Luxury You Can Afford

I wasn't sure what I was looking at behind the trash bags and debris.

It turned out to be a Bentley and a Rolls Royce, cheek by jowl.

Wave Street and Front Street, Staten Island.

Speed Trap

What's the best place for a speed trap? A place where people are likely to drive fast. What's a more likely place for people to drive fast than the Brooklyn-side approach to the Kosciuszko Bridge in the evening when there's no traffic? Because there is never no traffic. As I slow down just before the NYPD car angled to road, I imagine my conversation with the officer:
"A thousand nights of creeping along, inch by inch, towards the bridge. The first night I can remember not having to.... Couldn't you just leave it to the potholes to do the damage?"

Be Safe out There

I puzzled over this motto on the bumper of a NYC Department of Buildings Prius as we crawled towards the Kosciuszko Bridge. "Build Safe I live safe"? Or maybe it was missing a pronoun (and a comma)? "You build safe, I live safe"? Then I realized what you probably already have: That's not an "I", it's a "|", i.e., a vertical slash. Nobody ever said the DOB wasn't subtle. Or maybe nobody ever said it was.

Practice Patience

From John Cage's collection of 190 paragraph-long one minute stories. The text of each is is formatted to take up the same card-size space. In the piece, Indeterminacy, Cage (or the performer) would draw one from a card file at random and read it, then draw another and read it, and so on. It was performed recently in New York along with two other Cage pieces (at the same time). You can read them all on Eddie Kohler's beautiful site. Here's one for a Monday morning (before the BQE):

Standing            in            line,


      Max            Jacob            said,


          gives            one            the
  opportunity



to            practice





                                              patience.

Calling Warsaw 1939

An exhibit to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day in the third floor rotunda of the Public Library's main branch. In a glass case, open on a book stand, a Warsaw telephone directory from 1939. Jewish surnames predominate, along with typical professions and addresses: Glicksman, Józef, dr. med., Nowolipki 54; Glickson, Helena, lek. dentysta, Żelazna 75; Gliner, B., skł. futrz. tow. [fur warehouse], Grzybowska 70 [street of Warsaw's Great Synagogue], on and on.

It's an unexpectedly handsome volume, bound in brown leather, with "telephony" spelled out in an Art Deco'ish font (complete with stylish lower-case "T") on the cover. When I lived in Warsaw, 50 years later, I hardly remember seeing a phone book. Some buildings and districts still had spotty telephone service. I had friends with no phone. If you needed to reach them, you called a neighbor and they would go next door  and knock.

Trouble

Manor Road & Victory Blvd, S.I.

Trouble in the street

On the water

Under the water

On the train.

The answer is

Jesus Christ

Versus Satan.

-Subway Preacher (can't remember which line)

Fun in the Rain

Out of focus but somebody is having fun in the rain!