This is what happens when you go camping, have a few cocktails and such around the campfire, and after everyone else has gone to sleep.

© Armando Bellmas

© Armando Bellmas

Yep, that’s me in the bottom photo. Killer calves, huh?

I hit the ground running when I got back home from New York City a couple of weeks ago. I’m just now getting around to processing the film and looking through all the photos I made while walking the streets of lower and midtown Manhattan.

© Armando Bellmas

There are three things I did a lot of while I was in New York City: met a bunch of very creative and interesting people, drank lots of Ketel One, and walked my ass off.

© Armando Bellmas

It was during my seemingly endless walks that I would search for pieces of the city that I could bring home with me in photographs. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. It was a vague craving for something that would move me in a different way.

© Armando Bellmas

I had six days to take it all in and I was damn sure going to try to take as much of it home with me as I could. I posted this tweet to Twitter as I wandered down yet another street that I’d never been down before:

Last night here. Wandering around in a futile attempt to take it all back home with me.

Greedy, I know. I wanted to soak up and bring back so much of New York City that I wouldn’t miss it as much as I have after leaving it in the past.

© Armando Bellmas

In the end these photographs, and the countless others still on the contact sheets, have been a wistful reminder of my rambles around lower Manhattan. They capture exactly what I saw and experienced, even if I’m still not sure what I was looking for.

A few post-worthy things that have been buzzing around in my head lately.

⇓ A sort of privacy in public
Wendy Richmond writes about “What We Reveal” in the latest issue of Communication Arts. (It’s the Design Annual issue, not online yet.) She touches on one of the things that I love most about New York City.

During a recent television interview on NYI, the host, Sam Roberts, asked me, “Is New York City different from other places?” I responded that for me, a major difference is its extreme density and the intense, unconscious aptitude of its inhabitants that enables us to share our public space. We are able to be close and simultaneously maintain our distance — a sort of privacy in public.

⇓ Because of the times
Bob Dylan write a few words about our new President and the challenges he and all of us as Americans have ahead of us. Obama’s election is “the first step in a long, hard journey for America.”

Dylan writes:

Let us not forget how our founding fathers had no experience in governing a nation, but they succeeded based solely on the fact that they had to succeed.

Sometimes that is really all it takes: such a strong desire for something that you have to succeed. It’s what they call the American dream. Not that we always succeed, it’s that we succeed when we need it most. Today can be a day to be proud to be an American, but also a day for people with a vision to come together and try building a better and stronger America. We cannot fail, but I think that is why we will succeed.

I love that line: Such a strong desire for something that you have to succeed. You can apply that to almost anything: our country, your work, parenting, marriage, etc.

(You may have to become Bob Dylan’s friend on Facebook to read the whole note. I don’t know what’s weirder: that Bob Dylan is on Facebook or that he and I are “friends” on Facebook.)

⇓ My, you have a…
Lovely Package is a recent discovery all about product design. They bill themselves as “the leading source for the very best that package design has to offer.” It’s a constant source of awe and desire.

My 19-month-old daughter Sophie pulled this bookmark out of a book on the shelf recently. It’s from a bookstore I worked at fresh out of college in ‘93. I don’t know which book she pulled it out of. She just walked over and held it up to me as if she knew I would want or need it.

The phrase I wrote on the bookmark:

…walked with a stagger of experience…

I don’t recall what book the quote is from. The phrase, however, has just as much punch for me as it did back then.

Those days I noted the phrase in a bookmark as I read the book. Today, I scan the bookmark with the phrase on it and post it on my blog.