Pictures from Old New York
Miss Sally Struthers	In honor of NFL draft weekend at Radio City Music Hall this year, we’ve decided to, ahem, share some pictures taken on said weekend in New York City last year.  These poor, wretched orphans have been waiting patiently, through the dark and wet of winter, for an opportunity to look up at you, à la Margaret Keane, from a webpage—all in a piteous attempt to catch your jaundiced eye.  But don’t look away!  Won’t you devote a few precious moments of your valuable time to these pathetic foundlings?   Postscriptum I:  Speaking of Sally Struthers, click here to see my 2007 National Football League Schedule.   Postscriptum II:  Hold your left mouse key down anywhere on the distressed pleather background—and it will appear to move!  This is an illusion caused by the negative charge of your cursor reacting with the positive charge of the webpage, which briefly neutralizes your optic nerve.	Margaret Keane

At a sidewalk florist, Lane takes time out to stop and smell the flowers.  His wry comment to that effect is met by a blank stare from the Hmong proprietress.
Taxiing along somewhere between 51st and 52nd, I happened to glance out the dirty window and espy, inside the AXA (insurance) building, the very same Thomas Hart Benton that we have hanging at home, as a detail.  Our (scanned) print is shown above, and the corresponding original is highlighted below.  At last, I was able to read, in its entirety, the lighted sign that hangs above the beer-drinking flapper:  YOUR HEAD DEMANDS ITS SMOKE.	But, first, a cautionary tale.  While living in San Diego and taking this very picture, a man came out of his house, which was at the bottom edge in my viewfinder, and screamed at me to “get the hell out of here,” here being a quiet street in a residential neighborhood.  Scared, I did so but was met at home by police officers (the guy had called them with my license plate number).  According to the cops, he was going through a bitter divorce, so I had to prove my intentions by showing them my photo albums and colored lens filters.
This is only one in a series of nine murals on display in the lobby.  Entitled America Today, they were painted by Benton in 1931 and 1932.  Anyway, I returned on foot later that day to take a snapshot or two but was angrily rebuffed by Herr Schmutzenschutz there.  So I went outside, to a city sidewalk, where I took this picture using reflected light particles that had scattered into the public domain.  I was met by AXA stormtroopers mere seconds later and told to leave or face arrest.
The obligatory artsy-fartsy composition of trees coming into leaf at springtime (April 30, 2006), Riverside Park, Upper West Side.
We went to see Blossom Dearie, the 103-year-old jazz chanteuse, and talked with her after the show.  However, something was wrong with her conversation, which consisted solely of two words:  “no” and “flash.”  Look closely and you’ll see the security guard from the AXA building approaching from behind the potted plant in the window. For the rest of our sojourn in the Big Apple, he pursued me relentlessly, like Robert Patrick in Terminator 2.
No photolog of Gotham would be complete without a picture of its busy sidewalks, teeming with aberrant humanity—immigrants, business people, tourists, a private security force, the homeless.
Click here to experience the Blizzard of Aught Six.