Thursday, September 30, 2004

 
103
103rd and Broadway looks like any Broadway block. A cafeteria, a movie, stores. In the middle of Broadway is an island with some grass and benches placed at intervals. 103rd is a subway stop, a crowded block. This is junk territory. Junk haunts the cafeteria, roams up and down the block, sometimes half-crossing Broadway to rest on one of the island benches. A ghost in daylight on a crowded street. You could always find a few junkies sitting in the cafeteria or standing around outside with coat collars turned up, spitting on the sidewalk and looking up and down the street as they waited for the connection. In summer, they sit on the island benches, huddled like so many vultures in their dark suits. The peddler had the face of a withered adolescent. He was fifty-five but he did not look more than thirty. He was a small, dark man with a thin Irish face. When he did show up - and like many oldtime junkies he was completely unpunctual - he would sit at a table in the cafeteria. You gave him money at the table, and met him around the corner three minutes later where he would deliver the junk. He never had it on him, but kept it stashed somewhere close by. -- Junky by William Burroughs.
This is a picture of 104th and Broadway. The Casa Puebla building used to be a Horn and Hardart cafeteria--possibly purpose built. I don’t know if Burroughs misremembered, or was changing the street names to protect the innocent. Maybe there were two cafeterias on one block. Up through the seventies cafeterias: fancy ones like Horn and Hardart with their little mailboxes of food which could be released for a nickel, and steam-table hells were common in New York. As common as Starbucks and big, chain-drugstores are today. None, as far as I know, now exist on Manhattan. They were full of junkies and beatniks anyway.

 

Self consuming Dragon

litemoonlite

"The boredom of the voyage is handsomely compensated for by the emotions stirred up on arrival at New york, the most spectacular sight that anyone can see on this earth. The skyscrapers appear grey in the sky which has just cleared and they seem like the ruins of some monstrous New York abandoned three thousand years in the future. Then gradually you make out the colours which are different from any idea you had of them, and a complicated pattern of shapes. Everything is silent and deserted, then the car traffic starts to low. The massive, grey, fin-de-siecle look of the buildings gives New York, as Ollier immediately pointed out, the appearence of a German city." Italo Calvino, 11-9-1959, 'Hermit in Paris' Vintage Books, New York, 2003.


I love this passage. I like the fact that the only comparison he can come up with for New York,is, in fact, New York "three thousand years in the future." Like a dragon eating its own tail. The picture is not illustrative, except of that metaphor (because the moon is waning.)


 

exit


exit
Originally uploaded by niznoz.
Just another metaphor for existential angst? More than you know -- its a photograph of the exit (well you knew that!) at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. So there's the established church see, and all is dark within, and then there's a way-out, see, and light streams from it. Metaphors a damn fine thing.

Not that I'd take that one too seriously.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

 

Sitting in Starbucks

Back to this subject matter. Unoriginally I'm checking out the combination of a palm with a infrared keyboard and a wifi card and testing the feasibility of mobile blogging. I guess all I have to say is that it is totally feasible, and almost as convienient as a laptop. But a great deal lighter. I still seem to stuck in starbucks, although I could write anywhere and then cruise around looking to piggyback on somebodies home connection. Or an unprotected business connection, or something simple and free like Bryant Park. The only difficulty I come across is that the palm's browser doesn't automatically redirect to the sign-in page of the wifi network, and most networks, free and pay require you to sign in. Often this requires figuring out in advace where you are going to be and loading up the sign-in url in the browser bookmarks. Now I'm totally unprepared to answer the question "why" I would want to moblog, except, my-friends there is a certain transitory and no-doubt unreasonable feeling of power in being able to publish to the masses (even if no one reads the thing) via something you can fit in yr pocket. Better than postcards, and no duplicated effort, either. Next time I travel I am certainly subjecting my friends to a travel-blog. The next step in this pocket publishing thing will be to make it more automatic, more idiot proof. Something phone based. I can already send photos to my blog by phone. As you can, I hope, see. Anyway - lets see if this works

Saturday, September 25, 2004

 
five pointsFive Points with Longitude and Latitude:

40.714 73.999
What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies beyond this tottering flight of steps, that creak beneath our tread? — a miserable room, lighted by one dim candle, and destitute of all comfort, save that which may be hidden in a wretched bed. Beside it, sits a man: his elbows on his knees: his forehead hidden in his hands. ‘What ails that man?’ asks the foremost officer. ‘Fever,’ he sullenly replies, without looking up. Conceive the fancies of a feverish brain, in such a place as this!
Ascend these pitch-dark stairs, heedful of a false footing on the trembling boards, and grope your way with me into this wolfish den, where neither ray of light nor breath of air, appears to come. A negro lad, startled from his sleep by the officer’s voice — he knows it well — but comforted by his assurance that he has not come on business, officiously bestirs himself to light a candle. The match flickers for a moment, and shows great mounds of dusty rags upon the ground; then dies away and leaves a denser darkness than before, if there can be degrees in such extremes. He stumbles down the stairs and presently comes back, shading a flaring taper with his hand. Then the mounds of rags are seen to be astir, and rise slowly up, and the floor is covered with heaps of negro women, waking from their sleep: their white teeth chattering, and their bright eyes glistening and winking on all sides with surprise and fear, like the countless repetition of one astonished African face in some strange mirror.
from American Notes by Charles Dickens

Five Points: in the 19th century New York's most notorious slum. It is now in the center of Chinatown, somewhere underneath Columbus Park (built in 1897 it is one of Chinatown's few areas of recreation, and is much used), which abuts the criminal courts (and their holding cells, still known as 'the tombs'). The points were created by the intersection of Park, Worth and Baxter streets. For his film of Gangs of New York, Francis Ford Coppola recreated the neighborhood in Rome, using local extras. The original inhabitants were mostly Irish and African-American (and their proximity to each other was probably one of the things that shocked Dickens). Such were the times.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?