Let There Be Neon ! Rudi Stern !

While driving home the other night from work at around three in the morning, a realy-o truly-o ungodly-o hour, I wouldn't wish working at night on anyone, I noticed a small splash of neon light in a spot that had never caught my eye before, so I stopped to take this picture. The more I looked at it, the more I realized that someone really went to great lengths to cut the outline of this sign out with painstaking precision and attention to geographical accuracy. In France the country is often called "l' hexagone" as the outline of France approximates a hexagon, and many signs have a hexagonal shape for that reason... but whoever made this one was a stickler for detail ! Bravo to whoever you are, nice job. Only one of the three neon arrows was working though. Either they are economizing electricity, or this sign needs repairs.

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Anyway, neon signs always, infallibly, get me thinking about a guy who I was lucky to have met and considered a good friend despite the short time I knew him... Rudi Stern. Rudi was one of the founders of a company which is still going strong in New York City called : Let There Be Neon Don't hesitate to get in touch with them if you need any neon signs around your place, these guys are the best ! On their website there is a tribute to Rudi. He sent me the photo just below the sign here while he was living in Italy, just a couple of short years before he died in 2006. Rudi, Rest In Peace man, you were a giant in my eyes.

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Rudi Stern : In Memory

I did this portrait of Rudi Stern in July, 2002, in a small outdoor café in Jersey City, NJ, directly across the Hudson River from where the World Trade Center towers had come thundering down less than one year previously. Rudi was telling us how he had been walking his dog, as usual, that September morning along the river when the proverbial feces hit the fan. Even from across the river he could see people jumping from the top of the stricken towers as the smoke billowed up. Oddly enough, in August 2001 he had sent us a postcard to invite us to a party he was throwing on September 9th, 2001 at his new studio in Jersey City, as a housewarming. This is the postcard, on which he had pasted the PS about the view from his roof... a view that was radically transformed just two days later :
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All things considered, I suppose it is just as well that we couldn't make it to Rudi's party that weekend, as we probably would have had a hard time getting back to France if we had stayed for a day or two afterwards, which would have been likely.