Thomas Locke Hobbs' Weblog

2003-06-27T11:46:00.000-03:00

ThomasLockeHobbs.com is my new photo-weblog. All new updates will be there.

2003-02-12T14:31:00.000-03:00

LA Freeway Interchanges on Lightningfield. Pictures like this make me homesick for California--no kidding.

2003-02-12T13:04:00.000-03:00

Station to Station, Photos by Lisa Gidley Each photo in this series was taken within a block of a different station in the New York City subway system. [via Photojunkie]

2003-02-07T17:34:00.000-03:00

Tel Aviv Bauhaus (via Blog the Bog)

2003-01-17T16:13:00.000-03:00

Photographs of Alice Austen. 1890s New York.

2003-01-15T10:09:00.000-03:00

Caracas Chronicles, a weblog in English by local journalist, Francisco Toro. Mr. Toro wrote freelance for the New York Times but recently quit because of his activism in the Opposition to Chavez' rule. The blog is great reporting and very lucid, particularly this post about the reality distortion field surrounding foreign press and their ability to make sense of the situation in Venezuela: "Foreign papers don’t quite know how to deal with [Venezuela's] complex reality".

2003-01-11T22:50:00.000-03:00

PATH Train Progress at Ground Zero. Try to find the Two Towers' Footprints. So much for sacred groud.

2003-01-08T14:31:00.000-03:00

Latin America in 2003, Morgan Stanley. (via Beautiful Horizons)

2003-01-03T18:22:00.000-03:00

Business Card Drawings by Hugh MacLeod, via memepool.com.

2002-12-30T19:15:00.000-03:00

Colorful photos of Holland

2002-12-30T15:56:00.000-03:00

Beautiful Horizons / Belo Horizonte. Weblog by American in Brazil.

2002-12-30T15:55:00.000-03:00

10 Facts About Beaujolais Nouveau

2002-12-09T17:07:00.000-03:00

Midtown under 400ft. of Water. Wired New York.

2002-11-05T18:09:00.000-03:00

Food Lover's expedition to the Lower East Side, Epinions.

2002-11-04T18:52:00.000-03:00

Wright Morris was a novelist and photographer. His work is somewhere between Walker Evans and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Right now there's an excellent exhibit at the Stanford Museum of his work.

2002-11-04T15:44:00.000-03:00

Jared Diamond on the Evolution of Religion [NYRB]. massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world

2002-10-29T19:02:00.000-03:00

Warren Buffet Hagiography from Fortune. Also see articles from 2001 and 1999.

2002-10-29T14:53:00.000-03:00

Vilhelm Hammershoi, Danish painter of light and solitude [in Danish, presumably but the best pics I could find online]. A little like Vermeer.

2002-10-16T15:39:00.000-03:00

Daniel Isengart is a cabaret signer who does songs from the 1930s in French and German. I saw him last night at Starlight in the East Village [167 Ave. A, btw. 10th & 11th]. He sings there on Tuesdays at 10pm accompanied by an acordion player. It was quite good. I'd recommend going.

2002-10-09T10:59:00.000-03:00

Urbanlens, photographs and descriptions of abandoned sites in and around New York.

2002-10-04T18:36:00.000-03:00

Shots from the Hip, by Ken Heyman.

2002-10-02T15:19:00.000-03:00

SkyScraperPage. Diagrams of the world's tallest buildings. Super coool!

2002-09-30T15:16:00.000-03:00

Vintage Signage, Greenpoint Brooklyn, courtesy of BrooklynKid.

2002-09-27T13:59:00.000-03:00

Simon Ladefoged. Danish Photographer. Scandanavian banality.

2002-09-27T13:52:00.000-03:00

WTC Architecture Rant from the New Republic.

2002-09-26T13:24:00.000-03:00

Art Deco Buildings on Bronx's Grand Concourse, nice photos and good history of a fascinating section of the Bronx, the website also has good pictures of art deco buildings in upper manhattan

2002-09-20T14:11:00.000-03:00

Brasilia under construction, photos from the late 1950's.

2002-09-20T10:54:00.000-03:00

Yucatan photos, by photographer Robert Hansen. I really like this picture of a small town plaza in the fog

2002-09-18T11:27:00.000-03:00

LVMH Tower, Cool Pics on 57th St. in Manhattan, via the ever cool Architecture forum at WiredNewYork.com

2002-09-16T17:23:00.000-03:00

Etymology of the Smiley :-) (via Dan Gillmor)

2002-09-13T17:48:00.000-03:00

Argentinaahhh, a cute picture showing how things are these days in Argentina, from a local weblog.

2002-09-06T09:27:00.000-03:00

Small-town meetings, large scale photographs, by Paul Shambroom. Currently on view at the Julie Saul Gallery in NYC. [not bad for an artist's website but it's annoying how poor most professional photographer's web presence is]

2002-09-03T14:22:00.000-03:00

Cave Photo, no natural light, lit with flashlights.

2002-08-30T08:04:00.000-03:00

Co-Op City, Bronx. Aerial View. [i'll probably overload this guy's bandwidth limit]

2002-08-29T14:03:00.000-03:00

Pedestrian Friendly Cities, in 10 easy steps (Metropolis Magazine)

2002-08-27T09:08:00.000-03:00

Cemetaries in Warsaw and pictuers of the Polish landscape. [a photo gallery]

2002-08-18T13:41:00.000-03:00

Graffitti in Buenos Aires

Taken July 2002. Protesting government's freezing of bank accounts and bond exchange plans.

2002-08-18T13:23:00.000-03:00

Two good blogs on Latin America: El Sur, which has news analysis and Treasaigh, which is by an American living in Buenos Aires.

2002-08-14T08:53:00.000-03:00

I've become a daily reader of Brad DeLong's weblog, lucid economic analysis, frequently updated.

2002-07-30T08:29:00.000-03:00

Financial Times - Americas has by far the best Latin American news section of any major news paper.

2002-07-28T15:28:00.000-03:00

Brad Delong has short but good analysis of Argentina's Crisis: Cavallo's Dollar-Peso link was doomed from the start because of unresolved conficts in the country's political system.

2002-07-15T13:32:00.000-03:00

Granta 77: What we Think of America. Essays by foreign writers, some are available online.

2002-06-19T14:18:00.000-03:00

MTA's guide to Subway Art. Mediocre pictures but a decent guide if you're into that. (Via Lightningfield, of course)

2002-06-10T12:03:00.000-03:00

Bootlegs of Contemporary Art, by Eric Doeringer. Canal St. moves to Chelsea. (via bloggy)

2002-06-10T11:08:00.000-03:00

Underground Typography, signage and fonts on subways, with much discussion of New York.

2002-06-07T17:39:00.000-03:00

Photos of Brasilia: one and two. Scanned from the New Yorker. Taken by Robert Polidori [who's job i would love to have].

2002-06-07T17:10:00.000-03:00

Detroit's Ruined Central Station. An article from Metropolis with some great photographs. Also relevant a site documenting the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit (w/ photos by Robert Polidori).

2002-06-05T13:06:00.000-03:00

10 Transit Myths about Los Angeles. Also compared, LA rail transit in 1910 and 2002.

2002-05-29T13:57:00.000-03:00

The Name-O-Meter tracks a name's popularity across decades. Its fascinating to see the surges of popularity correspond with relatives' birthdays like Jerry, Laurel, and Helen.

2002-05-29T13:54:00.000-03:00

More photos of Sao Paulo. (again from photo.net)

2002-05-16T14:31:00.000-03:00

Amazing, amazing photos of Brazil, by Paulo Pampolin.

2002-05-12T22:46:00.000-03:00

Interesting weblog: Brooklynese.com.

2002-05-09T09:11:00.000-03:00

I put up a short page of photography tips, primarily for point-and-shoot users.

2002-05-07T14:33:00.000-03:00

I love the minimalist design of Paul Krugman's web page

2002-05-01T09:38:00.000-03:00

On weird first names in Brazil (eg. Etelvina , Gutembergue, Raymilson, Oflar, Edval, etc)

2002-04-05T15:02:00.000-03:00

Photos of the Towers of Light, from up close [by quarlo]

2002-03-30T21:14:00.000-03:00

Pictures of Mexico City, and more, including buildings and fountains

2002-03-25T22:42:00.000-03:00

Richard Misrach has an exhibition of photos of a flooded Nevada desert.

It's at 210 Robert Mann (210 11th Ave. at 25th St. in Manhattan) thru April 27, 2001

2002-03-24T06:28:00.000-03:00

Paul Goldberg on Architecture

Paul Goldberg writes for the New Yorker on issues relating to architecture. Recently I've enjoyed a couple of his pieces:

The rebranding of 745 7th Ave.. This is a skyscraper near Times Square notable for it's facade of LCD displays plastered along the lower floors of the building. The display is meant to be abstract but when the building was sold from Morgan Stanley to Lehman brothers, certain changes were in order. Click for some pictures and more pictures

745 7th Ave.

On Prada and Toys R Us, two stores which use flashy architecture to please the masses and disguise the fact that their respective spaces are dark, musty, Manhattan grottos.

2002-03-15T13:01:00.000-03:00

David Hockney's Secret Knowledge

David Hockney's book, Secret Knowledge,claiming the wide-spread use of mirrors, lenses and other optical devices in European painting is a great read. The theory is very convincing. The color reproductions are fantastic. The text is concise and to the point. The juxtapositions [Ingres and Worhol, Hockney and Van Eyck] are a joy.

Reading the book engaged me with the paintings, forced me to notice their details, in a way that a catalog or monograph would not. Knowing that Caravaggio used lenses to project images of his models takes nothing from my appreciation of his work.

Pearblossom Highway by David Hockney

If you can't read the book or [even better] see the old masters' paintings in museums, you can read two articles by Lawrence Wenschler. The first, published in the New Yorker, describes the beginnings of Hockney's discoveries. The second, from ArtKrush, was published a year later and chronicled later discoveries. Wenschler is very readable and the second article has many details and reproductions from the book. It's a good summary.

2002-03-11T01:26:00.000-03:00

Kay Hassan

PS1 is a contemporary art museum in Queens with a current exhibit on contemporary African art. This work below, by South African artist Kay Hassan redeemed the entire show for me. It's a collage made of scraps of billboard paper. From a distance it looks like an excavated fresco from a lost, colorful civilization. Neither the thumbnail, nor the larger version it links to do it much justice.

[click for larger version]

You can also read this good interview with the artist. Amazon also has a book on Hassan. The photographs of Seydou Keita, a photographer from Mali, were also a highlight.

2002-03-07T15:52:00.000-03:00

Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photograhper who produces large prints of incredible detail [i'm guessing with an 8x10 view camera] of things like Bangladeshi Shipbreakers, Californian Tire Dumps, and Compacted Cars.

2002-02-25T01:34:00.000-03:00

Partially Erased Chalkboards.

2002-01-03T15:24:00.000-03:00

Minimalist photos of Icebergs by Lynn Davis, one of which graces the print edition of this new yorker article on icebergs and global warming.

2001-12-10T23:45:00.000-03:00

Catherine Opie is a photographer who as done series of houses in Beverly Hills [pic1, pic2], LA Freeways [pic1, pic2, pic3], female-to-male transsexuals [pic], and panoramics of Wall St..

The last I saw at a gallery this weekend in Tribeca. The first two, as a Californian, fascinate me as subjects and I wish I'd been around for these earlier gallery shows. Unfortunately the presentation of Opie's pictures on the web suck. Is it that hard to put up a few good slide scans? You can also read a good, brief overview of her work.

2001-11-26T18:27:00.000-03:00

Un Ladron Que No Quiso Bonos. Clarin.

In the Argentine province of Chaco a robber entered a bakery. When he saw that the box was filled with government scrip he shouted, "¿Quién quiere esa porquería?", which I would translate as "who wants this shit?". Provincial governments in Argentina are basically broke and many pay their civil servants and pensioners in government bonds--scrip. Many stores don't accept scrip, others only partially for purchases. The irony of a theif who didn't want government scrip wasn't lost on anyone.

2001-11-23T17:21:00.000-03:00

Friends of the High Line, a group dedicated to saving an elevated freight railway that runs along Manhattan's west-side. The site includes a gorgeous slide show depicting New York's changing seasons as seen from the long un-used railway.

2001-11-23T16:53:00.000-03:00

Graffiti Painted Subway Cars from the early 1980s. Imagine standing on the platform and this pulls up. NYC must have been a strange place back then.

2001-11-23T16:41:00.000-03:00

4th Ave IND Elevated Station. The subway station I use to go into Manhattan is an "art-deco masterpiece."

2001-11-16T14:10:00.000-03:00

ABC Rock Argentino. Letras, historias, links, rankings. I found it looking for the lyrics to one of my favorite songs by Charly Garcia.

2001-11-14T18:22:00.000-03:00

Here is New York is a gallery exhibit of pictures of the World Trade Center Disaster. It is a mix of professional and amateur shots. The prints are from an Epson inkjet and can be purchased for $25 with the proceeds donated to charity. I bought this photo, which shows the interior of the Brooks Brothers across the street. This was roughly where I was standing when the second plane hit the south tower (you can see my photos of the disaster). Of course this picture was taken after the collapse, by that time I was well into Brooklyn.

I'm not sure what I'll do with this photo. On the one hand I'm entranced by its beauty but I could never imagine putting it up on my wall. I suppose I get a nice matte and frame for it and just stick it somewhere in the closet, taking it out from time to time to take a look at it.

While I'm on the subject of the WTC disaster, Colson Whitehead's essay in the NY Times Magazine this week brought tears to my eyes while I read it last night on the subway.

2001-11-14T15:19:00.000-03:00

Internet Cafes are the new Peep Shows (In Islamabad)

From this week's Slate Diary from Islamabad (which is an excellent read in many other ways), the author describes the dynamic in the city's internet cafes:

Though TV stations censor kisses out of Western movies and prohibition is the rule, the city has a veritable glut of these Internet stores, which all have the look of peep-show arcades. Every computer to a booth, every monitor facing the wall. The carrels even have closing doors. The place oozes porniness.

In Arica a city in the far north of Chile, I remember the net cafes there had curtains around each station.

2001-11-13T17:54:00.000-03:00

Commemorative Quarters

The best designs are those which depict an event or icon and use the whole surface of the quarter. The worst are those that just stick on the geographical shape of the state. Virginia's is sublime. Here's a list of all commemorative quarters in circulation.

2001-11-06T18:19:00.000-03:00

Amazing Aerial Photos of Burning Man

Click for more photos

2001-11-01T10:57:00.000-03:00

User Interface of NYC Subway

Lars Pinds, a programmer, has a series of essays on his website analysing (and criticising) different aspects of New York City's subway system from a user interface and usability perspective. They include:

2001-11-01T10:49:00.000-03:00

New York City Subway Map (circa 1972), (today)

2001-10-24T12:09:00.000-03:00

Kite Aerial Photography. You attach a rig with a small camera to a kite. Pictures from a new perspective. Now I want to learn how to fly a kite.

2001-10-23T15:20:00.000-03:00

2001-10-19T14:24:00.000-03:00

Eduardo Galeano on Authority

In remote times women sat in the bow of the canoe and men in the stern. It was the women who hunted and fished. They left the villages and returned when they could or wanted. The men built the huts, prepared the meals, kept the fires burning against the cold, minded the children, and tanned skins for clothes.
Such was life for the Ona and Yagan Indians in Tierra del Fuego, until one day the men killed all the women and put on the masks that the women had inveted to scare them.
Only newborn girls were spared extermination. While they grew up, the murderers kept repeating to them that serving men was their destiny. They believed it. Their daughters believed it, too, likewise the daughters of their daughters.

From The Memory of Fire, vol. 1.

2001-10-12T14:40:00.000-03:00

Another Thomas Hobbes

A little while ago I recieved the following email:

I have a report for my 10th grade English class that deals with your treatise titled 'Leviathan.' We are supposed to say what your first principal of human behavior is and how it relates to the novel Lord of the Flies. I cannot find anything about your treatise, so can you please give me some information about it. THank you.

I think he's looking for somebody else.

2001-10-05T19:13:00.000-03:00

Ferdinand Botero

A nice overview of Colombian painter and Sculptor Ferdinand Botero

2001-10-03T12:29:00.000-03:00

Photologs

A variant of weblogs, photologs mostly use photos to communicate. When i'm a zombie from working 10 hours it's just easier to view people's pictures rather than read what they have to say. Some one's I've recently discovered:

Lightning Field (New York)
Quarlo (Brooklyn & Queens)
Photographica (metafilter for photos)

Also surfing I found some very nice photos of Buenos Aires taken by a former resident. If you haven't seen them, you might want to go see my Buenos Aires photos.

2001-10-02T15:55:00.000-03:00

From Piezography, a maker of archival ink for inkjet photo prints. You can get a 11x14 print of the photo above with a $100 donation.

2001-10-01T20:18:00.000-03:00

Pinhole Photography

I'm gonna try my hand at pinhole photography. I've been inspired by a couple of sites:

Pintoids, turning Altoid boxes into Camera Obscuras.
Portraits from Oaxaca taken with a pinhole camera.

And so I've recently purchased a Beseler Pinhole Camera Kit.

2001-09-28T10:09:00.000-03:00

Airline bailout is Corporate Welfare. (Slate, Steve Landsburg): There has always been some small risk that an unforeseen disaster would dramatically reduce the demand for air travel.... If you want to participate in this particular risk, you buy airline stocks. If not, you buy stock in something else.

2001-09-27T14:53:00.000-03:00

WTC Disaster and it's Architectural Consequences; a sober and well-written article by the Sunday Times architectural critic on the recent events. Includes good details about the engineering of the Twin Towers.

2001-09-25T11:59:00.000-03:00

WTC Disaster pictures taken from Brooklyn. Pictures similar to my own (see entry below); someone with a camera at the right place and time. The link comes via World New York, which also linked to my pictures.

2001-09-17T00:27:00.000-03:00

Posted my pictures of the World Trade Center disaster.

2001-09-06T18:19:00.000-03:00

Redundant Acronyms: ATM machine, HIV virus, LCD display, etc...

2001-09-06T17:28:00.000-03:00

Colombian Rock

I've recently discovered Los Aterciopelados, this fantastic Colombian rock group. I recommend their album Caribe Atomico. I'm going to see them in concert on Sept. 13th at the Roxy.

2001-08-27T15:02:00.000-03:00

Apartment Listing Sites

Both are free and seem to have a fair amount of listings here in NYC. Unlike the Village Voice, which the whole world reads, these sites seem to be somewhat hidden, an insider thing. I found my current place via April's List.

2001-08-17T12:04:00.000-03:00

The apartment chronicles cont'd

I can easily see how this seldom updated blog could become entirely about apartments and real estate. The follow ad is for a place costing $850/mo in the posh heart of midtown Manhattan. For you non-New Yorkers this is way, way, way cheap. Of course, there is always a catch...:

top location in manhattan,56th and madison ave. new beautiful apartment building.close to many subways. one beautiful bedroom for you, share sitting room, bath and kitchen. The reason why they room is so cheap is that there's Only requirement upon you:you must be IT professional (ecommerce or oracle dba prefered)and willing to help me a little bit when I got trouble with work or study.or otherwise the rent might be higher

2001-07-23T16:47:00.000-03:00

Annorexic Models

Walking around Manhattan in the last three weeks I've seen about five fashion shoots. The first was right in the main concourse of Grand Central Station. Two tall, emmaciated, women lamely puzzled over train schedules while dressed in the lastest fall fashions (in the middle of the summer heat, of course). These and the other models I've seen photographed do not look normal in real life. They are tall and completely skin and bones. They aren't beautiful, they simply look weird. I am so used to this version of unreality in magazines and catalogs that I really don't give it a second thought. Now having seen a number of models in person I can better appreciate the gulf that separates them from the rest of humanity.

2001-07-17T14:09:00.000-03:00

$800 Closet

Real estate dominates all conversation in New York City they way traffic in Los Angeles or altitude in La Paz, Bolivia do. Crazy stories abound; rent-controlled steals, illegal conversions and all kinds of compromised situations. I have one small one to add. Recently I looked at a closet in Brooklyn. The asking price was $800. Literally, the room was a mid-sized closet, just barely big enough for a twin mattress. Above a coat rack still hung with hangers. In defense of the closet it was attached to a loft apartment with high ceilings, two walls of windows, an enormous living room, and great views of Manhattan. Basically for your money you get a roof over your head and use of the common space. Friends who have lived in the city long enough to be bitter but not long enough to have their own rent controlled places nod their heads and say it's a good deal.

2001-07-03T19:22:00.000-03:00

Urban Backpacking

I went to Costco in Brooklyn but I lack both a car and those little foldable dollies that everyone here seems to have. Lacking anything else to lug bulk food around in, I brought along my ever-trusted Eagle Creek travel pack, my indispensible companion on three extended bus trips through Latin America. It felt odd packing bottles of Ragu into a backpack while every one else strolled to the parking lot with their shopping carts. People on the subway surely thought I was some grubby European backpacker touring the US for the summer who was lost (no tourist ever goes to Brooklyn).

2001-06-27T16:41:00.000-03:00

Legiao Urbana was one of the big rock bands in Brazil in the 80s and 90s. I like their stuff, it sounds very 80s, somewhere between The Cure and Duran Duran (except in Portuguese). If you're going to Sao Paulo you can pick up a pirated copy of their greatest hits for $2 downtown (as opposed to $23 from Amazon)

2001-06-24T21:47:00.000-03:00

Casual Out, Biz Suits In.

2001-06-24T21:40:00.000-03:00

Richard Posner's New Book. (NY Times Review) After all, if economics can help us understand the human behavior that gives rise to the law, then why not psychology, anthropology and sociology?

2001-06-24T03:04:00.000-03:00

Death by Chocolate. Seagulls, not Humans (via Obscurestore.com).

What's wonderful about Obscure Store is that the headlines read like The Onion, except the stories are real.

2001-06-24T02:59:00.000-03:00

Penn Jillette on Weightlessness. Recounting experiences on "vomit comet", plane used to train astronauts. Check out picture of ZZ top guitarist floating free of gravity (via Metafilter).