In a few hours I will be getting on a flight bound for the UK. It’s just a short trip to see the folks and to perform my duties as the best man’s speech for a friend’s wedding. That’s right. Not the best man, just the speech. Our return flight will be during the daytime, but I doubt I will see anything as spectacular as this. For more aerial views, check out Russian pilot Leha’s website. (Via Metafilter.)
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Within one block of our apartment in Prospect Heights are three laundries. Being creatures of habit we stick to the same laundry regardless of whether clothes go missing or emerge charged with static electricity.
But it’s not just habit. We really like the Chinese couple who work at the laundry. They don’t speak much English other than to say “Hello, how are you?” “Okay, seven o’clock?” and “How your wife?” They arrived in New York around three years ago, about the same time as me.
The other week at about 6pm I saw a small crowd gathered outside the laundry. Inside, about eight or nine police officers crowded into the tight space. Some were wearing protective masks as they sprayed for fingerprints. The laundry had been robbed at gunpoint at about 6pm on Flatbush Avenue, one of the busiest roads in Brooklyn.
A couple of days later Sofie and I popped in with a box of chocolates. Apparently the husband had been in Chinatown leaving his wife alone in the laundry. A man came into the store with a gun. He took money. And to make sure the man’s wife couldn’t call the police he ripped the phone out of the wall and stole the couple’s cell phone.
When we took our washing in the other day—about ten days after the robbery—the man’s wife wasn’t there. “Very scared,” said the man, shaking his head. I don’t think she will be back again.
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New York blogs have recently been abuzz about the activities of the splasher, a cretin who is going around the city throwing paint over street art and posting pseudointellectual notices nearby.
The story made it into the New York Times this weekend, where Alex Mindlin reported that the splasher has been defacing New York’s street art for more than a year.
So far, most reported attacks have been in Williamsburg and SoHo, but they have been in the Prospect Heights neighborhood too. This one is on the corner of Dean Street and Flatbush Avenue.
Here, a Gothamist reader puts the above vandalism in context:
No TagsThe image that you destroyed above is of a woman that is involved in a TRUE struggle for autonomy and liberation from Capital. This portrait made of a woman who lives in Oaxaca is being used to raise consciousness about the uprising and movement of the APPO, (Popular Assembly for the People of Oaxaca). Some prints of this were recently returned to the women in their villages, and pasted up (I dare you to travel there and splash paint on them) The point is that you as a viewer reduce the image to be something to consumed and not something of beauty or of something to learn from. YOU decontextualize them and make them into nothing. Just like your actions have become. I look forward to the further attention your actions will recieve from the history makers at the NY Times this sunday, it will be YOU, and your actions that will be turned into just another movement. And consumed you are, one dollar an issue,read online for free or at a coffee shop.
You piss me off, you insult true revolutionaries working for self-determination that suffer real consequences. And you do it all within the safety of your home, in front of the computer, or at night on the street with a bucket of oops paint.
I find no integrity in your actions.
This is the last time I waste breath reacting to your senseless acts, because you just upped the ante.
-k
Could Mickey and his pals above the entrance to the Fifth Avenue Disney store do with a bath? Or have they always looked like that?
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Bluejake has a stunning image of the Brooklyn Bridge taken the other night during filming for Will Smith’s latest movie I Am Legend.
If you’ve never visited Bluejake before, it’s worth having a root around his other New York images too.
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Following hot on the heels of artspeak comes chefspeak. Here’s chef Thomas Keller telling the New York Times about the shortest menu in his restaurants Per Se and the French Laundry, a $250 nine-course meal:
“I’d like them to experience the entire experience, the entire Thomas Keller, the entire French Laundry,” he said. People who stop at five courses, he said, are doing the equivalent of leaving a Broadway play at intermission or walking through only half of a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Has the exhibit given them the full impact of what it was supposed to by whoever designed the exhibit?” he asked. “Probably not.”
Read more in the inadvertently double entendre-tastic You May Kiss the Chef’s Napkin Ring.
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Towards the end of last summer I was sitting in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park with Sofie when I looked up to see an enormous bird taking off from the top of a tree. Some time later I found The City Birder blog and its author Rob Jett who told there was a good chance that huge bird was a red-tailed hawk called Big Mama who has been living in the neighborhood for at least the past five years. My story about Big Mama appeared in the New York Times this weekend.
Until my talk with Rob I had no idea that red-tailed hawks lived in Brooklyn. And I was determined to see one again. I spent two wonderful, if unsuccessful, mornings walking around Prospect Park with Rob, who pointed out all kinds of birds and wildlife that I had never noticed before despite frequent walks there.
Because I was unsuccessful in the park, and because Big Mama had last been sighted in Green-Wood Cemetery, Rob put me in touch with a couple of birdwatchers there. And pretty soon I found myself being escorted around the cemetery by Marge Raymond, a member of the Green-Wood Historic Fund who gave me a tour of all the interesting tombs as we searched for the hawks.
Green-Wood was stunning in the fall. And I made a return journey a little later, during hawk migration month in November, when I saw sharp-shinned hawks, cooper’s hawks and even a turkey vulture. We caught a glimpse of the red-tails but that was all.
On November 3, Sofie’s birthday, we decided to go for a walk in Prospect Park. It was a perfect day, not least because it was midweek and the park was as close to deserted as any park in New York can be.
As we were walking along the path on the eastern edge of an area called the Long Meadow I saw something hurtling towards us from our left out of the left corner of my eye. I couldn’t work out what it was because it was coming so fast and low. At first I thought it was a rabbit. There was a flash of white fur and then the object bounced off the brow of a low hill about 20 ft to our left and spread its enormous wings.
The bird flew about midway between us and another couple who were walking about 20 feet ahead, startling the living daylights out of all of us. We all just stood and stared as it sat on the low branch of a tree about 15 ft feet away to our right. The woman in the couple ahead wanted to know what it was, as did a woman who appeared from behind. But of course, I already knew. I’d spent all that time looking for a red-tailed hawk. And out of nowhere a red-tail had found me.
My photos from that day didn’t come out very well. But this one from the New York Times, of a red-tailed hawk in Prospect Park gives you just as good a view as we had that day. It wasn’t Big Mama, probably one of the other hawks in the park. But still an awesome sight.
