Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/06/15
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Hi LUGGERs, Delete if you are not interested in a long-winded story with no punch line! The last posting I made about a LUG dinner was on the occasion of the celebrated Hong Kong fly-in last December. Adrian Bradshaw dropped by from Shanghai, Shintaro Y. from Tokyo, Ting Lee from NYC, Alastair and Helen Firkin from Australia, and I breezed in from Bangkok, all convening at the Foreign Correspondents Club where Joseph and Sarah Yao had arranged for us to enjoy the company and good cheer of various Hongkong-based LUGGERs over a bounty of food and drink. We actually shared photos (how novel!) as well as admired each other's accretions of camera stuff, both orthodox as well as non-Leica. More recently, Adrian and Joseph reported to the LUG on their visit last week with Tom and Tuulikki Abrahamsson in Vancouver, along with an account of the fine hospitality they all enjoyed courtesy of Ted and Irene Grant in Victoria. The saga continues. At the end of last week the "Joseph and Adrian Show" moved from Vancouver to New York. As it happened, my son and I were also on our way to New York where he has an internship for the summer -- I went along partly for the ride and partly to help install my son in his summer digs. My son and I made a rendezvous with Joseph at the Yale Club where I had suggested we all stay. Adrian had already arrived in NYC the day before, and walking around the streets of New York he and Ting Lee (last meeting at the HK LUG dinner) managed to bump into each other purely by chance! A highly unlikely but most welcome coincidence. The weekend thus began on an auspicious and serendipitous note. (But one chord that some here might find dissonant: when we all got together, it turned out that Ting, Adrian and Joseph were all enthusiastically sporting Konica Hexar RFs - -- what is the world coming to?!? All along I thought that my CLE made me a major renegade.) After meeting at the Leica gallery, we proceeded onward to what was to become a LUG dinner, joining up with various other photo-folks that one or more of us knew in common, including photo-journo-turned- picture-agency-honcho Richard Ellis and photo-journo-cum-newsmag- photo-editor Andrew Popper. The venue was a marvelously boisterous formica-table establishment in Chinatown rejoicing in the name of Yummy Noodles, where the food was plentiful and of a very high standard, especially the Cantonese charcuterie and clay-pot casseroles (even passing muster by Joseph's stringent Hong Kong standards). We had a great time, told war stories (Richard and Andrew having covered the Gulf War), showed portfolios (Ting had with him his first Epson 3000 print made with a Cone Tech quad tone inkset), and generally made fixtures of ourselves at Yummy Noodles. Afterwards a rump group of us gamely tried to walk off some dinner by strolling through the streets of Little Italy and Nolita, taking pictures along the way of the parish street fair then in progress. Later in the weekend and the beginning of the week, various of us made pilgrimages to our favorite camera shops, to the photo exhibitions at MOMA, and generally squandered time talking photography at cafes and bars from SoHo to the Upper East Side. Joseph was already known by name at many of the camera shops, even though it was his first visit to New York. I am proud to say that I limited myself to the purchase of a generic lens cap for $4.95. On one occasion when I tagged along with Adrian to the offices of a weekly newsmagazine, the photo editor greeted us and marked our arrival by announcing to his colleagues that the "Leica brigade" had arrived. Can't imagine who he was thinking of, me with my CLE and no-name lens cap. NYC was a great place to continue the tradition of the fly-by mini-LUG dinner. Watch this space for the next installment -- who knows, the mini-LUG may strike in your neighborhood next! Home and exhausted in California, Peter C. ______________________________________________ FREE Personalized Email at Mail.com Sign up at http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup