Sir Harold Evans at the Strand Bookstore in New York City to discuss his memoir, My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times.

The images on this post are licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution; re-use is permitted but please link back to this post with credit.

The swine flu that is now an epidemic in the United States is likely traced back to a farm in North Carolina, and its first appearance in Mexico occurred near farms owned by Smithfield Foods.   We inject dairy cows with so many hormones that women who drink regular milk are three times more likely to have twins than women who drink organic.  The pollution from factory meat growing farms accounts for a fifth of greenhouse gases; that’s more than cars.

All of this occurs while 96% of Americans believe animals deserve some legal protection from harm.  We like animals.  It doesn’t matter our politics nor our backgrounds, we all agree that animals shouldn’t suffer.

These two ideas, the need to fix and protect the environment and the desire to not have animals suffer, was the common ground that Jonathan Safran Foer sought in his new book Eating Animals.  Tonight at the Union Square Barnes & Noble he read from it, discussed those statistics above and took questions.  His desire, he said, was to highlight the consensus we have on the environment and animal suffering to find ways to make better choices.

Foer has received a good deal of media attention for re-writing Fast Food Nation and Making Kind Choices, but that’s not a criticism.  It’s Foer’s own take, and every new voice that reaches new minds gets more of society thinking about what we are doing with factory farm meat growing.

We don’t think about its effects on our health, and we don’t think about how it’s hurting our environment.  Add Foer to the growing chorus of people who say: when will the mainstream media report this issue?

The images on this post are licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution; re-use is permitted but please link back to this post with credit.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya traveled far to New York City to discuss her work There Once Lived a Woman Who Killer Her Neighbor’s Baby. Only a few nights ago Snob Magazine hosted her at Russian Samovar on West 54th, where she sang cabaret songs as people downed vodka.  Tonight the setting was McNally Jackon, which played host to the Russian literary star reading, with Keith Gessen providing translation. From Wikipedia:

Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya (Russian: Людмила Стефановна Петрушевская) (born May 26, 1938) is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright. Petrushevskaya is regarded as one of Russia’s most talented contemporary writers, whose writing combines postmodernist trends with the psychological insights and parodist touches reminiscent of writers such as Anton Chekhov. Over the last few decades, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has been one of the most admired and acclaimed contemporary writers at work in Eastern Europe: The Times called her “one of the finest living Russian writers”.

Below is my photographic essay of Petrushevskaya.

The images on this post are licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution; any re-use is permitted but please link back to this post with credit.

Tonight Paul Auster, as a I type this post, only an hour after that photograph was taken, is speaking before a large group of people on the fourth floor of Barnes & Noble Union Square, the must-stop for anyone who has written something worth knowing about.

The choice this evening was Invisible, and for me the event ended a horror before it began.  I left shortly after taking these shots.

I had planned on quickly saying hello to Auster.  He, Salman Rushdie and I had a small conversation last year at a breakfast honoring Israel’s gift to literature, Amos Oz.  I wouldn’t expect Auster to remember some party chit-chat from 2008, yet it makes a good re-introduction as photographer’s routinely identify themselves to the subject.

But it was made impossible by a man who was almost a penciled caricature of a paparazzo. What made it comical to me (not to anyone else) was that there was absolutely no need to go paparazzo.  He and I were the only photographers there, and it was Paul Auster in a bookstore not Britney Spears on a red carpet.

I should have known the guy was trouble.  The entire twenty minutes before the start he wanted to go on-and-on with me about the guy with Alzheimer’s who won the Nobel Prize for something he did decades ago.  He talked about things I don’t care about, like Einstein and fiber optics, and the tragedy that only now this guy gets the big prize as he suffers from memory lapse.

Most photographers don’t want to talk.  Maybe over the years they see the same photographers covering the same events, and friendships develop; otherwise, they get in and out and don’t want to hear a random photog’s life musings.

Not this guy.  His eyes were so bloodshot that they barely looked like eyes since the inflamed skin surrounding them was the same puffy red-pink shade as his cornea.  It all blended together in a fleshy wrinkled mass.  Somewhere in there I saw blue irises, drowning. His hair was so badly dyed–the gray, coarse base with what looked like a black dye-job over a brown one–it resembled a toupee.

B&N Union Square, despite its size, is somewhat intimate.  Often, I am the only photographer there.  When professionals show up they know from experience to respect the venue.  A bookstore is not the place to start shouting, “Mista Austah!  Mista Austah!  Look left!  Now above!  Mista Austah, toyn some to tha right!”

He did this while Maria, the curator of these events, was in the midst of her introduction of Auster, causing everyone to stare in our direction to a point that Auster, holding up his index finger like a schoolteacher, had to “Shhhh” the guy.  He was making a spectacle of himself (and by association, me).

These photography sessions don’t last forever.  You’re expected to take a few shots and then let the person alone.  Not this guy.  He wouldn’t stop photographing Auster, gesturing, yelling loudly, “Mista Austah, one maw look down please…”

Every photo I took has Auster, lips pursed, staring at this fool.

Auster looked at me and I nodded in a sign that I got what I needed.  I turned off my camera and looked at this guy still going nuts with the flashes.  To stop the endless shots that had long worn out their welcome, I moved in front of the guy’s camera and made the quick introduction to Auster.  Flustered, he only brightened with recognition when I mentioned the Amos Oz breakfast.

Then he was called up to the podium.  I turned toward the exit embarrassed.

The images on this post are licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution; any re-use is permitted but please link back to this post with credit.

John Hodgman, known for his personification of a PC in Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign and as a correspondent on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, has just released the audio book of More Information Than You Require. Below are my photos for its release at Barnes & Noble’s Union Square megastore.

The images on this post are licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution; any re-use is permitted but please link back to this post with credit.

Between Saturday Night Live, Scare Tactics and 30 Rock, Tracy Morgan has become a one man gang of hysterical. Now he’s written a book about his experience, I Am the New Black. Amongst its revelations are how he felt about his former Saturday Night Live cast members:

“I had my finger on the pulse of urban comedy, but when I brought my act to ‘SNL,’ those motherf*****s just felt bad for me. None of the cast i came up with saw this future for me. No, sir. All i have to say about that is, where’s Chris Katan now? Where’s Cheri Oteri now? That b***h can’t even get arrested. … It’s all right; I don’t mind. It’s hard to get mainstream America to catch up. Mainstream America has just learned the words to Sugarhill’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’! And we don’t do that s*** no more! Jay-Z and Lil Wayne don’t sound like that! No one sounds like that no more!”

On friends who were only interested in his money:

“I’ve got friends who want money but don’t want to do anything to earn it. They won’t hold down a f*****g McDonald’s job to feed their own kids, but now that I’ve got money they want to come and work for me. I don’t know what the f*** makes them think i want them working for me if they won’t get off their a** to provide for their own family. I’ve lost a lot of friends that way, friends who feel like they deserve a place on my payroll. They don’t get it: I don’t need an entourage. I don’t need motherf*****s to play Xbox with me. I’d rather play Xbox with my kids.”

Below are Creative Commons photographs of Tracy Morgan that I released under the 3.0 attribution license that are now found on Wikipedia and my Flickr Creative Commons stream.

RZA, the co-founder of the Wu Tang Clan, was at Barnes & Noble Union Square to promote what is destined to be a must-read for any hip-hop aficionado, The Tao of Wu.  The Wu Tang is cited by MTV as the fifth greatest Hip-hop group of all time.

Something that stuck out was RZA talking about his troubled history.  He told the audience that even though his music seems to glorify violence and drugs, in reality he is embarrassed by some of the things he has done.  Hurting people, he said, is not something he is proud about.  The words were infused with a sense that, looking back, he probably made the choices he thought would most help his game even though he wishes he had had other options available to him.  It was a touching moment of honesty.  From Wikipedia:

Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, better known by his stage name RZA (pronounced ‘Rizza’; born July 5, 1969), is an American Grammy winning music producer, author, rapper, and occasional actor, director, and screenwriter. A prominent figure in hip hop music, he is the de facto leader of the Wu-Tang Clan. He has produced almost all of Wu-Tang Clan’s albums as well as many Wu-Tang solo and affiliate projects. He subsequently gained attention for his work scoring and acting in films.

Fox News reported that in mid-2007 RZA attended one of Hillary Clinton’s parties and donated money to her 2008 campaign. Fox News criticized the fact that Clinton took money from The RZA, claiming it was contradictory due to RZA’s felony record, FBI investigation, ties to the Gambino family and his music lyrics.  RZA referred to the investigation in one of his lyrics, “Plus, feds had one ad saying I gun traff’ / I sold 20 million records bitch, some laugh.”

Fox News is such a joke.

Below are Creative Commons photographs I released under the 3.0 attribution license that I took of RZA. They are now available on Wikipedia and my Flickr Creative Commons stream.

Tonight I had the supreme opportunity to listen to Nick Cave read from his new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro.  Katherine Lanpher interviewed.  A lot of Cave’s friends were in attendance, as well as best-selling author Larry Sloman, who I photographed on the red carpet at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.

The event was the Barnes & Noble Upstairs series (like Jane Goodall’s visit), and the store has been staging some first rate billing in the last year.  Good job on the events, Union Square B&N.

I haven’t returned to the photography–I sat out the Brooklyn Book Festival yesterday and attended a Wikimedia New York City meeting instead–but I did upload a few shots for Cave’s Wikipedia article, as well as a shot of Lanpher with Cave.  I hate seeing a brilliant man’s article suffer.

Below is a photographic essay of the evening (feel free to share your experience if you attended):

The last three I gave to the Creative Commons and may be reused (click on them for the license and to download higher resolutions).