On the way out, we (I) hit this mammoth pothole and popped a hole in the front left tire of the Aveo:
The nine-dollar-a-day insurance came in handy, so we returned the car to Budget at Stewart International Airport. This required a detour through Newburgh, but not before a stop at the US 9W Overlook above West Point:
Everything looked different than when we visited there last fall:
Then returning the car at Stewart International Airport. I had never been to Stewart, so it was a chance to check it out. While there, a well-intentioned State Trooper asked why I was taking a picture of the terminal. The folks cheerfully explained that we had a website where we put up pictures of anything and everything. He was alarmed, and took a look at the pictures we’d taken. Exterior shots of the airport were OK, but this image had, in his words, “no apparent aesthetic value,” language which I remembered hearing about:
You may wonder what the purpose of the Big Map is. Fair enough. I think the pictures have many purposes, including aesthetics (sometimes!) but also in terms of transmitting information. In the above image, there is an ad for Nyack in the foreground, the airlines that fly out of Stewart in the background and people in 2009 dressing a certain way and using particular types of luggage (carry-ons!). Many years from now people might be interested in these details. When I look at archival photos I’m often more interested in details that the photographer probably overlooked — stuff like clothes, cars, advertisements. Our own photos have adjusted over time with this in mind; it used to be that I’d avoid cars in a street scene until I realized that those details were what made images. Places like strip malls then become interesting — this is how we live today and what it looks like. Spots like IKEA that you wouldn’t normally think are interesting then become interesting — incidentally, I think the reverse is also true: sometimes those closeups of historic cornices are lame in that they’re interesting to contemporary audiences who get jazzed about old stuff, but they’re chronologically out of context (I’m not judging, either — I get sidetracked by cool old cornices all the time — but I also know that series of images of landmarked neighborhoods have a staleness about them; those are places that by definition remain static, and there’s less of a reason to run out to photograph them — of course those are the places that people love to look at). It goes on and on. But anyway, like I was saying, I think the purpose of photos changes over time. The utilitarian look of Stewart might be interesting years from now, even if it looks pedestrian today. In a way, it’s silly to talk about stuff like this, but the State Trooper made us think about it, so it’s worth remembering as you peruse the Big Map photos. (By the way, I’m smart enough not to take photos of the security areas, but those kinds of images will be interesting one day, too, in showing among other stuff how we live today.) For me, why do I want to take a picture of Stewart? Because I’ve never been there and I want to know what it looks like. And I want to fill in the spaces of the Big Map . . .
I took the car back to LaGuardia early in the morning, and waited for the bus home by the MTA Bus LaGuardia Depot. Again, a security guard asked why I was taking pictures, but he seemed satisfied when I pointed to this cool old bus:
So you see, an old timey-time bus is fair — and fair enough, more reasonable people will look at that and think, “Oh, cool!” and it makes sense that you’re taking a photo of it. But there are also the newer buses there — and in time they will become cool, too. Or maybe transportation will look totally different years from now and all these vehicles — or even the idea that there’s a depot to begin with — will have a different meaning to people. We — I — don’t know.
You can’t take pictures from the upper levels of the Guggenheim, but that leaves a lot to enjoy in the big rotunda on the ground floor of the museum:
Posted: September 22nd, 2009 | Filed under:Out Of Town
Late July down in Cape May County, New Jersey — Wildwood and Ocean City. We got down there by taking the new ACES Atlantic City Express Service from Penn Station, which is nice and pretty cheap (for now at least — $29 each way), though it does follow a circuitous route into North Philadelphia and back out to the Jersey shore along the Atlantic City-Philadelphia line (it’s still faster than the bus, I believe, and obviously more comfortable):
The idea is to decorate pleasure craft and parade them through the inlets on town’s bay side. Bay side residents typically have big parties that last well into the evening. It’s kind of difficult to photograph, but this YouTube gets across the basic idea:
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