Shot (to Hell) on an iPhone

Part of Apple's Shot on iPhone 6 campaign, this shot is by Brendan O. of Copenhagen. It occupies the dedicated Apple billboard at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, which is visible to BQE drivers heading east (earlier post). The lanes narrow and curve just there to get under the bridge. It's easy to imagine the PR gang at Apple having fun with idea of harried BQE drivers desperately trying to stay in their lanes while their eyes are drawn into this bit of Copenhagen street art--if that's what it is. All the way down the rabbit hole.

Bridge Partners

The Harlem River Drive is one of my favorite ways to enter New York. Once you cross the George Washington Bridge and manage to separate yourself from the scrum trying to get onto the Cross Bronx Expressway, a narrow center lane, leads you down along the West bank ridge of the river. It also you allows you to appreciate some of NYC's less major (I won't say "minor") bridges. Stuck in traffic before the exit to the Triboro (RFK) Bridge, I caught one of these clearly, the Park Avenue Bridge (above), and one, inexplicably, in a sun-blur, the Madison Avenue Bridge (below).

In Plein Sight

The BTB was tipped off a while back by Robyn Love of a real-time painting going on right under our noses in the little triangle of formed between the LIE, the exit ramp to 48th St. (just off the BQE on the Queens side), and 48th St. itself. Demonstrating true esprit de blog, she got herself out there in time to meet the artist and get a snap of him with the work. Meet Daniel DaSilva.

(Photo: Robyn Love)

The BTB's own Research Bureau was a bit slower on the uptake. When we finally got out there this morning, we found the site--after a completely unnecessary roundtrip across the Kosciuszko Bridge--but with no artist in sight. It seems like unlikely spot to celebrate, at first. But looking at Daniel's work (in progress, from his website), you begin to appreciate the grandeur of it.

Like standing beneath a Roman aqueduct, perhaps. (Better, actually, since it's exceptionally well served by buses, one from Queens and one from Brooklyn.)

Sorry I didn't get to meet the artist in situ. You can see some more of his work on his website www.danielgdasilva.com.

Moving Shea

The local route to LaGuardia Marine Air Terminal takes you by the Shea Moving lot.

Gowanus on the Riviera

Or vice versa. A Buick Riviera (guessing around '64 or '65) on the Gowanus Expressway. And some other vehicles.

What happened to our cars?

Erasing the View

The Apple billboard on the BQE. Beyond a highrise development on the north end of Brooklyn Bridge Park.

My Dinner with Wally

To be clear, it wasn't dinner and I never spoke to the man. But, for the second time in my life, Wallace Shawn walked into a cafe I was sitting in.

Shawn and Andre Gregory in My Dinner with Andre (1981)

Perhaps, not as unexpectedly this time, since his name was on the program I had just been handed. (He hadn't been announced in advance, they informed us, because he had a 7 a.m. shoot for The Good Wife and wasn't sure he'd be able to make the event.) The venue was a performance space at the Baryshnikov Arts Center on W. 37th St., made over as a cafe for an evening "salon": Music by Mozart, Berio, John Cage, and readings Beckett poems and excerpts from Cage's "Composition as Process" ("32 Questions") by Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg (short story writer and Shawn's wife).

I'd just noticed Shawn's name on the program when I looked up to see him entering the room with Deborah Eisenberg, surveying it with that mildly stunned expression that has become his trademark. It recalled a scene in a Warsaw cafe, the Nowy Świat ("New World), where I'd gone for coffee and cakes with my students from the college. Perhaps a bit bored, I'd glanced towards the door and noticed Shawn standing there, surrounded by some artsy Polish types. At that point, I'd seen him in My Dinner with Andre, and that was about it. What was he doing in Warsaw? He looked around--the same expresssion. Before I could explain to my students who he was, he left, along with his entourage.

Flash forward to 2015, Shawn and Eisenberg sit one table away from us. Almost as close to me as Andre Gregory was to him in the movie. I maintain decorum: no celebrity hounding. Though I was dying to say, "Excuse, Mr. Shawn. Do you remember walking into a a cafe in Warsaw in 1990? Oh, you do? What was it that made you leave? I've been wondering about that for 25 years."

Egg-Beaters on the S.I.E.

Is music just sounds?

Then what does it communicate?

Is a truck passing by music?

If I can see it, do I have to hear it too?

If while I see it I can't hear it, but hear something else, say an egg-beater, because I'm inside looking out, does the truck communicate or the egg-beater, which communicates?

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

- John Cage, from "Composition as  Process" (just a few of the 32 questions he asks in the essay).

H.P.

Nothing if not timely, BTB catches up on the devastating fire at the Marly Supply Company lumberyard in Greenpoint in early January. The Daily News story provides some amazing photographs of the event, which necessitated shutting down the BQE for some hours.

(Source: New York Daily News)

How many thousands of times have I driven by the Marly sign? It's a favorite, with its mix of language, typography, and iconography (the backhoe and rearing horse). I photographed/posted it one rainy night in December (see below).

I just assumed the Chinese characters meant Marly. I was driving by the sign about a week ago with a friend who reads Chinese. She looked at the sign and laughed: "Oh, it says 'horse power.'"

I am glad to know it. And glad it is still there.

Not the End

(Photo: BTB)

Longtime BTB readers may remember a post from 2011, "This is the End." A mash-up of BQE photographs from the 7-train and the Mekons song "Cockermouth." Well since then, the Mekons documentary has been released (Revenge of the Mekons) and Dave Mandl's series of photographs of every dead-end street in Brooklyn has come out via Places journal. Read about it and see many of the images here.  Here are two from that series:

(Gowanus. Photo: Dave Mandl)

(Windsor Terrace. Photo: Dave Mandl)

BTW: Mandl hosts an excellent program on WFMU called World of Echo with Dave Mandl.