Archive for the ‘Pickman’ Category
into the world
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Sleep has not come easily for your humble narrator of late, and dreaming offers little nepenthe. Days and nights it would seem, are consumed with images of the dread Newtown Creek and its insalubrious valley. English Kills in particular, the logical paramount of the waterway and the heart of darkness itself, draws my attention.
It is important to mention here that I am speaking from a personal point of view in this post and not espousing a majority opinion or policy of any of the “groups” with which the Newtown Pentacle has become affiliated. There are those I work for, work with, or work for me- who might not agree with statements made in this post offered to stimulate discussion on “common wisdom”.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A decision which proved controversial this summer, on several Newtown Creek boat tours, was my demand that we no longer cross the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge with the general public on board. This is a deviation from prior years, but the prurient interest and wonderment of viewing the place is far outweighed by the risk posed to those who are exposed to its poisons. If you want to go back there, there are other options and other parties who will take you. Often it will be in a small vessel, often a kayak. Which is the point of this missive.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned, last week your humble narrator met with that staff of Manhattan doctors which have long maintained my delicate equilibrium. One of the topics of examination which the white coat crowd brought forward to me was the environmental exposure which my activities along the Creek brings, the long term consequences of same, and certain laboratory testing which they would like me to undergo due to my walking its banks. Paradoxically, certain interests involved in the ongoing story of the Newtown Creek held me to task for statements about water quality as related to recreational boating, fearing that my opinions might harm their particular interests and provide fuel for their critics in officialdom.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Everybody’s friends at EPA are still in the process of discovering all that there may be which is buried down there, and until the results of their analysis are revealed (which will be nearly a decade from now)– no hard and fast statement about the water quality can be considered reliable or sound. Apocrypha and incomplete discoveries, however, suggest that a witch’s brew of worst case scenarios are to be found all along the Creek- and especially in the section of English Kills which lies beyond DUMABO (Down Under the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The “numbers” which most use to discuss water quality in this place are relative to the presence of microscopic entities like the enterococcus, bacterial counts of which are calculated relative to recent rain events and so called “outfalls”. Famously, the rule in most of NY harbor is to wait 72 hours after it rains before swimming or boating because of a “high count”, and the folks at DEP calculate the success of their endeavors based on an accounting of the population of this particular microbial specie (a Federal Standard, they used to use Fecal Coliform). Virii and Prions are neither tested for, nor counted.
When a beach is closed, its usually because “the count” is high, for instance. The difference to the surrounding waters which Newtown Creek presents is that sewer borne bacteria are merely the tip of the iceberg which floats in this stagnant water.
Don’t forget- orange juice and ice do not a screw driver make, it’s when you stir in the vodka that you achieve a proper and singular cocktail bearing a potency beyond that of its individual components.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
An enormous waste transfer station acts as a concentrating point for the putrescent waste of New York City just back there, producing an excruciating stink. The shorelines of this particular valley are lined with state superfund sites, and large sewer outfalls feed millions of gallons of human waste into English Kills annually. That CSO “flow” also carries with it every chemical which has passed through a human filter- birth control and steroid pharmaceuticals, undigestable food additives and dyes, and all the runoff from the gutters which carries solvents, automotive drippings, and whatever washes out of the enormous acreage of cemeteries which distinguish the neighborhoods around the Newtown Creek watershed.
Not trying to “gross you out”, but facts are immutably facts.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Detractors would offer that your humble narrator is not a doctor, scientist, or much of anything at all. They would further inform you that I am a doomsayer, alarmist, and given to making unfounded statements based on a layman’s understanding of the complex chemistry which composes the so called waters of Newtown Creek. They call me a vulgar fool as well, but not to my face.
All this is true, of course, but it doesn’t mean that I’m incorrect.
ecstasy and horror
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Although mysticism and the esoteric are dismissed casually (except for the dogma of organized religious denominations, of course, whose every fantastic claim of metacognition and supranormal “logic” is widely accepted as “gospel”), both the syncretic belief systems of foreign born peasant magick and long held folk superstitions are as much a part of the landscape of Western Queens and North Brooklyn as the concrete and steel which form it. The colonialists who conquered the western tip of Long Island were positive that witches, ghosts, and curses existed. Perhaps they were right, and perhaps we disregard their viewpoint at our peril. To wit, check out a posting which appeared here two years back- describing a haunting in Astoria.
The White Lady of Astoria, from a Halloween two years previous.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Personally witnessed, the vast cemeteries which distinguish and define western Queens and form the so called “Cemetery Belt” offer nocturnal privacy and ritual sanctity to 21st century sorcerers and other bizarre conjurors. Strange altars, burnt offerings, odd bits of symbolically knotted cord are so often observed by your humble narrator in these centuried polyandrions that scarce mention is made of them. One of the more obtuse and bold practitioners of the mystic arts used a certain hilltop in St. Michaels cemetery here in Astoria for rites that seemed to be tied to a lunar schedule for better than a year.
Pale Garden gathered together a series of postings on the weird activity at St. Michael’s Cemetery.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Found on a hill of Laurels, nearby that Lethe of New York City which is known as the Newtown Creek, First Calvary Cemetery was consecrated by the Archbishop of the Romans- Dagger John Hughes- in 1848. Visitors are warned not to spend too much time here, lest that which cannot possibly exist notice you. Sensitives and psychics avoid the place, for it is a font of buried ambition, and those who lie here refuse to be forgotten. Sanctified ground, the odd ceremonies which are observed at St. Michaels cannot take place here, due to the power of Dagger John’s wards, but still certain old world traditions and their leave behinds are observed in lonely corners and atop wind swept hills.
Remember the witch knots at Calvary, which were described in “Triskadekaphobic Paranoia“?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The high art of a prelate like Dagger John, or the disgusting practice of degenerates like Aleister Crowley find commonality in highly intellectual and overtly ritual observances. Peasant magick, however, whose tradition stretches back to the debauchment of slavery and the colonial oppression of the aboriginal cultures of the Americas may be observed everywhere one goes. Whether it is the “blue eye” talismanic wards of the Hellenes or the corner store Botanica of the Latinos, peasant magick surrounds and infiltrates our modern communities. Not long ago, this altar of handmade artifice was observed.
Little Memories described the odd altar encountered on Broadway and 43rd street in Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Your humble narrator grows increasingly concerned that the dime store spiritualism of pop culture “ghost hunters” is propagating both an acceptance of unblinking credulity and “magical thinking” in our culture. Skepticism and high standards of proof are required for extraordinary claims, and pseudo scientific methodology masks the propagation of a mystical world view which has led the nation to the current circumstance which threatens not just our personal liberty but the very existence of constitutional republicanism. Don’t forget that the last President of this Republic started a war based on the notion that his personal Deity had put him in office to do so. Accordingly, one morning I set out for Calvary Cemetery with the intention of capturing a “ghost photo”.
Scenes familiar, and loved presented what might be a “ghost orb” or “dust” at Calvary Cemetery’s Almirall chapel.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Happy Halloween, folks, and if you’re looking for me today- I’m heading down to the Newtown Creek and will be searching high and low for all evidences of the Blissville Banshee.
I’ll be listening to this on my headphones, and would remind you that the old adage “The best trick of the Devil is convincing you that he doesn’t exist” is most often repeated by scurrilous and ambitious prelates trying to convince the gullible that their particular avatar of divinity does exist.
high and wild
– 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.
disjointed jargon
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Whilst marching past the sky flung and quite cyclopean walls of First Calvary Cemetery, which form the border between life and death along Review Avenue here in Queens, your humble narrator found himself stricken with certain longings for times past. Not the usual longings, borne of long nocturnal studies into the occluded and dim history of the fabled Newtown Creek and environs, but instead a desire to return to that moment in time when it was all new to me- just a few years ago. Far have my solitary marches across the concrete desolations of the Newtown Pentacle taken me from that original path.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When that hellish green flame of revelation was first lit, before I found out about Conrad Wessel and Cord Meyer and had no idea who Michael Degnon or Dagger John might be, the wonderland of Newtown Creek was merely another industrial area which had fallen on hard times and the sort of place which I always found myself wandering through. As a kid, it was south Brooklyn and the maritime era leave behinds which adorn Jamaica Bay. These days I’m conducting tours of the area for academic and political crowds, and speaking extemporaneously on the historic ramifications of it. Fear has risen in me that I’m losing my focus.
I almost walked past this glob of risible decay without photographing it, for instance.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent inundation, which has been typical for the storm addled year of 2011, has saturated the low lying alluvial plain around the Creek and betrayed its past as wetlands. Accordingly, anything lying on an open patch of dirt immediately becomes soaked. I couldn’t tell you what this glutinous mass with a vaguely fibrous texture once was, but I am oh so glad I was still capable to notice it. The thing about the Newtown Pentacle, a term coined to describe the pentangular geographic distribution of the early European colonies in western Queens and Northern Brooklyn, is that the devil is always in the details.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Microscopy upon any subject often obscures the larger themes surrounding it, in essence when you follow Alice down the rabbit hole, you forget that the shire still lies without. The pile of discarded newspapers in the shot above, which are curiously and analogously arranged in the shape of a fallen man, obscured a bag of pots and pans. Repulsively filthy, one of the cooking pans was filled with human excrement.
Curiously, the pans were in the approximate location that a pelvis might be found on a human.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It has been painful to stand in public, as to be seen by so many diminishes me. Duty, however, demands that I tell the story of this place, no matter the personal cost.
This Sunday, the public tours of Newtown Creek will be departing from Pier 17 at South Street Seaport. The afternoon session is already sold out, but a few tickets are still available for the morning one. Heavily discounted (and I would point out that I have zero financial interest in the tours) at $10, due to a grant from NYCEF fund of the Hudson River Foundation, these will most likely be the last chance for the general public to see the Newtown Creek by boat until the spring.
And your humble narrator is anxious to get back out on the streets and find more mystery globs of risible decay, altars of unknown and foreign gods, and the graves of both Battle Ax Gleason and “he who must not be named”…
deeply hidden
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When your humble narrator was still a boy, certain promises and prognostications were offered by the society at large which have, frankly, just not worked out. Yes, we have the TV which you can wear on your wrist, and there are indeed robot vacuum cleaners… but where are the jet packs and moving sidewalks?
For another set of angles on the LIRR yard at Hunters Point, check out this Newtown Pentacle posting from September 12, “Little Memories“
from 1877′s “Long Island and where to go!!: A descriptive work compiled for the Long R.R. Co.“, courtesy google books:
Long Island City is the concentrating point upon the East river, of all the main avenues of travel from the back districts of Long Island to the city of New York. The great arteries of travel leading from New York are Thomson avenue, macadamized, 100 feet wide, leading directly to Newtown, Jamaica and the middle and southern roads on Long Island, and Jackson avenue, also 100 feet wide, and leading directly to Flushing, Whitestone and the northerly roads.
Long Island City is also the concentrating point upon the East river, of the railway system of Long Island.
The railways, upon reaching the city, pass under the main avenues of travel and traffic, and not upon or across their surface.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Concessions will be made that yes, people these days do indeed dress in the manner of superheroes when exercising- modern form fitting fabrics garishly colored are a common sight. However, personal jet packs have never materialized, and the “meal in pill form” is still not a reality.
from wikipedia
Long Island City station was built on June 26, 1854, and was rebuilt seven times during the 19th Century. On December 18, 1902, both the two-story station building, and an office building owned by the LIRR burned down. The station was rebuilt on April 26, 1903, and was electrified on June 16, 1910.
Before the East River Tunnels were built, the Long Island City station served as the terminus for Manhattan-bound passengers from Long Island, who took ferries to the East Side of Manhattan. The passenger ferry service was abandoned on March 3, 1925, although freight was carried by car floats (see Gantry Plaza State Park) to and from Manhattan until the middle twentieth century.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A game my adolescent friends and I used to play was guessing which future scenario offered by cinematic prophets might be the one that society would end up following. We always hoped for Star Trek, with its quasi socialist and expansionist state- but from my vantage point in October of 2011- our culture has instead lodged itself solidly into a Blade Runner/Robocop style dystopia.
from ny1.com
Residents of a building in Long Island City, Queens say they are near their wits’ end over the noise from train engines that idle all day in a nearby yard, and want the MTA to put the brakes on it. Borough reporter Ruschell Boone filed the following report.
For some Long Island City residents, the sound of idling train engines plow through their day.
“I’m not here to observe it all day. I wouldn’t want to be here five days a week,” said resident Mark Goetz.
“It’s really horrible. I mean, like I wake up to this noise every morning,” said resident Lillian Marchena.
Marchena’s apartment is directly across the street from the Long Island Rail Road rail yard. She says residents have been complaining for years about the diesel engine trains that sit idling during the day.
“It’s actually gotten a little bit better from the beginning when I first moved in, but it’s still a big problem,” she said.
Over the last two years, the LIRR has turned off some of the engines during the day and placed some trains in other parts of the rail yard as part of a compromise, but some residents said the noise is starting to increase again.
“From 7:30 in the morning ’til 5:30 at night, Monday through Friday,” said Community Board 2 Chairman Joe Conley.
It is a harsh reality for new residents moving to the once-industrial area. The rail yard has been there for more than 100 years, but residents want the diesel engines turned off during the day.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If you were to read the predictions of a century ago, it was all about optimism, locomotive ambition, and confidence. The promise of a pneumatic, electrified, and somewhat insect free world was the dream of the educated class in the early 20th century. When we dream of the future, here at the start of the 21st century, it’s about maintaining health insurance payments and staying ahead of our bills.
Where is my jet pack?
a Newtown Pentacle posting of April 26, 2011 discussed the LIRR yard in some detail- click here for “Squat Creatures”
