Never Too Much Whitman

"All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery, nor resist
it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the
surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
What is less or more than a touch?

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul."

Brick & Metal

Adorn

More Trash

Icies

What's more cheering than an icie cart?

Yablokoff

Fourth & Ninth

Is Your Bathtub Happy?

Hard to make out, & mixed in with a travel agent sign.

Stout, Pleasing Sign

Spring Morning

Who needs a weekend getaway when you've got Lowe's parking lot?

Gowanus Mirror

Beer for Brkfst

Red Hook House

Coney Island Monuments

There's something about this place, a combination of its name & its modest appearance, & perhaps the woman waiting outside it, that almost breaks my heart. I wish I'd taken a better photograph, but I'm grateful that I got it at all.

Quentin Rd.

Shatnes Laboratory

Across 110th Street

Heard this Bobby Womack song on the radio yesterday. Knew about the song, but not the original 1972 film of the same name, with Anthony Quinn & Yaphet Kotto. Kotto might be best known for his role in Homicide:Life on the Streets, one of my all time favourite shows. The whole movie can be seen on youtube, & there's some great footage of the city. This is a remix of the opening credits soundtrack. A good sound, with classic 70s orchestration.

Coney Island Avenue Twice in One Weekend

Pizza & Caviar

Let Your Wisdom Ignite

Working on the Tracks

R.I. again

From Roosevelt Island, 7:30 A.M.

Why not get off the train mid-journey?

Lit. & Phil.

I came across this 1978 Iris Murdoch/Brian Magee interview a couple of days ago. I like it for a number of reasons. The brisk opening music is ripe for satire, & Brian Magee seems to be exactly the kind of media intellectual Stephen Fry liked to spoof in A Bit of Fry & Laurie: accent, intonation, repetitions, hand gestures, it's all deliciously there. And what about Iris Murdoch - gruff voiced, and glowering, with the beautifully plummy "Yus, yus," as she agrees with Magee? What a surprise when she smiles! From this vantage point, it's funny, and endearing, but the conversation is also a genuinely interesting one, and the two are allowed plenty of airtime. It's a timepiece, and reminds me of what a lifeline television was to a teenager marooned in a dull provincial town, with little access to adequate libraries or bookshops. Even though there was plenty of entertaining dross to watch (and watch I did!) television in the 70's still had a mandate to Educate the Layman and Propagate Culture. There were plenty of good quality plays (earnest social realism, the pioneering drama of Dennis Potter), & plenty of talking head discussions & documentaries. I lapped this kind of stuff up.

Review

In this month's Atlantic Benjamin Schwarz considers David Kynaston's Tales of a New Jerusalem, and Terence Davies' Of Time and the City, works I've mentioned earlier on this blog.

"Of Time and the City is frequently described as “nostalgic,” and while that word fits the filmmaker’s yearning for an irrecoverable past, it doesn’t convey his profound ambivalence toward that past, his appreciation that “we love the place we hate, then we hate the place we love. We leave the place we love, then spend a lifetime trying to regain it.” In this way, Davies shares Kynaston’s insight, unsettling to both progressives and reactionaries, that, as I pointed out in reviewing Austerity Britain, the past was a better place for being a worse place: that the better grew out of the worse, the worse out of the better."

Red Paint

Down by Valentino Pier