Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Just a Friendly Game of Baseball

The day started as almost all of my good days in New York City start: with a walk over the Manhattan bridge. It's not that the Manhattan bridge is that great or anything, it's just that a journey over a fairly wide river has a way of clearing your head and making things seem a little more epic than they normally would. In this photo you can see a bunch of things: the Brooklyn bridge, obviously; a structure being built up next to it for Olafur Eliasson's forthcoming waterfall installation; a water taxi; the Staten Island ferry in the background; the Statue of Liberty. It's all run-of-the-the-mill but sometimes I look at these things and think: wow, there's a lot going on in New York harbor.

We met at the Shark bar, at Spring and Mulberry. I know I sound like a broken record about this but the taps are extremely clean at all times and you know what you're getting. It opens very early, so it was the go-to choice for meeting at 11am before a 1pm Mets game.

On the way to the subway to head out to Queens we ran into my friend the photographer Ben Pogue. Ben has shot all kinds of stuff for Uniqlo, The New York Times, V, and other magazines. It's not easy to find a great still life photographer and he is truly talented.

When we got to Shea Stadium we discovered that we had absolutely amazing seats, courtesy of the FDNY. Firefighters do not make much money in New York, but there are little perks here and there that help make up for it.

This guy was sitting up behind us. He had been on the job for 30 years or so and retired.

We enjoyed some delicious wienies and beers.

It was a trainwreck of a game—the Mets lost to Pittsburgh 1-13. Truthfully, I couldn't care less. I'm not a baseball fan, never have been. My parents are artists. I played some other sports here and there and pretty badly, but I never played baseball on a team and I never so much as played catch as a kid. Still, the experience of going to a game in the middle of the day was pretty frigging fun.

No comments: