We visited the Transit Museum in Brooklyn today which included a series from an antiquated pageant, Miss Subway (1941-76)….
As well as advertisements with dated pitches…
Does that come with a paper bag and straw?
Oscar Predictions
Will Win Should Win
Picture Argo Amour
Director Steven Spielberg Michael Haneke
Actor Daniel Day Lewis Joaquin Phoenix
Actress Jessica Chastain Emmanuelle Riva
S. Actor Tommy Lee Jones Phillip Seymour Hoffman
Sup. Actress Sally Field None of those nominated
Cinema Claudio Miranda (Pi) Mihai Mailimari (Master)
Script Django Unchained Moonrise Kingdom
Most ridiculous nomination:Argo for editing. This film had no less than six cliff-hangers at the end, all of which were blundering and predictable. For this film to be nominated in this category, the final 20 minutes would have to be removed.
Excerpt from My Bad Side: Everything was brittle and cracking. I beat my arms across my body, kicking my legs to get warm, and then lay there, as cold as before, worse, breathing fog. I closed my eyes. It was the same, awful and cold.
I was cold and dark in my head. My cheeks hurt. My breath was stuck. My sleeping bag was twisted and stunk of industrial plastic. I couldn’t move my fingers. I felt for my
heart and couldn’t feel that and then it wasn’t right, half beating and then
too many in a row and then none at all.
I half followed him across Union Square and took the 4 Train. I found an empty car. There was a homeless woman sleeping at the end, her head cushioned on a blanket against the window. I wondered if she was really asleep. I wondered if she ever slept. I sat and stared and missed my stop. I was going to get off, but I didn’t. I went to the end of the line instead.
“You ever think about throwing yourself in front of the train? I mean more like rolling along the front of it like a dance move or Cirque de Soleil thing. You spin up kind of, hands out like a spinning top, you know, with that old thick wire. And then it gets bad. You hit the wall. Not even that. You just fall down and the train cuts off your legs or something like that.”
There is no doubting that it snowed in the city. But it was just a snow storm, not a blizzard. Many in the city remain on edge about storms – storm alerts, panic buying, empty subways – given the fact that the last one was much worse than most expected.
It was rush hour. The northbound 6 train was packed, pulling into 33rd Street. The doors opened, and the crowds shoved in and out. Someone shouted and another snapped back; two men were in a shoving match at the wall. The bigger one wound up and punched hard; the second and collapsed on the bench.
“Stay there!” The attacker got onto our train. The doors closed behind him. He looked around at everyone. No one looked back. It was quiet in the car, silent except for the train on the tracks and the man’s heavy breathing. I was supposed to do something. I knew that. The idea of explaining to the man that what he did was wrong popped into my head. He looked my way and I looked past him. The train swayed through the tunnel. The man was given a lot of space as we pulled into Grand Central as he went to the doors. I considered following and pointing him out to a policeman. He left. I did nothing. Nobody did. The train doors closed and he was gone.
A couple of years after that, I was on the northbound 4 train just after midnight; we pulled out of Brooklyn Bridge. A man yelled out to the riders. “Watch this!” A boy, maybe 10 years old, assumedly his son, did a remarkable dance, spinning on the ground, flipping head over heels. He was very good. The father passed around his hat. I stared back at him. “This city has child labor laws, you know.”
“What’s that?” He had bad eyes, dark and small.
“You’re not allowed to do that.”
The train had arrived at 14th Street. The man turned away and then suddenly kicked at me sideways, right on my ass, hard, and walked out, his boy behind him. Nobody seemed to have noticed any of it.
There is a new Metro Transit Authority announcement these days: Stay Back from the Platform Edge. Recently there have been a couple of highly publicized incidents of people being pushed to their deaths on the tracks. I’ve always tended to be an edge-stander, but now I check behind me and stay a few feet back.
Disappointment is a simple word. It is a big word too. It is the signpost marking so many turns.
Mostly I am disappointed in me, but I find it too much in others as well, those I know, pass in the streets, in the news and everywhere else. Today, I was on the 6 train northbound, and a young woman sat down, crazily smiling. I thought she had just remembered something funny, seen somebody, something like that, but her smile went on and on. She kept smiling crazily as she put on her chapstick.
A homeless man got on the train at Bleecker Street and made his appeal. “Anything you can spare, even a penny, whatever you can give helps us provide those in need with a sandwich or a bowl of soup.” He held up a laminated badge. Most everyone ignored him except the crazily smiling woman, who gave him a dollar. He bowed to her for that. “God bless you. I hope you get safely to your destination.” He made the rounds. No one else contributed. He bowed to the crazily smiling woman again. “God bless you. I hope you get safely to your destination.” I was disappointed in him making such a point of her dollar, weirdly damning the rest of us for not coughing up the money. (I doubted the soup story.) And I was disappointed in her for encouraging him to do it again – and take his “god-bless-your-trip” smiling still. But in the end, when they both had gone and it was just me and all the other silent, staring people, I was disappointed in myself. I had done nothing and, worse, had stood stupidly in judgment of a smiling woman giving a dollar to a homeless guy. Ugh.
I came out of the subway tonight just below St. Paul’s Church, and a man ran past, half crashing into a passerby. He apologized, spun away and continued fast down the road. Someone muttered, “That’s awkward.” Another man came past, a security guard, and then another. The only sound was of the feet. Nothing else. No yelling. No heavy breathing. A third person came past a moment later, a woman, looking tired. She was quiet too. All of them vanished up the road toward St. Paul’s, police lights flashing. It didn’t look like the first man had much of a chance. It stayed quiet.
Downtown Manhattan is a noisy neighbourhood, making it hard finding a place to think. For example, while there is a park around the corner….
John Street Methodist Church Park
It is claustrophobic, more akin to a prison yard than a park. City Hall Park offers a beautiful fountain, festively decorated during the winter, for contemplation… But the traffic, on Park Row and Broadway, is a never-ending story. The East River Esplanade looks like it might have moments of quiet…
If not for the fact that the traffic on FDR Drive Overpass is worse.
The World Trade Memorial has potential as a place of solace…
Once the security checkpoints are gone and the construction is complete.
World Trade One projected completion date: 2014
Until then, I will have to accept that the only time silence comes anywhere around here is when a hurricane comes to town. But then the power is gone too…unless I get a generator. And there’s no quiet in that.
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.
This isn’t in praise of the system, certainly not the cleanliness nor service, but rather a sentimental rumination on the aesthetics of industry and decay. The water stains and hanging wires, the rats chasing garbage, scurrying over carcasses of each other. It’s like art, something true. There’s the silence, the distant footsteps and then vibrations and the approaching train, coming and suddenly there, not yours but the express, flashing past the steel pillars, thick and black. It’s strangely idyllic, a place of calm and respite, the traffic and weather above, the air from the tunnel rising up, the train coming at last out of the dark air and dirt. The conductors wear protective glasses – for the grit and abuse – and might hold the train for the switch from local to express, but then seem to prefer the opposite. It’s just a game. I took the E train on a late-night trip from World Trade Center to Jamaica Center and back again. It was full at times – leaving Manhattan and into Queens – and empty too – coming back from Jamaica at 1:30am. I woke, the train idle in the station, half of the shiny blue slippery benches filled with people not going anywhere. I’ve been kicked – hard and with intent – and stood idle after a brute of a man jumped onto the train, having punched another – hard and with intent – and all of us stood there, quiet, eyes averted, complicit. It’s something deep, the furnace of this city, the noise and quiet, the dark and roar, the rush and the emptiness again.
As well as advertisements with dated pitches… 
