About Face: Old Pictures

I'm planning on putting the Seattle posts up here in the morning, but didn't want to lead the day (for my few regular readers) with discussions the nature of which concerns the previous piece.

I found a few old pictures from the Fourth of July in 2009. I think they look kinda cool. In the first you can see how I appeared at that time and place in the world. We were living in Brooklyn, my hair newly short, and I still smoked. In the picture I'm outside our west-side Manhattan bar, Lansdowne Road, watching the fireworks go off over the Hudson River between the buildings, which is the next picture. The ladies behind me are also looking at something off in the distance:



The way the fireblooms looked between the buildings was too tempting to pass up trying to photograph, but even the most minor jostle makes the streaking pyrotechnics look feathery and soft:



Murphy's was our east-side Manhattan bar, while O'Keefe's was our downtown Brooklyn bar. Out of a gigantic city with fifteen-thousand bars, that we had three separate places that knew us is either a testament to our drinking, or to the way in which the pub acts as the place where public life happens in a place as crowded as it is.

I'll have a touch more on that subject--pubs and bars--in a bit.