Posts Tagged ‘photowalk’
abnormal ticking
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Well, Merry Christmas, huh? Actually, Festivus comes first – on the 23rd, then Christmas on the 25th, and Kwanzaa is the 26th. So exciting, ain’t it, the holiday season? Yesterday was December the 19th, and I feel compelled to mention the date as being the anniversary of the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903, and the USS Constellation fire at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1960. This was your calendrical paragraph of the day, lords and ladies.
The shots in today’s post were captured while scuttling home from a visit to Long Island City’s Degnon Terminal area, which adjoins the Dutch Kills Tributary of Newtown Creek. This particular walk (from and to Astoria) is kind of my default destination when I have no particular destination in mind. My feet just point in the right direction and I follow them.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Over the last decade, a great gnashing of teeth in Western Queens has revolved around a movement for safer streets. The answer to all things safe has revolved around bicycles, bike lanes, and a well organized lobbying campaign which engages in the tried and true methodology of redefining commonly held terms and tropes. Bike lane advocates offer that a car isn’t “parked” along the curb, instead it’s “free car storage.” Automobile owners and operators are described as wheeling around in “two ton murder machines” for instance. I’m actually quite impressed with some of the people and organizations who have led this charge, and less so with several of the quite volatile sock puppets who show up at governmental meetings.
What is always forgotten in these conversations are pedestrians. As a dedicated pedestrian, I spend a good amount of my time these days dodging electrically powered bikes riding at 20 mph on the sidewalks, and crossing the street in several places in Western Queens is now a horror show. You used to just step off the curb when the vehicles passed by, now you’ve got to worry about a secondary line of traffic too, one which doesn’t obey stop sign/red light/yield to pedestrian indications. At least cars have license plates and an insurance company to sue if you get hit by one. Meanwhile, in all the arguing and tumult, basics like street lighting and roadway maintenance are ignored. The corner above hosts a bike lane on the sidewalk, relegating foot traffic to a narrow and dark corridor.
How narrow and dark, you might ask?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That narrow and dark, I answer. I’ve opined to the “bicycle people,” whose aims I’m generally quite supportive of, that it’s only a matter of time until the political winds blow in a different direction and the City of Greater New York does what it’s historically done regarding every other issue encountered in its long history and legislates that bikes will need to be registered with an bureaucratic agency and be adorned with some sort of license plate. Operator licenses won’t be far behind that, either. This will be a nightmare, using a City version of NYS’s Department of Motor Vehicles as a model. It’ll become a revenue source for the city, with traffic agents handing out tickets for bikes illegally stored on fences and utility poles. Ask a car owner what to expect.
NYC officialdom has told me point blank that bike lanes are easy for them to do, since it’s a low budget improvement they can make. Those little plastic sticks, officially called “flexible delimiters,” are a lot cheaper than actual concrete separation for bike lanes. The ones without the sticks are “just paint.” Now… the paint isn’t paint, it’s a substance called thermoplastic which is applied to the street. When the paint degrades and fades, where does the plastic go? Into the sewers, that’s where, and since NYC has a combined sewer outfall system which discharges directly into the harbor…
We are just doomed. Merry Christmas.
“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.
oddly corrobative
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The routine one currently ascribes to involves a schedule of “one day out, one day in.” What that means is that if I’m out with the camera on Monday, Tuesday is the day I’m at HQ developing whatever I shot and delivering it to the Internet. One opines that internally lubricated parts like the knee or hip joints require regular flexion lest they lose function. Scuttling, always scuttling, that’s me. As a point of interest, the way that this shakes out this week is that tonight I’ll be out and scuttling.
One appears to be little more than a pile of filthy black fabric caught in a stiff breeze to most passerby, but for some reason I’m catching people’s eyes these days and I don’t like that. Some of the humans want to talk with me, whilst others are suspicious of my presence. Unfortunately, there are also those whom have seemingly developed a taste for human meat during the pandemic, and they gaze at me and my possessions hungrily.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Things have become odd out there, in this second winter of Covid. A winnowing of patience, the thinning of empathy, an acceptance of “that’s how things are now” has been arrived at. You can feel “the vibe” if you’re the sensitive type. Personally, I miss the illegal fireworks.
I’ve been observing the sort of things which hint at the continuing unraveling of civil order, encountered malign actors on the deserted streets, and have taken to swiveling my head around more than previously. Blame whatever you want to for this, I don’t care what others say, and I’m sure there’s a political narrative you’ll find comfort in. It’s going to be a real shit show when the Cops start doing their jobs again, which I predict as coinciding with the arrival of a new local political regime in January. It’s likely too late for that to have any real meaning, however, as the Djinn has escaped its bottle.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pictured above is a frontline of next year’s political bullshit here in Astoria. A mega project offered by the Kaufman Astoria people called “Innovation Queens” is slated to begin paying off local “voices” to sing the song of gentrification. If you want to know what it costs to buy off these voices – it’s about $5,000 a head. You’ll get all the usual characters – the street minister who’s secretly a gangster, the well thought of community leader who’s secretly the secret gangster’s mistress, the odd local business owner who was planning on selling his bar soon anyway. These sort of characters were all in for the LIC rezonings, the BQX, Amazon, etc. – whatever big idea City Hall and the EDC were flacking at the time and writing checks for. That’s why I can tell you what and how much they cost, because that’s what they cost the bosses last time, and the time before that. Five grand isn’t even bagel money for the real estate people.
The Innovation Queens people describe this little industrial zone along Northern Boulevard as “dark, deserted, dangerous.” In actuality, it didn’t used to be, but ever since they started acquiring/emptying/blighting the properties hereabouts…
“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.
bodily visit
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One last trio from Dutch Kills for today. What can I say, it’s either been horribly hot or raining for the last week. Gah, do I hate this time of year in NYC. If there was only mist or fog associated with NYC’s summer humidity… but it’s just a blue haze of murky ozone light in late August. If you’re curious, I was flipping through all of the lenses in my kit while at Dutch Kills this particular evening, and the one used for today’s post is the RF 24-105 f4 L.
Every lens seems to have its own color rendition, flaws and strengths, there’s even a difference in exposure in some cases. Science and optics, bro, science and optics.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Since it was a lifetime ago, and a former variant of the current “me,” I seldom mention to people that I used to draw comic books. Saying that, the training in “storytelling” that revolves around that particular discipline of cartooning continues to come in handy, and informs the way I use the camera. Most photo people come to a scene and do “one and done,” whereas I’m gazing “up, down, all around” before I even click the shutter button, trying to figure out how to tell a story with it.
You need to do “establishing shots” which place the reader in a scene, followed by close ups and other angles, and a wrap up establishing shot. It’s better to have the singular composition which will be your “wow, look at that” photo accompanied by several companion shots from a storytelling point of view. Another concern which I try to shoot for is the unfortunate fact that a lot of my shots are going to end up having type set against them for presentations. That’s something else you learn from drawing comics – leave room for the speech balloons and sound fx. I mention this because today’s images are all establishing shots.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another incarnation of mine was the advertising industry production and photo retouching one. The comics never really paid the bills, and a boy has to eat. I’ve done Times Square billboards, specialized in publication specific print ads (there’s a 15 year period during which I had something printed in either the New York Times or Wall Street Journal every day), worked on early internet sites like Jaguar.com, and if you walked into a Footlocker to buy sneakers at the start of this century the big banners and other “POS” stuff hanging in the windows was probably something I had sent to the printer. Again – leave room to set type or a logo on the image but shoot it so that it still could stand on its own as a single image without copy. It was an incredibly dull work life, incidentally, and not remotely like Mad Men.
The current incarnation is the craziest life I’ve ever known, however.
“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.
flowed conflictingly
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Becoming reacquainted with that old/new lens of mine, a 70-300 zoom which I had retired several years ago since it didn’t get along well with my old camera, is something I like to do at familiar locales. Luckily, there are few places more familiar to me than the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek. There’s my favorite little tree again. Don’t worry, you’ll see more of it tomorrow.
Often, when out shooting at night, intuition tells me that I’m being watched. It’s usually primates doing the watching, more often than not through the monoculars of security cameras. Sometimes it’s one of those dick Canada Gooses, others it’s a stealthy raccoon or some other beast of the night. I mainly worry about the primates, truth be told. I’m pretty sure I can win a fight with a raccoon, and actually fended one off not too long ago in Maspeth with my tripod.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This time around, when I felt a pair of eyes boring into me, it was a cat sitting on the bulkheads of Dutch Kills. How it managed to get to this spot mystifies, but Cat’s are capable of great feats of athleticism. You don’t normally see Cats with this colorization hereabouts. Calicos and tabbies seem to be more common on the Brooklyn side of Newtown Creek, in LIC there seems to be some sort of genetic advantage to having your fur pajamas cast in black. Black cats with yellow eyes seem to dominate.
Remember back in the before times, prior to the hipsters and gentrifiers, when there were packs of wild dogs roaming around? Lots of feral animals in those days.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This little murder machine seemed to on the hunt for something which was hiding behind that concrete block on the right hand side of the shot. Probably some prey animal like a rat or a mouse, or some sort of shrew. It was really paying attention to me as well, and seemed to know that it was being photographed. I swear that it saw the camera and posed. Never signed a release, though, so I can’t sell this shot.
Back tomorrow with more from the shadows.
“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.
strange tributes
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dutch Kills is a tributary of the fearsome Newtown Creek, a Federal Superfund site some 3.8 miles long that provides a border for the New York City Boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens for the first three miles of its course. The waterway is polluted by industry and open sewers, and there’s a bed of sediment at the bottom composed of coal tar, petroleum derivates, human waste, and everything else that’s ever fallen into the water. This sediment is called “Black Mayonnaise.” The Dutch Kills tributary branches off of the main waterway about 3/4 of a mile from its intersection with the East River, flows entirely within the confines of Long Island City, and is about .7 – .8 of a mile long.
I’m obsessed with that little tree growing out from under a factory along the bulkheads. It’s a Tree of Paradise aka “Princess Tree,” I’m told.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All of those little streaks in the water, along the rotting bulkheads which I focused in on, are fishies. What you can hear at night, from all over this industrial canal, are the slaps and splashes of predator fish picking off these little bug eaters who gather around light sources. You can also hear passing ATV’s and muscle cars with modified exhaust systems, but that’s a different post.
I spent a bit of time hereabouts recently, waving the camera around and investigating what might be hiding in the shadows at Dutch Kills. As long time readers here at Newtown Pentacle will attest, a humble narrator is endlessly fascinated by this section of the greater Newtown Creek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Water fowl, these Canada Geese are dicks. All Canada Geese are dicks, and I’m racist towards them. Specist, actually, I guess. At the very least, I’m extremely prejudiced against them.
Wow, remember when there was a difference between prejudiced and racist, as in there was a level of severity for being an asshole to other people? I was having a conversation with a younger friend of mine about this lately, one which centered on how you bleed pressure out of a closed system. There’s different levels of murder, for instance – manslaughter, homicide, etc.
At any rate, the Canada Geese are ultimately downy piles of meat, and what I was doing at Dutch Kills on this warm night was searching for a carnivore which legends say hunt these waters. Looking for a hunter? Focus in on the prey.
“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 