Posts Tagged ‘Central park Zoo’
terrible, revolting, and inexplicable
New Yorkers are a bunch of animals, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Psychological Industrial Complex would call it aversion therapy. After being permanently scarred by what I’d witnessed at the Central Park Zoo back during the cold weather months, it was with a palpitatant heart that I approached the Snow Monkeys at Central Park Zoo… In actuality, I had to go in to town for an appointment with my accountant at six, but I also had to call in to a Newtown Creek CAG meeting at four, so I decided to use my NYCID card granted free membership to the Zoo. Whilst the call in meeting was buzzing away in my headphones, I was wandering about the place and shooting. That, lords and ladies, is what you call “multitasking.”
Regardless, I was terrified that a couple of these apes were going to “do the deed” in front of me again. Last thing I need is for the Newtown Creek crowd to hear me screaming and gibbering in shocked horror.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Despite my prior protestations to the contrary, one still has not managed to bank away enough time to make the trip deep into Brooklyn to visit the Aquarium. The Queens Zoo has been visited within the last year, and last month I squeezed in a trip to the unknown country known as “The Bronx” where NYC’s premier animal prison is located. I’m going to try and squeeze the Prospect Park Zoo into the summer schedule as well, but it’s a bit of a pain in the neck to get there from Astoria. The Aquarium is actually a straight shot for me on the N or Q to the end of the line in Brighton Beach/Coney Island.
Btw, did a whole post on the Penguins at Central Park Zoo last year – click here.
Alternatively, I’m thinking about just taking the 5 to its terminus near Brooklyn College and walking from there. That’s my old neighborhood, after all, and the place where I first developed my taste for wandering aimlessly across the megalopolis. It’s been a long time since I took a walk in that part of Brooklyn.
Either way, it’s going to be an all day sort of thing to get there and back.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Time was growing short, and my appointment with the accountant was nearing. I left the zoo and on my way over to “my guy’s” office the usual line up of carriages and horses was encountered on the periphery of Olmstead’s master work. Since I was in an “animals” mode that day, a few shots were cracked out of the critters as I moved along. While I was doing this, the Newtown Creek conversation was revolving around familiar topics – largely sewers, and oil spills, trying to interpret the motives or true goals of the various “Potentially Responsible Party’s,” and puzzle out the kabuki of Federal regulators with their Sphinx like behavior. The usual stuff, in other words.
As the shot above was captured, I was thinking about sending it to the Mayor with the caption “Nice try, Bill, I’m still here.”
Upcoming Events and Tours
Saturday, May 21st at 3:30 p.m. –
A Return to The Poison Cauldron of the Newtown Creek,
with Atlas Obscura, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
Thursday, May 26th at 6 p.m. –
Brooklyn Waterfront: Past & Present Boat Tour,
with Working Harbor Committee. Click here for more details.
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direct wire
PENGUIN!!!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As it happens, even a humble narrator requires a break every now and then. Single images will be greeting you this week, and normal programming will resume Monday of next week.
That’s a photo of a penguin, as you’ve likely surmised by now. It’s part of a collection of fowl that you’ll find at the Central Park Zoo.
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unutterable aeries
Tekelele, indeed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described in yesterday’s post, a sexual display committed by two monkeys at the Central Park Zoo scared me, so a retreat to the “safe space” of the Penguin house was enacted. It should be pointed out that the lighting in this section of Manhattan’s premier animal penitentiary is rather dim, which I suspect is for the comfort of the captive birds contained therein. It took every trick I know, as far as the subject of low light photography goes, to capture the images in today’s post. You can actually discern the sensor grid of my camera in a few of these shots, as it was pretty darned dark in this safe space and the exposure triangle required for hand held shots (through glass) leaned toward staggeringly high sensitivities. Also, a significant amount of condensation and moisture was observed on the barrier glass of the bird prison, which actually created some interesting visual effects, imho.
Whilst concentrating on my task, errant thoughts kept intruding, and one couldn’t help but think about H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness.” Actually, since I was listening to an unabridged reading of the novella (Audiorealms, Wayne June reading) it was extremely difficult not to think about the star crossed Elder things and their shoggoth problems. Tekelele, tekelele.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Of course, given the largely useless amount of trivial information which populates my thoughts, a secondary narrative began to intrude. The Mountains of Madness tells the story of a fairly inaccessible Antarctic region which holds the remains of an alien city whose inhabitants were exterminated by a certain biological technology which ran amok, which Lovecraft called “shoggoths.” Good book, this, and Lovecraft makes a good case for letting “sleeping dogs lie.”
The ends of the earth, and the so called “poles of inaccessibility” began to come to mind. Anything, anything to erase the micro aggressions suffered at the Snow Monkey enclosure, was a welcome reprieve.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Oodap Qeqert is a bank of gravel and rock which is found off the northwest coast of Greenland, and is possibly the most northern point of land one might find before the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean obliviates terrestial life forms. Geologists don’t consider a gravel bank to be actual land, per se, and Kaffeklubben Island (also off the coast of Greenland) is officially the northernmost point of dry land you can get to if you’re on the way to the North Pole. If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, and headed for the antipode, the most remote island on Earth warrants a visit. It’s a Norwegian territory, believe it or not, called Bouvetøya Island.
Unless a Penguin got seriously lost like Topper (the scarf wearing Penguin from the Rankin Bass “Santa Claus is coming to town” animated television program), you won’t find any in Greenland. You’ll find lots of Penguins on Bouvetøya Island, however.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The chilly waters of the antipode are actually quite mysterious. Lots of interesting and fairly undocumented things happen down there, like the so called Vela Incident back in 1979. The Antarctic Continent is literally the last terrestrial frontier for mankind, and was a focal point for the Super Power competitions of the Cold War era. The Soviets established Vostok Station nearby the Southern “Pole of Inaccessibility” on the continent. What that “POI” term means is that it is situated as far away from a coastline in every direction as you can get on Antarctica.
Famously, the Russians who now inhabit Vostok Station have been involved in a deep drilling experiment to access the unfrozen fresh waters of Lake Vostok, which lies some 13,000 feet beneath the glacial surface that Vostok Station sits upon. Speculations about what sorts of primeval life – the lake has been sealed off from the rest of the planet for fifteen million years – might inhabit the lake cause one to shake and quiver with horror.
Truly – who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Soviets were goofy for drilling deep holes into the Earth, it should be mentioned.
Their “Kolskaya sverkhglubokaya skvazhina,” or Kola Superdeep Borehole, not too far from their border with Finland on the Barents Sea, managed to penetrate down better than 40,000 feet. The rocks and geological layers that their drills reached to date back to the Archaen Age, which are about two and a half billion years old. The Kola project was abandoned in 2008, and the Russian Federation made it a point of not just destroying the facility and equipment, but capping the hole with reinforced concrete and steel. They likely had their reasons. What is held in the deep earth is not something that mankind truly wishes cognizance of, and were its contents to become widely known… Incidentally, Kola is the supposed location where that “well dug to hell” recording was captured, but that’s just an Internet meme, right?
Deeper holes have been drilled since Kola, in pursuance of hydrocarbon deposits nearby Russia’s Sakhalin Island in the Northern Pacific Ocean, and in the Persian Gulf by Qatar.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My recovery from the startling and outré Monkey incident accomplished, a humble narrator decided it was time to return to Queens, where my delicate sensibilities might be better coddled, cultivated, and wrapped in vibrant diversity than here in Manhattan’s Central Park Zoo.
On the whole “poles of inaccessibility” thing, I’d suggest study of the village of Suluk in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which is one of the so called “cradles of nations” and likely the most inaccessible place in Eurasia. Closer to home, the United States’s “POI” is called Corn Creek, and it’s in Allen, South Dakota. Allen is, coincidentally, the poorest county in the entire United States and the median family income thereabouts is $3,819 per annum, and that is all the justification you’ll ever need to hear for the importance of loving someplace with a harbor or port nearby.
Hell, $3,800 won’t even get you one month in a closet sized studio in Williamsburg.
The geographic center of New York State is in Madison County, and is around a half hour drive from Utica.
The geographic center of NYC is on the “Boulevard of Death” – the middle of Queens Blvd. at 58th street – according to the NYC Dept. of City Planning. There’s a brass plaque and everything on the spot, and it’s one of the places where a humble narrator likes to shout out “Tekelele, Tekelele” at passing traffic.
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urge primal
Trigger warnings abound in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
So, last week there’s a day I have off. My mac is back from the shop and working again – and that’s a good thing. It’s also unseasonably warm out, so a humble narrator starts cooking his noodle about finding some cheap diversion to spend the afternoon in pursuit of, which – as any New Yorker will tell you – ain’t that easy.
It occurs to me that I haven’t been to the Central Park Zoo in a few years, and since the price of admission is just twelve samolians, a visit is within my means. Alternatively, I’d go take a walk around the Newtown Creek, but I just wasn’t in the mood for pollution and devastation this particular day, so off to the City I went in pursuance of getting some charming shots of the critters which the Manhattan people hold captive for their amusement.
The trip also fit into the whole “House of Moses” thing I’ve been doing all year, wherein I’m trying to visit as many of the Robert Moses built projects scattered around the City as I can. Central Park Zoo, the original I mean, not the modern version which was rebuilt in the 1980’s, was one of Moses’s flagships.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I enjoy shooting critters, even if they are the captives of the Manhattan types.
The Japanese Snow Monkeys… is it still ok to refer to the national origins of a monkey… I don’t know. Does it make one a specist, referring to the particular clade of primate which a creature is? How about the snow part? The world has changed, and so has language, in the last few years. Is this creature a “cisprimate?” I don’t know. Is it ok to use “critter” anymore? Is there an approved thesaurus which vouchsafes the linguistic sensitivities of every possible iterate? I’m old now, and hail from a violent and ignorant era where half of the nicknames from my old neighborhood in Brooklyn would now be prosecutable as hate crimes.
I’d like to reach out to the college campus types to advise.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
While pondering the incomprehensible mine field offered by the overly sensitive and “waiting to be offended” types, the… beings(?)… were engaged in that most primatological of behaviors – grooming each other.
Ahh… that’s nice, said I, and focused the lens in on this pair.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Suddenly, this happened.
My triggers all began to pull without warning, and a humble narrator was reduced to a shivering wreck. Didn’t these “beings” realize that there were children about at the zoo? There were no consent forms exchanged between them, nor “safe words” negotiated in the presence of a third and impartial party. The Zoo displayed no signage warning me about what might be encountered on their grounds, and at no point was I offered a safe space in which to recover from the bestial display which the organization just allowed to happen. I had to make due with the Penguin house.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Unbridled, and with zero concern for the casual observer, these creatures continued their lewd act. One wishes that he could have stopped photographing it, but every muscle in my body had involuntarily spasmed into the position it was in when this display started, and my camera shutter just kept on flipping. Oh, unhappy act.
I intend on instituting a law suit against the Central Park Zoo shortly after this post is published, as I have been materially damaged and will never be able to photograph a primate again without revisiting this scene. In effect, I have been raped by my willful observance of this act of sexual violence, and my delicate eyes will never be able to look upon a Curious George book again without micro aggressions rocking the mirrored surface of my mind.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After this occurrence, which was as serious an offense as the Nazi extermination of the Jews to one as correct, and politically sensitive as myself, a humble narrator returned to his darkened rooms to sit and shake while whimpering. How dare these primates parade themselves thusly, knowing that others might be offended by their public actions?
This never happened while Bloomberg was Mayor, and therefore it must be de Blasio’s fault. These apes need to be sent to a sensitivity training camp, and educated in proper societal etiquette. Accordingly, an announcement is offered that I’ve founded a new non profit which offers this service to zoo animals, for which I’m applying to both City Hall and the Federal Government for funding.
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snorted heavily
Mr. Waxman’s break continues.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Some kind of amphibious dog or bear, this critter finds itself imprisoned in Manhattan for the amusement of the children of that Shining City’s elites in Central Park at the zoo. As to the reasons for this presentation of archive material at this, your Newtown Pentacle, suffice to say that one such as myself is barely able to get the laundry done.
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