Queensboro Bridge Revisited 1

I'm not sure why, but both entrances to Queens nearest me are visual wonderlands.  Here I make another visit to the Queensboro Bridge.

Wall Street Crash is Great News!

The crash may be bad news for Wall Street types and the people who serve them, like chauffeurs, sex workers, artists, etc.

But it's great news for me.  All the Wall Street workers will cancel their luxury condo plans and retreat to the hills of Connecticut, where they will break into the wine cellar and start guzzling investment grade vintage like it's Mad Dog 20/20, then break out their "survival gear" -- bulletproof vests with car alarms attached to the shoulders, chrome shotguns, barrels of pharmaceuticals, and a virtual U.N. of blow up sex dolls -- and wait till their testosterone level has climbed back into the red, then go outside and skeet shoot their investment grade Franklin Mint plate collection.

Once they and their money have left the city, it will be left to the rest of us, the sullen zombies who lurk in the shadows fighting pigeons for scraps.

All the new luxury hotels and condos in the Bowery will turn into fetid flophouses for down & out condo brokers, ranting dementedly about the amenities they used to offer: "Live chinchilla shoe buffer in the lobby!  Squawk!!  Fresh virgin's milk spa on the deck!  Eeep!  Creative Artists Agency screening room just off the lobby, which is not a reproduction, but the actual Palace of the Swiss Guards' Fighting Eunuchs XXV-Corps, purchased from the Vatican in 1942!  Squawk!!"


Meanwhile all the luxury condos going up in Williamsburg will be turned into chicken farms, recycling centers, and solar powered hydroponic farms.

This means people like me, whose hands are untainted by money and not afraid of real work (like typing this post) will finally be able to live like royalty.

I plan to move into Karl Fischer's Ikon, pictured on top, where the bottom floor of the ant farm will be my bowling alley and driving range.  I also plan to move into his NV building, pictured just above.  There's something about its "plastic castle" look that appeals to me; not only does it afford an easily defensible, crenelated roof line, but it's close to the East River, and "tap water" will soon be a memory, like "FDIC insurance" and "government."

How will I pay for food?  That's easy -- pretty soon employers in China, Russia and India will be outsourcing their jobs, and that $3 an hour will make me a king compared to envious neighbors outside my NV castle.  All I have to do is figure out how to stay alive till those jobs show up.

You know, I bet there's a ton of food in the basement of that 20 Bayard condo, above right, where all those well fed Top Chef contestants are holed up...

Palin Seduces Moose

Palin seduces Bullwinkle, lonely in rutting season.  He woke up
missing his antlers and musk gland -- he might as well be a squirrel!
Warning: This is serious and yes, another rant.  I realize that people like Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Gail Collins, and Jon Stewart are already doing a better job than I ever could, but that doesn't stop me.  If you love life, how could you not be upset at a time like this?

I've been heartened by the aggressiveness of the New York Times this week, in both its editorials and reporting; the world needs journalists to step up, and so few media empires give them the chance.

And I made the mistake of reading Michael Goodwin in the Daily News' free handout.  He lambastes the Times for letting non-GOP reporters dig into the facts behind Gov. Palin's front, as though fairness is what happens when you stand midway between facts and fiction.  (Interesting how Creationists use the same bogus "fairness" argument to weasel their way into science class.)

Goodwin repeats what the GOP considers Palin's qualifications, that she is not just "pro-life" but can "field-dress a moose."  He's rehashing the GOP dream factory script that brought us the B-movie heroes Reagan -- whose chief accomplishment was demonizing the idea of government and "the common good" -- and Bush Jr., who, along with a GOP congress, has demonstrated the inevitable result of the GOP's cynical philosophy.

Why does the GOP make my blood boil?  Because:

1) It is a con, top to bottom.  It's created an alternate reality at the core of the world, where facts -- which can be shared by people of different faiths and worldviews -- don't exist.  Where whoever cons best wins.  The GOP, since long before Rove, has had an uncanny knack for getting voters to let their resentment trump common sense and their own self interest.

Most people just want to be left alone; people are anxious because technology and globalization are pulling the rug out from under them.  The GOP sells a simple fiction to counter that anxiety -- the world is black & white, just like Leave it to Beaver -- trying to make a knee-jerk response to the world seem principled.

In a world wired together like never before, where actions cause complex hair-trigger reactions, that's a drunk-driving, suicide-murder level of irresponsibility.  And in true Con Man fashion, while one hand distracts the other helps the filthy rich get richer; meanwhile the religious right has no worries -- why should they when they -- like Bush and Palin -- believe their knee-jerk impulses are part of God's plan, and that they'll wind up in heaven no matter what happens to the rest of the world?

2) Their love of ignorance.  I think curiosity is at the center of the "life force."  The GOP and religious right hate curiosity, because it leads to facts and answers that challenge their narrow beliefs.  I really don't see the point of life if we're all supposed to sit here in the dark, regurgitating the words of a single book, as though life, human history and everything else could be reduced to one literal explanation, like a car repair manual.

And since I'm pretty sure I have a better idea of what's on God's mind than the fundamentalists, I'll just add: He/She is not happy with those who insist on blind ignorance and spit in the face of all His/Her work.

(If someone from Focus on the Family stumbles on this and has an aneurysm over "He/She," I'm happy to have facilitated God's plan; one of "the Left's" worst habits is wasting decency on those who wouldn't spend an ounce on anyone else.)

God has also shown that when it comes to earth we're on our own.  All we can do is try to keep a level head as the Swift Boats approach, flinging crap, and do our best to steer toward the light.

Buckle Up

I don't wear a belt or get the urge to decorate myself, but I do get the urge to copy all the pictures at the Buckle Shop to Flickr so they're preserved for eternity.

The Jolly Roger buckle above looks more sturdy than the Dreamland Perfume skulls below left, and are about $100 million cheaper than Damien Hirst's bauble below right.  At $15 a buckle, you could make a near bullet proof vest for less than $500.  Imagine the sweet feeling you'd get the first time your army of skulls caught a bullet in its teeth.


And though the shop sells a nice, heroic Painter buckle, I prefer the sexy one below.


Update: I just noticed C-Monster is talking affordable skulls today too.  Is something is in the air, besides all that crap from cars & trucks?

In Search of Superfinger

The Finger Building was born in Williamsburg, but they exist wherever developers seek to lord over the existing skyline and poke the eye of God with luxury condos.

Manhattan has a few new ones you can't help but notice, even though it's already chock full'o fingers.  (And even though its fingers must feel totally emasculated by the vertical pipe being laid in Dubai, like the Burjfinger.  [via C-Monster])

I've been looking at One Madison Park, above right, for months and -- forgetting for a moment that it's destined to house a few hundred people so rancidly rich (min. $7.5 mil. move-in) that they expect to have a self-cleaning chrome toilet in the park across the street -- I like what I see.  If you're going to build 60 stories, skinny is a good way to go.  (I take that back if it winds up looking as crappy as the rendering, right.)

But I have to give my Superfinger Award to the relatively puny 42 floor Ismael Leyva design at 785 8th Ave., top left, left, and below, for being the scariest finger in town, like a malevolent alien spaceship, a gargantuan Gillette razor, or the creepy condo tower in the Sharon Stone bomb Sliver.  And especially for looking like a dark, futuristic illustration, even in real life -- I haven't doctored the photos here at all.

Prefab: MoMA Home Delivery

I went to MoMA's "Home Delivery" show a few weeks ago (Nicolai Ouroussoff's NY Times review here; a lot of good stuff in the show's timeline here), and managed to see everything but the main attraction -- the outdoor models -- which had a 200 yard long ticket line, even on that free-admission Friday.  I shot the photo above through the chain link fence.

I've always been a fan of svelte shacks, and have lived in a few backyard shacks.  I can identify with the utopian urge to efficiently build small, well designed housing.

But I don't buy the Home Delivery curators' claim that prefab housing is a "critical agent in the discourse of sustainability."

It's the infrastructure of society -- the footprint of housing and commuting -- that matters.  And unlike their street cousins in trailer parks, and excluding the few Katrina cabins that outlive disaster relief, prefab houses like the models at MoMA are likely to wind up on hillsides, in forest or on beaches, eating up the natural world just like McMansions.  At best the MoMA prefabs are vacation homes for people with money and a conscience.

The show also reinforced my suspicion that people become architects because of the scale models, like the ones here.  Above left: what looks like the business end of Archigram’s 1965 Living Pod.  And below are two (by Richard Rogers and Su Rogers?) that look like hamster housing built from computer cases.