The Newtown Pentacle

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Last Saturday, after conducting a walking tour of Dutch Kills for a group of enthusiasts, your humble narrator found himself walking up 35th street, and upon arriving at the street’s intersections with both 38th avenue and Northern Blvd.- I was moving past the titan Packard building.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Engaged in conversation with Our Lady of the Pentacle, who helped out with the tour, I suddenly felt as if someone might be throwing crumpled up bits of paper at my back. Spinning around to confront my attacker, this swarm of bees was observed.

It had been bees bouncing off my back!

- photo by Mitch Waxman

One of the things I’ve learned about Queens is this- if something “should be done or said”, no one is going to do it, so you’d better do it yourself. Our Lady of the Pentacle sighed at this point and walked up the block to find a shady spot to sit down while I crossed the street and yelled “BEEs” at anyone who approached this spot.

After many years of marriage to one such as myself, she knew that the following would take a while and she might as well get comfortable.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

I called 911, and told the operator that there were a lot of bees swarming on the same corner as a subway stop, and was told that that’s not an emergency and that I should call 311. With a hearty “yes ma’am” I hung up and called 311.

The operator listened to my description of the situation, and asked me if I had contacted the property owner about the situation.

Attempting to explain that I was attempting to report a dangerous situation here on the streets of Queens, she interrupted me and chided that “I wasn’t letting her talk”. There no way, of course, that this situation would have been dealt with differently if I was calling about such a situation in say… Manhattan.

She continued that “bees are part of nature and that the City of New York doesn’t mess with nature”.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

It is not impossible that your humble narrator was conceived in the back seat of a car like the one pictured above, observed recently on Northern Boulevard here in Astoria- or at least I hope I was. A 1966 Ford Mustang, lovingly cared for, and sporting the sort of style which defined the industrial supremacy of American auto manufacturing in the 20th century.

from Wikipedia

The first-generation Ford Mustang is the original pony car, manufactured by Ford Motor Company from 1964 until 1973.

It was initially introduced as a hardtop and convertible with the fastback version put on sale the following year. At the time of its introduction, the Mustang, sharing its underpinnings with the Falcon, was slotted into a compact car segment.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

From nearly every perspective, whether it be safety or fuel economy or pure comfort- a modern car is preferable in a straight comparison to a vintage ride like this one. However, if you’ve never felt the volcanic rumble of a 1960′s muscle car starting up, or been pressed back into the seat by the acceleration…

from themustangsource.com

Not much changed for Mustang in 1966. The grille design changed a bit–the 1966 models had the running pony inside the corral free-floating on horizontal grille bars. The side trim was slightly revised and a restyled gas cap completed the exterior changes.

On the interior, the instrument panel was redesigned with five round gauges, replacing the panel borrowed from the Ford Falcon for previous model years. Ford broke the 1,000,000 Mustang mark in 1966–18 months after its introduction. To celebrate, Ford released the Sprint 200 Mustang. They were mechanically identical to other six-cylinder Mustangs, but had a chrome air cleaner and a special engine decal which read “Mustang powered Sprint 200.”

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Few cars are as iconic as the early Mustangs, there’s the GTO and Trans Am of course, but the Mustang just screams rock and roll. Driving this car without “The Doors” playing would just be a crime.

from dmv.ny.gov

Standard series historical plates for passenger or commercial vehicles display either:

• a five-digit number followed by the letters HX (for example, 99999HX), or
• the letters HX followed by a five-digit number (for example, HX22222).
• Standard series historical motorcycle plates display the letters HM followed by three numbers.

Personalized Historical plates for any historical vehicle or historical motorcycle are now available. For an additional fee, registrants can order personalized letter/number combinations of up to eight characters (includes spaces and/or a silhouette of New York State) or 6 characters/spaces (no state silhouette available) for a motorcycle. Personalized Historical plates have the word “HISTORICAL” along the bottom of the plate.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

The dashboard exhibits classic form over function, with scores of knobs and sharp edges that would cut you to ribbons in an accident. This isn’t the design of modernity, overly concerned with what could happen, rather this is a can of Budweiser between your legs and a pack of Marlboro Red on the dash kind of design. Braggadocio on wheels, the chariot of a youthful culture manufactured before everything went so terribly askew.

Compare to the modern variant here: ford.com/cars/mustang/

- photo by Mitch Waxman

A few interesting photos adorn today’s posting, progeny of the prodigious amount of exploration a humble narrator has been occupied with for the last couple of weeks. There are so many great things “in the works” which haven’t been publicly announced yet, and which I’m bursting at the seams to tell you about, that I’m all a twitter.

2012 promises to be one of the great years for you to see and experience the Newtown Creek for yourself, as the early stages of several walking and boat tours are in the works.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

In the last two weeks, I’ve walked the entire creek in pursuance of one of these projects, which will be finalized and made public quite soon. I’ve worn out a pair of shoes, and shot literally thousands of photos for this project. My path has carried me from Bushwick to Long Island City and Greenpoint to Maspeth.

I’ve dodged trucks and trains, violated perhaps three separate sets of legal restrictions, and encountered a vast coterie of characters both malign and inspirational.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Within the next couple of weeks, announcements of many, many public events will begin. Meanwhile, the concrete devastations of Western Queens and the oil choked sands of North Brooklyn have been catalogued and categorized, concatenated and containerized.

It’s going to be a great summer.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Merry Christmas from the Newtown Pentacle.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Sad and scared today, the Newtown Creek tours were yesterday, and your humble narrator spoke to 2 sold out boatloads of eager enthusiasts. This isn’t the first time I’ve spoken before a group, but anxiety and nervous energy ruled an otherwise beautiful autumn day, and I am exhausted. Accordingly, here are 3 pretty pictures to cheer up the mood, captured recently in the brilliant light of autumn in the borough of Queens. A single moment from the real world in 2011, found on Northern Blvd. is above.

from wikipedia

As opposed to nostalgia – the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home – “solastalgia” is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment. A paper published by Albrecht and collaborators focused on two contexts where collaborative research teams found solastalgia to be evident: the experiences of persistent drought in rural New South Wales (NSW) and the impact of large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative effects exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

When I’m walking around, looking for moments of time to freeze and or document, the movements of my eyes seem mechanical. Up, down, all around- notice everything. The things I seldom photograph, as I find it rude, are the little domestic scenes which make life in this ancient community of Western Queens and North Brooklyn worth living in. The old guys posturing with a bottle of bear, some old lady shucking beans, yuppies arguing with their dogs. My “thing”, however, is found in lost thoroughfares, graveyards, and wherever the night winds are answered with defiance and howls.

from wikipedia

Hypervigilance is an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect threats. Hypervigilance is also accompanied by a state of increased anxiety which can cause exhaustion. Other symptoms include: abnormally increased arousal, a high responsiveness to stimuli, and a constant scanning of the environment for threats. Hypervigilance can be a symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder and various types of anxiety disorder. It is distinguished from paranoia. Paranoid states, such as those in schizophrenia, can seem superficially similar, but are characteristically different.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

In the last week, the two walking tours of Dutch Kills for Open House NY, a private boat tour of Newtown Creek for an elect group of education professionals, and the two public tours on Sunday the 23rd have been accomplished. The massive preparation and study associated with speaking on these tours has flattened my psyche, and left my frail and ruined physique a shattered mess. Enjoy today’s photos, and I’ll be back tomorrow with another missive from deep within the Newtown Pentacle. Oh… almost forgot to say it… I’m all ‘effed up.

from wikipedia

The onset of a stress response is associated with specific physiological actions in the sympathetic nervous system, both directly and indirectly through the release of epinephrine and to a lesser extent norepinephrine from the medulla of the adrenal glands. These catecholamine hormones facilitate immediate physical reactions by triggering increases in heart rate and breathing, constricting blood vessels. An abundance of catecholamines at neuroreceptor sites facilitates reliance on spontaneous or intuitive behaviors often related to combat or escape.

Normally, when a person is in a serene, unstimulated state, the “firing” of neurons in the locus ceruleus is minimal. A novel stimulus, once perceived, is relayed from the sensory cortex of the brain through the thalamus to the brain stem. That route of signaling increases the rate of noradrenergic activity in the locus ceruleus, and the person becomes alert and attentive to the environment.

If a stimulus is perceived as a threat, a more intense and prolonged discharge of the locus ceruleus activates the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system (Thase & Howland, 1995). The activation of the sympathetic nervous system leads to the release of norepinephrine from nerve endings acting on the heart, blood vessels, respiratory centers, and other sites. The ensuing physiological changes constitute a major part of the acute stress response. The other major player in the acute stress response is the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.