Giving Thanks (for the last time in the naughts)

A few shots from Thanksgiving day in Harlem.

Katherine’s mother gave her a special Thanksgiving bowl for the mashed potatoes, and she shows it off here with Josephine.

Charlie made the salad.

Grace was invoked as a lovely Quaker hymn sung to guitar accompaniment.

I was grateful for not being put on the spot to say what I’m grateful for. And I was also grateful to have a place at the table next to young Lee, who preferred Cheerios over Turkey.

iPhone Photos from a Brooklyn Walk

A few shots from a walk from my Gowanus apartment to the Brooklyn Promenade and DUMBO.

A Wedding BBQ and the Harp Returns Home

The harp needed to come home.

Last weekend, I returned to some of my old haunts in Atlanta, including the neighborhood where I once owned a house.

The occasion was a wedding celebration for Lee & Pete, who hosted a BBQ, complete with a backyard fire and live band, at their house in southeast Atlanta.

While in town, I had a lovely brunch with friends and a nice walk in Lullwater park with Bradley, who I hadn’t seen in a long time.

I also got to spend some time Mike and Terry, and celebrated when I got home and found out that Mike is free from cancer following a months-long fight that included radiation and chemotherapy.

And I retrieved the harp.

In the late 90s, when I was traveling in South America, I fell in love with the music of the Andes, the pan flutes and gut-string guitars, and never tired of hearing the ensembles playing on the streets and in restaurants. I even enjoyed what was likely hundreds of renditions of “El Condor Pasa” during my four months there. In our final week of a year-long adventure, we spent several days in a Peruvian mountain town where I saw a beautiful, hand-crafted harp in the window of a music store.

On a bit of a crazy whim, I bought it. I imagined myself mastering the Andean harp and coming back to Peru one day to surprise the locals with my prowess.

To get it home, I stuffed it in the luggage area of the bus back to Lima. We encased it in cardboard and tape and, at the airport, wrapped it in plastic wrap, like the luggage you see on the carousels at JFK from flights arriving from far-flung lands.

Though I never learned to play it — its strange tuning was alien to my ears — the harp held a prominent corner position in that little house in Atlanta. When I moved to New York, I knew it was too big for most places I could afford to live. Lee offered to keep it for me, and it sat in one of her guest bedrooms for nearly 8 years.

After celebrating the beginning of Lee’s new life with Pete, I realized it was time for the harp to come home. I took to the UPS store, where Chip, behind the counter, said “it looks like you brought us a challenge.”

I spent four times as much as I paid for the harp to ship it to New York. Now I just have to find a corner for it to rest itself here in the Gowanus bachelor pad.

It’s what they call a conversation piece.

 

Captain Patrick Harris: One in Eight Million

Those of you who read this blog regularly may remember my photos and thoughts about my voyages over the years on The Ventura, a 1919 hunting yacht refurbished and owned by Captain Pat Harris. I’ve enjoyed a dozen or more harbor cruises on his beautiful single-masted sailboat. And my friends Kathryn and Jeff got married on The Ventura a couple of weeks ago. Captain Pat officiated.

I’m a big fan of the New York Times multimedia series called One in Eight Million, which profiles the fascinating characters who populate this city of 8 million inhabitants. Last week, I was happy to see a familiar face among them. Captain Pat was profiled with great photos by Todd Heisler.

The Shuttle Atlantis Rolls Over

Last Tuesday, I got up before dawn to arrive at NASA to shoot the crews moving the space shuttle Atlantis from a hangar to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) where it would be fitted to the external tank and solid rocket boosters in advance of a November launch.

As the sun rose and the air heated up on an unseasonably hot October morning, the shuttle rolled along at a snail’s pace, on top of a specially designed truck.

Dozens of people were there to watch the roll over, and their enthusiasm was infectious. To launch a shuttle, it takes teams of people to handle everything from the mission and payload, to the tiles that protect the vehicle from extreme heat on re-entry. And folks from all the various elements of the mission came to watch this journey of a hundred yards.

Some held banners for photos in front of the orbiter as it inched toward the VAB.

Inside the VAB, the shuttle is fitted into a harness and lifted off the truck.

Cranes, operated from a booth more than 400 feet above the VAB floor, will lift the shuttle up 16 stories and over to the waiting tank and booster assembly.

I was there to interview the crane operator in the VAB. That story releases Friday, when I’ll tell you all about it.

The Axis of Video

Every year, when the United Nations General Assembly meets in New York, and heads of state buzz around the city in black cars and helicopters, two things are certain: New Yorkers will grouse about street closings on the east side of midtown Manhattan as a consequence of heightened security; and world leaders will make their rounds among the major journalistic organizations in the nation’s media capital to get some face time in the news.

This week, TIME reporters and editors were fortunate to have exclusive interviews with former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (who will be TIME’s 10 Questions interviewee in next week’s edition), Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

On Thursday morning, the day after Gaddafi’s rambling, 90-minute diatribe in front of the GA, I accompanied two of TIME’s top editors to meet the man his handlers said was to be referred to as “brother leader.” That’s easier to say out loud than King of Kings, which is the former Libyan army officer’s latest self-proclaimed moniker. (I have long wondered why this man, who has been in power since a 1969 coup when he was an army captain, has remained a colonel and never promoted himself to general.)

His staff was curious about the video camera for a magazine interview, which is pretty common. People still don’t grasp that there is practically no such thing as a print-only publication anymore. Perceptions are slowly changing. There was a Libyan TV crew there as well, documenting the Brother Leader’s every meeting. So they allowed me to shoot — at least for a few minutes. Six minutes into the interview, one of brother-leader Gaddafi’s top handlers began pointing to his watch. A few minutes later, Gaddafi said, in English, “you must stop.” I stalled to try to have a conversation about continuing, but the handlers began unplugging the audio cables from my camera and pushing me away from the scene. The editors were allowed to continue their interview, and Gaddafi became more relaxed — now that the cameras were gone — and they chatted for a half-hour longer.

Later that afternoon, Kofi Annan was warm and gracious, and had come to our offices to do the 10 Questions interview in a three-camera shoot.

Rockets and the Weekly Acoustic News

Been a busy week at the “things that move and make noise” department at TIME.com. Producer Caitlin Thompson and host Katherine Lanpher continue to create an informative and engaging financial toolkit podcast every week. This week, TIME columnist Justin Fox and reporter Barbara Kiviat joined Katherine this week to discuss the week’s business news. The main topic is the lessons from Lehman Bros., a year after the collapse of that financial titan.

David Clair is getting his groove on, and he’s on a roll. He’s a month and a half into his Weekly Acoustic News series, and on nine-nineteen-two-thousand-nine he is seeing Biblical signs in the week’s news.

This past week, Ze Frank took on the rash of disrespectful acts in the news recently.

Ron Paul answered viewer questions.

And I’ve finished the last two of the four stories I shot at Burning Man. Barbara Traub’s photos from 1994 show a more austere Burning Man, in the days when the participants numbered in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands, and the Man himself, stood directly on the desert floor, not on a giant, decorated pedestal. I added her to the series of pieces on iconic photos.

And one of the most prominent art pieces at this year’s event was the Raygun Gothic Rocketship, a forty foot-tall metallic rocket in a retro design out of 1930s sci-fi serials like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. I spoke to one of the artists.

5 Things Cities Can Learn from Burning Man

Here’s the major opus from Black Rock City, newly posted on TIME.com. After chatting with Burning Man executive director Larry Harvey, I gleaned 5 things Burning Man accomplishes every year that other cities might try. Things like: getting cars out of downtown areas and creating pedestrian space; making people more responsible to pick up after themselves; promoting virtue, even if you have to shame people into it; rethinking commerce; and supporting artists.

Of course it’s a lot easier when your city is made from scratch every year and is only inhabited for a week.

Still, food for thought.

Dusty in the Black Rock Desert

Here’s me, all dusty, trying to shoot during a sand storm at Burning Man (photo by Barbara Traub)

And below are shots of me with Dusty, my hobby horse, crafted with loving care by the amazing Ann Wood and named after my father’s old horse.

The horse/camera was a disarming ploy at Burning Man, where the participants are wary of the media and weary of all the cameras that cover this annual festival of craziness in the desert each year.

But how could you be angry at such a sweet little horse? Talk to the horsey!

I’ll explain later…

The beautiful handiwork of the delightful and talented Ann Wood, will be put to work later this week. I’ll explain how later.