Ah, chinatown
astoria to chinatown is a long walk, by most standards. i did that today. i might have made my day‘s goal of reaching the battery but it was getting late and i had made miles and miles of circuitous detours around delancey street area. allen street, orchard, essex, ending at the spotwhere alelen becomes pike street. i remember when allen street was completely scary, and fascinating to me for its wide-open doors and screaming people sweating and shoving boxes from unlabeled trucks into basements. today i couldn‘t bring myself to bemade nervous or even aware of any scurrilous elements, but it‘s just as well, i think, since that area is mostly yuppified into artistic generica. i wanted to find more old telephone numbers in that area but i mostly failed, spotting only the oftseen Regent Sign Co and its AL phone exchange number. i am not surprised of these artifacts of the past are mostly gone from the lower east side and other environs ransacked of their pasts.
still, the old buildings and the old signs offer up some clues to thepast, and traces of the history (however brief) of the world seen through the windows of the buildings. the windows are like eyes, are they not? sometimes mournful, other times prying, the old buildingslook across and over us, sometimes down, always spying somehow. newer buildings, ugly glass, are blind.
there is a mournfully beautiful building in midtown, near times square. an old hotel. i can‘t think of its name but the façade caught my attentions a few weeks ago, for the first time i can remember, though i have seen it and walked past it hundreds of times. the old brick façade and the tall windows seem to beautifully but dolefully accept the towers of glass and riches which encroach upon it like bullies on the schoolyard. i remember when the Conde Nasty tower was being built and a crane collapsed, nsnapping off its 50th-story spine and smashing into the room of an elderly woman sitting out her days at the Woodstock Hotel. instant death for her, but the tower never stopped rising. Times Square, i recall, was closed to traffic for several days. this seemed like a big deal to me at the time, the cock&balls of New York City cut off to vehicular traffic, but what did i know. the bigger deal was the violent death of that woman in the Woodstock Hotel.
i ended up today on the M15 bus from Pike Street to 57th and 1st Ave. these endlessly lenghty buses are welcoming to freeloaders sneaking in the back doors. i noticed it twice today. i don‘t know if it is more common on these newer, very-long buses, but it seems like the busdriver can not see what washes up in the back door when said back door is far, far away. i have never evaded a fair, but there are any number of such MTA/NYPD co-ordinated fare-evasion traps into which i might fall some day.
i had originally planned to go to the staten island mall today, via the D and then the R train to Bayㄲ꺄꺙ㅎㄷ ㅁ무뭉 ㅅ소솓소두 ㅅ소솓 Ridge and then the S79 bus to Staten Island. But I got to Rockefeller Center and lost my lovefor the adventure. Among other things I just did not feel like being inside a mall on such a lovely day as this, but i could not decide how long a trip it would be and if the D/N/S79 connection was the best route. i shall try again on a hot and miserable day… so instead i walked.i somehow knew today would be like this. i made it to Old Town Bar on 18th street, where i took an emergency dump in the bathroom with its windows wide open and the eyes of i don‘t know who from i don‘t care what building possibly staring in on my white, shitting butt. i think the last time i shit anywhere except at home was at calvary cemetery, which felt like summer camp with its windows all open, the smell of freshly cut grass mixing it up with the earthy smell of my turds, and the cheapest, crinkliest toilet paper ever made feeling like the leaves with which i wiped my ass in the woods of tennessee and north carolina. ah, summer camp. ah, calvary.
i hunted for signs under signs today. i found a few. old signs sometimes linger under the awnings and canopies of newer businesses. mostly they are invisible, if they even exist,but today i spotted some specimens (heh) of signs from previous business still visible under the signs of the current place. it‘s like lifting the skirt of the present and copping a glance at the past.
i am sunburnt and looking forward to wding through today‘s mass of pictures, though most of the day of photography felt like too-hard work. maybe, then, it will be decent quality. i got bored with what i had at about 2pm and so i got gutsy, i showed my balls,and i went for people, zooming in on innocent human beings, heeding the only professional advice i ever got from a newspaper photo editor and going for people,not things, not bags of dog shit, but people.
i wish i could have got shots of the beautiful woman and her bored, indifferent boyfriend on the M15 bus, sitting less than 1 foot away from me. they looked perfect. i could have finagled a cameraphone shot but the reality of things was more interesting than photographing them. i reminded myself, halfway through this day, that i should take time to see things and experience them instead of simply taking pictures of them.
oh, battery. oh,dying, light-blinking battery…
