[Leica] Re: Mini-LUG dinner strikes NYC

[Jim Brick <jimbrick@photoaccess.com>]

Great story Peter! When you recover, we need to have a mini-mini-LUG lunch.
You, me, Godfrey, Byron, and George. I'd like to hear more about your trip
and see some photographs.

Jim


At 08:31 PM 6/15/00 -0400, peter choy wrote:
>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.
>
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