Move over, Seattle

This has been one of the wettest Junes in New York City history. It rained twenty out of the first twenty-five days of the month. All those crazy storm clouds do make for some spectacular, otherwordly sunsets. If someone was out and about with an SLR this evening, he could give the Flickr Hivemind a run for its money.

BBG

It finally warmed up enough for a bit of snow in Brooklyn. (The thermometer on the local grocery store registered -14 degrees Celsius this past week. Brr!) While screaming hordes of sledding children comandeered the Long Meadow at Prospect Park, I went for a much quieter walk in the Botanic Garden next door.Japanese Garden, Brooklyn Botanic GardenCherry Esplanade, Brooklyn Botanic Garden

The Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill

I'm so glad I got to see this before it closed. (Thanks, Linda!) Banksy, the ubiquitous London street artist, tried his hand at animatronic irony. As he puts it, "New Yorkers don't care about art. They care about pets." The Independent has a better explanation. The Wooster Collective, an excellent blog devoted to street art, described it in October:

While New Yorkers have been consumed by the stock market meltdown, a tiny little pet store quietly opened four days ago at 89 7th Avenue between West 4th and Bleeker Street in the West Village of New York City.

There are no puppies or kittens in the windows here.

Instead, a live leopard lounges on a tree in the window.

Or is it?

In other windows, things get a bit more bizarre.

McDonald's Chicken McNuggets sip barbecue sauce. A rabbit puts on her makeup. A CCTV camera nurtures its young.

Italia

I took my mother on a tour of Italy for her birthday. We saw so much of the countryside, I think I need a vacation from the vacation. :)An amazing view of the Alps on the plane ride over.The Sistine Chapel isn't the only beautifully painted part of the Vatican.Michelangelo's "Pieta" in St. Peter's Basilica was amazing. The guy was only 24 when he carved it. My photo-montage of the Colosseum. Impressive structure, no?Roman gladiators wandering the grounds.The Trevi Fountain in Rome (as seen in Roman Holiday and Three Coins in the Fountain), largest free standing fountain in Rome.The Isle of Capri, playground for the rich and famous (and home to fashion mavens and movie stars) sure was swanky. Lovely weather though, and perfectly blue water.Pompeii was probably my all time favorite part of the trip. Romans were unbelievably technologically advanced - running water, pedestrian crosswalks, fast food stalls, paved roads, spas, public toilets, sporting arenas... not a far cry from modern life. These were once gladiator barracks.Italians are very serious about their gelato. I tried some rosemary and raspberry gelato in San Gimignano at Pluripremiata Gelataria and it was superb. This year's Italian gelato champion, in fact.

Crash Bang

At 5:20am I was woken by a huge crash followed by what sounded like a garbage can being knocked over. The noise had actually penetrated my closed window and the air conditioner, so it must have been loud enough to wake up the entire block. When I stuck my head out of the window I realized it had been.

The neighbors up and down the street were wandering out of their apartments in bathrobes and basketball shorts, sneakers untied, some sort of attempt at hair management. It looked like our little anthill had been disturbed, all the people milling around and more exiting their apartments to view the carnage, as seen from my third story vantage.

Directly in front of my building someone had run into a parked SUV so hard the back tire jumped the curb. The force was strong enough to pop the back hatch and the belongings of the poor owner had poured out onto the wet sidewalk. Swirls of the neighbors' conversations came from below

- He was drivin' the wrong way down the street.
- Must've swerved or something.
- Which one your car? This one here?

Someone called the police. The owner, some white kid with long I'm-in-a-heavy-metal-band hair, spent some time picking his stuff off the street. Either he had just moved in or was travelling from somewhere else because leaving that much visible stuff in your car is asking for a break-in. A firetruck arrived.

Say what you will about my neighborhood with its construction cranes and corner liquor stores, abandoned brownstones next to ones renovated for someones real estate portfolio. The people on the block who have been here the longest were the first on the scene. It will be a shame when the gentrification of our street is complete and the little community that watched it go from ghetto to fabulous can no longer afford it. What will happen to the black man with the pocked face, who bought a car and drove from Brooklyn to California back in the 70s? Or the one with the pageboy cap who shuffles religiously up and down the street on his daily constitutionals? Or the one with the dreads who wakes up at 4:30am every day and rides his Honda CBR to Queens for work, hair flying? What about the crack house at the end of the block? (Well, I guess that can go.)

Anyway, that was my morning. It's nice to see a neighborhood acting like a neighborhood - nosy, pushy, helpful, worried, being all of these adjectives as a group, held together only by an address.

9/11

Blah blah... Freedom Tower... blah blah... Daniel Liebeskind... blah blah... iconic importance... I know that there is a prime chunk of unused real estate in the clogged downtown of Manhattan. Nonetheless I find the memorial of light more symbolic and beautiful than any useful building. Photo by kingfal

Hanna

Tropical Storm Hanna is dumping all over NYC. What a mess.