First-Person Shooter

Gamers, seek life elsewhere. This person shoots real life. Here you'll find images, sounds, and text relating to New York-based writer Chris Norris. Born in Boston and raised by an inventor-engineer at '70-'80s-era Polaroid, I was one of the light-reflecting objects he used to refine instant photography for the analog age.This is about life and art in the uncanny valley of ones and zeroes. 

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They placed a cup in NYC/And round it was on that caged tree/Must’ve ordered Daily Cleanse/And got a Super-C #nyc #streetphotography #nycstreetphotography #wastefulhumans #anecdoteofthejar #wallacestevens #onepointperspective #urbanpastorale #palinode #poststructuralist #notsonewcriticism

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Five years ago. (Today, nearly 7 octaves.) #nyc #birthdayboy #milestones #calder #scale #howdoyoumeasureayear (at New York, New York)

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Throwback Thursday (Classic Rewind). #mlk2017 #alt-history #retrograde #ihadadream #funkypresident(people, it'sbad) #dramaticirony #fakeprez (at New York, New York)

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The Bösendorfer. Just add 87-year-old demigod, cellist Okkyung Lee, drummer Jackson Krall, soprano/sopranino saxist Harri Sjöström, electronic sampler/sound processor Tony Oxley, and 150-odd Homo sapiens sapiens. #ceciltaylor #whitneymuseum #imaginethesound #nyc (at Whitney Museum of American Art)

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The Units. #ceciltaylor #whitneymuseum #nyc (at Whitney Museum of American Art)

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Original scores and launch codes, on display. #ceciltaylor #whitneymuseum #nyc #imaginethesound

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Closing night (unless CT says otherwise). #ceciltaylor #whitneymuseum #imaginethesound #nyc (at Whitney Museum of American Art)

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Atelier 16. Richard Lohr, between projects. #studiovisit #richardlohrstudio #nudes #nyc #photographerlife (at Joe Jr. Diner)

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70 t-shirt headstones at St Mark's this Holy Week. For the 700 U.S children shot since last Easter: age and circumstance on each one in black ink. #Easter #holysaturday #guncontrol #innocents #stmarkschurchinthebowery (at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery)

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(Photo: Kurt Iswarienko) Fellow members of the Michael Shannon Army can dig my profile w/this link http://goo.gl/VZujWi

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Throw(way)back Thursday: Behold the first photo I ever took. My father, shooting unreleased prototype of SX-70, shot on Polaroid Swinger by his 5-year-old long-time subject. (Nabokov: “after months of coaxing by a scientist, [the ape] produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”) Not shot on iPhone 6. #lomography #SX-70 #Polaroid #familysnapshots

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My ode to the pivotal early doc by Werner Herzog (l): The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (r), 1974. http://goo.gl/A35th6 You'll believe a man can fly.

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GOLDEN YEARS

Anyone who followed David Bowie’s career up through his new album must have had at least a flicker of doubt he really died. Forget the fake-death disappearing act his likeness pulled in Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine. Just look at the video to “Lazarus” off his excellent new album Blackstar. Look at the imagery the master deploys now. Listen to those opening lyrics. If not a diabolically committed performance piece, this is either the mindblowing-est album launch or history’s most exquisitely turned departure.

Sadly, I know at least enough about the man to know to mourn his loss. I spent brief amount of time with him in 1999, and whenever a non-journalist asks if I get star-struck around stars,  I say, Just once. This is the once.

He was about the release his 1999 album hours… , and tape an episode of VH-1’s Storytellers. Before our scheduled interview, I came by just to hear him and his band rehearse for Storytellers in a mid-sized performance space in, I think, Hell’s Kitchen. I sat down in a chair, someone handed me headphones patched to the main mixing board. As as my butt his the seat, the band went into “Life On Mars,” and I more or less beshat myself.

Seriously. It was so beautiful: loud, soaring, yet intimate at the same time. The headphones carried everything but the drums, piano, and voice, which played alone in the room. I’ve never heard such a beloved song like that, never will. They group did one more song then took a break during which the publicist brought me over to meet David Bowie. Since the real interview was set for another day, he and I down sat at the lip of the stage and shot the shit, just two New Yorkers passing the time.

The can confirm the widely-held opinion this man was almost crazily congenial. No bullshit, no pretense.  I’ve gotten more attitude from reality-show cast members. We talked about New York. He asked where I lived, I told him where my studio apartment was (then recalled he owned an entire Soho building). We talked about how New York had changed through the years and before long I was off and running. 

I talked about what Alphabet City was like when I first started coming here, in the late-80s and early 90s. How, when I moved here in ’94, friends had gotten beaten up trying to score on blocks where I’d just seen a $20,000 Persian carpet hanging in store window. I marveled at how quickly gentrification had transformed that area. He nodded his shoulder-length chestnut hair and said,  “Right, right. “Know what’cha’mean.”

Then one of those woozy, zoom-in/dolly-back out-of-bodies hit me, as I recalled just which low-key Brit I was chatting with. I don’t know if I blushed, gasped for breath or what, but Bowie seemed to sense a bit of passing distress and took a mercifully long and reflective cigarette drag. I soon regained my shit and we spent the rest of the break talking around the fact he was David Bowie.

Today, I looked at the interview I did, which is worth reading, and I’m amazed at how prescient he was, and how dumb I was, thinking he’d like Todd Haynes Velvet Goldmine. He was 52 years old, not much older than I am now, and so many decades wiser.

Today, I have a three-year-old son whom I recently introduced to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. The version I grew up with was recorded with narrator Captain Kangaroo, who fell somewhere between Boris Karloff and Sean Connery in the piece’s 60-odd narrator roster. The one Calder’s growing up with was narrated by David Bowie in 1978. 

Calder perks right up when that slightly Cockney voice brightly begins: “This is the story. Of Peter. And the Wolf.” We’ve listened to it so often together that I have a pretty good Bowie down now. Just as long as I’m only doing the lines from the album.

Since we started, his impact spread beyond Prokofiev and on to some carefully curated Bowie songs. And now, Calder sometimes wants to hear stories read in a different voice, and will ask: “Can you read me this one, David Bowie?” And as Bowie, I say, “Yes, I can, Calder!” and we start Don’t’ Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.

But is that what he’s really asking for? Is he requesting an imitation? Or does he want that person, in some way, to join us for a story?

Our small family has been lucky so far in how few and non proximate deaths have entered our sphere. This one I’m not telling him about. I’m not so sure I ever will. I may just tell him David Bowie had to fly back into space.

[bychrisnorris]

If there's an actual war on Christmas, whoever's waging it's getting served. #carolingmob #xmasnyc (at Stuyvesant Square)

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Cosby VS Killa Beez? I need a ruling on this. #wutang #yologo #xxxlmass

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The Charles Duke family (c. 1970) still there on the Moon's Descartes Highlands, where their astronaut dad left the snapshot 43 years ago. (Why does this make me want to cry?) #whiteyonthemoon #apollo16 #uncannyvalley #nonfictionheroes #manonmoon (at The Motherf***ing Moon)

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Seriously, how awesome is this? Vija Celmins (b. 1938, Latvia) "Heater" 1964 #visualart #electricstilllife #newwhitneymuseum (at Whitney Museum of American Art)