New York City streets are notorious for defects and foibles. 
The website for the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) has pages devoted to reporting problems, including cave-ins, hummocks, ponding, missing manhole covers and pot holes.
Driving through the city, over grates and grills, around barriers and pylons, can be a disquieting experience.
It’s not just the hazards, but the mottled surface, the cracks and excrescence.
And how it seems to have always been here, not senescent but permanent. 
Sometimes it just needs to have its contiguity checked.
Monthly Archives: December 2012
Sensationalism: the whittling of a word
Warning: This blog is entirely derived from sensationalism
Sensationalism is a type of editorial bias in mass media in which events and topics in news stories and pieces are over-hyped to increase viewership or readership numbers (Wikipedia), such as a horrific event from this week in which a man was pushed onto the tracks and killed by a New York subway train. 
This image of the man’s final moments has led many to ask why no one helped and instead took pictures of his death. This type of imagery dominates the media and has indeed infected my memory. (Or as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road: The things you put in your head are there forever.) I remember well the 1979 murder of ABC journalist Bill Stewart in Nicaragua, played over and over on network television, and obsessed over another image taken in 1988 of a German bank robber threatening to kill his hostage. (He didn’t.)
In the end, I used this as source material for my first novel The Sacred Whore, a sensational story in itself about prostitutes who kidnap a basketball team so that they can broadcast their views on what’s wrong with America.
Sensational (also a horse, album and hip hop artist) is defined as causing great public interest and excitement, as in “Sensational Superstar Vickie looks sensational!”
The 3D tools for Sensational Superstar Vickie
Sensation (also a song, event, film and type of BDSM play) is a style of writing, similar to verisimilitude, which aims to imitate the sensations of experiencing an event.
Christopher Walken experiencing too many sensations in film, “Brainstorm”.
Sensa is Latin for ‘thought’ or ‘teachings” as well as being a weight-loss program.
Rodin’s “The Thinker”
Sens is a commune in Burgundy, in north-central France.
Cathedral in Sens, France
Sen is the name of the protagonist in Miyazaki’s magical Spirited Away.
Sen (Chihiro) in “Spirited Away”.
Se is the internet country code for Sweden and also represents the element Selenium. 
And S is a letter, a series of Tesla cars, the stock identifier for Sprint Nextel and the sound a balloon makes when it’s run out of air.
Editing to nothing
The editing process can be grueling. You have to be cruel to yourself, almost masochistic. You have to cut, cut, cut! But first you need a sentence: I couldn’t go any farther and trying to do just that, forgetting which way to turn, thinking of nothing like that, drunk, not what I am in my head, fat in my stupid genius, a dreamed ecstasy with gilded mirrors, neon blue, stars on my hips and in my eyes, gold lines along the ceiling, wisteria, my toes out of their straps, my brilliant life. 
Well, yes, I must admit that does need a bit of an edit: I couldn’t go any farther and, forgetting which way to turn, thinking of nothing, drunk, I was lost in my head, a stupid genius, thinking of gilded mirrors, neon blue, stars on my hips and in my eyes, gold lines along the ceiling, wisteria, all of it, my brilliant life. (It’s a start.) 
I couldn’t go any farther, drunk and, forgot which way to turn. I realized I was lost. I was stuck in my head, ecstasy in my head, gilded mirrors, neon blue, stars in my eyes, wisteria, all of it whirling. (Have I lost it already?) 
I couldn’t go any farther. I was drunk. There were gilded mirrors, neon blue, stars, wisteria, all of it whirling. (Is that what I meant?) 
I was drunk. Neon stars and wisteria spun around me. (Just that?) 
I was drunk. (No more?) 
Drunk. (Uh-oh.) 
And then…a black hole. Not even that. And I have to start again: I saw the wisteria...
Broadway at Night: Canyon of Dreams
Broadway, also called the Canyon of Dreams, is a location for an early morning scene in my novel, My Bad Side:
A flock of small black birds swirled above Bowling Green, hovered a moment, a single organism, and landed in the bare glowing branches of the beech trees. 
Apollo watched, his mouth open, moaning softly. We followed the plaques. 1910, June 18: Theodore Roosevelt, following return from his African Safari; 1926, August 27: Gertrude Ederle, first woman to swim the English Channel. 
Crystal called.
“You’re up early.”
“More like late.”
1950, August 31: William O’Dwyer Upon his Resignation as Mayor of New York. “You remember the Santa Claus Parade?” 
“I was an icicle.”
“I was a workshop elf.”
“They painted my face with silver glitter. I had that crazy hat that pointed straight up.”
I could hear her moving, her mouth muffled, distant from the receiver, and then the tinkling of glass, bottles going into the recycling.
“I sat on a giant wooden mushroom.” I switched the phone to my other hand. 
“We should go on a trip.”
“Where?”
“Las Vegas.”
There was scaffolding on both sides of the street now, the black and silver crossbars, rusted bolts sticking out through broken strands of duct tape. 
“The Galapagos. We could swim with the seals.”
“They would just freak me out.”
“It would be incredible.”
“Rome,” she suggested. “Or St. Petersburg.”
“Really?”
“The Crystal Palace.”
A rat popped out and veered wildly back at the sight of Apollo. “The Winter Palace.”
“Is that what it’s called? The Winter Palace?” There was the snap of her lighter and the intake of another cigarette. “It should be called The Crystal Palace.”
New York City Hall
Broadway: Bowling Green and Ticker Tape Parades
New York’s famed Broadway starts at Bowling Green, the city’s oldest park. 
It was here, on July 9, 1776, where the Sons of Freedom, in an act of defiance against England, took down the statue of King George III and sawed off the finials from the fence – the saw marks which are still visible today. 
Bowling Green is also where New York’s ticker tape parades begin, all of which Manhattan’s Downtown Alliance has documented by imbedding granite slabs into the sidewalk. The first parade was impromptu – a collection of people going up Broadway after the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. 
There were another six parades over the next 35 years…
27 parades in the 1920s…
17 in the 1930s…
22 in the 1940s (all after the end of World War II in 1945)…
A whopping 62 in the 1950s…
32 in the 1960s…
And 20 over the past 42 years, many of which were sports-related. It is actually an interesting exercise to review the list of these ticker tape parades, especially to note how these celebrations have transformed from a focus on politics to that of sports. 
It is the very apolitical nature of the more recent parades that might indicate how unlikely it is that the current statue in Bowling Green will be taken down any time soon.
Wall Street’s Bull at Bowling Green
Wolf Leaves; Prius Stays
The Wolf of Wall Street was only on Maiden Lane for one day – Tuesday, November 27.
Mr. DiCaprio will be elsewhere.
Whether that was their initial plan or it was due to the lack of power and excess of damage, there will be no DiCaprio sightings here. Meanwhile, 33 days after Hurricane Sandy, the generators and fuel trucks remain,
Fuel delivery on Maiden Lane
as does the Prius.
Prius on Maiden – 33 days after Hurricane Sandy
It is as smashed up and dilapidated as ever…
but it is still there, and with a message.
Leaving us to wonder how exactly ‘off’ does it mean?