Some Lights In The Darkness Of Downtown

There are a couple beautiful photo essays about life downtown during Sandy.  Today's TIMES has a photo essay of night time pictures during the 5 day blackout. They nicely captures the odd feel of bars lit by candlelight and shopping in delis via flashlight.

It was a surreal life for a few days here but one that had its charms too...especially on Halloween evening when I took a stroll through the east village lit only by a full moon. The HuffPost has a similar story, focusing mainly on Halloween in the east village with some photos too (like the one above taken on Essex and Houston that evening).

Could 48 Frames Per Second Ruin The Magic Of Movies?

There is a bit of a technical tempest brewing this week after Peter Jackson screened footage from his upcoming THE HOBBIT.  Utlitizing a new digital technology that shoots 48fps (as opposed to the 80 year old 24fps standard for films), Jackson hopes to revolutionize cinema with this new look.  However, the screening of 10 minutes of scenes from his highly anticipated pre-quel to LORD OF THE RINGS got a decidedly negative reaction at Cinema Con this week.

As reported on the HuffPost and geek blogs everywhere, many people though the footage looked so hyper-real that it lost the magic that the standard movie image has.  There were unflattering comparisons to the film looking like "a bad soap opera" and the sets looking like....sets.  This sounds a bit like the concern 10 years ago when HD was first introduced and everyone thought actors on screen would look too real, and thus ordinary.  But as HD rolled out, that concern appeared to be overstated. However, given the strong reaction to Jackson's screening, it might be longer and rougher road for the conversion to this 48fps format.

Lost Photos Of The Catskills Concord Hotel

I was on the Huffington Post recently and stumbled across this amazing shot of the Concord Hotel, one of the famed hotels of the Borchst Belt that prospered in the Catskills during the mid-20th century.  These are actually photos from a series of postcards that were sold at the hotel, recently discovered and collected by Jordan Smith.  They show a lost world of glamour and leisure--where Don Draper might have gone on vacation (if he was Jewish, that is). You can watch the full slide show here.

The Concord was abandoned in the mid-1980s and recently demolished to make way for a potential casino. Regardless of its future, there is no denying it had a gorgeous past. I get very nostalgic for this era when I see photos like this, even though it was well before my time.  There is a certain glamour to it all which remains appealing, some 50-odd years later.

Troubles At The World Trade Center

There have been a number of problems recently at the World Trade Center site which have slowed construction of what was formerly known as the "Freedom Tower" and has brought construction on the 9/11 Museum to a halt.  Also, construction for a planned WTC 3 tower that was supposed to be 80-stories tall may now stop at the 7th floor due to a lack of tenants for the building.

All this was reported by the AP today over on the HuffPost's NY page.  The slowdown on World Trade Center 1, which was rising at a floor a week, is being attributed to technical difficulties as the building passes the 90-story mark.  But problems with the other projects are more complex, involving a problem in the steel production for the site and political/budgetary disputes with the Port Authority.

The bottom line in all of this is that completion of the site is going to be delayed for months and possibly years, with the opening date for the 9/11 Museum being pushed to 2013 at the earliest. It's disappointing news considering how so much progress was made in the last couple years. Hopefully, the mayor can intervene and get these entities working together to complete this massive project sooner than later.