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Tasha, Sep '16 #contaxt2 #blackandwhite #nofilter #film #35mm

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Boscombe Bay, August '16

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190 Bowery - New York City

It’s the American Dream as a house, a building that went from rags to riches on a street once known for its murders, now known for its centrality. Photographer Jay Maisel broke the bank when he bought the bank in 1966 for $102,000. Back then, the Bowery wasn’t a place you went so much as ended up, and the main floor (now a basketball court) was allegedly knee-deep in garbage and coated in soot, with “every single thing that can come out of a human body” left on the doorstep. Maisel’s parents cried.

Today, the bohemian castle may look deceptively decrepit on the outside, but inside it’s a dream. A home-made ventilation system (to deter the insane expense of what central air would cost in such a space) consists of a network of plastic tubing throughout the building. The original 1898 copper cage elevator still works, the second and third floor are gallery spaces, the fifth floor has various workshops (including a room dedicated to Mylar-window shades), the sixth floor has bedrooms, bathrooms, and the kitchen, and the roof a wowing view of lower Manhattan.

While you’re at it, why not take lessons from Maisel? Details on 190 Bowery’s photography studio at Atlas Obscura…

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Horselover Fat’s nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself. She was calling everyone she knew. By now she had fifty of them, but she needed thirty or forty more, to be on the safe side.

At once Horselover Fat leaped to the conclusion that this was her way of asking for help. It had been Fat’s delusion for years that he could help people. His psychiatrist once told him that to get well he would have to do two things: get off dope (which he hadn’t done) and to stop trying to help people (he still tried to help people).

As a matter of fact, he had no Nembutals. He had no sleeping pills of any sort. He never did sleeping pills. He did uppers. So giving Gloria sleeping pills by which she could kill herself was beyond his power. Anyhow, he wouldn’t have done it if he could.

‘I have ten,’ he said. Because if he told her the truth she would hang up.

‘Then I’ll drive up to your place,’ Gloria said in a rational, calm voice, the same tone in which she had asked for the pills.

He realized then that she was not asking for help. She was trying to die. She was completely crazy. If she were sane she would realize that it was necessary to veil her purpose, because this way she made him guilty of complicity. For him to agree, he would need to want her dead. No motive existed for him – or anyone – to want that. Gloria was gentle and civilized, but she dropped a lot of acid. It was obvious that the acid, since he had last heard from her six months ago, had wrecked her mind.

Valis. Philip K. Dick.

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Cat, April '16

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Festival of Cats, April '16

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Cat, April '16

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Cats, April '16

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Sandra G, Islington, March 2016

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Niece, Paris, Oct '15

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Paris, Hampstead Heath, Oct '15

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Keys, sunglasses

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Natasha

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The capital’s only micro weaver: London Cloth Co’s Daniel Harris

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Style icon now and forever

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Boules tournament, Les Vans, France

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Barcelona at night