labeled, “Shot with an iPhone 6.” It’s certainly safer to go black-and-white, as then there’s less chance of digital crud. And of course they’d be running the photos through something like Lightroom—dialing up Clarity and Sharpness a bit, and cleaning up pixel stutter with the Noise sliders. And if it’s a wonderfully envisioned and framed shot, it’s gonna look good. If you have strong lighting that helps too. And you’d want to shoot it in such a way that you don’t have to crop, so that the meager iPhone pixel count isn’t being stretched too much for the blow-up.

What’s this? Bolts of cloth and buttons in Hart’s fabric store in Santa Cruz. I end up accompanying Sylvia here quite often, and to pass the time, I tend to take a photo or two. Sf concept: a “fabric store” where supernal god-like aliens buy materials for making quilt-like universes.

Going back another month or two, here’s a seagull at Fort Mason in SF. Haughty aplomb.

A red flag at Ft. Mason! Rothko style. I’m crazy about weathered old walls. Easy to shoot, as they’re flat, like a photo. All you need to do is to see the shot, do a minimally competent job with the camera (never a gimmie!), and fix the light in Lightroom. Got this one the day I went there for the beatnik con with V. Vale and Marian, and I lost my glasses (now replaced).

And that’s about enough for today.

Waking up early on a summer day.

Perched atop a tree, chirp. What to do today?

Fourth of July we saw a wind instrument concert in Oak Meadow Park in Los Gatos. I love to look at kettle drums, and to hear them.

And my fellow Los Gatos citizens here amid our signals and wires.

I love propeller hats, I didn’t used to know that anyone actually wore them. But this li’l guy does.

Couple of weeks ago I was at a beatnik themed conference at Fort Mason in SF. The event wasn’t real well attended. I walked around for quite awhile taking pictures. I love corroded, peeling old walls.

V. Vale was there with Marian Wallace, we went up and had a nice cheap dinner at the little-known hostel on the hill behind Fort Mason. I said a few words on Vale and Marian’s panel talk

You can listen to Podcast #86 on the Rudy Rucker Podcasts channel.

I lost my glasses that day, which was bad for me, as it took me nine days to get a new pair. Horrible experience.

Dig the cherub with the rat. It’s on a big sculpture in front of the De Young museum in SF, honoring wine, made by the famed illustrator Gustave Dore.

This is my idea of really successful photo. Shot in Cruz. I love abstract visual designs made up of daily objects. You can see the photo better if you look at the 1200 pixel across version. Should the foreground be in focus or the background? Can be a tough call. I went for the foreground this time. Does that work? How about if you look at the 2400 pixel across version…

Ever since I started shooting with my wonderful wide-angle lens on my Fujifilm digital X100T camera with 22m f2 lens, I’ve been tilting the camera more and more. I picked that up from looking at a lot of Garry Winogrand photos a lot of times. Winogrand used to deny that his camera was tilted. In some higher sense it was level, and I’m starting to get that.

Another nice random pattern photo, a child’s leg with some pens. I prefer not to put the faces of my family on my blog, but this red leg is very expressive in any case.

Another example of the kind of shot I like. Taken on the hill behind Fort Mason looking down at the parking lot. I don’t like seeing parked cars in my photos, they bore me, so I crop them out whenever I can—often using a “tilted” crop frame if that’s what I need. I like the three trees. The godlike trees calm, and the human-street-line-painted parking area all bossy and honking and busy. And the colors are dull, as it’s misty in late afternoon SF.

You can’t do much better than a photo of a neon roller rink sign. When I was little my Mom would drop me at a roller rink in downtown Louisville for an hour or two, and a lot of kids my age would be there skating. I saw my first electronic game ever there, it was a shooting game, you had a “gun” with a metal node on one end and you were looking through the sights at a turning metal disk with planes on it, and when your node touched the bump on a plane while you pulled the trigger you got a point or a beep or something. Paradise.

This is a fat swollen stump near Stow lake in SF. Bloated with life. Everything is alive.

A painting by one of my grandchildren plus a random houseplant. I truly to wish I could paint like a kid. That was one of Master Picasso’s skills. Sometimes I’ll fake it by starting with a kid-like underdrawing, or even copying something from a kid’s painting.

And we saw some turtles in Stow Lake. I rented an electric paddle boat for $14 extra—worth every penny, as son Rudy said. You don’t paddle at all just glide. At first I thought the turtles were bronze sculptures.

This is how I looked when I was just realizing that I’d lost my glasses last week. I was so bummed that I went out and bought two pairs of new ones. Let joy reign unconfined, as my Pop used to say when he’d get some kind of treat for my brother and I after we’d whined for it for a long time.

I went to see the Grateful Dead concert at Levi’s Stadium in San Jose this Sunday, June 8, 2015. I got a ride with a friend Dan Pulcrano, but he wanted to push up to the very front, so most of the time I was alone, getting into my head.

I enjoyed the concert as a scene, although the music didn’t transport me as much as some concerts by others do. For my taste, the Dead don’t rock hard enough. Not funky and bluesy enough. And they’ve never had a really strong vocalist. My idea of a great live band is Rancid, or of course the Rolling Stones, or the Breeders—I saw a Breeders reunion concert in Santa Cruz last year that fully hypnotized me. But there were definitely some fine moments with the Dead. And they closed with a heartbreaking rendition of “Fare Thee Well”

Just being in such a giant crowd was very cool. 70,000 people, okay? Everyone I happened to talk to was really nice to me. This one tier of bleachers, the sun was going down behind it, and all the people in the top row were fringed with gold, melting into light.

A big part of the show is the people there, of course. This guy above had skintight gold lame pants. I spent a lot of the time sitting on a piece of foam I’d brought, next to a speaker tower. The woman in the picture and her boyfriend had come down from Oregon.

The speakers were curved a little bit. Kind of alien and futuristic.

This striped-pants woman is just about perfect in terms of hi-fash deadhead concert goer. Forgoing the tie dye. So California.

Here’s another woman, at night, with the moon in the background. She let me have a little of her popcorn. The moonmaid, I called her to myself. Slender, iconic, cosmic.

One of the first guys I saw, out by the gates, was a wonderfully weathered dude with an antediluvian cap. I liked how he was standing there with the unlit cigarette. Part of his look, not that he cared much about his look. When I see guys like this, I always have an instant connection. We recognize each other.

They did well with the lights. The searchlights seemed very good. I still don’t know why electronic light-show purveyors don’t use continuous-valued cellular automata! The electronic effects tend to be too non-chaotic, too controlled. But they did really get going during the drums.

Another guy I haven’t mentioned yet, I saw him right after I came into the stadium, this guy maybe even older than me, a really weathered old Deadhead in a t-shirt with a fuzzy image of skull, this guy catches my eye like he’s my long lost brother and says “Hi” and gives me a high-five, only it’s a high four as all but the bottom joint of his fourth finger is missing. He was the coolest guy I saw there, like a prophet welcoming me to a last supper but a limp somewhat worn prophet, a guy like a piece of driftwood or sea wrack found on a Santa Cruz beach. Unfortunately I didn’t get his picture.

[Photo from Fort Mason, SF]

Later, during a space jam, they kept showing the image of a hand missing most of the fourth finger—upon the giant digital screens on either side of the state, the hand in red, like a hand in ink that had slapped a piece of paper. An image solarized and made into a red silhouette, on the lower screens on the sides of the stage.

Seeing that hand up there, I started thinking that the old guy with two joints of his ring finger missing—maybe was in some way a mascot or secret force of the band. It felt cosmic and synchronistic that I was seeing that hand up there, they’d displayed it there as a cryptic message to those fortunate ones who’d done high four with the sea wrack dude. As most of you know, I haven’t been drinking or getting high for some years now—but I’m still tripping in my head just the same. Just like anyone else. None of us humans is even remotely “straight” or “normal.” And the Dead shows celebrate that.

[Photo from Fort Mason, SF]

The next day when I was discussing my missing finger revelation with someone, the guy told me that Jerry Garcia had had part of his fourth finger missing, so that was Jerry’s hand on the big display screen. So maybe my greeter was in fact Jerry in resurrected-Jesus format—or, likelier, he’d self-mutilated himself to look that way. Which is entirely within the realm of possibility for a devout deadhead. Like those guys who wear crowns of thorns and drag giant crosses up tiny cobblestone streets.

[Photo from Darwin Ranch, WYO]

Plenty of time to strange thoughts during the long numbers, nothing to do but be there and live through that interval of time, with my mind rising into the empyrean. The occasional planes going directly overhead were good too. Why not tell it like it is and admit that fully 20% of airplanes seen low over our urban centers are alien UFOs?

So here I am at the show, wondering about that cryptic phrase, “Steal your face.” The title of a live album, the informal name for the blue/lightingslash/red/skull logo, and line in their song, “He’s Gone.” When they did that song on Sunday, it felt like they were singing about Jerry. Such strange lyrics:

Rat in a drain ditch, caught on a limb,
you know better but I know him.
Like I told you, what I said,
Steal your face right off your head.
Now he’s gone, now he’s gone…
Like a steam locomotive, rollin’ down the track
He’s gone, gone, nothin’s gonna bring him back…

Some Wikipedia research reveals that “He’s Gone” was really about drummer Mickey Hart’s father, Lenny Hart, who embezzled about $150K from the Dead and dropped out of sight. So “steal your face” is being used fairly literally in the sense of being a thief. And I’d been thinking of it terms of the cosmic cycle of life and death eventually “stealing” my fleshy face off my head and leaving—a grinning skull, as suggested by the album cover image below.

“In the land of the night, the ship of the sun is drawn by the grateful dead.”