kite flyers underground

On the F train, a Mother and child returned home from the KiteFlight event held annually on the roof of Penn Station, another one of the visionary events New Yorkers have cooked up. Nothing could rival kite flying in earthbound open air events, except maybe this Sukkah City in Union Square.

subway grid

Magic square puzzles, aka Sudoku, date back 4,120 years and occur as talismans in a wide range of cultures. Maybe I should take them up. Maybe by doing these, as this woman on the F train was, we bring the world, or the small clump of earth we call "I", a fragment closer to balance. According to Chinese legend, the square was brought to the people by a turtle emerging from the sea after a huge flood in the Lo River. Perhaps the puzzle programs the subconscious to know and to seek balance, and to avoid flooding. Who knows what numerical qualities make possible. As physicist Heinrich Hertz put it, "We cannot help but think that mathematical formulae have a life of their own, that they know more than their discoverers do and that they return more to us than we have invested in them."

Orange You Glad

Got to work and on the elevator noticed the 2nd Floor manager was wearing a bright orange dress, stunning against the stainless steel tread that lines the elevator walls, her right ankle snug in the cast that's been on her leg for about 6 months. Somehow she always seems like a happy doll anyway, ready to laugh.

I'm glad I didn't get struck by any fallen tree limbs today considering the winds blew up to 55 knots. There were at least two branches on the ground around here, an Ash limb and a Linden.

For some reason, I often find myself upset on really windy days. My son cheered me up though by helping me peel and slice the carrots for Pea Soup. I'm also glad to have seen the sky this morning, the low clouds moving North quickly, keeping time with the Ash leaves barreling down the avenue, while the higher cloud cover hardly moved, and the sun ripped through wherever it could.

From the Viaduct

You only get a good view of this traveling into Manhattan frompoints beyond Smith/9th on the F train. I spied it before, a few times when heading towards Coney Island, but it's not worth a photo from the other side of the track. The roof, before it caved in, was expansive and sparsely outfitted with apparatuses resembling space capsules qua retroviruses, translating easily into a low-lying lunar landscape. Beyond the ruin, the area which I believe is called the public space, toxic, I hear, and now boasting one of the most extensive meadows I've seen in Western Brooklyn.

Seeing it, I think of Guskind, and wonder how he would have reacted to the ceiling collapse, and what he knew about this site that I'll never learn.

The subway window schmutz apparent in the images I gift to you at no extra charge.

The Reflex

These two have gotten far too quick for my lazy lens.


















I've found more docile subjects on the F train.

Viaduct View

Because I missed my stop coming home from a birthday party on Mulberry St. last Friday, the 13th, I wound up having to take the G to the F, which meant waiting at the elevated Smith-9th station.

Have you ever stood there on the South side of the platform and watched the scrap metal claw at work on the side of the Gowanus? I had never seen that before. I'm not sure why they were at it so late, Friday at around 10:30 pm. Maybe because the metal heap is so enormous they have to do it when they can, before it all slides into the canal. The claw rig has floodlights on it so the operator can see what he's doing as he grabs heaps of metals parts and drops them onto the barge floating in the canal. You can see the lights in the picture above, to the right of the Lowe's sign. The canal is the void of black beyond the parking lot. The distance from the platform to the metal heap reduced the impact of all the sharp edges in the scene, even the brutality of the claw as it tramped down the metal on the barge over and over again.

The scene had that aesthetic of grand scale industrial decay Spielberg drew from in Star Wars. And where did he get it from?