NYC Irritation Innovation

Sightseers swing past earth at Columbus Circle
NYC is a hotbed for innovating things that irritate.

Old irritation: Idling sightseeing buses.

New irritation: Idling sightseeing buses with huge ads exhorting people not sitting on their ass on the bus to get in shape, like above.

Old irritation: Door jumpers.  You open a door for yourself and someone a few lengths away jumps through it before you do.  They're parasitic ghosts who slip through space between real people, stealing muscle power, avoiding having to touch the filthy door (probably some of the same people who use a store restroom, don't wash their hands, then fondle merchandise or clamp their polluted hand on the escalator rail on the way out).

New irritation: Door jumpers using cellphones, who consider it only right that others open doors for them because they are busy on the phone.

Old irritation: Spatially oblivious people.  Like spaced-out tourist families that pick the most congested choke point in pedestrian traffic to stand around debating where to go next -- forcing everyone else to churn through their whirlpool of confusion.

New irritation: Spatially oblivious iPeople.  They notice you are about to collide, so they consult their cellphone -- they actually stutter-stop for a half second to study it as you converge -- as though they hope to flee into Cyber Phone Space and avoid your onrushing mass of molecules.

I have seen people do this at the most inappropriate moments -- stepping onto or off a train, in the middle of a busy doorway -- and suspect they really are split between worlds, too lazy to choose one.

And speaking of "inattention to surroundings," the article at the link below is a hoot.  It says that, even before cellphones, national park visitors would put their kids on a wild animal's back for a snapshot.  Now they use technology to extend their idiocy.  One quartet of hikers sent out high tech emergency signals three times -- each time sending a $3400 an hour helicopter into action -- and refused to fly out until forced.  Their second emergency?  They thought the local water "tasted salty."
- Technology Leads More Park Visitors Into Trouble, NYT

Cluster Faves

A few of my favorite clusters of stuff.  Above, looking down Broadway from in front of the Fifth Avenue Building at Madison Square.

It's nice that the Levi's ad, left of the clock, sinks into the surrounding brown.  Too bad they had to insult us with "Everybody's work is equally important," here in the land of banker bonuses.  Are the workers in the ads socialists, or have their brains evaporated from too many 12 hour shifts in the denim mines?

Below left, the southwest corner of West Broadway and Watts.


Above right, looking west on Metropolitan Ave. from next to the BQE in Williamsburg.  And below, looking north on 1st Ave. from below 33rd St.

Noir Double Bill

Robert Mitchum is a modest medical professional with a perfectly decent, true-blue girlfriend.  He should be satisfied, but one whiff of expensive perfume and he throws in with an about-to-be heiress whose screws have come loose.  Twice! -- in two movies I watched a few weeks apart:


Above left, Jean Simmons in Angel Face, 1952.  Above right, Faith Domergue in Where Danger Lives, 1950 (on a DVD with the also worthy Tension).

One movie has a "happy ending."  Find out which one!

Film still capture credits: Only the Cinema, Some Came Running and tubeonline.info.

New Bloomberg City

Like wide screen TV, but $1000 a month to maintain
I think it's time we quit fooling ourselves, and rename NYC New Bloomberg City, or NBC.

Rinse off the stench of
wealth at ABC Home

The city's transformation is nearly complete, as Bloomberg Preferred Citizens^TM -- bankers, developers, and other people with Wall Street incomes, and the drones who furnish them with the regular and stainless amenities formerly found only in upscale suburbs -- have firmly taken control and, like arrogant weeds, are sucking up all the air that used to allow for the cultural and economic breadth and depth that made this huge village special.

Today's reminder that we live in two worlds: People who spend six figures on aquariums for their $16.9 million apartment as an alternative to a big screen TV.  Watching the bright, swirling trails of captive fish soothes the owner, and lets them imagine they are rinsing the filthiness off their wealth, transforming it to beauty and meaning.

Spend to Transcend ^TM*

I suspect that washing off filth via home furnishings and improvement is what a lot of people with too much money do.

From the window displays at ABC Home (above and right), where Spending is Transcending ^TM, to Jean Nouvel's "Vision" luxury tower in Chelsea, that had the normally egalitarian critic Nicolai Ouroussoff enthusing over interior details, as if the city is enhanced -- not by what anyone can see from the outside and the way a building meets the sidewalk but -- by imagining we were invited into one of those luxury apartments to enjoy the precious details and the way they express the owners' sensitive and complicated relationship to wealth.

And now, as usual, the rest of us are left to watch the Elect, those who gave their souls to Mammon, live the high life in their pretty fish tanks strung like pearls along the High Line, and let the enjoyment trickle down on our imaginations.

[ Previously: A Tale of Two Economies ]

* This ABC Home display, though up during Black History month, always made me think of a home makeover by the Manson Family.

Leaning Tower of Confucius Plaza

Some pictures of the Confucius Plaza Apartments tower.  I liked the way the ropes seem to be pulling the tower and the white building at its feet together so much that I preserved the crookedness in these photos.

1) Above, the ropes pull the tower over like a loose fence post.
2) Below left, the tower pulls back a bit.


3) Above right, the arched back of the tower as it pulls itself up.
4) Below, the puny white building is ripped out of the ground.

Wanamaker Store Annex 2

Different day, different light, different skin at Wanamaker Annex (home of the Astor Place Kmart).  I'd like to thank the sun for the nice flare above.


And again, it mystifies me how such a humble surface can look so good.  Compare the color and temperature here with the previous photos.


[ Wanamaker Store Annex 1 ]

Upstairs Window Displays

Some upper floor displays.  I remember Lost City wasn't fond of newer stores uptown that lit up the floors of crap inside at night, but I like these old-school displays.

Above and left, Earrings Plaza on Broadway near 31st.  It's a pleasing display but, with three levels, it's screaming for a religious theme with heaven on top, earth in the middle, and hell below.

Then, below left, there's the window of Man Hing Import on 5th Ave. near 28th.  With all the exotic rug merchants nearby, it was probably a good location for selling exotic vases, back in The Day when wealth might produce a few Culture Vultures in between the uncultured kind.


Above right, a window that Jeremiah's Vanishing NY has admired too, on Ave. A near 2nd St.  It's a warm relic, forgotten in plain sight, that harks back to modest days when a simple middle class kitchen -- with automatic dishwasher! -- was the height of luxury.

And finally, below, some brides who've likely been waiting in the window for years -- in gowns still as white as the kitchen appliances above -- on 6th Ave. near 38th.

A Tale of Two Economies

Explained below.  Meanwhile, learn to breathe under water...
There's the Wall Street Economy, run by people who still make huge amounts of money skimming the take in the deregulated casino they've built at the core of our economic system.  (Wall Street, where the average salary is $392,000, is hiring!)  Then there's the Jobs Economy, where the rest of us live, where state and local governments are still laying off teachers and closing fire stations.

Welcome to the Recovery, says Timothy F. Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury.  The recession is over because his economy -- the Wall Street Economy -- is doing fine, because "financial engineers" are still building ever faster and more convoluted ways to hide the smoke inside their "financial instruments" and rationalize their huge bonuses.  (Paul Volcker vs. "financial innovation.")

What about the Jobs Economy? "The point is that a large part of Congress — large enough to block any action on jobs — cares a lot about taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, but very little about the plight of Americans who can’t find work."  - Defining Prosperity Down, by Paul Krugman. 

Krugman is worried that people like Geithner have accehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uBmCW9lZ_0pted high unemployment as "structural," as a fact that can't be changed.  And from what Geithner and others are saying, Krugman's fears are justified.

The illustration above is my take* on how income distribution has changed in favor of the filthy rich, aided by the GOP and its accomplices.

On top is the Ideal distribution, with wealth spread across the middle class, and relative few poor and rich.

Then in the middle, the middle-class was gouged out by Open Pit Mining, as manufacturing and capital went global while labor stayed local, and Reagan and the GOP convinced everyone that deregulation and lower taxes for rich people would cause their wealth to overflow and "trickle down" on the rest of us.  (Wealthy Reduce Buying in a Blow to the Recovery.)

Of course trickle-down does not lift all boats; it makes people already too rich richer and drowns everyone else, so we've wound up with the world at the bottom of the illustration, where -- thanks to technology that connects the islands, and helps outsource any work not nailed to the ground -- First-World Islands for the rich stick up out of a sea of increasing misery for the multitudes.

Time to learn to live and breathe under water [Hendrix at YouTube].

* Graph is built to get the point across, not on actual data, though I'm sure plenty of poor people have been kicked off islands, and a few million middle-class mortgages are "under water."

Oddly Handsome 1441 Broadway

I spent a ridiculous amount of time on photos of this building -- built in 1929 at 41st & Broadway -- and wound up with just these five.

Still, it is an odd and interesting building.


The vertical ribs and color hold all the shifting brick & tile patterns together, and light bouncing off the windows adds life.


Sergeant stripes on tweed, below, suggest a rumpled authority -- like a sport coat worn by professor at a small-town college with a secret past as a drill instructor?