Archive for December 2017
seasonal tiding
It’s National Date Nut Bread Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Holiday greetings and salutations to all of you lords and ladies who ascribe to the particular sort of iconography pictured above.
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hidden picture
It’s National Hamburger Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If my plans work out properly, while you’re reading this post, I’ve actually managed to drag myself away from the slothful indifference to all things which have distinguished the last couple of weeks and I’m somewhere in Manhattan pointing my camera at things and humans. The shots in today’s post are from the archives.
That’s a juvenile Red Tail Hawk at Calvary Cemetery in LIC, as seen on a wintry morning a few years back.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I like all the seabirds, but will be damned if I can tell you with certainty what speciation they are. Everytime I try, I’m wrong, which somebody gleefully points out and then all my credibility is shot. It’s like that game “Jenga,” pull out the wrong brick and the whole tower crashes down, credibility is. It’s best to say “I don’t know” and muster up my Brooklyn accent for “Issa Boid.”
I enjoy taking pictures of birds, it’s rather challenging. The ones above and below are from this past summer, at Hallets Cove in Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Actually… come to think of it, the one above of the murmurating flock was gathered on 48th street in Sunnyside, nearby that shopping center off of Northern Blvd. There’s always a lot of seabirds thereabouts for some reason. Maybe the birds are passing on some genetic or inherited memory of where there used to be water to their kids. Maybe they’re just hanging around the Stop and Shop parking lot because they’re in a gang. Who knows?
That whole zone used to be quite swampy, as a note, prior to the whole Sunnyside Yards happening.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This little war monster decided to die on my porch in Astoria. It still had a little life left in it when I found it, so I scooped it up on a piece of paper and let it die while lying on soil in the shade offered by a potted plant. What can I tell you, I’m a giant softie for well armored pollinators. I also didn’t want the dog to get too interested in it either.
The next morning, after having poked at it with a pencil to assure that it had met its demise and wouldn’t vaingloriously sting me as part of some futile last stand, I had my way with its corpse. Photographically, I mean… sheesh.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The reason that Red Tail Hawk was hanging around Calvary Cemetery in the first shot is exemplified by the subject of the one above. There’s a population of these groundling burrowers which exist in the loam at the polyandrion. Groundling Burrowers is what I call ’em, of course, but the kids all just say “Bunny!”
I’ve seen what happens when the aforementioned birds of prey achieve their intentions, regarding these burrowers, and it ain’t a pretty sight – I’ll tell ya.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is actually a fairly old photo, depicting one of the yellow eyed black cats which manifest sometimes as I scuttle along and around the Borough. The one above used to live on 29th street in LIC, and I often saw it hunting along the bulkheads of Newtown Creek’s Dutch Kills tributary. When I see one of these golden eyed swivel eared shadow beasts, I know it’s going to be a productive day photographically, and Queens has something special in store for me.
I just have to keep walking and find it. Queens is coy like that.
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cupboard linings
It’s National Sangria Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
File this one under “Old Man shakes fist at passing cloud.” We really have to do something about these utility wires here in Western Queens. You’re looking at an amalgamated twenty five to thirty years of wire in the shots today. Somebody moves in to an apartment, they order cable or internet service, and next thing you know – there’s a new lead coming off of the utility pole that gets tacked loosely onto their wall.
Thing is, the cable people never seem to remove the old wire, and just leave it in place.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s when it snows that you can really discern the clot of coaxial cabling which owns the sky here in Astoria. The scene hereabouts is reminiscent of those old photos of Manhattan, the ones from the late 19th century when the telegraph and telephones had just come to town.
There has to be close to a ton of cable criss crossing back and forth on every single block in Western Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When I say Western Queens, I really mean the totality of it, incidentally. I see this mess everywhere that the local community board didn’t force the cable people to put their wires underground, as they are in Sunnyside Gardens and other parts of Community Board 2.
It’s not just the cable folks either, Verizon and Con Ed can boast rather impressive bundles of electronic spaghetti mingling with the street trees.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’ve witnessed a couple of disasters, and a few near disasters associated with this utility wire situation. Thanks to the intervention of Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer, the NYS Utility Commission compelled Cond Ed to replace a bowing utility pole on Astoria’s Broadway last year. Saying that, neither RCN nor Spectrum have bothered to move their wire hookups to the new pole yet, and their conductive tonnages are still being supported by the ancient wooden one.
Additionally, as a note, the Spectrum Installers Union strike is still going on.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A summer ago, the entire RCN grid began to simmer and smoke on the poles. To their credit, the company brought in extra crews and got their customers back online in a day or two. To their detriment, they left all the damaged cables in place. One hopes that at some point in the future, a cohesive plan to rationalize this situation will be undertaken wherein Government officialdom will compel the utilities…
Aww. Crap. Forgot the Borough motto. “Welcome to Queens. Now go fuck yourself.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Nothing will be done, and everything will get worse. Storm clouds will gather, rain will fall, and the puppies will be unhappy all about the neighborhood. The cables will fall and randomly kill us all, falling like asps from the sky. Ruination and death will be answered by calls for a rezoning by City Planning, with increased height and residential density in mind.
That’s when the wires will disappear into the ground.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All is ruination and death. Everywhere you look.
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insinuated lapse
It’s National Hard Candy Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We recently had some company staying over, at HQ here in Astoria. Amongst our lodgers was a 12 year old fellow who lives in the (extremely) exurbs of Denver out in Colorado, which is a somewhat “sheltered” place as far as the tangible realities of life go. As we were moving along, he pointed out an older woman on Broadway who was collecting cans and bottles for recycling and cash redemption, and asked me if she was homeless. The kid had apparently never seen a homeless person before, which is a whole other story, and I had to explain to him about the industry of the “canners.”
Somehow I ended up in a lefty speech about personal initiative and the streets being paved with gold from an immigrants point of view, lauding the canners for their pluck and chiding native born New Yorkers for literally throwing money out in the garbage. The kid wasn’t impressed and went back to playing with his phone. He just wanted to say he saw a bum when he was in the City, I think.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My dog Zuzu is quite used to these little invectives and flights of politique fancy. Whomever to and whenever I’m trying to make some long winded and esoteric point, Zuzu just sort of hunkers down and waits. She knows it’s going to be awhile, especially when my response to someone starts with “No, that’s not how things work… it’s complicated…”
Don’t get me started, really.
Funnily enough, I’ve recently had several of the people in my “social media” world label me as a “liberal.” Most of the real lefties I know think of me as a “stealth Conservative,” whereas I argue that none of these labels actually mean anything anymore. Might as well call me a Whig.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There are, of course, things encountered in NYC that just defy description, and if you didn’t take a picture of them – nobody would believe you. Zuzu the dog won’t commit to anything more than a quick sniffing of such anomalous items, and the kid from Colorado barely seemed to register most of what was going on around him.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
defeated aspirations
It’s National Roast Suckling Pig Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The other night, I mentioned to a friend that I had no reason to get up in the morning, and he inquired as to whether or not I was depressed. My statement had nothing to do with mood or mental state, instead it was factual – my daytime calendar is fairly empty between the first week of December and middle January. Part of this is my peculiar vulnerability to cold weather which necessitates a certain amount of hermitage, another part of it is that this is the time of the year when I’m hitting the books and doing research into this or that, and working on presentation materials (working on the 2018 photo portfolio, me). This has really hampered photo gathering – as a note – which is a negative, but I’ve got to get my house of cards together for the new year. You’re only as good as the last provable shutter flop.
Since I don’t have to necessarily be “somewhere” at 8 in the morning most days, what’s the point of maintaining a farcical kabuki and simulating adherence to the “ole nine to five”? I’m often up at the hour of the wolf this time of the year. If you’re sacking out at four or five in the morning, you ain’t getting up at seven, if you know what I’m saying.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One thing that’s emerged in my searching through multiple archives of photos, which number in the tens of thousands at this point, is that I seem to have fallen into a bit of a rut over the last year and a half. The other is that a bunch of my friends have died along the way. There’s a few long term projects which will be reaching fruition in the next twenty four months, and the stuff generated by this “rut” has become noticeably more refined, but it seems I need to get out more. That’s my New Years resolution, by the way.
“I been everywhere, man” is a bit of generalization and I certainly haven’t been “everywhere.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As is my annual habit, I plan to wallow in laziness and turpitude for another couple of weeks and get it out of my system. By the new year, boredom and self hatred will have expanded sufficiently to force me into action. Some pedantic and utterly banal explosion of activity inspired by Marcus Aurelius will form up and despite my ennui – me and the camera are going to be “out there” every single day.
For now, though, I still don’t have much of a reason to wake up in the mornings.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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