Working from home but missing Metro North.
T.G.I.F.: Riding Metro North
July 31, 2020 by 22 Comments
Riding Metro North. With El ConVirus.
March 6, 2020 by 32 Comments
El ConVirus.
Platforms sparse.
Wide berth between waiting commuters.
Subways with empty seats during Peak hours.
Hands tentatively reaching for hand rails, door handles.
Hand shakes replaced with knuckle bumps and elbow touches. Followed by Smirks. The new greeting code. Disquiet.
Travel curtailed, discontinued. Conferences cancelled. Large meetings shifted to conference calls.
Corporates scrambling to pull together Business Continuity Plans. First one, then two, then more work from home, with sniffles, with flu, with Something.
Fear spreading like Bay Area fog.
I twist in my earbuds, fire up Audible Books on Tape, and settle in for the commute home.
75% through Colum McCann’s Apeirogon. “Apeirogon, a polygon having an infinite number of sides...Combing the signals like moisture from the air.”
A cough. A sneeze. Duck for cover.
Combing the signals like moisture from the air.
Photo: Pierre Bacus via Aberrant Beauty
The Not New Yorker (Christmas 2017)
December 5, 2017 by 17 Comments
Source: “The Not Yorker” is a collection of declined or late cover submissions to The New Yorker, curated by illustrators who love and admire traditional cover illustration. This site is for celebrating cover art, and great ideas that didn’t make it. Illustrators are encouraged to submit their rejected covers , so that they might have the opportunity to be rejected by this group as well. The site is not officially affiliated with The New Yorker
This declined cover is was created by John Tomac and titled “Christmas 2017”.
It’s been a long day
November 1, 2016 by 19 Comments
Notes:
- Source: Artist Ben Rubin with his subway doodle series @ designboom
- Related Posts: “It’s Been a Long Day“
Crowdfunding Smiles. Impossible, not to join.
March 31, 2016 by 19 Comments
“Coca-Cola Hired This Man to Laugh Really on a Crowded Subway Train in Belgium. It’s usually not a good sign when someone starts laughing maniacally on the subway. But riders in Belgium seem to take it pretty well in this new Coca-Cola ad. The agency, Gonzales in Brussels—working off the insight that “happiness starts with a smile”—wanted to make people laugh in an environment where they rarely do. So, they hired a guy to get things started. See how it went.”
Thank you Susan.
Riding the 7 Train. And the Moscow Metro.
November 7, 2015 by 26 Comments
I’m gripping the rubber handrail of the escalator that is creeping down, way down, into the bowels of the NYC subway system at 42nd and Grand Central, the second busiest station in the city. This, a ride down the shaft of a deep, underground coal mine. Black dust, airless and layered with noxious fumes. This, a visible symbol of America’s decay, its infrastructure crumbling.
There is no welcome mat out for the timid, or, for any bics: the acrophobics, the claustrophobics or the mysophobics. The incline is steep. The crowd thick and wary. The noise deafening. Even the Earth shivers from fright under Gotham when the trains rumble by. Here, here. The richest city in the richest country in the world, and here we are. The Suits. The Homeless. The Helpless. The Pick-Pockets. The Cons. The Certifiable. And the Artists, the canaries in this coal mine – their instrument cases open, serenading the masses with Bach or Mendelssohn, a thin stream of light amid this train wreck (no pun intended). Add the pungent stench of urine and this here is a petri dish of trouble. Grade? A Dump.
I’m waiting for my cross-town train and the mind drifts back, way back. [Read more…]
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