Marriott Marquis Hotel

At 7th Ave. & 54th St.  The tower above looks like the command center for a future fascist planet, while its entrance, below, is buried under warped plastic advertizing like the rest of Times Square.

Times Square

Wearing 3-D glasses to make it look real?

Tourists are dwarfed by, and buildings disappear into, the advertising

Emerging from the light

Left, Show Folks Shoes; right, from Father Duffy and self-sacrifice
to Morgan Stanley and self-serving aristocrats

Up the steps into the light and... poof! ...off to another world
I throw out nearly all the pictures I take of Times Square.  There are a few interesting relics buried under the billboards, like the Show Folks Shoe Store facade, but the only interest beyond that is watching visitors figure out that Times Square is just a massive corporate branding experience, and that they themselves -- all the thousands converging on this pulsating emptiness -- are the only real attraction.  And who wants to look at their tired, sweaty, tourist self?

They find out what it feels like to live inside the TV, surrounded by corporate messages from all the wonderful brands -- from friendly banks to candy -- that give life meaning!

My favorite pictures are ones where people look dazed, or like they're about to step into another dimension.  Maybe the latter is just wishful thinking, the hope that there are other worlds we can't see where the plastic simulation of civilization we've let happen here would melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.

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.

4th of July Toy Town NYC

Not a creature was stirring... well, maybe a mouse.
It was nice and empty out in Queens on the 4th of July.  Quiet, inviting spots under shade trees (below left); limp, tattered real flags (below right) that remind us why zero-maintenance bumper sticker flags were invented; and the LIRR commuter train tracks stretching into the overheated distance (above), so still and empty I could hear a worn part tick every so often, like an insect in rising desert heat.


Meanwhile, back in town, the Target Train (formerly the 6 Train, below) brought me back to reality and the real NYC -- once labeled Satan's Workshop, now become Santa's Toy Town -- where public space and infrastructure is sponsored by the highest bidder, those wonderful corporations that furnish what we share...

...with "street furniture" ad platforms that show us how to decorate our emptiness and keep ourselves occupied as the clock ticks down, as our supposedly sacred freedom seeps through our fingers because we can't decide how to spend it, because choosing one thing shuts out all the others.

We let con men sell us one self-serving Theme after another to fill the void, and it was only a matter of time before their sponsors became our sponsors.


And here we are, living in their Theme Park surrounded by ads for things that feed our insatiability and rob us of contentment, that lure and agitate us with pointless noise and movement, until we really believe freedom is the ability to update Facebook while lounging at the park, surrounded by thousands of shiny plastic reflections of ourselves doing the same thing.

Wasting our freedom on baubles, signing our world over to the highest bidder, so sold-out that -- like a small dog whose owner dresses it in a tiny sailor suit -- we don't even notice we've turned into clowns, into Barbie & Ken dolls riding toy trains, the playthings of sponsors whose only interest is keeping us hypnotized and nursing at their machines until they've sucked us dry.

They got rid of graffiti on trains so this could happen!