Holly Northrop Blog

I went to the dentist last week and it only cost $300. I don't know if I mentioned that I had oral surgery a few weeks back so making it out of her office with a bill less than $1500 is what I happen to consider lucky and quite possibly even a good day. So sad isn't it?

Even sadder is that I need to start wearing glasses. Oh sure I had reading glasses and would every now and then actually wear them, but for the past 6 months or so, I've started carrying them with me. I've never done that before. At first, I thought my eyes were just tired. Characteristically, all of me is tired so why not my eyes? But I noticed that I was having trouble actually seeing shit close-up no matter what time of day or what state of mind I happened to be in.

Martha and I would be at the grocery store, I would flip a can around to read the label, and I would not be able to see the fine print. I would hold if far away or pull it real close, nothing made it better. I can't see words under 6 point and I have ALWAYS been able to read tiny little things. I also noticed that the last time I used my 35m I had trouble focusing it. Fuck!

So Ms. Martha took me to the eye doctor. After several tests, some of which I found rather cruel; like that one where they dilate your eyes and then take a Polaroid (complete with flash) of the optic nerve. I saw nothing but magenta for ten solid minutes after she did that. Then she had to retake the left eye because I blinked. What, you didn't think I would blink? After realizing what was up when she shot the right eye, my internal self-monitoring OS intervened, thinking that I was on acid (hence the dilation) and was looking through the wrong end of one of my cameras. My eyeballs went into self-preservation mode. In any case, it didn't matter that I blinked on the first take, I still saw magenta because the flash was so intense that it just shot right through my onion skin eyelids.

After way too much fun at LensCrafters, it was discovered that my left eye, (the one I use to focus a camera with) is loosing its ability to focus. Super. Reading glasses will work for a time but the eye guy said that eventually I will have to consider bifocals. Even better.

Of course, Martha thinks I'm just a big pussy about it all. She's been wearing glasses since she was twelve, when she couldn't see the chalkboard in class. When she got glasses, it was one of the most depressing days of her life. And there you have that.

In what I hope is the last day that my back pain is on this here earth, I have an appointment to see the Pain Management Center on Ascension of Christ Thursday. Yes, yes I know, to hell I go.

Remodeling the Homeland
Jasmine is home all week and besides lying on my couch demanding On Demand and sushi, she is going to seriously paint our kitchen. Before and after photos will follow but the project is not just a simple paint job. She's going to paint the cabinets and possibly do a little backsplash tile work. It is a big enough project that we will be paying her, which should help on a number of levels.

We are also getting a new front door, if the guy will ever call us back. The trailer trash red front door will soon be in a landfill somewhere, replace by a nice white no nothing fiberglass thing complete with a sexy storm door.

After months of waiting it out, Martha got a "good deal" on a brand new Sharp stainless steel stove. In the beginning, there were only a few catches. First one was that we had to get it from Mahwah to Hudson. Okay, after she sweet-talked a few folks at work, they got it in the back of the Jeep and we drove it home on the New York State Thruway. I was a tad nervous seeing how the thing weighs over 200 lbs and was not tied to anything. But really, what could we have strapped it to that would have held? It was the kind of scenario where a minor fender bender could have killed us, mowed over by a stove yes sir. But then again, there really isn't much less than massive fireballs when shit goes wrong on the Thruway. On the tame side, it is either a flat tire, general car trouble or a dead animal on the side of the road. The other, is a pillar of smoke at the end of a 5-mile backup where at the ground zero site of the accident, it looks like a bomb went off. High-speed interstate fuckery is a death dance.

But yes, back to the stove for a minute. So we get this thing home and Martha has arranged for the gentleman who mows our yard (Homeland Dan) to help us remove the skank-ass 40+ year-old stove that came with the house and put the new free stove in its place. Old stove comes out, no problem. New stove goes in, no problem. New stove is plugged in and then, there is a problem. The sensor fan will not stop running. Something is wrong.

The next day at work, Martha speaks with the tech guys and everyone agrees that something is wrong. We live so far out in the middle of nothing that there are no Sharp service people to come to the house. Somewhere someone thinks it might be the cord, so we buy a new cord and have Homeland Dan come back over to pull the stove out from the wall and install a new cord. Which he does and when he plugs the new cord in, the sensor fan comes on.

So now, (as I type this now) I have a broken stove in the middle of the kitchen. The "plan" is to have Homeland Dan come back over and put it back in the Jeep. Martha and I will then travel with it back to Sharp where she will have others unload it. She's to find another stove, test it there, and then have that one loaded up in the Jeep and we will drive it home to where Homeland Dan will come over one-more-fucking-time to unload the stove, drag it in the house and hopefully be done with us.

So we had Orkin come to the house and spray for wasps and various other kinds of things that freak us out. Wasps are all I really care about so we did the bare bones treatment. Of course the normal neurotic mess that I am when someone is in the house was already the baseline for the day (also known as Wednesday) when he arrived, everything was heightened a few notches by my total conviction that deep down this was going to kill that cats. I can't help it, I tend to get a little wacky when poisons are sprayed in and around my home. Green smeen, there is no way all that shit is 'pet friendly'. Besides, I know a misuse of a buzzword when I see it. Right, all of your poisons are Green. Right, define Green. Please, it is poison; you cannot kill EVERYTHING the Green way. How about you just don't kill my cats, K? K.

So the Orkin guy thinks I am a total loon. Well he's in good company. Everyone who has ever met me knows I am a total loon.

The whole thing had me so frazzled that long after he had gone, as I was vacuuming the floors and getting ready to scrub them, I noticed that I had left the lid open on the washer while it was running. I was staring at the agitating bubbles, all frothy on top of the washer, when it occurred to me that I didn't remember actually putting any clothes in there. I pushed the vacuum towards the machine to look closer. I stopped next to the machine, still holding on to the very loud and very on vacuum cleaner and replayed the last ten minutes in my head. I remembered turning the washer on and putting soap in there but I didn't remember loading it with clothes. I looked back at the laundry basket in the bedroom that was still full, but then I couldn't remember how much laundry I had had to begin with. So check this stupid shit out; while holding the extension hose to a running vacuum cleaner I stuck my hand into a swirling washing machine that was full of soapy water. There where no clothes in there, but then it occurred to me just what the hell I was doing as I snapped my hand out of the water and said out loud,

"Oh my god! You did not just stick your hand in tub of water while vacuuming! What the fuck is wrong with you!"

It is as if my inner voice actually yelled directly at me you dumb motherfucker. What an idiot. See, this is how I'm going to die. Something so beyond stupid that Jasmine will have no choice but to become the greatest short story writer ever. I mean how she could keep her shit together when telling the tale of how '...my mom died when she electrocuted herself with a washing machine and a vacuum cleaner'? It's already the beginning of a bad lesbian joke.

No Flash Needed
Ah yes, it is New York and spring is very much here. In Manhattan, things are full on blooming. I love shooting NYC in the spring. Winter is good for the 3200 black and white film but spring, the flowers, the sky and the people are just alive with color. Even the midtown people strip down to their suit jackets and the reverberation of pounding high-heeled open toed pumps invade the sounds of my iPod. Everywhere I go, someone is there and they are up my ass. So what do I do? I decide that it's a great time to shoot Times Square.

Lunch hour on a Friday and I was there, in the thick of it. I started at the bottom at 42nd Street, but could only handle it up to 48th street before I bailed and turned around. Up Broadway on one side and then turned around at the M&M World Store, which is right next to a massive Hershey mega store. Crazy chocolate up there, I tell you. Seriously, we are talking about a whole block of chocolate and you know, it didn't even smell like chocolate. I know in Hershey, PA it smells like chocolate miles before you even get there. But not in New York.

Anyway, I went up one side and came back down the other and for the first time in the entire seven years that I have lived here, I saw The Naked Cowboy.

I ran to the island in the center right before the light changed and it was only after I landed there that I noticed I was stuck there with him. It was just the two of us in the middle of Times Square. We chatted, he posed and I shot photos. The only time that I didn't have throngs of tourists touching me was when I had a man with a cowboy hat, boots and wearing only underwear sharing a ten foot space with me. It was the calmest I had been since I started shooting in Times Square. I'm not sure what that means but it's somehow comforting. Standing there with him was just the break I needed.

Finding something indigenous to New York in Times Square has become a serious challenge. Walking around there is like walking around Vegas. Nothing is real, everything is bigger and more obnoxious than the thing next to it and the idea of fake is excessively celebrated. On some level, it has always been this way but before I could always see slivers of old New York. I don't see old New York anymore.

Times Square has finally pushed through to pure middle-American plastic and Middle American pours in like crazy. They travel across the country to visit a place that looks exactly like what they left behind, minus all the day-to-day annoyances of their individual lives. Everything costs triple what they would normally pay, unless you are from the UK, then everything is dirt cheep. They can shop, eat and walk down a sidewalk five wide (complete with strollers) just like at their local mall. In my walk, I could have pet a NYC police horse; gone to the bank and had lunch at anyone of the three-dozen or so "Family" restaurants. If I were from somewhere else, or if I was someone else, it would have been great.

Of course I could have grabbed a slice (if I ate pizza), walked and shoved food in my mouth. Just like a true New Yorker, I could have collected city bits and hair on my food, except that a true New Yorker would never have been in a Times Square lunch crowd unless they were shooting it, stealing from it or most unfortunately, working in it.

The oddest thing about being up there is knowing that every second of my journey was being filmed. Times Square has one of the most intensive security camera set ups (that is not a military compound or Ground Zero) in the Untied States with over 600 cameras within at 10-block radius. Everything I did was recorded and archived, for what purpose I am not sure. This is not original to New York and ultimately is not really for the individual citizens' protection so much as the protection of the corporations that now live in Times Square. It gives the allusion of safe but has nothing to do with safety. I could be mugged or groped but no harm will ever some to Toys R Us.

Oh and the noodle shop that I love to stop at every now and then, is gone. The whole building is gone replaced with some unknown slice of the New Americana. The even weirder thing was that most of the crowds seemed perfectly happy with the massive absurdity of the volumes of people on the street. Like it was okay for it to be that congested. That's kind of weird when you think about it. But then again, why am I there? To photograph part of the insanity and to be part of the insanity. I know that very early on Sunday mornings when no one is around, Times Square is eerie with its absence people. All that neon and animation still going on and on yet no one is there to absorb it. The whole thing is down right spooky. A very different kind of disturbing then the ant settlement mentality of the lunch crowd. If no one came to Times Square, would it still be interesting?