Posts Tagged ‘New York City’
secretive youth
Existentialist archive stuff, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Everything is kind of gray at the moment, ain’t it? I’ve always preferred the British spelling of the word gray, incidentally, they use “grey” over there. They also use “colour” which is a prettier spelled word than ours, IMHO. That’s some nameless and bland east side of midtown Manhattan office building in the shot above, just if you’re curious.
The shot was chosen purely for its bleak and hopeless character.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
You wouldn’t believe the amount of preparation it took to get the moon shot above, at least in the chaotic environment and sooty air of Astoria, Queens. Tripod, long lens, lens extender, manual focusing, compensating for the counter revolutions of the planet and planetoid… yeesh, at least it wasn’t cold out that night. As a note, there’s some math genius out there who has calculated lens focal length vs. maximum aperture and created tables which tell you how long your exposure can be before movement begins to affect image fidelity. Google it.
The moon moves across the night sky in a surprisingly fast fashion, incidentally, at least when you’re looking through something like 700mm of optical magnification.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of Astoria, or “Point A” as I call it… it’s always great to come back here from Points B or M (or Point SI for that matter) even if it’s dark and raining. Can’t see the moon on those nights, of course, but Astoria rules no matter what the weather is like. Well, the cold sucks, but…
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easily showing
Continuing archive week, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of my favorite “night shots” of the last few years is presented above, depicting the mausoleum of Stephen Whitney in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. I was there well after dark with the folks from Atlas Obscura, on a summer night when I and two other narrators read Lovecraft’s “Horror at Red Hook” to a group of tapophiles.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I was actually listening to the Horror at Red Hook audiobook (Audiorealms version, Wayne June narrating) when I caught this shot under the 7 train tracks on Queens Blvd. over in Sunnyside.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I was thinking about Lovecraft, in general, when the shot above was captured in the Lower East Side section of Manhattan not too far from Hester Street. As a note, Jakob Riis described this area as being “Jewtown” or “The Ghetto” in his many anecdotal accounts of life in 19th century NYC.
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clung round
Night time in Queens, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This week, you can expect exactly zero newly minted shots from this humble narrator. One part of the reason for that is that Xmas week postings are (annually speaking) the ones with the lowest readership at this – your Newtown Pentacle, the other is that due to the gloom, wet, and cold last week – I wasn’t exactly outside a whole lot. As is my habit, a few shots were selected from the archives for presentation, your consideration and possible amusement.
That’s Sunnyside Gardens in the shot above, shot sometime in the late night or early morning, if memory serves.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Point A in my life is Astoria, Queens. All journeys start at “Point A,” for me, and end there as well.
Pictured above is 31st street beneath the elevated tracks of the Subway, on a drizzle choked evening.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of the elevated, I stand by my assertion that the 7 line is the most photogenic of all NYC’s Subway lines. That’s her, crashing through LIC.
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dominant concern
I hate Christmas, but I do like puppies.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is the worst time of year for one such as myself. The forced social encounters at Christmas parties, the darkness, the cold. One gets invited to a few holiday parties, which I agree to go to, then back out of the day of. This is kind of a dick move on my part, it is realized, but in reality I’m trying to spare the party giver that certain shadow which I carry around with me. Nobody actually wants me around their homes during the holidays, just like a kitchen fire. Y’know how a lighthouse looks? The bright beam of light scanning about? Imagine a beam of utter darkness emanating from it instead, that’s me.
During December, I always feel like some demon cursed and quite useless object that spreads an acerbic contagion to whatever it touches, or a tumor.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I prefer to work on updating my enemies list during December, looking through my calendar for those who’ve slighted or annoyed me during the preceding year, and begin to develop my plans for exacting vengeance on them. There’s a few people out there who I can already tell you will be having a very difficult time of it in 2017. Bah.
Usually, when I say “bah,” somebody chimes in with “humbug.” I don’t know what a humbug is, but I suspect it’s one of those angry red razor bumps people get from ingrown hairs.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s best for all that one remains secure in his hermitage this time of year. The humans all seem happy to be enacting their odd rituals, giving manufactured items to each other in the presence of a tree which they’ve had killed and then brought into the house. Luckily, the seasonal bacchanal ends in a couple of weeks,
Bah.
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dread aperture
There’s so many of us, at least for a couple of hours each day.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Scuttling down Skillman Avenue and approaching Queens Plaza, one was reminded of a conversation recently enjoyed with a locally deployed NYPD Commander about the unique nature of this area. For a couple of hours, each morning and evening, this is theoretically one of the most densely populated places on the planet, but the individual members of this population blob are seldom in the neighborhood for longer than a few minutes and they are in vehicular motion (however stunted) the whole time.
To put it simply, the multitudes moving through western Queens during the rush hours, on their way to work or home to other places – traveling by car, bus, subway, railroad, bicycle, or autogyro perhaps – create a statistically irrelevant but nonetheless astounding jump in the “persons per square foot” or population density of LIC. Thing is, lots of people elected to suffer a long commute when they moved to Eastern Queens, or Nassau and Suffolk counties.
Lots of time to read, I guess.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Statistical relevance is part of how planning decisions are made. It big math – “quant” stuff, actually, and beyond my understanding. The theory behind the relevance of statistical information is summed up by that quote from Josef Stalin that a single death is a tragedy whereas a million deaths are a statistic. A lot of policy decisions revolve around, or at least they’re supposed to, the greatest good for the greatest number.
“Greatest number” inherently means that someone gets left out, which translates as “not statistically relevant.” Planning of public works in recent decades has strived to expand and include traditionally marginalized groups, most notably folks with health related mobility issues – thanks to the ADA or Americans with Disabilities Act. A lot of public spaces and City buildings out there were formally denied to people in wheelchairs, since the era in which most of these public buildings were erected, the disabled population wasn’t considered as being “statistically relevant.”
Access to mass, affordable, and reliable transit – which parallels what’s available to “abled” people – still remains a problem, I’m told.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Statistical relevance, I’m informed, is a big part of the algorithm under which the 311 service of NYC was designed to operate. One person from Blissville complaining to 311 about a cat in a tree is low priority and statistically irrelevant, but the City will send somebody out when they can. Twenty people from the same block call 311 about the cat? Help is on the way a lot faster, as the problem is now far more mathematically relevant and the City will send out Superman to investigate and mitigate.
Make me wonder what would happen if everybody who was commuting through Queens Plaza on any given day suddenly called 311 to complain about something.
Then again, I wonder why it is that everyone doesn’t vote on Election Day.
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