Amazing story about this famous photo taken of the construction workers high above New York City in 1932.
Lunch atop a skyscraper
Amazing story about this famous photo taken of the construction workers high above New York City in 1932.
Amazing story about this famous photo taken of the construction workers high above New York City in 1932.
The Laramie Peacock
This is the Laramie Peacock. Those of you of a certain age have probably seen it 1000 times. It was used to introduce color programs on NBC.
It’s called the “Laramie Peacock” because the first time it was shown was right before the tv western Laramie. It was the first time the peacock fanned out with the soft woodwind music played in the background. I just thought it was funny that of all the names it could have been called, it’s named after the first show that it lead into.
The Laramie Peacock ran from 1962 to 1975.
It sure beats this “N” that was used from 1976 to 1979.
The Lyceum Theatre
I love this picture. It was taken in 1917. You can see the Lyceum Theatre sort of at the center, see it, next to the Loews sign? I was at a play at that exact theater last summer, 99 years later! We saw Jesse Tyler Ferguson in “Fully Committed,” a one man play.
I had a couple of premonitions that night. Stupid, but they played out as I described.
Before the play started, I told my cousin, who was seated next to me that the guy seated next to me would have his phone ring during the play. And it did. The only phone to ring! Jesse looked at the guy from the stage and made a joke of it, even though he was annoyed, but right on cue, the guy’s phone rang.
I also said something about spitting would happen. I wasn’t sure what, but I saw in my head that Jesse would spit on the stage or the audience. By accident. And he did. He talked so much during the play that at one point he just spat. Right onto the front row! He laughed about it and played it off, but it happened.
Now if I could only get a premonition about tonight’s lottery numbers!
This is the Lyceum Theatre stage last summer.
Lake Worth’s Street Painting Festival
I went to the 23rd Annual Lake Worth Street Painting Festival on Sunday. I go with friends every year (that’s me in the top blog nameplate at last year’s event). It’s a great event in the small town of Lake Worth which is in Palm Beach County, Florida.
They claim 100,000 people attend the event and that there are 600 artists participating. It does get crowded. The streets are shut down in the center of town and art takes over the streets. Amazing art. Here are some photos I took.
Classic.
The Joker.
I dream of Jeannie.
Carrie Fisher.
Golden Girls
It’s 3D when you photograph it. In person, it’s flat.
Kodak cameras
I saw these old cameras online the other day, they brought back so many memories. I remember having a Vivitar camera like this and one like the Kodak below.
This Kodak pocket Instamatic brought me back, too. I remember getting this exact one for my birthday one year.
I remember how cool it was in the box just like this. It had that weird extender for the flash club, remember, there were four flashes on a square cube. And the film was a cassette. I wonder what happened to mine. Did we just throw it out? I have to check my old closet at my parents’ house one day, it’s got to be in there.
When I was older, maybe in my 20s, I worked for a department store, in the camera department for awhile. We sold tons of these little cassette films.
And we developed so many cassettes, too. A guy would pick them up the cassettes and then deliver the photographs in envelopes to the store.
My favorite new app – VideoCam
I found this cool new app, which is now my favorite iPhone app. It’s called VideoCam.
I was looking for something that would allow me to video different scenes without having to edit them together. For instance, I was interviewing artists at a local art show this past weekend and I wanted to string the very short interviews together, without having to edit the videos at the end. I looked for two hours and finally found VideoCam. It’s so great in that you can start and stop the filming like you would do with Vine, only there is no time length. So you can pause and resume – you film one thing, stop it, then go off somewhere and film something else and so on and at the end, you have one long movie without any editing involved.
By accident, I learned of another feature which is truly amazing. You can edit out the segments you don’t want by just clicking an X box in the corner of that segment. The whole film is “raw” until you save it as one long piece. So each segment is its own short movie. What happened was, I was with friends and we were having lunch and for some reason, the camera starting filming in my pocket. So I had 11 minutes of us ordering lunch, with the black from my pocket on the screen and the sound. All this right in the middle of my artist interviews. I thought I had ruined the interviews, either that, or I needed to defeat the whole purpose of the app and learn to edit. But to my amazement, I found that feature that allowed me to just X-out the lunch footage and no one was the wiser.
The app is free, but for the extras, like this editing feature, you have to buy the app for $4.99, well worth it.
The other advantage to this is that you can film various takes and just X-out the ones you don’t want. I just love the app, I’ve used it every day since I downloaded it. You can always edit the films later in other apps, but the whole point of VideoCam is that you don’t have to be bothered with any of that.
Below is the first film I did. It’s a bit rough and it was before I realized I could redo takes and just use the ones I liked. But you’ll get the idea. I had cut the pocket filmed part out, so you don’t even know it was there.
I can’t wait to use it next weekend at the Street Painting Festival in Lake Worth where I can go from artist to artist and show their work in a single movie; and also Comic Cons and things like that will be a lot of fun to film.
Art Festival weekend
Been spending the weekend at the Coconut Grove Arts Festival and the St. Stephen’s Art Show, which is right next door. It’s a yearly event each February. The whole town comes out, then some. There’s so much art, people watching, food and drinking.
It starts out with breakfast at a gallery and then we all start toward the festivals, it’s two festivals right next to each other. Friends and family sort of separate, then at the festival we may meet up, some people may drop out, others may add themselves to the group. It’s a fun weekend. It runs Saturday, Sunday and Monday, which is President’s Day.
Juan Herman Gonzalez, paints a mural. He’ll be doing it on site all weekend.
Regatta Park, one of the sites for the Arts Festivals.
Love the pig.
Hi ladies.
Supporting Eaten Fish
By Emanuele Del Rosso
By Janet Cumming
By Jesus Aritimuno
By Kate Parkinson
By Matt Wuerker
By Ruosso
By Simon Farrow
By Terry Anderson
In 2013 a 21 year old Iranian cartoonist named Ali arrived in Australia The Australian government put him in a detention camp. He’s been in a detention camp ever since.
Ali cartoons under the name Eaten Fish. Cartoonists, starting in Australia, and now all over the world have been drawing fish cartoons and posting them on social media in the hopes of drawing attention to the detention.
Australia detains people who seek asylum if they arrive by boat. Talk about wet foot, dry foot. Ali is detained on Manus Island. Ali’s health is failing and people all over the world are asking for his freedom.
I have collected some of the EatenFish comics that have been making the rounds.
Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI) writes: “It is with profound alarm and sadness that [we] learn that our friend and colleague, cartoonist Mr. Eaten Fish, currently held in an Australian refugee rendition camp in Papua New Guinea has decided to undertake a hunger strike. He is a man who has given up hope, cannot struggle any longer, cannot face the future that is being forced on him, and he would rather die than submit to the indignities of further inhuman treatment.”
The Australian government has been petitioned many times both from within Australia and internationally asking that Eaten Fish be brought to Australia for medical treatment.
Cartoonists feel that they can bring awareness to the issue with a media campaign by posting images of fish with the hashtags “AddAFish #EatenFish
More in this issue here.
Killing history
There is a building in Brooklyn called Erasmus Hall, erected in 1787 with contributions from Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, John Jay and Robert Livingston, it was the first secondary school in New York State and is considered a grand example of Georgian-Federal architecture and an ambitious vision of education.
It’s in danger of being destroyed. Story in NY Times here.
Recently, Admiral’s Row, also in Brooklyn, was torn down, this was a bunch of Civil War period houses built between 1864 and 1901 which stood on Flushing Avenue for all these years. See what’s left here.
Now with the the new gentrification of Brooklyn, they are killing history.
On the whole, I’d like to be cartooning in Hoboken!
I completed a bunch of 10 With Tom interviews with new cartoonists who I admire. They were all gracious and humble. Very nice people. The interviews will be published in the Huffington Post soon and then I’ll link to them here in the Tomversation blog.
I also am ready to start publishing my comic panel, Tomversation, daily. I’m just waiting for the platform to be completed where I’ll publish on that platform along with Facebook.
I’m excited to start doing this daily – drawing comics and writing about them and other art-related things. It’s a nice way to spend the day.
I want to travel more in 2017, I renewed my passport last week. I’m home in Miami now, I do miss New York but not in this snow and cold, I prefer Spring, Summer and Fall up north. I think a lot about Hoboken. I’m imagining being high in a condo, overlooking the Hudson River and New York City, venturing out to a small coffee shop or cafe for lunch, cartooning in between. There is something that draws me to Hoboken. I don’t know what it is.
tomversation.com 