The Newtown Pentacle

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Well, you just had to figure that as soon as I was able to ride the trains again, y’all would be seeing multiple posts of trains here, huh? It has been a fairly nightmarish couple of weeks for a humble narrator, watching the world roll by while he’s been stuck in multiple holocausts of zoom meetings. Last week got gobbled up preparing for a virtual lecture on Dutch Kills for the Queens Public Library, which is online at the Queens Memory Project in case you’ve missed the dulcet sounds of my voice, followed by social obligations. After that, I got sucked into community board stuff.

Additionally, a little side project of mine for the last few months has been walking candidates for office in LIC around Newtown Creek and detailing problems or opportunities which the successor to Jimmy Van Bramer in the 26th council district will find landing on their plates. You very well might want to defund the cops, candidate, but you’re also going to have to form an opinion about a Federal Superfund site where 17,500 blue collar jobs can be either saved, magnified, or thrown away – in your potential district.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Luckily, Community Board breaks for the summer as do several of the various obligatory meetings for Newtown Creek. I’m actually heading up to the Empire State Building observatory this evening to do some shooting. One desires perspective, and when putting together the presentation for the Queens Library mentioned above I came to realize that all of the “top down” shots I’ve got of Newtown Creek have the old Koscisuzcko Bridge in them. Have to maintain the image library, me.

Additionally, as far as summer stuff goes, Our Lady of the Pentacle turned me on to a couple of great offers by Amtrak for regional rail travel. Might just take advantage of that, and take the camera out for a few day trips to the lesser Cities of North America.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Snap back answers are a big part of the current problem when discussing anything these days. So’s virtue signaling. Why do you have to have an opinion about everything?

Are you a racist? Probably not, but you’re a lying fool if you don’t admit to harboring prejudices. Are you an idiot? Probably not, but if you don’t offer that there are things you are completely ignorant about you are similarly a lying fool. There’s being a fool, and then there’s being sinister and weaponizing all of this current cultural bullshit going on for short term political gain. I’ve already seen “me too” weaponized.

As an example of weaponized politics, a casual friend of mine who is running for office in Flushing just got booted off his community board because the old guard thereabouts decided they didn’t like him or his opposition to a real estate mega project. This fellow is obviously East Asian in ancestry, but the specifics of his ethnicity never came up in the decade or so that I’ve known him. We mainly talk about food and transit, truth be told. As it turns out, he’s Korean, which I discovered on social media. This ethnicity thing became an issue since the specifics of race are very important to the anti racist lefties (dichotomy much?) who think that not building luxury condos is racist, and this fellow’s enemies – on the left – are accusing him of taking money from Pyongyang and acting as a Communist sleeper agent for North Korea. Wow.

Great thing about riding the trains again is having time to ponder, and think.

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“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.