aroused about
A storm’s a coming.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Depressing, that’s how I usually describe it. Shortly after taking this photo in the Court Square/Queens Plaza area of Long Island City, where the sidewalk was actually blocked off by this enormous midden of residential tower garbage, I sat in one of the high priced cafes installed into one of those residential towers (the kind that offers fare best described as a single perfect tomato served on a big white artisinal plate) and listened to a group of activists telling me that all this real estate development was just peachy and that they’d like to see more of it. My spiel about opposing the Sunnyside Yards fell on fairly deaf ears, and I inquired about how long the folks I was chatting with had lived here in LIC. The answer was pretty much encapsulated by De Blasio’s term in office, and I realized that these folks hadn’t been here for a transit strike, or a blackout, or had the Mayor turn a hotel on their block into a homeless shelter yet. Give it time folks, and remember the Borough Motto – “Welcome to Queens, now go fuck yourself.”
They didn’t mind the fact that they were living on the site of a 19th century chemical factory, and in fact didn’t care.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another sit down with a group whom I would describe as “hard left” was also somewhat dismaying, as their plan for the future involved collapsing one of the legs of the economic stool which the City’s economy stands upon. I’ve said this a million times, it seems, but one is not “anti-development” as macro economic forces such as our current building boom need to be managed, and the job of government is to manage and eke concessions or “buy-in’s” from the real estate industrial complex which both current and future populations will need. Transit improvements, green infrastructure, medical facilities, supermarkets and laundromats, school space, street level urban furniture like benches and garbage cans. Instead, our government still operates as if it’s the 1970’s and they need to beg developers to begin projects in NYC. The Real Estate people are awash in the “LLC” money that often malign foreigners are laundering through our local economy, so let’s demand that they share the wealth just a little bit and design some ameliorations of the City’s many needs into their towers – that’s what I say. It’s called “good old fashioned graft” in case anyone has forgotten that term. Why isn’t there still any place to take a piss, amidst all this new construction?
Is Long Island City going to function as a “city,” or is it instead just destined to be a dormitory for Manhattan’s job base. Why aren’t we talking about office space and commercial construction here? As the old adage offers – if you build it, they will come. That’s how Queens was originally developed a hundred years ago – they built the Subways, and the people came.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Walking these not so mean streets as I do, I can tell you that vast stretches of Queens are unfriendly, forbidding, and barren of any of the things you’d expect to find in Brooklyn or Manhattan. We’re starved for hospital beds, school desks, street trees. Our commercial strips are bare as far as street benches and everything else you’d expect to find in the “fastest growing community” in the northeastern United States, and Queens has less park land acreage per person than anywhere else in NYC except for Greenpoint in Brooklyn and the South Bronx.
While all of this is going on, or not going on, everybody continues to snipe and gripe and fight over an ever smaller piece of the pie. They’re fighting battles that they’ve already lost, which seems to be the Queensican way.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
rambling accounts
The compositional virtues of the Umbrella, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A thousand years ago, when a humble narrator was still a boy and a young Joe Piscopo was teaching America how to laugh, one of the classes I took in art school involved the finer points of composition and drawing perspective. The perspective part of this, as taught by cartoonist Sal Amendola, was highly technical and involved the underlying theories behind the physical representation of three dimensional spatial relationships on a two dimensional plane. Composition, alternatively, was discussed as how to break up the illustration in the name of forcing the viewer’s eye to go where you wanted it to. One of the bits of advice offered by Amendola, and by legendary cartoonist Gene Colan as well, is to stick an umbrella into the shot.
There’s something about the shape of an umbrella that’s “interesting.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m not drawing comics anymore, but as I’m waving the camera around at the various sections of the City of Greater New York which suffer my periodic habitations, I keep that old set of rules in mind. You really just can’t go wrong with an umbrella in the shot, framing the subjects with an interesting shape and subdividing it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Historical records suggest that the first folding umbrellas were a product of the Chinese culture, and there’s direct evidence of them dating back some 2,400 years. Umbrellas are related to, but distinct from, parasols (designed for sun protection, not rain). They were even used in ancient Ninevah by the Persian kings, parasols were. The umbrella spread from east to west, and there’s evidentiary material suggesting that the Romans and Greek cultures used them. The democratization of Umbrellas to the masses began in 1710, when a french merchant named Jean Marius began selling a folding model not dissimilar to the sort of thing we carry today.
Looks like tomorrow will be a good day to carry one, as a note, so now you have some small talk about the things to offer. Such conversational fodder and minutiae is a public service – as offered by this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
time at
A splash of color for a gray world.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator is not having a good week, and as it’s only Tuesday, portent does not offer much in the way of hope. The weather isn’t helping, either. This gray, misty, and unseasonably warm climate is depressing. Accordingly, since I haven’t been doing too much in the way of shooting for the last week or two, the archives have been accessed in pursuit of color and polychrome light. Consider this a public service from your Newtown Pentacle.
Or don’t, I’m too numb to care.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This whole climate change business seems fairly obvious now, don’t it? The butterfly in the shot above is the one responsible, and I was there when it flapped its wings.
I should be living inside a hoodie sweatshirt by this time of the year, damnit.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It feels like we didn’t get a “spring” in 2018, and that the summer was composed merely of the uncomfortably humid and hot days and punctuated by rain. Bah!
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
more affable
Heading somewhere, with nowhere to go, while having to “go.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator’s experience can be described, ultimately, as a series of denied ambitions coupled with frustratingly implacable obstacles. Too often are my carefully laid plans upset by an externally generated mid course correction, or by having the bar raised as I’m reaching for it. My life often seems to be gummed up while trying to get from anywhere else in NYC to “Point A” in Astoria, Queens while using the subway. Additionally, enough people have told me that “I’m full of shit” over the years that I’ve started to believe it.
Last week, I found myself going everywhere all the time and wandering about the City in pursuance of a series of mundane tasks. At the end of each of them, whilst trying to return home, creativity and adaptability were required.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On one particular day, and I should mention that I had eaten oatmeal for breakfast the day before, there was some urgency in finding my way back home, so the observation about “being full of shit” offered by many was demonstrably true. Certain biological functions, as centered in the alimentary system, had created a bit of a ticking clock which needed to be acknowledged and dealt with in a somewhat expeditious fashion. Renal function is easily accommodated, in my experience, but blowing other forms of ballast are something which I have a certain situational preference for handling back at HQ. Somehow the MTA realized this, and conspired with that malign sentience which NYC is possessed by to have some fun with me. I saw many, many subway stations and instituted several increasingly urgent transfers. Having what one would colloquially refer to as “one in the chamber” while negotiating the transit system is not pleasant.
Before you ask, I did make it home in time, but just barely.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One is blessed by predictable function regarding such matters. Regrettably, life in the Big City and its various exigencies don’t always jibe with or conform to the clockworks found within. Accordingly, while double timing it back from the N – as MTA had decided it would be crazy for me to have actually used the R line which stops two blocks from my house – one pondered that age old question…
Why is it that in the greatest city in all of human history there no acknowledgement of human biology, and no public “pissoirs?” The Romans and Babylonians managed to create facilitations for this unavoidable existential fact, so why not NYC?
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
voluntarily followed
ugggh, Manhattan, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s not paranoid to say that there’s always something watching you these days. We’re betrayed by our various devices to the data collection business. Conversations with members of a certain transportation authority let slip the fact that they can track a card “swipe” through their system and use the data collected for all sorts of things. You know this, of course, but it’s nice to hear it from “the horse’s mouth” as it were. There’s cameras everywhere, acting as watchmen, but with all the video data being collected – is anyone watching it?
Pondering is what I do while riding the subways, and on a particular day this week, these thoughts occupied me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I didn’t have anything prosaic or interesting to do, just visit one of my doctors for a routine checkup. Since I had to participate in a conference call directly preceding the appointment, my travel time to Manhattan was amended to “put me on the ground” for the call, which meant that I was going to be fiendishly early for my scheduled appointment. Accordingly, I got off the train some forty and change blocks from my destination at Union square and walked there while participating in the conversation.
One observation I can offer is that Manhattan’s daytime occupants have lost that old NYC skill which involved the negotiation of crowded sidewalks in a fluidic fashion. Part of it involves everybody staring into their phones rather than paying attention to their surroundings. The dichotomy of the deep attentions which the phones themselves are paying to their users in the name of data collection seems to be lost upon them, as they bump into others and randomly stop moving in response to the pings and chimes of the things.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What you should be worrying about, I’d advise, is the malign thing which cannot possibly exist in the sapphire megalith of Long Island City. Staring down at the world through its three loved burning eye, this figment covets, and sees all – even that which occurs across the river in the Shining City.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
