Calvary Baptist Church

On 57th St. between 6th & 7th Aves., dedicated in 1931, it's a skyscraper church with a crusader castle bell tower.  According to the References section at Wikipedia, it was the base of a radio broadcast empire, where "pentecostal delerium" reigned at times inside the church while its pastor Joseph W. Kemp called modern dancing -- where a man places his right hand on a woman's waist, and holds her right hand with his left -- a "shameless exhibition [that] violates the soundest hygienic laws."




Meanwhile, a 90 floor condo-hotel with two penthouses priced at $98.5 million each is going up down the block.  Isn't it wonderful we live in a world where even that amount will be chump change to someone?  You can see just the yellow construction crane above, and the hulk itself rising below left.

It's bad enough that it will obscure some of that odd building between it and the church, featured here, but I'm really going to be upset if its construction wrecks the Alwyn Court, at its feet on 58th St., and featured here.

Hurricane Irene Disappoints NYC

Did tired Irene [NYT] stop to rest in Trendy Corner's window at 6th & 37th?
Early Saturday morning a woman hustling a cart through Key Food gleefully announced "The End is here!"  Emergency shoppers had already cleared out the potato chip aisle, bought nearly all the canned sardine, and picked out all the single rolls of toilet paper, leaving bulk packages for the flood.  Streets were unnaturally quiet as people hunkered down inside; there's nothing like mass apprehension in a big city, waiting for the assault.

I was hoping that, before a satellite dish ripped from a roof came slicing through the blown-out window to chop me in half, I would have the satisfaction of knowing that luxury tower penthouses, with their invulnerable, weather-mocking owners still inside, had been sheared off and sent spinning north, to crash land on icebergs ruled by merciless inbred Vikings marooned centuries ago, and that the towers that house NYC's Feckless Lords of Finance had popped their glass and exploded, or at least got their feet wet.

But after a heart-pumping two day buildup, as our glorious, furious Doomsday Bride approached, ready to scourge, drown and then lift us, cleansed, into the sky...

Nothing.

So instead of being delivered into the loving arms of a wrathful god, we are left to face the dreary prospect of yet more life on earth: Washing the dishes (Didn't I just do that?), brushing our teeth (Didn't I just do that?), and leading shallow lives soothed by constant interruption and babbling screens that promise illumination but deliver just radiation.

Now I know how the Family Radio Worldwide believers felt when doomsday fizzled:

Keith Bauer, a doomsday believer who drove his family from Maryland to experience the Rapture at Family Radio's Oakland offices, told the News he was disappointed.

"I was hoping for it because I think heaven would be a lot better than this Earth," Bauer said.

From The Rapture to A Whimper, from the ultimate satisfaction of seeing your enemies crushed just before you retire to an eternity of bliss, to the realization that the only thing you have to look forward to is deciding which fugitive hope to spend your last $5 on: Caffeine or the New York State Lottery?

Now a chastened believer, I think I'll split my bet between the two...

Penn Station Salvation

It's getting warmer at Penn Station
I sit down outside the 7th Ave. end of Penn Station, and start drinking my coffee.  A street person surrounded by bags is chattering away, chipper as hell, as if his brain was just sprayed with happy juice.  He asks if I want to join him at Heavenly Burgers, his treat!  He launches into a glowing description of Heavenly Burgers, like a radio ad.  I smile but ignore him.

Then a kid in a red t-shirt walks up, with a plastic-sleeved Metrocard hanging "ID style" from his neck, always a bad sign.  He says his name is Jason and he's come with a group from Texas to pray for New Yorkers (15 more red shirts are working the area).

I ask "Don't you have enough sinners in Texas?"  He says "Yeah, but don't you need a prayer -- for money, a job, for something -- or is life really so great you can't use one?"

I say "No thanks" again, then point at Mr. Heavenly Burgers and say "How 'bout him?"

I try to not eavesdrop as the two go back and forth for the next ten minutes, but I learn that Mr. Heavenly's real name is Bam-Bam and that he's not married to the idea of Heavenly Burgers, as he tries every debate trick he can think of to get Jason to transform the water of prayer to wine, or at least food or cash.  The exchange seems to end in a draw, with both of them moving on to more promising pasture.

"How 'bout him?"... I love it when my brain does exactly what it should, even before the coffee crop-duster has sprayed its dead gray rows of cotton with happy juice!

Meanwhile, a block away on 8th Ave., an old man in a red
striped shirt airs himself out under the water tank crown

Judson Memorial Church

Three angles on the front of Jusdon Memorial Church on Washington Square.

The Mind of God

Above the clouds again
I think about the idea of God sometimes but -- because I can't imagine that God would be involved in all this petty, deadly human drama, and because I think it's pointless to speculate too much on something inaccessible -- I don't waste much time imagining how God might think.

My best guess is that if there is a God, He/She/It is a creator, like a scientist whose field is finding the essence of creation, a Genesis formula so perfectly balanced that it yields every possible world and form of existence, each struggling to survive, in the hope of finding things unimaginable to God.

But after setting off each experimental blast (Big Bang to us), God just watches as the green mold battles the purple mold in the Petri dish.

The idea that a being with the power to create worlds would stoop to support "the righteous" -- churches that hate women (take your pick) or fundamentalists who'd happily fry anyone who doesn't agree with their totalitarian, imperialist dreams (from the GOP's religious right to Al Qaeda) -- is laughable.

I never cease to be amazed at the hubris that makes people who promote ignorance and hate think God would want to hang out in heaven with them -- listening to them complain about heathens and swap stories about their favorite smitings -- for all eternity.  The only thing in it for God would be the joy of watching them squirm, in between their tiresome bouts of kissing Its ass, as they try to figure out how to ask for the virgin brides or whatever other grand prize they believe they've earned.

It's insulting -- they think God is a deadly, deluded, self-serving asshole just like they are!

Above Greenpoint Ave. & McGuinness Blvd., Greenpoint
At any rate, maybe it's the onset of senility, or just wishful thinking (a popular form of belief), but it's occurred to me lately that the "love" people talk about in relation to God likely comes from the sense that God could not give us the glimmers of beauty we see -- in between all the torture, boredom, and explosions -- unless God understood how we would feel.

But that's just touchy-feely sentiment; sure, an all-powerful being might have feelings, but It's likely to have a huge amount of ambition too, to understand and transcend Its own existence.  And what more ambitious program could there be than re-creating the same dilemma you find yourself in, in an infinite number of possible worlds, to see how the beings in those worlds deal with your dilemma?

It's like throwing technology at a problem on a grand scale.

The dilemma I'm talking about is "individual freedom" -- that thing human history seems to seek.  Those of us lucky enough to be free -- to decide what we will be -- are cursed with the desire to construct Meaning in place of the simplifying motives of responsibility and brute survival.

We become puny alternative copies of God, and feel the burden God might feel: If you can be anything, what do you want to be?  The burden is not following commandments, it's making up your own commandments when your conscience can imagine the weight of worlds hanging on your ability to find the balance point between all the opposed forces of motivating passion, cold logic, and a chaotic existence shared by countless souls traveling their own brute or sublime trajectories.  You need to find the balance point that allows all those worlds to flourish in your absence, so you can rise above your own world and begin to understand it.

I'm just imagining what it would feel like to be lifted one level up, outside this universe, and look down.  And it reminds me of something I've felt for a long time, that has taken on personal meaning: That the whole point of human existence, the long climb from the caves, with the rest-stops of civilization in between the erasing, barbarian raids, with periods that give us the luxury of individual freedom and the ability to add to the scaffold of knowledge, to climb up out of our puny selves... the whole point is to continue climbing to the stars, then up past them, out of this collapsing universe into the world that wraps it, and -- if, passing through that singularity, that rebirth, we retain anything of what we learned -- start climbing up out of that world too.

So there's the thought: When we have the luxury of freedom we share God's dilemma.  And if I was an idiot who thought he could comprehend the mind of God, I'd guess that we are being used to help God climb up out of whatever layer of the cosmic onion He/She/It is now stuck in!

So the whole point of our individual and collective journey, and God's, is to climb up out of our world so we can look down and apprehend what we just left -- so we can understand, at least for a moment.

St. Thomas Church Statues

Unlike a lot of buildings (and churches) around New York, every slot on the face of St. Thomas Church (5th Ave. & 53rd St.) that looks like it should contain a statue actually does contain a statue.

Above, the top of the 5th Ave. entrance.  When I looked at the closeup below left I thought "They look way too grim to spend eternity with."  You would have to visit hell every so often just to thaw out from their icy glare.


Above right, the massive tower's clean lines look almost calligraphic, and the emptiness of the "statue slots," like the little huts on the corner, looks intentional.  Maybe it's meant to suggest missing persons, or vacancies in heaven?

And the statues below, just above the entrance, look warmer and less stern -- in spite of the spear and sword -- than the bookish ones above them, on top here.  Maybe the builders didn't want to scare parishioners on the way in?