I had an old roll of Fujichrome Velvia slide film buried in my camera bag, so I figured I’d try it out. I didn’t take into account that it’s almost impossible to have slide film processed without sending it out. However, I found a sweet spot in Greenpoint that is half photo lab and half Hello Kitty dealer. The guy who runs it will do C-41 Processing for two dollars per roll and scan negatives to a CD for five more. Nonetheless, I had my slide film cross processed in C-41 chemicals and got these super contrasty photos with some really inconsistent color shifts.

These photos are from the past four days.

Williamsburg Bridge

Williamsburg Bridge while riding

Ave B

Suffolk and Delancey

Houston and Suffolk

Looking out the living room window

The release of my car from Brooklyn Navy Yard Impound

Riis Park

Tunnel under Rockaway Beach Blvd

Riis Park

Beach at Riis Park, Queens

More beach

People exit?

Headed back to Brooklyn

Rooftop view of the southside and downtown Manhattan

Northside and midtown Manhattan

Car exit

After picking up these photos from the lab in Greenpoint this afternoon, I rode my bike to Jackson Park, Queens and located what may be the best (only?) pastor tacos in New York. Good as they were, they’ve got nothing on the grilled lobster tacos I’ll be preparing on the roof on Monday.

I’ve got regular color negative film in the camera now, so more soon.

I dropped Juan off at MIA last Friday afternoon and immediately headed north on I-95, stopping only for waffle fries and regular unleaded until RIchmond, VA, where I retired for a night’s rest around 5:00 AM Saturday. After leaving Richmond at 2:00, fighting DC traffic, almost running out of gas in Baltimore, and spilling cherry limeade all over the dashboard, I crossed the Verrazano Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn around 8:00 PM Saturday night. I’ve been posted up in the top floor of a loft in Williamsburg ever since (how ruthlessly absurd).

Here are some more photographs of questionable quality:

This is Slick Rick rapping at his own birthday party in South Beach. Not sure why I was there, but it was fun.

This is a liquor store on the way to Versailles- a castle that is also the best Cuban spot in Miami.

This is what I ate at Versailles.

These are our bikes at the beach.

This is what a Central Florida sunset looks like.

This is the Brooklyn side of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

This is the Brooklyn Bridge as seen from the northbound BQE.

This is the view from the rooftop where I’m currently residing.

I saw these in a thrift store in NoHo yesterday.
Their subtle way of saying “you have a free roundtrip on jetblue, now use it to go to Bogotá or else.”

These are from a Kodak disposable that I bought in Long Beach:

This is the view from my flight from LGB-ORD earlier this month.
The transition from the San Bernardino Mountains to the Mojave Desert is sweet.

This is the approach over Chicago, complete with a u-turn over Lake Michigan.

In other news, a great lunch was enjoyed today at the Boston Market in Ridgewood, Queens. Starting tomorrow morning (Friday) I have to go to three airports in four days and I’m not even flying anywhere. Saturday, however, I will be driving upstate for the day. No idea what I’m doing next week.

Also, I promise that effective immediately there will be no more hipstamatic photos on this blog.

Karaoke in Hongdae

Fried Chicken Delivery in Seoul

Compton Station on the LA Metro

Seoul Tower

That way

Central Seoul?

Rooflife in Playas de Rosarito, Mexico

Fail Mirror in Colorado

This TV Dinner was good

But the actual restaurant was way better

TV Dinner Restaurant

Serious?

Strange Fruit is my favorite

Cosmos is pretty sweet too

How to spend $20 on a photobooth in Long Beach

Two trackbike boutiques in two blocks in Hongdae

Taco truck in Seoul

Moroccan sandwiches after a party in Seoul, shortly before a 5:00 am cab ride to Incheon Airport.

Five bikes on a rack for three on the way to Mexico

Look at all these Lenos. Burbank, CA.

Jerome getting political

Cause he’s got the money to be political

Long Beach airport is my favorite

How to drive from Chicago to Miami in under 20 hours

Juan’s fridge in Miami

Yesterday I bought the hipstamatic app for my phone, which is pretty amusing. These next few are from that.

Sir Juan’s Villa

Driving back into Miami from the beach

Fail raft

I’ll be in Miami until Friday, then headed to New York for a while. More soon.

Instead of staying in Tokyo I came back to handle a few things in Chicago. I got back to LA on Sunday and Chicago last night. Disposable and iPhone photos coming soon.

Here’s some pictures from the past few days.

Earlier this evening Jerome bought a sweet Korean track frame from one the two fixed gear shops that exist within two hundred meters of each other. I bought a pastor taco from the taco shop that lives between the two bike stores. It’s worth noting that it was both more authentic and more delicious than any taco I’ve ever had in New York.

Last night was fun, which accounts for our not leaving the apartment until 3:00 this afternoon. Today we took the subway to Dongmyo to a flea market that puts the LA swapmeets to shame. Afterwards we wandered around Sinchon and the university on the way back to the apartment.

Nighttime in this city gets the full stamp of approval. I haven’t seen so many people on the streets at 5 AM since Buenos Aires. Headed out to a party in Hongdae now. More soon.

Invasion!

Leaving LA

Limousine to Jerome’s

This is how the seafood stays fresh

Near Sinchon Rotary I think

Seoul is built in and around the mountains

More soon!

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I drove to California again last week. Unlike most of the other times I’ve driven across the country, I won’t be driving back. Instead, tomorrow morning I’m catching a flight from LAX to Tokyo and finally Seoul. Not sure what the plan is after that, but I have a flight back to LA from Tokyo sometime in early May. I’ll be trusting Aidan and Wurl to return themselves as well as my car to Chicago.

Twitter tells me that we left Chicago (the corner of Washington and Damen, to be specific) at 5:57 PM on the evening of Monday April 12th (just moments after moving out of the apartment I’d been living in for the past six months). Despite the brief roadside fiasco that took place after a dead deer found its way underneath the car in rural Iowa, we made it to Denver in time for a proper breakfast at the Denver Diner, though not before Wurl offended the entire city by ordering a Boulder Omelette.

A single phone call from the breakfast table in Denver reserved us a room at the Tropicana in Las Vegas for that same evening. The reservationist found it to be quite amusing that we would be driving from Denver that day. Out of fear of overstimulating her, I omitted the fact that we’d already been on the road for fifteen hours.

I was able to finish some design work in the time that I spent in the passenger seat, so a few stops were made along the way to send off work at wifi hotspots throughout western Colorado. The snow in Summit County slowed us down a bit, but we still made it to St. George, Utah in time to enjoy a sundown In-N-Out stop before the final stretch into Vegas. Vegas was Vegas, as it always has been and always will be. We stayed up late, woke up early, and drove to Long Beach.

Not five minutes after arriving in Long Beach, Marky S called from the runway of Long Beach Airport, as his flight had just arrived from JFK. Despite numerous objections, Brendan picked him up. Wednesday and Thursday were pretty typical derelict Long Beach days. Friday morning we woke up and drove to Mexico.

A few weeks earlier I’d finagled a pretty awesome rate on a two bedroom suite at the Rosarito Beach Hotel, which is where we based our operations for the weekend. As it’d been a few years since I’d set foot in Baja, it was pretty shocking to witness the effects of the border crime and the resulting US Travel Warning on the area. The whole south end of Rosarito is a ghost town after dark- the Coney Island of Baja California. Nonetheless, we had access to two hot tubs, three pools, and ocean, and complementary dinner buffet both nights. In addition to this we had signed up to ride our bikes fifty miles down the coast to Ensenada on Saturday, which we all did quite impressively on track bikes.

Shortly after purchasing a box of churros and refusing to purchase a small dog, both while waiting in the always ridiculous line to enter the United States at San Ysidro, we were enjoying ourselves at the In-N-Out/Denny’s in National City. Later that evening our group spent upwards of thirty dollars on the photo booth in Alex’s Bar, resulting in perhaps the greatest sequence of photo strips in history. We can only hope that one day someone will actually scan them. Two more days of typical Long Beach/LA derelicism bring me to the humid living room from which I’m currently blogging.

Packed and ready to leave Chicago.

Working from the Safeway parking lot.

Island Tower at the Tropicana.

So amusing.

Five bikes on the trunk and headed to Mexico.

Stop at Target in San Diego.

Getting into Mexico is easy.

The Rosarito Pier just outside our room.

The lesser of the two pools.

Our suite.

Starting area for the ride.

Us.

The Halfway House- the first check point.

Half way between Tijuana and Ensenada.

Bikes.

Where the free road meets the toll road, just north of Ensenada.

Going to eat sushi, do laundry, go to the bar, and go to Asia. More coming soon.

(posted from my iphone as a test)

More soon.