We had plans to reach the California and visit various family and friends. This turned out to be unobtainable while still allowing for some sight seeing and side trips along the way.

We set up a separate website for this event: OldDodgVan.com. Lots of pictures, stories and a map there.

By the time we finished all the arrangements it was 11 pm. So, we got up a 4 am to drive down to NYC. Mighty few people on the Taconic at that hour.

I spent the day in Manhattan starting at 7:15 am here at Rush Passport, a very efficient though also very expensive service. Lightened of $520 ($350 for the service and $170 for the State Dept.) we left Manhattan.

Karen and I then had breakfast at a diner in Bayonne NJ before dropping her at Newark Airport. She went ahead to Hong Kong.

I went to Harlem and had a nap at Andrea’s house. No one there but the cat. An hour’s snooze and I was off to one of my regular stops whenever I can at the 42nd St. library. this always includes a visit to the Reading Room on the top floor.

By 5 pm I had my new passport. I will leave for Hong Kong on Monday.

I tried hard to think up a scenario to blame Karen or anyone beside me for this gaff. But I have so far failed.

Off to the Whitney leaving Dave and Enid munching

Last Wednesday we went off to NYC for a day of museums and food with Dave Drake and Enid Advocate. Arriving in the City at late lunch time, we just had to have a bite. This landed us at a Dean & Deluca’s deli (Madison and 85th). After the bite Karen and I departed leaving Dave and Enid still munching. We went off to the Whitney to see the Lee Friedlander show, “America by Car”. This is the latest demonstration that Friedlander still knows his old trick of shooting from inside his car with a quite unvarying framing approach. Roof pillars and rear view mirrors are in almost every image. When you are confronted with two rooms of pictures, 192 in all,  with two rows running around the walls with almost no spacing between each picture, the effect is not even numbing, just mostly boring.

Third Ave. near 21st Street 6PM

Friedlander,  living legend in the photography world, desperately needed a critical voice in his ear. Maybe, if he had been challenged to boil this current odyssey down to 20 images, or even 40, we might have  been able to identify what was new in his eyes.

By this point I was not in the right frame of mind to enjoy any more of the Whitney. We did march through “CHARLES LEDRAY: WORKWORKWORKWORKWORK” and a mysterious small show on the first floor, “SARA VANDERBEEK: TO THINK OF TIME“.

Mark and Karen in stairwell of Whitney - a continuing series

Karen and I did continue a ritual photo on a seat in the stairwell of the Whitney.

We then met up with Dave and Enid at the Met. Enid had finished her homework assignment. We went to the Baldessari retrospective “Pure Beauty“. I have never “gotten” conceptual art. Most of the “concepts” are either trivial or simply silly. This Baldessari extravaganza simply added more to my sense of betrayal about this art genre. This is cheap stuff done over and over. The art piece from which the show draws its title is a great example of what a waste of time this art is.

borrowed w/o permission: http://www.lurkmoophy.com/tag/john-baldessari

The words “PURE BEAUTY” are painted on a pure white background. (see the image to the left) Now this is worth a moment’s pause, but the next twenty variations on this trick reveal that Baldessari is just another exploitative hack. He found out that people would pay money to own and display this sort of work and so he gave them what they wanted. The only other note about this exhibit is that making bigger works of art does not mean better. Some of his later works took up whole walls in the vast halls of the Met. Boring and insulting.

Artistic Furniture of Rohlfs at MET

Fortunately my day at the Met ended with a trip to a little show of furniture by Rohlfs. He started making furniture at age 40 after starting life as a mold maker and designer of kitchen stoves at the turn of the 20th century. His furniture making career only latest ten years, but he made some interesting pieces and some pretty clunky stuff too.  The flip top desk was presented in a rather unthoughtful manner by the MET. Th desk looks to have stubby little wings (see image below).

Rohlfs cantilever desk

Rohlfs' flip top desk

On closer examination it is clear that Rohlfs built these folding sides to be placed flush against the side of the upper box of the desk. Perhaps the MET thought that people would not notice the graceful curved openings in the sides so they left both at right angles to the desk. Thus the ungainly appearance of vestigial wings. Better that the MET had folded one side entirely flush with the desk case and left the other at an oblique angle to show off the carvings.¹

Our day almost ran off the rails at this point. Dave, not being aware of how pedestrian some of his compatriots are about food, suggested that we stop at Chirping Chicken. I was ready. Fortunately, in most regards, we closed out our day with a trip to Eataly across the street from the Flat Iron Building on Madison Square (5th Ave. and 23rd St.). This hot spot for well-heeled youth was a terrific opportunity for excess, though the excess actually ended at a Belgian hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Amsterdam on the Upper West Side for desert and coffee.

David Drake, the fish, Mark Orton

1. all images of the furniture borrowed without permission from http://www.curatedmag.com/news/2010/10/19/the-artistic-furniture-of-charles-rohlfs-exhibition-at-the-met/

I have been following the development of e-readers quite closely for years. Back in my software company days, we sublet office space from Common Angels. I got early looks at electronic paper because E Ink Corp. was one of their investments. It was clear that soon digital displays would leave the world of energy intensive heavy displays and move to a technology that would be more paper like in its resolution, weight, and durability.  Just last week I looked at the Sony Reader at B & H Photo in NYC. I have looked at the Amazon Kindle when I have bumped into users in coffee shops.

And, over the last six months, I have been reading detective novels, mainly, on my iPod Touch. I have quite a collection of free books stashed on my Touch. It is great to be able to take out a book and read wherever I am. And, at night, I can reverse the display to show the text in white against a black background. Great for reading in bed without any other light source. This of course suggests that when I shift to electronic paper displays that I will have to turn on the light to read since electronic paper is not backlit like all other electronic display technologies.

Finally, now that the New York Times costs $2.00 to read on paper, we have taken up reading it via the New York Times Reader on our laptops and desktop machines.

So, it is clear that new reading tools are available and the race is on to making them a mass market device.

I was startled though to see the Sungale 7 inch eReader (picture above) for sale at Price Chopper, our local supermarket, for $75 amidst a pile of other discounted electrical and electronic products near the checkout counters. On closer examination, it turns out this is not much of an e-reader since it will only display .txt files and offers none of the conveniences that the real ereaders provide. This is really a mislabeled device for displaying pictures and music videos. Nevertheless, this is an early signal of the coming ereader revolution

Our first visit to this part of NY.  We drove Rte 9 north to Rte 4 N in Troy. Then we picked up Rte 4 wtih a stop in Lock Number 2 on the Champlain Canal (aka Hudson River north of Troy, NY). Troy and Glens Falls are definitely worth another real visit. Lake George is just a large a resort town with lots of hotels and amusements.

Lots more to do in the Adirondacks. Karen read that this park is larger than the state of Vermont.

The trip back via Rte 87 was 90 miles and took 1 and 1/2 hours.

Click here to view a map of our trip Hudson to Lake George Trip October 10, 2009. ( in a new window)

Hydro-electric power at Lock 2.

Lock #2 on Champlain Canal

view from Prospect Mountain, near Lake George, towards northwest of Adirondacks

Escalators in Kowloon Tong Station Hong Kong

This is one of series of postings flowing from our trip to Hong Kong and Vietnam between December 15, 2008 and January 7, 2009.

During my visit over the last three weeks in Hong Kong I was on more escalators than in my entire existence. This reflects the well known verticality of both the natural and built environment there. It also shows the city’s interest in maintaining foot traffic as a viable mode of mobility. Even in the more remote parts of the city, pedestrian travel is aided by sidewalks, elevated walkways, and everywhere a web of pedestrian friendly access connected everywhere by escalators.

Compared with the chronic outages of service on the MBTA escalators, I never came across a single escalator that was out of service.

A final little reminder of the more typical lack of reliability of public escalators I experience in the US came on our return at Newark. After clearing customs we rounded a corner to see an escalator to carry us upstairs to catch our connecting flight to Boston. Sure enough, this escalator, a “Schindler” was emitting a loud clanking sound. We had seen plenty of Schindlers as well as Otis escalators in Hong Kong. None greeted us with such dramatic evidence of imminent failure.

Karen organized an expedition with Nyla, Noah, and next door neighbor Teddy to Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskills. Karen took these pictures. Due to a lengthy summer drought there was very little water coming over the falls.

I lagged behind and took some other photos. See below.

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Here are my photos. I found evidence that there was some sort of manufacturing or processing done on the sides of this ravine. Large riveted and welded containers and old pipes.

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