56th & Park Construction

The world's longest exhaust is still there, above right.

Winter in Hell

On 3rd Ave. off St. Marks, it would be nice if cellphones seared the flesh off users' heads, like above, but the culprit here may be the "Chipotle BBQ Bacon Angus" and "5 shots of anything $10" advertised below the skull.


More food at 51st & Broadway, where snow turns the flying saucer in front of Mars 2112 into a cinnamon roll.


And at 51st & Broadway again, steam (and a Wicked billboard) over dirty snow conjures Winter in Hell.

I hear winter is the best time of year to visit hell.  For one thing, since everything is melting, you can ski and water ski at the same time!

How to Stay Alive in the Woods

Post Apocalyptic HQ at the Queens end of the Greenpoint Ave. Bridge
As I wake up to headlines that say the world is careening like an old car with no brakes at the edge of an abyss, I remember that the used survival book I had banked on to save me when it came to this -- Bradford Angier's How to Stay Alive in the Woods -- is probably a load of crap.

Along with practical information that gave me confidence I could not only stay alive but dress stylishly in the post apocalyptic woods, like:

Some aborigines make waterproof garments by opening the dried intestines of large animals and sewing the strips together vertically with sinew.

...were ambiguous passages like this:

The point is: no ordinary problem will stump any of us for very long if we possess sufficient enterprise and ingenuity to have a reasonable chance of surviving at all.

...that robbed me of confidence and made me wonder if the cigars and brandy he was enjoying as he wrote this stuff -- probably with a silver fountain pen, while dressed in a smoking jacket in a wood paneled study -- had dulled his interest in the reader's survival.

So I will have to go with guidance from my backup survival book, Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  You would think a story about a father and son walking south in a gray, post apocalyptic world, dodging fiendish perverts and cannibals as they hone their survival skills, would be boring on top of grim.

But The Road turns out to be suspenseful and deep, and McCarthy -- who can pour on the turgid prose until you feel like a soggy stack of pancakes drowning under a bottomless bottle of thick purple syrup -- in this case manages to pull life and hope from a restricted, monochrome reality in a natural way.

The Road tells me I will have to do some horrible things to survive, like bushwhacking bushwhackers before they bushwhack me, and mating with hill country Jezebels with enough inbred genetic damage to make sure our Jethro spawn are dim witted enough to want to survive a sooty hell on earth.

And it tells me that after this house of cards collapses, with any luck, we will meet again in the grayness of spring, perhaps on the Gulf Coast, where we will find a boat.

It will be years before the smoke clears, but the sail will hold, the wind will know the way, and before long we can start over fresh, free of fiends.  (Except for those stowed in our genes.)

Lee Lee Go Pee Pee

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as ...

It's heartening to see a tagger take that first step toward poetry -- especially with such well-formed script -- but I'm still upset the Williamsburg Bridge maintenance crew saw fit to erase the Chance Mexico Map above (before left, after right) but preserve lee lee go pee pee, right.

I'd like to thank TV, the Internet, and the Academy for the gutter I find myself swimming.

Titillation and humiliation rule Culture, and I am just a lowly entertainer, a spastic dervish clown dancing for your pleasure, spinning faster and faster, turning redder and redder, slipping and flopping but never stopping.

Forget the tree falling in a forest; do I exist when you stop looking at me?