Alwyn Court Detail

Alwyn Court detail revealed by Christmas morning's even light.  Note the pine cones and ornaments at the bottom, above.

A Curse on Rupert Murdoch

With the world up to its neck in a cesspool of evil, and not a lifeboat in sight, I've been forced to take supernatural measures, to pray like hell for a Vicious Christmas Miracle and conjure Dark Forces with an assortment of hexes, curses and spells, to serve my enemies the slow and painful justice they've earned!

The target of my first curse is Rupert Murdoch.  Seldom has the gift of life been squandered with the gusto spent on this evil pile of flesh.  On to the cursing!

Please groan the following chorus (of two anagrams for "Rupert Murdoch" generated by the Internet Curse Server) over and over while you read the curses below: Cur Turd He Romp, Rec Duh Rump Rot

- May the withered, flaccid remnants of his sex organs get slammed in a car door.

- May the used toilet water that irrigates his diseased flesh back up into his head and gush out his grotesquely hairy ears and nose, leaving tiny dingle-berries of toilet paper hanging in their hair trees.

- May those same nose hairs braid themselves overnight, snake around his neck while he snores, and strangle him.

- May his progeny grow to hate him even more than they already do, and succeed in their plots to shorten the time he stands between them and his money.

Viagra Angel & Murdoch

- May his festering crotch itch so severely that he takes a table fork to it while under the spotlight at the holiday dinner sponsored by his venal lick-spittle minions at Fox News, the NY Post and the Wall Street Journal, all dressed in grimy elf costumes to make him look more human.

- And while I'm at it, may all those evil elves, from Roger Alies on down to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, catch the same case of crotch cooties, and scratch them so furiously that they churn themselves up into an angry white tornado of skin dust, that whirls off across the plains and erases half the Bible Belt before it leaps into space to scratch itself against the sun and, like dried cat crap placed at the business end of a particle accelerator, explodes in a poof! of particles that scatter across a half dozen backwater spacetime dimensions, the sewer pipes of Creation, and be flushed down the drain for good.

Or at least until my dark mistress, the Savage Queen of Curses, decides that Creation is a little low on evil.

Landmark Galleries

Window displays were a disappointment this holiday season until I took a look at Landmark Galleries, on 57th St. west of 6th Ave.

The big window, below left, reminded me of fair/carnival booths with dishes and figurines you can (supposedly) win by tossing coins onto them.  Except that the figurines here are much higher class, at least according to the price tags, which also include artists' names.

And the subject matter here is racier than what you get at a fair.  From the Viagra Angel on top, to the milky Louis XIV cleavage clock above right, to the innocent-as-Roman Polanski tableaux below right, everything needed to furnish the lecher's living room is here!


And who can resist the innocent "artist at work" scene below?  So innocent that even the saintly San Pio -- the bearded figure to the left who looks evil only because he's been dipped in silver -- isn't paying attention.

Bike Zealot Future

Roadmap to the Future, OnEarth Magazine, NRDC From the comments on my last bike zealot post:

Anonymous: Also, let's say, as you assert early on, that biking only displaces transit trips, no auto trips.  This is like being a chess player who thinks only one move ahead, but let's run with this for now.  It's still more environmentally efficient than transit in terms of energy input, wear and tear on infrastructure, etc. My reply: I don't see how a flashy bike network plunked down in the middle of NYC -- that does nothing to ensure the orderly bike traffic necessary to scale-up bike use -- does anything but put on a show. The U.S. grew on and will choke on cheap energy, and the heart of the problem is in the suburbs, not in city centers served by mass transit.

To elaborate a little, arguments like "It's still more environmentally efficient" make no sense.  The environmental benefits of urban biking are essentially zero now, and bike use would have to radically increase for it to make a measurable dent in energy use. But how can urban biking scale-up when bikers refuse to be held to the same standard of behavior as other vehicle users, like motorcyclists?  The idea that bikers deserve special treatment because their personal vehicles don't pollute is ridiculous -- congested cities should not encourage personal vehicle use, tailpipe or not. As for the "chess" argument, my favorite environmental organization for years has been the National Resources Defense Council, or NRDC.  It's a dogged and hard-headed group that's been happy to do the hard work -- getting governments and manufacturers to live up to their responsibilities and adhere to tighter standards -- while groups like Greenpeace work the headlines and the Sierra Club dabbles in tourism. At any rate, I just happened to see the NRDC magazine's "Roadmap to the Future" feature on reducing energy use a few days ago, pictured above, and looked for bikes. Bikes do play a part, but a tiny one, in the last panel of the story (closeup above left).  And I'm sad to say that even the NRDC did not think things through, because the bikes appear to be whizzing right through pedestrians boarding a train, just like New Bloomberg City has bikers slicing through tourists on the Brooklyn Bridge, above right. Still, in the Roadmap to the Future, bikes barely beat out the gnat-sized Segway contingent. Note: The same issue of OnEarth also has a great interview with E.O. Wilson.

Anselm Kiefer at Gagosian

Did she know before she arrived that her hair would match?
A friend read a review -- I assume A Spectacle With a Message, Roberta Smith, NYT -- and requested a report.

The show does feel like a spectacle -- the huge, unpolished vitrines could just as well hold the remains of a crashed alien armada.  And a few things look like they came from space, like the hanging garden of ghostly sunflowers (below right) Smith calls "mysterious creature-plants."


Above left, a leaden barn full of leftover Nazi salutes.  Above right, the giant ghost flowers probe cracked earth.

In spite of the scale of the show and the huge amount of calculation and manufacturing that had to go into it -- not to mention the eight or so guards who add a slight Fort Knox feel -- it doesn't feel overblown, and some of the pieces still have the raw energy Kiefer seems to shoot for.  The show, at Gagosian's 24th St. outpost, closes this Saturday.


Above left, a nice ad hoc roof on a twig mountain at the bottom.  Above right, an exploding glass shard wedding dress, raw as student work.

Like an unheated, slightly creepy museum

St. Regis Surface

The front of the St. Regis, on 55th St. at 5th Ave., from before recent work started.  I assume the crew, which is applying a paint-like coating, knows what it's doing, and the surface will be sublime as before after a little weathering.



[ St. Regis in my first Building Faces post: Faces of New York ]
[ St. Regis Street Steam ]

Bike Zealots Con Council

I think the markings on the left mean "Bikes Run Intersections"
Bike zealots are now spreading their tired propaganda at City Council meetings [NYT].  "A group of cycling advocates wondered why the city would reject a nimble, environmentally friendly mode of transportation in favor of bulky, polluting automobiles."

Biking in NYC has zero environmental benefit, and adds bikes without subtracting cars because nearly all riders come off mass transit, not out of cars.  And "nimble" is right -- bikers typically ignore vehicle traffic rules and behave like high speed pedestrians.

Councilman James Vacca says "Nobody disagrees that using more bicycles is a good thing," but I beg to differ.  Biking is good for bikers and no one else, especially not for NYC pedestrians who already need eyes in the back of their head.

And it's no surprise that Bloomberg's facade-building traffic commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan plans "a major advertising campaign featuring celebrities" to get bikers to behave.  (If it works I suggest they get rid of all the traffic lights, stop signs and traffic cops, and treat all vehicle traffic the same way...)

Then bike zealots "argued that the lanes encourage a safer, more environmentally friendly mode of transportation while making the city safer for pedestrians."  What a crock; with bikers constantly on the sidewalk, running lights and signs, going the wrong way, and shooting past from behind -- they're an aggravation to pedestrians, not protectors.

Bike zealots hope everyone ignores the reality that, in an urban environment full of pedestrians, fast-moving vehicles -- tailpipe or not -- need to move in an ordered and predictable way.  The city continues to build bike infrastructure that suggests but does nothing to deliver predictable bike traffic.

Boycott BP poster plastered over the No Bikes sign
on the pedestrian side of the Manhattan Bridge
It's tiring to hear bike zealots constantly present themselves as environmental saviors and the allies of pedestrians when they are neither.  Their self-serving campaign depends on the idyllic vision of a motor-free world -- reinforced by controlled events like Summer Streets -- and on building props that suggest orderly behavior -- "Bike stop lights!  Just like in Europe, where they probably stop at those lights!"  All you have to do is walk any distance in NYC to see that those things have nothing to do with the daily reality here.

If they really want to do something that benefits anyone but themselves, why don't they take their campaign to the suburbs, where they might really get drivers out of cars, and where there are no pedestrians in their way.

Flag Foundation View 2

More from the Flag Art Foundation on 25th St. in Chelsea.  Above, looking straight down from the ninth floor patio.  Below left, the magnificent Starrett-Lehigh Building to the west.


Above right, the top of the huge Post Office facility on 11th Ave., with New Jersey across the Hudson.  And below, a woman stops a respectful distance away from the sun-blasted ghost tree on the patio.

Palin for President!

I am so sick of the world we've let happen...

...of NYC turning to plastic, phony as a high-rent hooker's smile, as it services the Wall Street party-til-you-puke aristocracy ...of cellphones, wi-fi, and shiny people infesting every corner of public space, broadcasting their emptiness ...of people "following" people on Twitter, "real" people on reality TV, "friendship" on Facebook, and all the other noise that helps us forget the difference between going somewhere and going nowhere.

It can all go burn in hell.

We have reached the End of Democracy, and found that freedom is more than we can handle. We are idiots in diapers, O Lord, who have fouled everything you gave us.  The universe would be better off if earth was replaced with a dirty black hole, sucking in garbage tossed off other planets.


Sarah Palin morphs to Jim Jones
So I hereby endorse Sarah Palin for president in 2012, and offer the following campaign slogan.

Palin for President:
Let's just get it over with!

The sooner she gets to work, the sooner all this crap will be erased and we can return to the Eden our Founding Fathers knew, savoring the flavor of our fingers as we rubbed our hair with possum fat to make it shine, and enjoying the simplicity of a world where, when you noticed someone "following" you, you detoured into the woods and snuck up behind them, then hit them over the head with a club.


Don't laugh, she could win.  Politically cunning, and burning with hatred for anyone who's dissed her, she makes other GOP hopefuls look like the tired hacks they are.  Our arrogant prince of a mayor will run on his own billions and split the vote with Obama, leaving Palin the winner.  I always figured she'd make a decent banana republic dictator, and it won't be long before we find out.