Archive for the ‘Astoria’ Category
striated skin
Bored, bored, boredity, bored.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pain and I are old pals, so whereas the broken toe dealie has indeed been less than a pleasant experience, it’s certainly something which my particular wheelhouse has a checklist for dealing with on a clipboard. What’s been really getting under the skin has been the inaction and lack of capability. Not being able to push away from the dinner table and announce “I’m going out for a walk” is a manifestation of the very worm that gnaws for me. Normally I’m a pretty active fella, and all this sitting around with my foot up is driving me nuts with boredom. The thing with a busted bone (or any medical condition, actually) is that “you have to be patient when you’re a patient” and it takes six weeks at the minimum for a bone to heal.
The toe pain thing is really getting in the way, though.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Luckily, I’ve only had to conduct two walking tours during the last few weeks, and there’s only been one photo gig which required me to be on my feet the whole time. Everything else has been revolving around writing stuff, so at least there’s that. Problem is that I’ve been fairly isolated down to my little stretch of Broadway here in Astoria since the last weekend of October, and both me and the camera are keen to get out there and do some work. When I’ve limped out of the house, I’m trying to carry my minimum kit in an attempt to reduce the amount of weight I’m dragging around.
Wish I could say that my time has been productively spent otherwise, but I’ve mostly been sitting around with the left foot elevated and watching a lot of TV.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Unfortunately, I’ve missed out on a lot of cool atmospherics and conducive to photography weather conditions during my hermitage. For those of you who have asked, the toe is recovering nicely. I’m no longer wearing the weird orthopedic sandal dealie, and no longer require the phalange to be wrapped up in gauze and a stiffening bandage. It still smarts when I’m walking about, but I’ve managed to navigate the subways at rush hour in the last week, and seem to be able to walk for several blocks at a time before being reminded of the broken bone. I won’t be kicking anybody’s ass with it prior to Christmas, however. Soccer is not going to played anytime soon either, but that’s ok as I don’t actually play soccer but I like to have options and right now I don’t.
Sigh. My creek is calling and I cannot answer.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
Limited Time 25% off sale – use code “gifts25” at checkout.
“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.
peeking through
Minimalist Wednesday.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shots in today’s post are decidedly citrus in flavor. During the cold weather months, I’ll often set up a table top studio in my kitchen and experiment with various gizmos and time consuming techniques. In the case of today’s post, citrus fruit is sliced with a razor blade with the goal of creating sections that are about a centimeter thick. I set the slices up on a petri dish, which is in turn affixed to a little stage. Under the stage is a fairly powerful flashgun, which blasts light through the cultivar revealing its hidden structures.
That’s a navel orange in the one above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The lemon one above is one of my favorites, since the light passing through it illuminates the ovum casing of the seeds.
The fruit slices end up operating as defacto light filters, I’ve discovered. The burst of flash lighting moving through the slices gets recorded on the camera sensor sans the opposite color frequency, as in the shot above which ended up with little or no representation on the blue plate of the rgb image. If you really want to get into the “nitty gritty” of how digital imaging works, a controlled environment with known parameters for color temperature and so on can really teach you a lot. Believe it or not, lessons learned while photographing centimeter thick slices of lemons in my kitchen informs and improves the underlying technique used to shoot a tugboat or bridge out in “the wild.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator is under medical orders not to eat limes or grapefruits, due to a medication that is consumed daily, which regulates my blood cholesterol levels. It seems that the pill is essentially a refined and concentrated form of a compound found in both cultivars, and that consumption of the fruit might create a dangerous set of conditions in the liver. That’s sucks, as I really used to enjoy drinking a “Cuba Libre” cocktail every now and then.
I’m particularly fond of the shot above, as everything just went right with it.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Come to the library!
In the Shadows at Newtown Creek – The Roosevelt Island Historic Society has invited me to present a slideshow and talk about my beloved Newtown Creek at the New York Public Library on Roosevelt Island, on November 14th, 6 p.m. Free event!
Click here for more information.!
Buy a book!
“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.
anguished frenzy
Cut and cover.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Let’s say that a humble narrator announces a tour of the fabulous Newtown Creek, or a boat excursion to some remote corner of the harbor, and I end up taking a bath on the endeavor and lose money. Did I take a risk that didn’t pay off? When I’m talking about my empty right hand pocket, do I pretend that the roll of hundred dollar bills and the bag of assorted gem stones maintained in my left pocket doesn’t exist? What if my left hand pocket assets included billions and billions of dollars of Manhattan real estate? Can I just confess that I didn’t market the tour properly, or manage its costs competently, or proceeded with the operation under some rose colored ideation that it would sell out and make me richer than Croesus? Did I employ the services of a bunch of incompetents who are related to or friends with various political party officials, using my project as a patronage mill?
Or do I just blame the audience, accuse them of trying to get one over on me, and then go further in debt to hire a small army of armed guards with marching orders to generate revenue via fines and tickets because I can’t be losing money unless someone is stealing from me? Of course not, I’m not the MTA.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The practice of blaming the ridership, accusing them of theft of service, pretending that your pocket is empty when in reality you are one of the biggest landlords in New York State… that’s the MTA. Need a few billion bucks? Maybe sell your office building on Jay Street in Brooklyn and move your operations to a less tony location in Nassau or Suffolk County, or maybe Westchester. I understand that Mount Vernon and Yonkers have several abandoned office parks which would be quite affordable to move your army of bureaucrats into. Still underfunded? How about selling off some of your investment properties in upper Manhattan while the real estate market is hot?
That, or you can just wait for the next video of a bunch of cops having a fist fight with teenagers over $2.75 to make the nightly news.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Me? I’d let the Wall Street guys have a go at MTA. Let the bean counters in there to look for redundancy and cost savings through consolidations. Funny thing is, this would barely be felt by the Union people who actually keep the system running. MTA loves publicizing the fact that some shlimiel on the LIRR collected an outlandish amount of overtime pay, but never discusses the number of empty suits populating the office cubicles at their Jay Street HQ. I’d like to smash the system over there, where the subways are still operated as if the IND and IRT were distinct. There’s multiple bus companies, LIRR and Metro North have virtually zero interoperability… it goes on and on. The MTA real estate and property manager folks operate in shadow, with virtually zero public awareness of their shenanigans.
If NYC is an organism, with DEP the liver and kidneys, MTA operates the venous system. Arteriosclerosis is something I’m familiar with. The best treatment, long term, for this sort of disease vector is lifestyle change.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Come to the library!
In the Shadows at Newtown Creek – The Roosevelt Island Historic Society has invited me to present a slideshow and talk about my beloved Newtown Creek at the New York Public Library on Roosevelt Island, on November 14th, 6 p.m. Free event!
Click here for more information.!
Buy a book!
“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.
debased attainments
The ole 11103.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Given my current limitations, let’s just say that one of my normal pedestrian based travelogues through industrial Maspeth isn’t going to be on offer for a bit. One is more or less confined to a very narrow slice of almond eyed Astoria, and unless it’s directly related to a “have to” or work I’m not going to mess around with the healing process for the broken big toe. Luckily, Astoria is seldom boring.
Yesterday, my “have to” related to limping over to my optician to get the lenses in my spectacles updated with a new prescription. While waiting for the process to finish, I noticed this artifact of the recent holiday displayed vulgarly atop a fire hydrant.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Returning towards my side of Steinway Street along Broadway, laborers were busy clearing out the remains of the Duane Reade which has occupied the corner of Broadway and Steinway for the entire time I’ve lived here. Duane recently announced that their landlord had raised the rent for this cavernous space to usurious levels and the corporation decided to shutter this location.
Man, if Duane Reade can’t pay the rent…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I don’t title photos, since I’ve always hated the ego which such a practice displays. Back when I was a retoucher working on Madison Avenue, a standard refrain one might hear being shouted from my cubicle was “I HATE PHOTOGRAPHERS.” The level of preciousness attached to imagery by some of us just drives me crazy. It’s not an oil painting, despite the amount of skill and practice it takes to produce quality shots. Studio or big outdoor shots with props and lighting equipment do not change the equation all that much, in my mind. I know comic artists and fine art painters who don’t treat their works as preciously as some photographers do. The only members of the discipline whom I’ll grant the preciousness thing to are the photo journalists who work in war zones, capturing scenes of combat from “within the trenches.” That shot up there is a “snapshot” of a garbage can on 43rd street in Queens, and it doesn’t deserve much in the way of preciousness.
So, as mentioned, I don’t title photos. If I did, the one above would be called either “Childhood’s End,” or “Mommy and Daddy don’t live together anymore.”
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Come to the library!
In the Shadows at Newtown Creek – The Roosevelt Island Historic Society has invited me to present a slideshow and talk about my beloved Newtown Creek at the New York Public Library on Roosevelt Island, on November 14th, 6 p.m. Free event!
Click here for more information.!
Buy a book!
“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.
joy denying
The most wonderful time of the year.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To start, Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself will be gathering with our crew at Doyle’s Corner (found at the Times Square of Astoria, 42nd st and Broadway) after 4 p.m. to hand out candy to the children. Join us. I’ll be the one wearing the Mitch Waxman costume. To continue, I’m aghast at the efforts of the Dental Industrial Complex to deny the youth their annual birthright, and really must offer the chide that you people have to get a grip and quit it with the teachable moments. For the sake of all that is unholy, don’t politicize Halloween.
You’ve got your radical Pentecostals, Evangelicals, Hasids, and other groups who propagate the mythology that Halloween is a celebration of the Devil itself. That’s just ignorant. Also, the Dentists should embrace this holiday, as it means their cash drawers will be full by Thanksgiving.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s probably several radical lefties who don’t like this holiday as well. Pumpkins causing global warming? Somebody out there announcing that the carbon points of each candy bar can be calculated into a seemingly random number of dead Rhinos? Some stupid statement about the day which got tweeted out of the White House? What did the Mayor and Chirlane dress as? Halloween as an example of a capitalist or consumerist orgy of sugary greed coming from the socialists? Are the Trick or Treaters blocking your bike lane? Are Halloween’s origins in the European Catholic mythos exclusionary to Muslims, Buddhists, or the Baha’i?
Take a break today, folks, it’s a holiday. At least give the rest of us a day off to have a little fun without it having dire import.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In my case, I don’t need to watch any horror movies today. The swelling in my smashed toe is going down, which means I am now experiencing the fullness of pain one would associate with a fractured bone. Regardless of this uncomfortable situation, one cannot ignore his obligation to sugar up the neighborhood kids, lest a refusal of treats results in an abundance of tricks.
I’m officially bored to tears after several days of rest and keeping the foot elevated, and cannot endure watching any more television. I haven’t annoyed anyone who works for the government this week either. Officially, I’d like to thank everybody who has filled my head with horror stories of people they know who have suffered foot injuries which became infected which led to sepsis, amputation, and early death as well. That has been a real treat, having that in my head while trying to fall asleep as the toe throbs.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“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.
The Newtown Pentacle 