Quinn Pictures

2011-11-08T15:41:00.003-05:00

An Empty Hungarian Freight Car

Haarlem, NL

2011-11-08T15:36:00.002-05:00

2011-03-28T22:56:00.002-04:00

2011-02-06T17:31:00.000-05:00

2011-01-23T20:31:00.001-05:00

2nd Avenue, 5, 6, 7, 8

2011-01-23T18:04:00.010-05:00

Morris Gershwin bought Ira a piano but he showed no interest so George became the family pianist. On delivery, the hallway in the building at 103 2nd avenue was too narrow for the instrument and it had to be hauled by pully from the roof and swung into the living room through the front window of their apartment.

2011-01-08T20:02:00.002-05:00

In September of 2009 Inglourious Basterds was playing at the cinema in Berchtesgarden, not too far from the local synagogue. Notice how the swastika was blacked out on the poster. Its illegal to publicly display a swastika in Germany.

2010-08-08T09:36:00.001-04:00

In the first edition of Film Threat Magazine one of the writers was asked to go to 50 screenings and ruin them for the audience. He decided to go to the same film (I can't remember which) and learn the story. At subsequent screenings he would blurt out the dialog in anticipation. At first the audience would be annoyed but over time he got very clever and essentially stole the screenings.

The Lake House

2010-04-17T20:44:00.005-04:00

Lava Lamp

2010-04-07T00:46:00.003-04:00

Obersalzberg

2010-04-04T01:55:00.010-04:00

Avenue A • Mechanics Alley

2010-04-04T01:32:00.015-04:00

Walking to the Subway

2009-12-15T07:20:00.009-05:00

Click on the video on the top then quickly click on the video on the bottom and watch me race to the subway.

Zurich, September 27, 2009

2009-12-06T18:17:00.008-05:00

On a bright and sunny Sunday the central part of Zurich (along the river, leading down to the lake) was closed off for a small festival for young children celebrating the diverse mechanics of transportation. The event coincided with a woman's foot race and a film festival. It was the day Roman Polanski was arrested.

Obersalzberg

2009-12-05T19:20:00.003-05:00

Capri

2009-12-05T18:55:00.009-05:00

Sicily

2009-12-05T05:51:00.012-05:00

Siserton

2009-12-03T22:21:00.016-05:00

I remember driving south from Aux Le Bain on a toll road early new years day 2001. I payed the toll in Francs and received change in Euros. I looked up at the toll booth operator who simply nodded in the affirmative. I had forgotten that it was the first day of the new Euro.

Messkirch, Memory and Association

2009-12-03T12:05:00.006-05:00

After taking this photograph I realized that I was not too far from Messkirch --the town where Martin Heidegger was born.
This part of Germany reminded me of the rambling farm land of upstate New York or Pennsylvania that I knew so well as a child. My association between a manicured, European landscape and a North American facsimile corresponds with both the intention of the European settlers who cultivated the land in a manner consistent with their homeland and a personal inclination to identify something new with something familiar.

Milan

2009-12-02T23:03:00.020-05:00

In 1979 I stopped off in Milan for a day while traveling north on my way to catch a plane home out of Luxemburg. Since I had only a short time I headed off to see the Last Supper. When I arrived, the entrance to the building was unattended and wide open, I walked in and stood in front of the fresco with not a single person nearby. I had the painting all to myself.

I returned to the city a few years ago but this time I was able to spend more than a day. The cathedral (Duomo di Milano) was surrounded by scaffolding to support the workers who were busy removing 100 years of industrial grime. Air pollution no longer seems to be a factor in the daily lives of big city dwellers and the legacy of the age of smoke would soon be removed. From what I could see, the cathedral would soon become a pristine, white, gothic masterpiece restored to the way it must have looked before the early 20th century. To my eyes, the cathedral lost its character. I didn't bother to revisit the Last Supper.

Berlin: 2006

2009-02-18T10:53:00.027-05:00

Like many museums, the Filmmuseum Berlin-Deutsche Kinemathek's permanent exhibition is arranged in a chronology —moving from decade to decade, from room to room. The first few rooms are dedicated to the early pioneers of German cinema including Max Skladanowsky and Oskar Messter. The exhibition then moves through the Weimar period -from Caligari to the works of Lubitsch, Murnau, Fritz Lang and Pabst. And, the legendary screen stars that colaborated with them, including Emil Jannings, Peter Lorre, Louise Brooks

The room dedicated to the war years is called: Film under National Socialism (1933–1945) In this bright aluminum-paneled room, video monitors, suspended from the ceiling, play period-melodramas. Escapist entertainment intent on soothing a troubled populace. Lilian Harvey is included in a list of period stars. Because of her association with Jewish colleagues and her emigration to France then Hollywood she fell into disfavor with the Nazi regime.

Along the walls are small cabinet handles. Pulling one of the handles and out comes a flat-file style drawer. Within the drawers are small video monitors. While the drawer is open a small monitor plays a film from the period. These "encased" films are the overt products from the propaganda ministry, hidden away. The viewer is engaged in the projection-process, forcing the film to play while holding open the spring-loaded drawer. Release the handle and the screen goes blank and back into its place. The curator's intention is that the, "The drawers in this room are not only reminiscent of an archive, but also of a morgue."

The room is designed with monitors and what appear to be flat files (see image). The monitors play period melodramas. The flat files contain monitors but are only activated when the drawer is pulled out by a museum-goer. Overt Nazi footage can be viewed (Riefenstahl etcetera).
The Museum is in the Sony Center; across the street from an important place.

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The location of Hitler's Bunker has purposely been diffused into an intersection of an office building and a playground. Three years ago (on my visit) it was intentionally unmarked. Their were explanations going around that the government didnt want it to become a place of Nazi worship. I walked the intersections (one street is called Hanna Arndt Strabe) and saw two different english-speaking tour groups mis-directing the location of the bunker.

After returning home, I learned that the local government decided to go ahead and label the bunker. Apparently, tales of the bunker were becoming mythic. Its size, shape and exact location were in question.

Premeasuring time • Predetermine value

2009-01-31T01:05:00.036-05:00

The small, Swiss city of Beil is on the slopes of the Jura mountains and is home to Omega watches. Before Omega moved there the town was recognized as the capital of inexpensive time pieces. There was a time when owning a reasonably accurate but relatively inexpensive timepiece required a Swiss movement manufactured in this town.

That all changed in the 1970s with the advent of inexpensive quartz and digital technologies, much of which was invented and perfected by the Omega company. Soon afterwards, Texas instruments and Seiko introduced incredibly inexpensive digital watches, manufactured in Japan and Hong Kong. These new, affordable time pieces revolutionized time keeping with unprecedented accuracy.

The city of Beil went through economic upheaval as the culture and manufacturing traditions of the community became obsolete. While the Swatch Group and Omega reorganized and became competitive in the business of time keeping, the city slowly adapted and became a center in the manufacture of medical and other precision equipment.