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How to be August without really trying.

How long did I spend deciding to write this blog? Ten minutes. “Should I write about what’s going on?” I asked Gayle. “Actually talk about money. How many bloggers talk about their money situations unless they are dispensing advice, or buffing their prosperity hair before heading out to brunch. Lunch. Coffee. Whatever. Who talks about the crap one goes through? Should I do that?

Is there a speck of value here for people?” “Hmm. It’s a bold thing to do,” says she. Leaving the decision, of course, to me.

There is a certain amount of fakery going on. Ask someone how things are going. The most frequent answer I get is, ” Well, yeah, OK, though things are pretty tough out there.”

No shit.

Another thing. Do I protect the wicked? How about the innocent? Perhaps I’ll do it the way I do just about everything. Make it up as I go along. It isn’t an entirely blase way to read life. It’s a working method. Process. It all comes out of the same pot of stew, the way my life hums. And given my current circumstances, I am not doing it well.

Yes, unemployed. It’s a depression. Sometimes I envy those with jobs. Monday is my favorite day of the week. One weekend, I’d like to know what’s going to happen on Monday. Sometimes I am frightened, really frightened. It passes. I am sitting and standing, no prosthetics, no cancer or heart disease. I am one lucky guy. I have a beautiful wife. I have two amazing dogs. And I have, with increasing frequency an unease in my chest.

Right off, a few relevant details. I don’t drink and have not had a drink in almost eighteen years. I don’t smoke. I have no problem with discipline in getting work made. I work without thinking about it as work. Working on images is the most relaxing activity because it is so focused and in some kind of zone. The world cannot hurt me when I am making images.

I have a problem getting paid. I’m not the stupidest brick in the wall. I read books, magazines, blogs, newspapers, opinions. Advice. Business stories. Love them. How the titans did it. What on earth goes on in Richard Branson’s head? I have a fascination about how the major success stories happen. I grew up without television and was twenty two tears old when I owned my first TV. Thank you South Africa, for being the second last country on the planet to give your population television. I think India was last.  So reading goes back to my crib. Nothing like a great new book, or a short burst of wit and wisdom from an online voice.

“You are SO talented, I hear, nearly day in day out. I am sick of it. Oh, the compliment sits well with me, but my inner voice answers, “So?”

I am broke. I have been broke for a year. No, eighteen months. Not two grand in the bank broke. Ten dollars for the weekend broke.

And this is the part that might be taboo. So I’ll dance with it African style. Personal finance is kept to oneself. Do not discuss politics or money or religion. Well religion I don’t care about, I got that squared away years ago. Politics was great sport during the election. Now it’s just an argument and the public is pissed off. Politics is too big, it has fallen off the table and made a mess on the floor. Too many cleaners and salesmen, too big a government. I leave it there. But my bank balance? Hey, that’s no one’s business.

Which is why I am going to write this blog and attach pictures that have absolutely nothing to do with the content. Because I take pictures, thousands of them, and this is where I’ll post them. I’ll write this blog because we are at point zero. From here there is only beginning. There is no end here, just the starting. I have absolutely no idea where this blog will go because I have no idea where tomorrow is going. Yes I know no-one does either, but if you have had a job for thirty years and a cubicle and there are no signs you are being let go Friday, well, maybe you have just a little more wiggle-room than I at this moment. If you are in this position, count yourself lucky and work very hard. You need your job.

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By Howard Stein – February 23, 2010

Moving DOON

For the third time in a year we will move house. We tried two small towns of upper New York State including the beautiful lower Hudson Valley, but sadly,  they are filled with transparent buildings, one empty store after another. We also found out a thing or two about internet marketing and making money working purely online. We followed the some sage advice only to find it lacked the right flavor for our soup. There is little expertise to follow. We beat our own path and right now, face to face contact, in the design business it seems, is essential. So we spiral back to our roots, older, wiser, with some hard earned lessons won. New York offers opportunity and we hope to plant ourselves on its doorstep, a quick train ride from Grand Central. We will do our best work ever.

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By Howard Stein – February 22, 2010

Who opened for Who?

Just found this link via a short film Hillman Curtis did with David Byrne and Brian Eno. It’s not easy, for me at least to hear Eno’s full contribution,though it seems to affect all the sound. I am a huge David Byrne fan. Back in the day, Talking Heads played Central Park, double billing or opening for The Ramones, or did the B-52’s open for Talking Heads? It’s awhile ago, a perfect summer afternoon. I was outside the arena, as always, on my roller skates. Byrne’s energy never flagged and he continued to surprise and amaze me. Listen up at Everything That Happens20070912-2007L8841215.

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By Howard Stein – February 20, 2010

Mistress, master, monster

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. — Winston Churchill

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By Howard Stein – February 10, 2010

Break for café

With most things, less is achieved by doing them in a hurry. Take breathing. Breathing slowly and correctly can make such a profound difference to how one feels, we forget it is us who are being breathed. Sometimes tasks jump up for attention. A phone message heard on the machine, hurriedly returned and later a little reflection reveals a better way of how the conversation could have been handled. The world spins faster now. Mostly garbage in, garbage out. I try to take the time to pause and consider, and then when I find I’ve overlooked something, been afraid to assert myself and made an ill-informed decision, I berate myself, which only makes things seem to go faster. Sometimes I just don’t ask for help. I can do it faster myself. I liked the expression that it’s easy to look back and connect the dots to predict the past. Now Gayle and I are once more future bound. We are not cruising, we are bumping along and the future is a fog. So it is. The folly of expecting certainty. Break for café.

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By Howard Stein – February 8, 2010

The love of illustration.

No, it’s not art. For the most part it is not art. But what could one call an illustrator but an artist? No question about that. It’s odd. One can bullshit one’s way in photography. One can bullshit one’s way in real fine art, in real museums and galleries. But it’s really hard to bullshit in illustration. I’m thrilled to see my old love making a return with a vengeance. Perhaps it is because the great visual form of photography has become so bastardized. Our visual tolerance for photography is boundless. Some people need the highest quality HD flat panel from a specialist store in order to watch television and movies. But that same person looks at a police car chase through a grainy jerking dashcam with the same intensity as the newest epic movie rental. More so. Something about real danger, real events and the medium becomes secondary, the camera work incidental. Illustration sprays itself across the world’s surfaces with glee, invading every crevice of our visual culture. But for the most part this is one visual field where one does need years of training. Self-taught illustrators are few, great ones a rare breed. An architect might be found designing a new bag for LVMH, a fashion designer produces new work standing behind a camera, our visual culture is in an amazing exciting phase of cross pollination and flux. And in there is inserted the illustrator, part graphic designer, part fine artist, but seldom is it the other way round. Not many photographers simply produce a portfolio of illustration. It’s too hard. It takes years, even the intervention of the computer meant one could not take one’s eye off the drawn line or shape, and one’s hand learned how to do it with a drawing tablet or mouse. It is a fabulous profession, filled with great intellects and wits, philosophers, gentlemen, comedians, clowns and louts. Take a pause next time when coming upon an illustration that grabs you and give it the few moments it deserves. Illustration is not a field that hides or veils its effort. Usually all the years of observation and practice, even in other media, are apparent. It is one of the more transparent of professions. I’ve checked back in.

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By Howard Stein – December 30, 2009

Reasons for Watching

I never know. So I began a new series of illustrations, and posted them on a new site and called it DOONFACE. Serve up portraits of ordinary people in simple jobs or powerful occupations. Their wives, kids and pets. I can draw them all.

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By Howard Stein – December 22, 2009

A Blade of Glass

In New York City glass tells and hides stories. Constantly moving outside, a still-life inside, and the window is a screen, a barrier, a doorway inviting one in or keeping one out. To photograph windows one needs the right position, the right light, the right timing. And the right choices. Then an image can be made. It is the city of glass, and stories, layered, transient, like a river, no window is ever the same twice. The better the window display work the better bones for the river, but few window designers think outside their box. They consider only the looking in.
In New York it is more likely one sees the outside world in a window before what’s behind the glass. Nothing behind any window has ever surpassed the parade outside it. Glass is a servant of the city. It changes the mechanism of watching, as if watching dual realities, dueling realities, no directors, no actors, just a world within and a world without, both oblivious
and dependent until night, and the fight of light, and I have tried to see this in other cities, but nothing captures like New York glass.

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By Howard Stein – December 20, 2009

Looking for windows

It’s that brisk or biting time of year again, after a good snowing, all is piled high by the plows and banked and in some places blackened with car grease and road exhaust. Everyone is responsible for his little patch of snow in front of his house or shop. But that leaves little blinding mountains between these shops which no owner owns and therefore does not tread. So one does little mincing and hopping movements like an insect or circumnavigates and as New Paltz has no pedestrian rights, no honking is necessary before the innocent are plowed down.

Now.

Should one opt for a sedan-type car or a four wheel drive SUV-type car. One should only care so much about a car, after which one is simply being childish. There is little romance in cars today, despite the flashy sweeps of the designers dream, by the time they hit the road they all look the same. As a suddenly carless person, I am looking at the roads and parking lots as veritable window shopping. I think one factor is serviceability nearby. And perhaps snow. How snow capable does a vehicle really need to be. Seems there might be a conceit here I can easily bypass. So.

A Lamborghini might need to be driven for an hour or two to find a computer that will read its ills. I am just thinking. But a Honda can probably pop into the nearest Speedy or Midas or Jiffy where the parts are in a drawer or on a shelf. This is obviously not an area of expertise for me. Gas mileage should be quite good but not to be politically correct, one must be careful to make it relevant purely for rational reasons, an attempt at being frugal or responsible. Or not bother about that fact at all. If people want to drive huge trucks that get six miles to the gallon I see no problem. European cars can be a joy to drive and a pain to own in the US. Pity we cannot include Peugeot and Citroen and Fiat  and Alfa Romeo in our window shopping. Fantastic cars, and we have to be content with copies by Toyota or Nissan and Honda. I hear Subaru’s are very good cars. Pity they are among the ugliest cars on the road. Big Ford 150’s are great. Utterly American. I just don’t need one. What will I put in the back? Japanese cars lack just about everything that might appeal to the heart but they do appear to be improving stylistically and are apparently reliable. Aren’t most cars cars reliable today? The Lamborghini is possibly quite unreliable, a racehorse that is always catching a cold. So it’s walking and window shopping. In the north east in december. What do I own?

Someone just wrote that everything is a rental for the space we take up here whilst we live on earth. I don’t, therefore, own anything.  Maybe I own my dogs, because without me or my wife, they could not live. Sure someone else could feed them, but that’s theory. We are a pack, Gayle, me, DOON and Willow. Gayle and I are responsible for them because they care that we are their owners. This much they tell us. Can’t say that about a car or computer. One might own children to a point, I don’t know. A twelve year old can work, it has happened in the past, it has. If one fills a blank journal with writing, does one own it? If not, to whom does it belong? Once filled no-one can use it. Unless they publish it of course. That is not ownership, that’s commerce. Sometimes one is surprised at how temporary our belongings are.

They don’t even belong to us. Just the thought, itself, is temporary.

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By Howard Stein – December 14, 2009

A Jacket in Every Pocket

How many times have I cursed changing into a jacket without a notebook in the pocket before walking out the door? Often. Usually to walk the dogs. Just a phrase, a title, a visual idea, it slides into my mind from nowhere and I hang on to it for dear life walking DOON and Willow home, lest it be gone when I reach my desk. The same thing happens with the camera. If I walk the dogs without a camera, a good picture appears. With the camera hanging from my neck, my chances are about 70-30 I’ll not see a photograph worth taking. But the habit is mandatory. Carry the camera, and pen and paper. Day or night. Dogs or no dogs. And write whatever comes in. For it never needs to go back out.

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By Howard Stein – November 25, 2009