Category: NYC Subway

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Hurdy Gurdy

It seems that I learn more about exotic musical instruments on the subway than I ever did in all the music classes in college and high school. Kora music remains one of my favorite things to listen to while I code. Recently I’ve encountered a girl playing the weirdest instrument that looks like a mix of a guitar and a grinding organ, but sounds like a mix of bagpipes and violins. As it turns out, it’s an ancient stringed instrument called Hurdy gurdy that hasn’t been very popular since the 18th Century.

The performer, Melissa Kacalanos aka Melissa the Loud (blog), is extremely talented. I purchased her CD right there on the spot, and it was the best 15 bucks that I’ve spent in a while. I especially liked “Lucifer Goes to the Circus”, one of her original compositions. I kind of wonder, what “Stainless Steel Worm” would sound like as a song accompanied by Hurdy gurdy.

You know, being able to listen to ancient music played on ancient instruments by talented performers once in a while on a subway platform is one of reasons why people pay so much money to live in New York.

I am kind of surprized that I haven’t encountered any Chapman Stick or Theremin players yet.

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The Ancient Art of MetrocardTM Puppetry

It seems like humans will try to fold and rearrange just about anything. Paper, money, postcards. Some people make a living folding their members in a surprising manner. Others fold dollar bills. What chance did humble MetrocardTM stand from being turned into an art material?

A couple of days ago I found this MetrocardTM triacontahedron sitting abandoned on a subway staircase. I’ve seen these around in token clerk booths, but never up close before.

I managed to take it apart and put it together again, and the construction is rather ingenious. I’ll try making a few of these together and post the instructions then.

Of course, other people have been doing this for a long time. Here’s a guy who created purses, boxes, stars and pencil holders out of them. An entertainer that goes by the moniker Professor Puter has a whole load of tricks, such as metrocard shooter, star, bug etc. Here’s a fine specimen of MetrocardTM art too. If you want to annoy your cubicle-mates even more than you already do – MetrocardTM clicker is the right project for you.

Ad:

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A River Runs Through It

A babbling brook runs between the rails of the Brooklyn bound Q train at Atlantic Avenue. There is a lot of water and a pretty decent current there. It’s a major improvement from the waterfall that sometime resulted from a busted water main there and lasted for a few days.

The channel between the rails is there for safety – since most statons have no clearence on the sides, it’s the only place to hide from the oncoming train. The brown color of the water is due to tiny rusty shavings of steel that cover everything near the tracks. Fecal matter might play a role in that too.

The little riverlet has been there for so long that people started throwing coins there for good luck. Let’s hope no bums will decide to try and collect them.

As a bonus, here’s a picture of a subway sign from my trip to Japan. One of these days I need to sit down, sort the pictures and write everything up.

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Morning Deadwood

People were filthy and smelly in the olden days. And HBO capitalizes on amazingly good historical dramas teeming with filthy, period authentic characters. First there’s Carnivale, a mystical drama set at the turns of the Century. It has everything : carnies, okies, tarot cards, old cars, Art Deco and Craftsman interiors, mysteries, psychics, telekinesis, Knights Templar, evil preacher played by brilliant Clancy Brown aka Mr. Eugene Krabs from Spongebob and a lot of filthy people. And absolute tivo-worthy show.

Then there’s Deadwood, set during the gold rush. A high quality historical show, Deadwood writers try to stay as authentic as possible, hygiene and all. Famous hacker JWZ is not a fan: “It’s like watching paint dry. Dirty, foul-mouthed paint, but paint nonetheless.” I guess he is just not used to “Milch-speak“, a very peculiar style of dialogue that the show’s creator and writer, David Milch uses for his characters.

Familiar to fans of NYPD Blue, Milch-speak is a rather weird . I real life I encountered Milch-speak being used by often smart people with difficult and important jobs, who although lacking formal education, try to sound educated. It’s rather hard to explain, but I’ll try. First of all, milch-speakers use a lot of long words, meanining of which they more often know than not. They often mispronounce them though. The sentence structure is strange and tortured. It’s almost overly formal, Victorian in nature, and at the same time involves elements of Brooklyn Yiddish. It’s like as if listening to a very profane Victorian Yoda from Brooklyn. The sentence structure often resembles programmer-speak, so many logical twists and turns it has. There’s also lot’s of irony and slang.

Here’s a quote from recent episode: “Bad news or tries against our interests is our sole communications from strangers, so let’s by all means plant poles across the land and festoon the c*cksuckers with wires to hurry the sorry word and blinker our judgments of motive.”

The character who spoke that line, appropriately named saloon owner and master criminal Al Swearengen, according to Entrepreneur magazineinspired David Tufte, a professor at Southern Utah University’s business school to use Deadwood as a source for his students.

Here’s Al staring at me from an ad inside special Deadwood themed subway train:

Subway seats wrapped in special plastic to resemble old-timey leather chairs. Add a lot of filthy passengers and you’ll get a full Deadwood experience.

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Subway Doves

While a far cry from the exotic subway riding pigeons of Far Rockaway (I need to pay them a visit some time) described in Randy Kennedy’s “Subwayland“, there are some pigeons that live underground in subway stations. I missed my train to take this picture:

The black splotches of gum that cover so many sidewalks and subway platforms in NYC always make me think of a passage from “Roadside Picnic” (English translation is available on the official site for download) by Russian sci-fi writers brothers Strugatsky”:

“And, as was to be expected, there was nothing else to be seen on the road, except for the black twisted stalactites that looked like fat candles hanging from the jagged edges of the slope, and a multitude of black splotches in the dust, as though someone had spilled bitumen. That was all that was left of them, it was even impossible to tell how many there had been. Maybe each splotch represented a person, or one of Buzzard’s wishes.”

The 47-50th Street station has stalactites as well. It’s a very special station indeed. :)

You know, I feel that “pigeon” is just a pejorative for “dove“. Many of the pigeons that I see are probably descendants of the ones that Tesla fed.

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“If You Paid Attention, You’d be Worried Too” or Finit Finis Finish Omnious Omnium Shmomnious

The very special 47-50th Street/Rockefeller Center station has some very strange advertisements posted in the decrepit old clock boxes. You know, the ones overhead, the ones to which nobody pays attention too because the clocks are usually way off?

For some reason I thought that the ads that I’ve seen for a long time were cigarette ads. But recently I looked at them a little bit more carefully and realized that something was odd. The ads show a sunset over the forest and a flock of birds in the air. The caption says “Omnium Finis Imminet”. Huh. Hello conspiracy theories.

Well, my crappy knowledge of Latin tells me that “omnium” means “all”, “finis” means “end” and “imminet” since it sounds just like “imminent” means “is coming”.

Apparently graffiti with this nice apocalyptic message has been popping up in other places. On the other hand, this is not graffiti, is it? At the very best this is a well executed hack.

Come Monday (well, if the end of the world is not going to happen before then) I am totally giving a call to Gannett Transit (formerly New York Subways Advertising Co) at (212) 297-6400 to figure out what’s up with this.

Update.
I called Gannett Transit just to be kicked to voicemail, but it looks like the ad is legit. I’ve seen a whole bunch in West 4th Station and comments are rolling in about TV spots too. As commenters pinted out this is probably a “guessing game” ad for the new War of the Worlds movie or some stupid Sci-fi Channel movie or series. Well, at least nobody seems to be paying attention to the ads. None of the people I asked were able to recall what it was about.

Well, at least it seems that my humble blog ranks high in the very sparse search results for “omnium finis imminet”, “omnium finis imminent” and the other creative ways to spell this slogan, so hopefully I’ll gain some readers along the way.

Now, if this were an ad for Darren Aronofsky’s Flicker, that would be way cool. But I am not even sure that he is filming it at all.

Another update
Wow, it looks like New York Times fact checkers are in hot water as the reporters totally pulled this out of their butts (or read on this in my blog as it was the top result on Google for a while) :

“The advertisements portray a flock of birds against an angry red sky, with a single phrase: Omnium Finis Imminet, Latin for The End of All Things Is Near. The advertisements, for Steven Spielberg’s movie version of H. G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds,” cost about $50,000. The film is to open in July.”

They did post a correction later on. Here’s the full ad from a recent Scientific American that my wife brought me today.

Note the Photoshop lens flare and the horrible font. Looks like their art director is about as competent as their marketing director. The letter “T” is probably made to look like the Orange County Choppers dagger logo to capitalize on the popularity of that show.

He heh, the show seems to have a stupid “X-Files” marries “Millennium” premise. The end of the world is approaching, and investigators are a physicist instead of Scully and a nun instead of Mulder. That’s some sexy and original stuff. Just get a bad 80s rock ballad for a theme song and all the geeks mourning Star Trek will flock to see this.

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Soviet Realism In The Subway

During its renovation Times Square seems to have been steadily acquiring the biggest and ugliest modern mosaics. The architects seem to have forseen the ugliness of the mosaics and strategically used lighting with a lot of glare to mercifully obscure the them from view. Still, even ugly Soviet Realism style “The Return of Spring” by Jack Beal is a little better than water stained cracked tile.

Looking more closely though, some weird details become apparent. First of all, what is the guy with the hammer going to hit? Looks like one of the three guys in front of him. Also it looks like they are prying open a manhole, but it takes only one guy usually and they use a tool like this. The guy with a jackhammer seems intent on injuring the guy next to him too.

But what is going on with this guy’s hand?

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Kora Music In The Land Of The Stainless Steel Worm

Jaili Kandjia Cissoko, African Criot (Bard), Kora Player, Soloist Composer in NYC Subway’s Times Square station.

This is an illustration to my earlier article about Cora music. As Mr. Cissoko unfortunately doen’st have any cds of his own, your best bet of experiencing Cora music is either to seek him out in the subway or listening to one of these cds:

Djelika is my favorite, I absolutely love the title song that is based on the melody from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

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Overheard Inside The Stainless Steel Worm

A slightly non-standard conductor’s announcement:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a red signal against us” (instead of the usual “ahead of us”).

Fellow passengers use slang from a certain industry:
“West 4th is the money stop” (because so many people get off there. Budum-pum.)