This man is not a neo-Nazi; he was at the Festival of India in Washington Square Park yesterday.  The swastika on his shirt is an ancient symbol (though obviously a little jarring to see).

I thought it was funny that there was not one other person at the Indian festival that wore this symbol except this white guy. Hipster Hindu with ironic Whole Foods bag juxtaposition – only in New York.

From Wikipedia:

Archaeological evidence of swastika-shaped ornaments dates from the Neolithic period in Ancient India. It occurs mainly in the modern day culture of India, sometimes as a geometrical motif and sometimes as a religious symbol. It remains widely used inIndian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Though once commonly used all over much of the world without stigma, because of its iconic usage as Hakenkreuz in Nazi Germany the symbol has become stigmatized in the Western world, notably even outlawed in Germany.

Here are a few more photos from the festival, licensed Creative Commons 3.0

This photo below was on the side of a tent promising some multi-media mind expansion experience, or something.  This mural was particularly strange.  It shows the stages of life:

If you click on the mural and blow it up, the last stage right before death looks particularly gruesome:

New York is a city of parades, and one of the cool things about living here is that you can see so many different cultures in one place.  I don’t like parades because I don’t like crowds, so I seldom attend.

(post continues below)

I did, however, venture out to the West Indian Day Parade at Prospect Park in Brooklyn.  The West Indies are defined on Wikipedia as follows:

The region consists of the Antilles, divided into the larger Greater Antilles which bound the sea on the north and the Lesser Antilles on the south and east (including the Leeward Antilles), and the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, which are in fact in the Atlantic Ocean north of Cuba, not in the Caribbean Sea.

I hoped to catch a glimpse of Grand Marshal Colin Powell.  I didn’t see Powell, but I did photograph New York City Councilman John Liu, who is running for city comptroller, marching amongst a multi-colored crowd of incredibly sexy West Indian men and women.  Photos below.

There are some festivals that happen in New York you always wonder if they might up and close on you (Lady Bunny and Wigstock are still missed). So it’s excellent that the HOWL! Festival–the annual tribute to Allen Ginsberg and counterculture–continues in the East Village.

Each year the festival hangs up canvas over the gates of Tompkins Square Park inviting anyone to contribute a painting. It’s called Art Around the Park, and much of the work that goes up is as good as what you might find in a gallery (some artists seek to sell their work; others are anonymous and first grab wins once the festival is over).

Above to the right was a favorite of mine, by artist Izuo Watanabe, aka Izu, whose other giant face works can be viewed on Flickr, or on his website.

Finally, the last few weeks of testing the Samsung Memoir–what is supposed to be the best camera phone on the market–is coming to an end.  Previous forays include a beach vacation on Fire Island (Grade: B); poet Eileen Myles reading at Blue Stockings (Grade: F);  the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival (Grade: C); and its use as a spy camera (Grade: D-).

The shots below were all taken with Samsung Memoir, and it did a phenomenal job.

SAMSUNG MEMOIR CAMERA HOWL! TEST GRADE:  A

Michael Jackson

Artist David Greene–who has painted a series of public reproductions of iconic celebrity portraits–contributes his Jackson Five-era Michael Jackson.

Bloomdog Billionaire

Artist:  Krezell

Ben Dover

Artists:  Nora King and Lee Dawson (who seem to have come out of the Global Girls Art Workshop)

Anti-CIA

Artist:  Unknown (pictured)

Miscellaneous

Artist: Anonymous

Perfection or reality

Artists:  Sabel Salazar and Jeffrey Lux (click on photo to see contact information)

Politics of the LES

Artist: LV 2009 – I loved this!  I wish I could use it on Wikipedia.

Every year in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of New York City the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival takes over.  Parker lived right on the park.

As readers know, I’ve been spending a lot of blog space testing the Samsung Memoir–what is supposed to be the best camera phone on the market–in various settings.  Previously I did a beach vacation on Fire Island (Grade: B) and poet Eileen Myles reading at Blue Stockings (Grade: F).  The Parker festival was an opportunity to test the Memoir at an outdoor concert.

First, a little about Parker–a name you should know–from Wikipedia:

Parker played a leading role in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and improvisation based on harmonic structure. Parker’s innovative approaches to melody, rhythm, and harmony exercised enormous influence on his contemporaries. Several of Parker’s songs have become standards, including “Billie’s Bounce“, “Anthropology”, “Ornithology“, and “Confirmation”. He introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas including a tonal vocabulary employing 9ths, 11ths and 13ths of chords, rapidly implied passing chords, and new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions. His tone was clean and penetrating, but sweet and plaintive on ballads. Although many Parker recordings demonstrate dazzling virtuosic technique and complex melodic lines – such as “Ko-Ko“, “Kim”, and “Leap Frog” – he was also one of the great blues players. His themeless blues improvisation “Parker’s Mood” represents one of the most deeply affecting recordings in jazz. At various times, Parker fused jazz with other musical styles, from classical to Latin music, blazing paths followed later by others.

Parker, who hailed from Kansas City, had absolutley no desire to ever be buried there.  His death was dramatic:

Parker died in the suite of his friend and patron Nica de Koenigswarter at the Stanhope Hotel in New York City while watching The Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show on television. Though the official causes of death were lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, Parker’s demise was undoubtedly hastened by his drug and alcohol abuse. The coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated Parker’s 34-year-old body to be between 50 and 60 years of age.

It was well known that Parker never wanted to return to Kansas City, even in death. Parker had told his common-law wife, Chan, that he didn’t want to be buried in the city of his birth; that New York was his home and he didn’t want any fuss or memorials when he died. At the time of his death, though, he hadn’t divorced his previous wife Doris, nor had he officially married Chan, which left Parker in the rather awkward post-mortem situation of having two widows, a scenario which muddied the issue of next of kin and would ultimately serve to frustrate his wish to be quietly interred in his adopted hometown. Dizzy Gillespie was able to co-opt the funeral arrangement^s that Chan had been putting together and coordinated a ‘lying-in-state’, a Harlem procession officiated by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and a memorial concert before flying Parker’s body back to Missouri to be buried there per his mother’s wishes. Parker was buried at Lincoln Cemeter^y in Kansas City, Missouri.

The photographs of the festival once again showed how limited the “best” camera phone is in producing quality.  It’s the lens, not the pixels (the Memoir packs a wallop with 8 mps).

See, everyone thinks “More Megapixels, More Quality” but it simply is not the case when your lens is worthless.  Essentially, you get really large crappy photos.

More dispiriting is that the conditions for shooting–outside, daylight, but with shade–that I previously found to be the camera’s optimal conditions for shots helped little.

SAMSUNG MEMOIR CAMERA CHARLIE PARKER FESTIVAL TEST GRADE:  C

The Stage – I was up pretty close.  For a camera phone, the Memoir produced a decent shot.

Arguably the best shot I took of the festival, the park was swarmed with people.

One of the tricks to the Samsung Memoir is to get absolutely no light in an otherwise dark frame.  The only difference between this shot and the one before it is the sunlight/sky above the stage, which completely throws off the Memoir, as it did here.  If I framed the shot lower to remove the sky above the stage, it would have come out clearer.  Unfortunately, if you have to change your shot’s frame dramatically over things like ‘there was sky in the photo’ then the camera is not worth much.

Charlie Parker’s home on Tompkins Square Park.  This came out better because I cut off the top half of the building, which was much lighter due to the position of the sun, to keep the bottom half’s color intact.