Posts tagged ‘Street Photography’
i know some of you know this, but i’m one of michael bloomberg’s unofficial biographers. he asked me to do it unofficially a few years ago while we were eating bagels at le bagel cafe in brooklyn. it’s been a pretty cool gig so far even though i’m not getting paid anything. he throws me a bag of ridiculously salty pretzels here and there and once in a while allows me to use his bathroom at his apartment so long as he’s not around and i don’t crap in it. i was asked a few weeks ago by one of those reporters from the new york times whether i could tell her something about bloomberg that wasn’t on wikipedia. i had to think about it for a few minutes because there was a lot of shit that people didn’t know about the mayor. for example, he uses a reduced fare metrocard, will not under any circumstances shop at c-town supermarkets, loves, i mean loves barbara streisand and elizabeth taylor, and is deathly afraid of squirrels. but the one thing that really no one knows is that bloomberg was one of the founding members of run dmc.
my favorite thing about holiday shopping is the lines. i love waiting in lines, especially at the large national retail chains like target or as they say here in brooklyn, tar-zhayyyyy. there’s nothing like knowing that there will be three times as many cashiers and workers after the holidays than there will be in the days before christmas. i love getting to inspect the back of people’s heads and feeling the front of some asshole’s cart rubbing against my lower back in the only available four customer lines that each have at least eight hundred shoppers in them. i can’t find anything better to do on the day before christmas than wait three hours to get to the cashier and then when i finally do the scanner doesn’t work and there’s no one to price check my motherfucking gallon of milk. i say, ‘i’ll give you a twenty and we’ll call it even,’ because you know, i want to get out of there, but then she says in between chewing gum and twittling with her sterling plated earrings that her cash register is locked. i think maybe i could just steal the milk but then i remembered that during the holiday season there are like four security guards for every person in the store. so given the crowd, i figured there were at least two hundred and forty three thousand of them hiding behind the plastic bags or the woman’s lingerie. instead i went to the dollar store and got some expired milk and seventy eight corn husk angels for my nephews.
i will tax cut your ass off with my tongue. i will shut down your electricity with my cheek. i will divert all your orange juice to mayor bloomberg. i will take your ice cream from your freezer and put it into my toaster. i will move all government jobs to kenya. i will outlaw anything with yogurt in it. i will build a shrine to overweight cows and put it in the center of columbus circle. i will remove everything above 96th street and put it in the bronx under a big blue tarp. i will get rid of the subway and require everyone to drink gasoline. i will force everyone to put a tattoo of barry goldwater above their right knee. i will require everyone to put green backsplash in their kitchens. i will make it illegal to wear anything made of pashmina. i will force everyone to bow down to martha stewart.
the apes get all the damn credit. the fact is, when pierre boulle came up with his science “fiction” masterpiece, the motherfucker was talking about us. baboons, not apes. but the thing is, even in french, the planet of the baboons doesn’t roll off the tongue in that je ne sais quoi kind of way. that’s why he was forced to change it by those agents of his. charlton heston, the good man that he was, caught whiff of this and replaced every damn ape word with baboon. but when those commie bastards out in california heard the line, ‘take your stinking hands off me you dirty baboon,’ they got all sensitive because marx was a baboon. yeah, you didn’t know that either, did you? all that shit you read about the apes rising that’s fiction because apes are idiots and even if they weren’t idiots hypothetically you know they don’t have the chutzpah to actually challenge the human “race” for supremacy. but baboons . . . you better watch yourself. we’ll eat your baby without thinking twice bitch. that’s the kind of the old world monkeys we are.
re-guuuuuuu-laaaaaaaaayyyyy-torrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-zzzz!
mount up.
i play with rainbows and ferris wheels and cotton candy jump ropes when i’m not at school. i have a special place on top of an oak tree near prospect park where i keep all my magic stuff. i have to put it there because my brother doesn’t really share too well so i have to hide it from him. sometimes on the weekend, i go to vermont because i have a small plane that i keep there. it’s kind of hard to find but it’s only like maybe two hours from here. but i can go anywhere on the plane because it’s solar powered and wind powered too. last week i went to great adventures and the cool thing is that i don’t have to pay for the ticket i just land near the giraffes. they’re cool and all with me there so long as it’s just me.
i don’t know what kind of country we live in nowadays when the front page of over seventy-five percent of the dailies are reserved for what’s left of kim kardashian’s marriage. everyone is pointing their fingers and shaking their heads in disgust. but give the bitch a break. i mean, we want the drama. we want the fights. we want some salaciousness and some excess to top it off. that’s what makes that big ass of hers so interesting and fun to follow. if i wanted just to look at big ass, i’d go to the grand concourse with my video camera. kim kardashian is more than that. she took a big ass and gave it neon lights and a moustache.
whose listening to you?
when i go to sleep, i dream of things big and small. big like headlining madison square garden and singing like chris cornell or brent smith or maybe bringing about peace in the middle east or paying off my student loans with the money in my checking account or getting to spend a couple more hours with my dad before he died or teaching my three year old how to read. small like eating rocky road ice cream or swimming in the ocean without any fear of sharks or hanging out in prospect park eating some fried chicken. but right before i wake up, i find myself treading water amidst hundreds of paper boats, the kind you make with a few folds on a piece of folder paper and can double as a hat. and then the paper boats start spinning real fast like tops or something and when i try to put them back on course, they all start slipping toward a waterfall and then they jump off when they get to the edge as if they had legs. i watch as they fly into the air and do somersaults and flips and once in a while i think they’re going to float with the wind and maybe transform into a paper plane but then they just kind of dive down toward the bottom every time with a barely noticeable splash and then they’re lost in the spray and rocks and moss and water.
give me a few years and i won’t have to amaze you with either my word for word recital of dickinson’s ‘a curious cloud surprised the sky,’ the fact that i have lunch with tori amos about once a month at my parent’s house in bar harbor, or that i know the manager of pianos. wait until this estrogen really kicks in and i’ll tower over you like a giraffe in knee high boots.
e v e r y d a y aperture 