Air Ships

(www.cracowpostergallery.com)

From my vantage points on the BQE yesterday, I saw:
-Cruise ship docked at a Red Hook pier
-Small tug pushing a squarish work barge in the Gowanus Canal
-Sloop under sail, then engine, working up the East River
-Seaplane commencing decent onto the same river
-Blimp pivoting over the U.S. Open.

I had just posted that I don't have art for any of these, when I read in this morning's New York Times that Jan Sawka, the great Polish poster artist and illustrator (and many things besides), has died. So here's a poster for a student festival in Świnoujście from 1971 (7 years before Sawka emigrated to New York). There you go.

Troopergate

One thing you can always count on the BQE in is trucks (and vans) to read. Check out the iconography on this one: The Big Apple as ordinance. As you can see, it's Trooper Foods: "At Your Command"!

Bom Dia, Senhor Romney!

Obama will turn this country into a European style economy, or so Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan tell us (and will continue to tell us right through November 4th if not longer). Great news! The only question is which one? I'm hoping it's Portugal. Sure, the economy's shit but think of the wine, the sardines, the coastline, fado... To celebrate our coming Europeanization, here's the title sequence to the great Wim Wenders film  Lisbon Story. A German sound recordist, played by Rüdiger Vogler, has been summoned to Lisbon by his eccentric filmmaker friend (Patrick Bauchau). His trip south takes him through the newly borderless European union. He celebrates Europe as "mi patria" but, ironically and pleasingly, the film becomes a valentine to the very particularity of Lisbon and Portugal. Interspersed with the radio stations he picks up on the trip is the incomparably beautiful music of Lisbon's own Madredeus (the band becomes a character in the film). Next stop, Lisboa!

Radio Daze

Oars, anyone?

This MTA Arts for Transit poster on the westbound 7 platform in Jackson Heights caught my eye. The copy begins: "The subway system brings people together by providing an easy way to move from place to place, letting us travel to all corners of the city to connect with friends, family, and sometimes, a special someone." The leave out connecting with bosses, coworkers, and often backbreaking and/or mind-numbing labor, but fair enough.

Product placement?

It continues: "Artist Jonathan Bartlett imagines a love affair with the city set amidst the natural beauty of Central Park, only a subway ride away." Quaint. Looking closer, I noticed the small transistor radio perched on the stern is tuned to 93.9, the call letters of WNYC, the public radio megastation. Suddenly, with a soundtrack of Scott Simon, Leonard Lopate, Jonathan Schwartz, Brian Lehrer, or This American Life, the whole scene changed complexion. From bucolic paddle to banal babble in three digits. 

(Full disclosure: Written by a recovering NPR addict. It took just one semester's commuting on the BQE to ween myself.)

Las Escaleras de Jackson Heights

If you love music... (Check out the faux Colombian flag bannister on the right)

Or just need a haircut or a passport photo... (Dig the horizontal barber pole on the fourth riser.)

Roosevelt Ave. between 81st and 82nd Streets.

Completely Unspoiled

"Still unspoiled, still revolutionary"

Clever strategy, Connecticut state tourism agency, placing this billboard on the BQE East at precisely the point at which you are guaranteed to be crawling towards the Kosciuszko Bridge. Now you're thinking about the clean, wide waters of the Connecticut River as you cross over the fetid Newtown Creek. Talk about spoiled. What am I doing here? Next thing you know, you're rolling past your exit headed toward the Triboro Bridge. Bumping along on the Bruckner Boulevard and finally 95 North. Not long after that, you're stuck in traffic crawling into Stamford (should have taken the Merritt). Soon you're cursing Joe Lieberman. And Ralph Nader--isn't he from Connecticut too? Jesus, those clowns got us eight years of George W. Bush. Come to think of it, he was born in New Haven. You'll never make Bridgeport at this rate, let alone East Haddam or Deep River or wherever that billboard photo was taken.

True West

From New West

If you thought you had no reason to go to New Haven, I've got one for you. And it's not the new Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge over the Quinnipiac--a dull echo of the Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge in Boston. It's the Robert Adams photography show at the Yale University Art Gallery. An absolutely stunning retrospective of Adams' work over four decades. The' black and white photographs, mostly small format, many without people, evoke a West where the subdevelopment and shopping plaza encroach unapologetically on the plains, rivers, and mountains.

From Summer Nights

Even if you lived far from Colorado, Missouri, or Los Angeles, but were a sentient being in the late sixties or seventies, the houses, businesses, and cars--my God, the cars--will bring back that boxy, washed out time. You can see many of the images on the Gallery's website. But for the photo of the supermarket interior with freezer case after freezer case stocked with cans of frozen concentrate, you'll have to page through one of the books on display: What We Bought: The New World, Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area, 1970-1974.  I could almost feel the ice crystals on the cardboard.