The Playground: A Microcosm of Childhood

The playground is a microcosm of childhood, where archetypal agonies and ecstasies are revealed through fleeting glimpses . . . Abandonment issues on display: [little girl whimpering] “Mommy, mommy I thought you had left me!” The playground is aswirl with Freudian dynamics, a pageant of trauma and pleasure.


The snake pit of childhood is on full display at the playground. Taunting and teasing and ample coercion; preliminary stabs at exclusivity; the emergence of pecking orders; evidence of impulses to categorize and discriminate . . . Meathead-bully-predator-dirtbag: playground silhouette. Crew cut, sleeveless T-shirt, low-slung pants; the Neanderthal gait and the roving, hungry-cruel eyes.


The paradise of childhood unfolds at the playground . . . Children and pigeons, so fun to watch: a study in juvenile fascination. The endlessly endearing sight of children enjoying things adults would find mundane (or worse). Little girls running around in circles nonstop. Tykes, semi-alone—facing outward, in the subjective cocoon of the stroller—repeating the same word over and over with different inflections. Continual experimentation and the constant thrill of discovery—like no other time in life.


Youth—their image, their presence, their influence in the culture is a constant prod, a ready glimpse of innocence, and a gnawing reminder of times past, desires unfulfilled/never to be fulfilled. The shadow of youth ever looming—especially at the playground.

Seasonal Protuberances

Gentrification Haiku

Modern buildings among
rows of old ones
begs the question of “progress”

Environmental Ironies

Condos on the Highway, Next to the Cemetery

How’s this for a killer idea: condos on the highway (more or less), next to the cemetery (the Hillside Mausoleum at Green-Wood)? The half-finished building in Windsor Terrace is laughably dubbed “The Simone”—a simulation of elegance in a place lacking same. “Who the hell would want to live there!?” I exclaimed aloud. Not that there’s anything wrong with living near a cemetery, as the picture below illustrates. But The Simone’s proximity to Green-Wood simply underscores the developer’s morbid take on the dictum “location, location, location.”

Big Sky Brooklyn: A Part of the Landscape

Red Hook Decrepitude: Three Views

Convenience Store Across From Scrap Yard

Pouring coffee at Mobil Mart

looking out the window

the scrap yard is hypnotic

Six Minutes to Sunset

I was standing on the corner, experiencing the environment—landscape, buildings, noise, and sky. The sun was low, peaking over the red-and-white-striped KFC roof . . . A momentary convergence of sight, sound, thought, and feeling can permanently transform what is seemingly mundane or worse (squalid, bankrupt, decayed) into a sublime vista. A delusion? Perhaps. Regardless, the time and place were stamped on my consciousness.

St. Marks Pl. & 4th Ave., 10/28/06 (Saturday) at 5:25 pm

Cell Phone Tower Haiku

Cell phone signals bounce
from stolid buildings
under cloud covered skies

Satellite Saturated

Illicit Niches

Under the overpass, behind the billboard, in the tunnel’s shadow . . . illicit niches, where a spooky, unwholesome aura pervails; where pedestrians are all but absent, and the highway’s ruthless velocity holds sway. Yet signs of life abound, with trash and graffiti the primary evidence of biped activity--the withered spirit of humanity flails against concrete and steel through despoliation.

In the city’s crevices, when night falls, the only thing safe is the assumption that this is the wrong place at the wrong time. The glare of a thousand headlights could never illuminate the murky life that goes on around highway pillars and footbridges, in the tight spaces beneath billboards. The eternal day after is marked by a trail of empty beer cans, filthy clothes, and the odd used condom, all coated with exhaust fume dust. It’s not much to look at, but niceties are alien here, where flesh and blood is superfluous, yet, proverbially, insists on making its presence known.

PhotoGraffiti (No. 3)

Bumming in Bay Ridge

4/21/07 (Saturday), 2 pm - 9 pm

A vigorous trek up the eastern slope of Owl’s Head Park, a placid 27 acres next to the Belt Parkway, which is next to a sewage treatment plant, although nothing outside the park’s verdant hills can intrude; it’s a near-perfect symmetry of (engineered) nature and industry . . . A brief respite at the bustling pier off Bay Ridge Ave., then a long stroll through Shore Road Park, busy with ball fields, playgrounds, benches, and grass—all the amenities fit for a perfect April afternoon . . . Idyll from the start of a spring delayed, languorous and dream-like; the sun on the bay and Saturday in the air—that all-encompassing feeling of possibility, a pleasant, hopeful aura—sky and light and children at play conjure a mirage of simple pleasures and harmony all around . . . The houses on Shore Road, alongside which the long, narrow park runs, range from handsome to majestic . . . And looming always, over the whole neighborhood and other swaths of south Brooklyn, visible from spots in all five boroughs: The Bridge—Verrazano Narrows, that freak of engineering, the largest suspension bridge in the U.S., and perhaps Robert Moses’ most imposing statement.



The bartender at Irish Haven said that at one time Bay Ridge was nothing but churches and bars. There’s still plenty of churches and bars in Bay Ridge, but now it boasts many large chain stores, and it’s safe to assume one could probably find a yoga center or two and some other contemporary trappings there. Also, Bay Ridge has become home to a large Arab community. Hookah cafés and Middle Eastern restaurants line Fourth and Fifth Avenues for miles, and the pale, Christian throngs of what had once been an archetypal working class Brooklyn neighborhood (Saturday Night Fever was set there) have been altered considerably. There’s always the Irish Haven, though, whose jukebox is like no other, packed with the most Irish of tunes, from the likes of Christy Moore, The Chieftains, and The Clancy Brothers; everything from “Dunmore Lassies” and “Dear Old Donegal” to “Imis Dhun Ramba” and “Come Out Ye Black and Tans.” It’s a fine place for a soon-to-be-minority to cry in his beer or dream of reels and jigs past, back home on the Ould Sod.