Archive for the ‘Photowalk’ Category
moist verdure
A life well lived is a series of dull events.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My annual pilgrimage to the MTA Holiday Nostalgia “Shoppers Special” Subway event carried me to Queens Plaza one recent Sunday. It’s a fun and wholesome thing to do.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Luckily, I have more than just a few acquaintances and friends who also enact this yearly journey, wherein legacy subway cars are run on the M line in a circuit between Queens Plaza and 2nd avenue in Manhattan.
It’s always nice to see someone you know.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The weird thing, for me, is that it involves willingly heading down into the rat infested tunnels- an activity which normally fills me with a malign dread.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These are all retired subway cars, once typical, that represent various eras of design. At the time of their original deployment, each of these legacy units were state of the art.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The legacy cars performed well, although they are quite rickety in comparison to modern subways units. There was a brief interval wherein a door got stuck in the open position, but the MTA guys sorted that out in no time.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An odd mix of folks were observed onboard. Some were ordinary commuters and customers of the M line, while many were hardcore rail fans. More than one photographer was spotted shooting models in period dress.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The rail guys, they’re mostly guys, are the quiet ones on the train who watch every little detail and are listening to the machine. These cats can tell you the part number for individual screws on these trains, and you ignore their knowledge at your own peril. Foamers indeed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This show will be running every Sunday on the M line in December, operating between Manhattan’s 2nd Avenue and Queens Plaza. Check out the MTA Holiday Train page for schedule info.
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Project Firebox 99
An ongoing catalog of New York’s endangered Fireboxes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This 99th portrait of a Firebox depicts that which stands proudly upon Northern Blvd at the eastern extant of the Carridor in Queens. Great expectation has been expressed by certain readers of this, your Newtown Pentacle, that some Götterdämmerung of a Firebox posting will arrive for the 100th iteration, but that misses the point of these ubiquitous columns of street furniture and will surely leave one disappointed. This scarlet sentinel survived 12 years of Michael Bloomberg’s best attempts at firebox genocide, like its brothers, and that alone is worthy of comment.
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strange instruments
My neck hurts, I have to pee, and I think someone might be following me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Disturbing indications, delivered to the brain via input from that subcutaneous network of cabled sensors which are referred to as the nervous system (by layman and medical professional alike) and embedded within the skinvelope, abound. Certain sections of the decaying bag of meat in which one is housed were never much good when they were brand new and unsullied, and after nearly half a century of active service these sections have grown worn and are in a degenerate state of repair. Everything hurts, and the atmospherics surrounding the coming of winter irritate, causing my skinvelope to feel quite itchy.
For too long has my brain looked down upon the meatbag below from the perspective of master and slave, and I fear that a Marxist inspired revolution may be afoot, within.
from wikipedia
Details of delusional parasitosis vary among sufferers, but it is most commonly described as involving perceived parasites crawling upon or burrowing into the skin, sometimes accompanied by an actual physical sensation (known as formication). Sufferers may injure themselves in attempts to be rid of the “parasites”. Some are able to induce the condition in others through suggestion, in which case the term folie à deux may be applicable.
Nearly any marking upon the skin, or small object or particle found on the person or his clothing, can be interpreted as evidence for the parasitic infestation, and sufferers commonly compulsively gather such “evidence” and then present it to medical professionals when seeking help. This presenting of “evidence” is known as “the matchbox sign” because the “evidence” is frequently presented in a small container, such as a matchbox.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Crawling about in the dark of night, scuttling to and fro across the concretized devastations, my normally steady gait has become altered of late. Heavy camera bag and too many miles causes one to stoop his shoulders with the left held noticeably lower than the right. My right arm sweeps back slightly (steadying a camera) while the left comes forward, and at the waist I’m bent slightly forward a bit (from offsetting the weight of the bag). Also, I seem to pull myself inexorably forward using my right leg a bit more than the left these days, so my scuttle has evolved into a bit more of a squirm, reminiscent of the calamitous gait expressed by Hollywood zombies. Just a couple of years ago, my movements were somewhat more fluid, but I suppose I just have to deal with the aches and pain and work through this seasonal malady called winter.
Can’t just bury my head in the sand, and pretend I don’t have eyes and ears, or notice a world which is all around me.
from wikipedia
Worms live in almost all parts of the world including marine, freshwater, and terrestrial habitats. Some worms living in the ground help to condition the soil (e.g., annelids, aschelminths). Many thrive as parasites of plants (e.g., aschelminths) and animals, including humans (e.g., platyhelminths, aschelminths). Several other worms may be free-living, or nonparasitic. There are worms that live in freshwater, seawater, and even on the seashore. Ecologically, worms form an important link in the food chains in virtually all the ecosystems of the world.
In the United States, the average population of worms per acre is 53,767.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Current interests, “mah research” as I refer to it comically, have been leading me inexorably towards the history of an area known to modernity as Queens Plaza and the Sunnyside Yards- large sections which hosted either coastal marsh, flood plain, or littoral zone well into the 19th century. It’s plainly fascinating that the slab of fill and concrete upon which perambulation, vehicular, and mass transit occurs occludes the ancient patterns of flowing water. Somewhere, perhaps as little as 25-50 feet below the somewhat modern cut and cover tunnels underlying the streets, still flow the ancestral streams known by the Dutch.
Could there be underground grottoes inhabited by the atavist extant of the ancestral waters of Dutch Kills, or the Sunswick Creek down there?
from wikipedia
Myriapoda is a subphylum of arthropods containing millipedes, centipedes, and others. The group contains over 13,000 species, all of which are terrestrial. Although their name suggests they have myriad (10,000) legs, myriapods range from having over 750 legs (Illacme plenipes) to having fewer than ten legs.
The fossil record of myriapods reaches back into the late Silurian, although molecular evidence suggests a diversification in the Cambrian Period, and Cambrian fossils exist which resemble myriapods. The oldest unequivocal myriapod fossil is of the millipede Pneumodesmus newmani, from the late Silurian (428 million years ago). P. newmani is also important as the earliest known terrestrial animal.
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heard messages
It’s dark and cold, and I can’t feel my feet any more.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another Newtown Creek meeting drew me in recently, this time it was the Newtown Creek CAG. CAG stands for Community Advisory Group, and its role is mandated as part of the Superfund process. The EPA was there to discuss and disseminate some early data, which they stressed as being raw and entirely uninterpreted. This is an important distinction for we non scientists to understand, as they distributed disc copies of these early findings to several of us that asked, since a lot of the terms and subjects discussed by these documents can be a little off putting. The presence of arsenic in 100% of sampled sediment may not be something to worry about, after all, as arsenic is actually in 100% of the apples you’ve eaten over the course of your lifetime- its naturally occurring, just like in roses (my analogy, not EPA’s). It’s the “levels of” and “concentrations of” you need to worry about.
from wikipedia
The theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions, adding new ones to create a consistent belief system, or alternatively by reducing the importance of any one of the dissonant elements. Cognitive dissonance is the distressing mental state that people feel when they “find themselves doing things that don’t fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold.” A key assumption is that people want their expectations to meet reality, creating a sense of control. Likewise, another assumption is that a person will avoid situations or information sources that give rise to feelings of uneasiness, or dissonance.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The EPA data reports are highly technical, and richly illustrated with thousands of photos describing the process of sediment, atmospheric, and water sampling. Materials collected from Newtown Creek are sent to the laboratories of Federal contractors and other specialists, whereupon arcane tests, dilutions, and dissections are performed upon it. The raw data, which was collected during the last couple of years, presents the need for further investigations (which EPA indicates will be commencing in the coming year). The data is housed on 5 DVD’s and as mentioned- is completely uninterpreted. Your humble narrator has just begun to scratch through it, but so far nothing has jumped out at me, other than a vague sort of dread. You really wouldn’t want to swim in English or Dutch Kills, it would seem, and an amazing variety of worms were found living in the sediment layers- some of whom are not native to NY waters and hail from the overseas.
from wikipedia
Affective forecasting can be divided into four components: predictions about emotional valence (i.e. positive or negative), the specific emotions experienced, their duration, and their intensity. While errors may occur in all four components, research overwhelmingly indicates that the two areas most prone to bias, usually in the form of overestimation, are duration and intensity. Immune neglect is a form of impact bias in response to negative events whereby people fail to predict how much their psychological immune system will hasten their recovery. On average, people are fairly accurate about predicting which emotions they will feel in response to future events. However, some studies indicate that predicting specific emotions in response to more complex social events leads to greater inaccuracy. For example, one study found that while many women who imagine encountering gender harassment predict feelings of anger, in reality, a much higher proportion report feelings of fear. Other research suggests that accuracy in affective forecasting is greater for positive affect than negative affect, suggesting an overall tendency to overreact to perceived negative events.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The CAG is a good group, a sort of congress for those of us whom the Newtown Creek has claimed. The Newtown Creek Alliance is well represented, as is Riverkeeper, NCMC, the local elected officials, corporate and Business Improvement District associations, and the so called “Responsible Parties.”
These “Responsible Parties” are those corporate entities who have entered into an agreement with EPA which names them as culpable for the environmental issues that drew the Federal agency’s notice in the first place, and which binds the various corporations named so into financially and materially supporting the clean up process and its monumental cost. EPA acts independently, but the CAG exists to alert EPA to the unexpected or tangential results of the Superfund process and creates a point of access to its managers. It’s as complicated a set of relationships as you can get, I suppose, the sort of thing a person like me avoids like the plague- but at least I get to be around people.
The meetings are public, you know!
from wikipedia
The term fallacy is often used generally to mean an argument that is problematic for any reason, whether it is formal or informal.
The presence of a formal fallacy in a deductive argument does not imply anything about the argument’s premises or its conclusion. Both may actually be true, or even more probable as a result of the argument, but the deductive argument is still invalid because the conclusion does not follow from the premises in the manner described. By extension, an argument can contain a formal fallacy even if the argument is not a deductive one; for instance an inductive argument that incorrectly applies principles of probability or causality can be said to commit a formal fallacy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Interesting things reveal themselves occasionally. Something which came up last year at a CAG meeting, for instance, was that business owners around the Maspeth Creek area were having a difficult time securing long term credit due to trepeditious inclinations displayed by the banking community toward lending to clients with unknown environmental liabilities. Another was that there’s a strata of discarded metro cards lodged in the sediment. When I get through the stack of discs, I’ll let y’all know what I think I see, but we will all have to wait for the interpretation which will be offered by someone else who is smart enough to actually understand it. Addled, my aging mind can barely comprehend the meaning of these dancing columns of numbers, nor the multitudinously cryptic scatter graphs, and photos of those dark things which slither and flop through the Black Mayonnaise.
from wikipedia
In science, cognition is a group of mental processes that includes the attention of working memory, producing and comprehending language, learning, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. Various disciplines, such as psychology, philosophy and linguistics all study cognition. However, the term’s usage varies across disciplines; for example, in psychology and cognitive science, “cognition” usually refers to an information processing view of an individual’s psychological functions. It is also used in a branch of social psychology called social cognition to explain attitudes, attribution, and groups dynamics. In cognitive psychology and cognitive engineering, cognition is typically assumed to be information processing in a participant’s or operator’s mind or brain.
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monstrous guilt
The farbissina hunt rides again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Eschewing the behavioral requirements by which social graces are enforced amongst those who aspire, the qualities of polity and well mannered conviviality are not normally mentioned when the subject of discussion is your humble narrator. Oft has this lack of civilized manner called down unexpected storms- which offer, induce, and deliver personal angst and derision. The path I walk and life I’ve lived has been pedantic and painful at best, and many have volunteered that my personality is tolerable only in short doses. Vast physical inadequacies, and the social status of an ineluctably feckless quisling, demand that one such as myself retreats when trouble comes. There is no chance that a stand will be taken and instead to the shadows will I flee.
From my hermitage of shadows, lurking amongst the night, do I stab at and shun the world that surrounds. Humbug.
from wikipedia
Shunning can be the act of social rejection, or mental rejection. Social rejection is when a person or group deliberately avoids association with, and habitually keeps away from an individual or group. This can be a formal decision by a group, or a less formal group action which will spread to all members of the group as a form of solidarity. It is a sanction against association, often associated with religious groups and other tightly knit organizations and communities. Targets of shunning can include persons who have been labeled as apostates, whistleblowers, dissidents, strikebreakers, or anyone the group perceives as a threat or source of conflict.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When this- your Newtown Pentacle- first appeared on the vast interwebs a few years ago, the accusations hurled my way were many and varied. Some said that I was some sort of shill for the real estate people, given the wonderment expressed about western Queens. Shortly thereafter, some said that I was a pompous windbag pontificating to a nearly empty room of slack jawed Hipsters. Next up, I was accused of being some sort of sleeper agent placed by deep pocketed and borough wide political gangs with shadowy goals. After that, a sudden wave of auto cthonic attention from the press caused some to characterize me as a careerist and carpet bagger. Can you see why I stick to the shadows and shun a world populated by crazy people? If I was any of the things above, wouldn’t I be able to afford to own a car?
It’s mostly night time in December anyway, and I’ve always hated being asked to drink any flavor of Kool-Aid. Back in the old neighborhood, in Brooklyn, we just called it bug juice.
from wikipedia
“Drinking the Kool-Aid” is a metaphor commonly used in the United States that refers to a person or group holding an unquestioned belief, argument, or philosophy without critical examination. It could also refer to knowingly going along with a doomed or dangerous idea because of peer pressure. The phrase typically carries a negative connotation when applied to an individual or group. The phrase derives from the November 1978 Jonestown Massacre, where members of the Peoples Temple, who were followers of the pro-Communist cult leader Reverend Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking a mixture of a powdered soft drink flavoring agent laced with cyanide.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What this little invective has to do with the photos presented in today’s post, captured nearby Manhattan’s Flat Iron district in the east 20’s, is surprisingly simple. These were the thoughts roiling and boiling between my ears while I was shooting. It has been a long, long time since I’ve allowed myself to feel anything at all- let alone allowing an old and familiar cauldron of hatred and bile to come to a simmer. Here’s the deal, lords and ladies, and I’m saying it for the umpteenth time: There is no hidden agenda, nor guiding principal, nor shadowed paymaster behind the scenes around these parts. I show you what Queens and the Creek show me, that’s it. I take shots of seemingly significant structures and locations out in the field. I go back to HQ, research to the best of my ability, and present them here. Sometimes, I’m wrong, and count on the wisdom of crowds to point me in the right direction when I am.
Meanwhile, I’m busy shunning the whole world for awhile. Bah.
from wikipedia
Green Infrastructure or Blue-green infrastructure is a network providing the “ingredients” for solving urban and climatic challenges by building with nature. The main components of this approach include stormwater management, climate adaptation, less heat stress, more biodiversity, food production, better air quality, sustainable energy production, clean water and healthy soils, as well as the more anthropocentric functions such as increased quality of life through recreation and providing shade and shelter in and around towns and cities.
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The Newtown Pentacle 