I got a job with NYNEX (now Verizon) in my second and final year in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. I was also a GA in the department this second year, which meant I didn't get much out of the classes.

I commuted most mornings from the East Village to White Plains and my job in a small development group. Everyone in the group had been hired out of ITP. We were designing interfaces for video on demand and demoing those interfaces at trade shows. The programming was all done through Apple's Hypercard and third-party widgets that connected with Hypercard. Through the touch-screen we faked the video streams that were actually being read from a laser disk. Sometimes I shot those videos.

At the time the engineers knew that video wasn't going to arrive through twisted-pair copper, the only thing the phone companies had. The whole industry was waiting for a faster infrastructure—faster processors, faster modems, big optical pipes, and tremendous advances in compression. All of this eventually arrived and became the Internet.

After several years at NYNEX I went to work developing mass-market CD-ROM reference disks for Macmillan. It was early attempt by a publishing house to make money from the new electronic media. Publishing still hasn't figured out how to do that.

Weekends with our friends Mike and Jan were the beginning of our disillusionment with the East Village. Heading back to the city at the end of our visits we slowly realized that we didn't want to be home. It took us till '97 but we finally got out.

At Jan and Mike's place in Saugerties while Jan and Mike were in France. We brought our cat and had some friends over. L to R: M, K, R, C

Before C I'd loved a pair of Siamese who came with girlfriend Fran. I was always very aware of the breed due to an uncle's set: Ming, Mang, and Mambo. They were unusually hostile for cats and I avoided them every time we visited Ray in South Bend.

After C it's been a string of black-and-whites. I always heard the black-and-white (the tuxedo cat) was smart but the one we have now isn't. It's easy to trap him in a closet; he even does it to himself. I've had smart tuxedos, too, and that's a different kind of problem. Piggy (pictured above) was a smart cat with East Village roots. He spent his last years at our place in Putnam County.

Foreground with snow was shot in '93, background about twenty years later. For lack of a better term I call it a temporal composite.

In 2014 this one was included in the “Wondrous Indeed!” show at the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado.

The green church steeple is at the corner of Avenue A and 10th. If you kept walking in that direction past Avenues A, B, C, and D, in fifteen minutes you’d be at the East River. I lived here about seventeen years.