very simple

I’m distracting myself from our current political dystopian hellscape by going through my backlog of photos that I still need to post.

I took these about a month ago. When I saw this tree, my first thought was that it was really early for it to be blooming like this, but how lucky I was to come across it because it was so pretty. Then I got up close and realized the whole thing was a fake. Cloth flowers and plastic branches. That would certainly explain it.

This is also grand street, but much further east. I was walking to meet some (from out-of-town) family for dinner in a corner of the city that I hadn’t really spent much time in before, and managed to find a spot that hadn’t been taken over by the gentrifying hordes. Yet.

It’s filled with pretty much the same stores that you can find anywhere, overrun with tourists, and you can see the reflection of google’s headquarters in the windows, but Chelsea market is still in a great relic of a building – one much better repurposed than ton down. So…yay?

I live in a neighborhood with an abundance of parks, but this is my favorite. It was closed last year for repairs, but now it’s open again.

This is the entire thing. Just a tiny little pocket park with benches wedged between two buildings on 71st street. I took these a few weeks ago on the first not-freezing/rainy day of spring.

It was a long and arduous process, but over the decades, the New York City subway eventually adopted Helvetica as the font of the NYCT system. The really classic mosaic designs of the IRT system are (to my mind) more beautiful, but for sans serif fonts, nothing beats helvetica.

(I may be biased – helvetica is also the principal font on this site)

Spotted on my wandering through Soho on Wednesday night. I got strangely sad at the sight.

The weather has finally started to turn radically pleasant here in NYC, which should last for about a week before we all start complaining about the heat.

On Wednesday, I decided to take advantage of the extreme niceness and a late appointment downtown, and spent a few hours after work wandering around the village and soho just soaking in the spring air (ok, it’s NYC exhaust, but it’s as close as we get around here).

Almost everything downtown is super gentrified, with high end furniture stores and designer dry goods and whatnots, but sometimes you cross an intersection and spot a tiny little sliver of old New York peeking through in all its graffitied glory.

I end up on this corner on a regular basis, even though I no longer live downtown – I still frequent all of my old favorite restaurants and shops – what’s a mere subway or bus ride against the allure of one’s favorite hole-in-the-wall sushi joint, where you barely need to order, and an extra chair magically appears despite there being no open seats at the bar?

So I see this view constantly. So much so that it’s de riguer. But sometimes, when the rain hasn’t started, and the light is just right…

It’s as magical as the first time.

I took this pic about a month ago (February 24th), on the first evening that I left work where it wasn’t absolutely dark outside. Obviously now that it’s daylight savings time, it’s light out on the regular, but I always like the small moment of noticing that the darkness (at least of the celestial tilt variety) is coming to an end.

On a technical level, I recognize that trump won the election based on the rules as they are written. The fact that he and his cronies/backers/the russians may have gamed the system to influence voters (at best) or possibly outright rigged the system (at worst), is something that we need a better remedy for than relying on the integrity of members of his own party who view him, despite their whispered, off-the-record misgivings about his sanity, as a convenient patsy to sign their starve-the-poor legislation (at least for the time being).

So, yet again, this is what we do. It’s presidents’ day, so people took to the streets again to protest. In NYC, the main rally was very conveniently in my own neighborhood, and so I just wandered down central park west – since this was a little more planned than the immigrant ban protests, the signs and costumes were a bit wittier and funnier, and the whole thing was a bit better organized (and controlled by the police). I didn’t stay all day – once the main stage started playing some truly awful free jazz (yes, I know, insert every liberal stereotype here), I decided that was a subliminal method of crowd control and I willingly complied. The photos are pretty self-explanatory. as aways, click on the thumbnails after the page finishes loading to see the full image.