unsatisfying uluations
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Scuttling, always scuttling, that’s me. Filthy black raincoat fluttering in the wind, camera in hand, shoes scraping along the sidewalk. It’s horrible to behold, my countenance, I’ve been told. I dread passing before a piece of silvered glass.
The good news is that a humble narrator was recently engaging in a bit of calisthenic stretching and one of the tendons in my trick left foot shifted and made a sound not unlike a cello’s base string being struck with a hammer. Ever since, the pain and tenderness in the left foot and ankle has ameliorated a bit, which has just been awesome. Of course, I’m in my 50’s, so my right hip immediately began to hurt instead.
I like to refer to this phenomena as my pain squirrel, which finds a different branch of the body’s tree to sit upon every day. My physical form is like a meaty Yggdrasil, with the Pain Squirrel Ratatoskr found above, and the Death Serpent Níðhöggr chewing his way up through my roots from below.
I have an entirely pedantic inner life.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This time around, I was out for a short walk, which these days sees this shattered husk walking the equivalent of four to five subway stops in one direction and then looping back towards HQ. It’s malevolent, winter weather, and my particular “kryptonite” revolves around cold.
Partially, this is due to the medications prescribed by the team of doctors who labor to maintain my homeostasis. The ichor flowing though my circulatory system tends to run away from cold, rendering the extremities cold and pale. If I’m out for a long walk on a very cold night, it looks a great deal like this when I return home.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Nearing HQ, this scene greeted me nearby a construction site. Obviously, somebody does not grasp the concept nor practice of municipal recycling, on a fundamental level.
More tomorrow.
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amorphous amenity
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Lucky. Just happened to be in the right place at the right time, which happened to be the Brooklyn/Queens border, found on the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge, at about 8 o’clock at night on a Friday in middle January. The tug is the CMT Pike, a 1979 vintage push boat operated by Coeymans Marine Towing.
This was a very, very difficult shot to get the exposure right for, as a note. The difficulty was due to the contrasting environment of bright lights and deep shadow, and complicated by the boat being operated at full steam and sliding quickly across the gelatinous waters of Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One doesn’t like heading home along the same path which he left it from, so my toes were pointed in a generally “Maspethian” direction for the return leg of things. There’s a little park, on Review Avenue at the corner of Laurel Hill Blvd., that was constructed along with the new Koscisuzcko Bridge. One likes to have a bit of sit down there when out for a long walk, and although sitting on a block of concrete in January isn’t exactly comfortable, it’s still nice to be able to take a load off for a few minutes and “unclick” my back.
As long as I was there, why not get in a couple of shots of the bridge? Why be lazy when you’re already out and about, and sitting down on a block of frozen concrete which is draining your body heat away through your butt?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My path back to HQ in Astoria found me walking through Sunnyside Gardens, and looking over my shoulder a lot. My paranoia alleviates around Newtown Creek, given how relatively depopulated it is. Sunnyside, however, enjoys quite a dense population. Using my old rubric that 2 out of every 10 people are straight up evil, what that means is that when you’re moving through a densely populated neighborhood about 20% of that population might screw with you.
My “rule” is that out of every ten people, two are evil and two are good. The remaining six are in the middle, and can go either way depending on whether or not they follow their social cues from the good two or the evil two. “The company you keep” isn’t just something your grandmother warned you about, in my mind.
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cliffside cabin
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Intriguing are the bits of property which my Dad always referred to as “community driveways,” like the one in Astoria pictured above. The particular one above is interesting to me as it’s a dirt road. You don’t encounter much in the way of open soil here in Western Queens. A community driveway, for the uninitiated, is a pathway which leads to a “behind your house” parking spot and often a garage at the basement level. It’s an amenity!
Even the laconic Croats, and the other similarly reserved “Yugoslav” populations they coexist with here on Astoria’s southern edge, will get misty eyed when the subject of a private parking spot comes up.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Wandering around in the cold night, a humble narrator found that the aphorism “All roads lead to Calvary” was quite true when he found himself standing at the gate. It’s been quite a while since my last visit to the great polyandrion of the Roman Catholics, but since this one was well after sunset – the gates were securely fastened, as is the habit of the cemetery management. Couldn’t resist cracking out an exposure through the gate, however.
When leaving HQ, one told Our Lady of the Pentacle that I’d be taking a long walk, but that I didn’t plan on leaving Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Not wanting to make a liar of myself, one walked onto the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge over Newtown Creek but didn’t cross the legal border into Brooklyn. Instead, I lingered mid span for an interval, and got lucky with what Queens wanted to show me. As a note, I sort of love the photo above, depicting a fuel truck traveling across the double bascule drawbridge.
More tomorrow.
“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.
rumour ran
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described in prior posts, one has been making a real effort to keep up with kicking his feet about the neighborhood, and maintain a regular schedule of long and short walks. One of the stops I always make on my way to somewhere else is at the Sunnyside Yards, here in Long Island City.
“Hey asshole, why do you call it LIC when the word “Sunnyside” is in the rail coach yard’s name? You obviously don’t know what you’re talking about thereby, and all you say is false” is the sort of thing you’ll see in the comments section here occasionally.
If it’s west of Woodside Avenue, north of Newtown Creek, and south of Bowery Bay – it’s technically Long Island City. Astoria, Long Island City Heights Sunnyside, Hunters Point, and Blissville are all LIC – as in they were part of the pre 1898 municipal entity which dubbed itself as LIC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Sunnyside and Astoria have since become “kind of” their own thing. I refer to Northern Blvd. and the yards as “LIC” as they stand apart from the residential and mixed usage zones of Sunnyside and Astoria. Skillman Avenue west of 39th street is LIC, whereas east of 39th street it’s Sunnyside – for instance. I can say the same thing about Queens Blvd. west of about 37th street, which is where it stops being Sunnyside and starts being LIC.
The blurred lines and neighborhood borders of Queens are endlessly fascinating. Woodside and Winfield, or Astoria and East Elmhurst will yield subjective one side of the street versus the other opinions from the Queensican Commentariat. I call these gray zones “the angles between neighborhoods.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One actually sweats this assignation of nomenclature. The real estate people will claim that parts of Brooklyn which are closer to Nassau County than they are the East River are “Williamsburg” or “Bushwick” or my favorite – “Ridgewood,” which is actually found in Queens. Remember when a whole section of Manhattan went from being “midtown” to “West Chelsea” about twenty years ago?
I generally rely on what things used to be called prior to the REBNY era, which is before the real estate marketing people began assigning twee names to undesirable locations. Heck, I actually prefer the pre-1898 city consolidation names, in truth.
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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.
solid crag
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What had drawn me to the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek on this particular night in early January was the presence and promise of snow, and the hope that my favorite little tree might have some adorning its branches. No such luck, unfortunately, but that didn’t stop me from getting a shot of it anyway.
I’ve been shooting that little tree in every season for a couple of years now.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On my way back to HQ, curlicues of snow blowing off of a factory building’s roof nearby the Sunnyside Yards caught my attentions. I did wish that I was carrying a zoom lens with me, but my “night kit” is typically two fairly bright lenses – an 85mm f2 and a 35mm f1.8.
I like to travel light whenever it’s possible these days. Generally, unless I know it’s going to be a day when I need “reach” or that conditions will be changing at every corner, I leave the big and heavy zoom lenses at home. Besides, if I’m using the zooms at night, I pretty much have to rig up with the tripod if I don’t want to be in sky high ISO ranges. It’s also the difference between carrying around a 1.5 pound camera bag versus carrying an 8-9 pound one, ultimately.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just as I crossed over into Astoria, one encountered another neato ride. This particular “Bobcat” was outfitted with a snow plow, and there were several plow vehicles parked nearby – parts of a private outfit who had been clearing the large parking lots connected to an electronics store and a movie theater.
This would be my ride, if it was street legal. Instead of a plow, I’d have cameras mounted to its front end.
Back next week with more, at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
“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 