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2007 Grand Central Kaleidoscope Light Show – Part 1

December 10, 2007

Every year, Grand Central has a short light show in the Grand Concourse. They try to make the show as big and as grand as the place is. The first year I saw it, it was a laser light show of some sort that really played on the ceiling. For the past couple of years, the light show has become exponentially larger with the main show occuring on the walls of the station. And those are big, big walls.

Recently, I went to the show during rush hour just to see it in the midst of crowds. Here’s the view just as I entered the Grand Concourse from Vanderbilt Hall.

I positioned myself at the west end of the concourse and waited. Here’s a picture of the walls. You might see that they are reddish. That’s part of the show. The red is a “curtain”.

The first sign of the show is a brief light show in the ceiling. Just moving stars.

And the curtain rises…

And then the walls light up.

I haven’t mentioned the music. Yes, there’s music. It’s all instrumental snippits from a variety of music sources. The only one I remember recognizing is part of the Nutcracker Suite. Some of it was just abysmal, but it’s just a form of background more than anything else.

You might notice that it isn’t a true kaleidoscope as the pictures aren’t broken up into different reflections. Last year, it was; but this year they seemed to prefer large pictures projected on the walls.

Some weren’t as clear as others, but they mostly did not constitute a kaleidoscope view.

The ceiling was usually included in the presentation, but I don’t remember if it ever really reflected what was happening on the walls. The pictures below if about as close to a kaleidoscope as any I ever saw.

But the below is a little more typical of the show.

Famous Ankles Stops a Protest (or so it seems)

December 4, 2007

I took the day off on Monday and late in the afternoon I started hearing some sounds from outside my apartment. Okay, sounds different than the normal cacophony of cars, sirens, horns, yells, music, jackhammers, dogs, etc. Some sounded like singing and I thought maybe it was some sort of Islamic call to prayers. I decided to investigate.

When I got to my lobby, I asked the doorman if he knew what was going on. He said that he had seen a lot of cops about a block away and didn’t know what it was, but it appeared big.

For me that’s like an irresistible call to take a quick jaunt. I went out with some hope of finding something interesting.

I didn’t see a huge crowd of cops. There were some cops directing traffic and I saw a NYPD mobile command center sort of vehicle. I started hearing the sounds again and thought it sounded like it was Hebrew. At that moment, I saw two Hasidem men nearby. My thought was: they’re back! Last year there had been a huge protest by Lubavitchers where they had the noisiest demonstration I have ever heard. I talked with a few of them and they were unfailingly interesting to talk to and friendly.

And they, being very orthodox Jews, were protesting the existence of Israel. The unexpectedness of the particulars still fascinates me.

I looked harder. I found a truck. As in, a single vehicle with a megaphone.

Actually, a minivan. A single minivan with, I think, one person inside.

And it did seem to be the Lubavitchers again. One minivan worth. I don’t know if the two Hasidem I had seen were associated with the minivan. If so, where were all the rest? Last year: thousands. This year: 3?

Here’s a closeup of the roof.

The Israel Mission to the United Nations is across the street from where this picture was taken and I presume that the content of the protest was similar to last year’s.

I took four pictures (three nearly identical to the first picture above).

As soon as I took the fourth, the van took off. They just went away and didn’t come back.

I didn’t mean to chase them away. Honest.

-H

Categories: Events, Manhattan, Mid-town

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2007 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – Part 2

November 24, 2007

Thursday’s parade was very pleasant and for all of the right reasons.

Adults with children are always trying to get them into the right position to view the parade. As I mentioned earlier, dad-duty involves putting your child on your shoulders for a view, despite what it means to those of you behind. The picture below is what I call the “wall of dads”.

But there are easier means of propping up the little ones. One very popular technique is to bring step-stools and even ladders. Another is to put the kids on something high.

You can see from their expressions that they had a good view. The problem is…well, they are kids and something always happens.

In the above case, the little one is objecting strongly to the loss of his camera to his dad. That kid could wail!

But with enough balloons, even the greatest of injustices is assuaged.

There was only one sort of “celebrity sighting” from my vantage point. When I first spotted the below float, I thought “These guys must be some sort of music group or boy band.”

I hadn’t the slightest idea who they might be. I then googled the parade to see, and all I could find was something about Ground Zero firefighters. It wasn’t until this morning that I was flipping channels and ran into some info that indicated that this was the new “Menundo”, a re-constituted boy-band from the 1990s.

My next picture was of something quite a bit different. Whatdoyathink?

It turns out that this is a bit of real art done by artist Jeff Koons. Apparently Macy’s is trying to bring in some artistic sentiment alongside the popular entertainment. This is a highly enlarged, and balloonized, version of his work titled something like “Shiny Rabbit”.

It certainly provoked a lot of conversation amongst us who didn’t know of it beforehand. It was regarded as something of a Bugs Bunny robot or a robot rabbit for whatever reason anyone would ever want a robot rabbit.

Now compare that with the cultural meaning of the below.

For me, Mr. Potato Head rules over Shiny Rabbit any day and in every aesthetic sense. Of course, I’m a bit of a Luddite and metalicized rabbits aren’t my thing.

[UPDATE on 11/25: Just to show what I know about modern art, here’s a post about the rabbit. I think you can get Mr. Potato Head for $10 or so.]

-H

Categories: Celebrity Points, Events, Manhattan, Parades

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2007 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – Part 1

November 23, 2007

Other than eating way too much turkey and trimmings on Thursday, my main activity on Thanksgiving was going to the parade. No big surprise as I seem to go to most NYC parades and the Macy Parade is the best known of NYC parades.

A co-worker of mine has a family tradition where friends and all are invited to their place for breakfast and everyone leaves for the parade around 8:30am. Well, not quite everyone, but most. The traditional gathering place is just inside Central Park at the intersection of Central Park West and 72nd Street. That’s just opposite the Dakota, which readers will know is one of my favorite buildings.

Yes, it looks like the waiting line for the parade is 30+ people deep. Incredible. Most parades I’m in the front or even all alone in the front. In some of the better attended parades I can end up behind a couple of people. I’m never 30+ people back! The sidewalks are jammed with families and people are already two or three deep several hours before the parade (at least when the weather’s good).

And the weather was spectacular. And so was the crowd. Lots of families with little kids.

This is my third time at the parade. I always see a phenonmena I call “dad-duty” which is to hoist your child on your shoulders. Every dad with a child under a hundred pounds seems to be involved in it.

For the first time, I saw a mom pulling “dad-duty”. I didn’t have the heart to take the picture, though. Her little girl really wanted to watch.

If you’re my height and you want to watch the parade, here’s one of the typical sights: a marching band.

Yep, you can see their heads, and that’s about it. And this is before the crowd got even larger and every dad was enlisted into dad-duty.

But the balloons show up very, very nicely. They are big and they are small.

72nd Street is your standard wind-tunnel street in Manhattan. Just to the west (6 blocks or so) is the Hudson River and the wind whips across there faster than you would expect. At this intersection, there have been accidents with balloons being blown around. For the parade, they put up a wind sock and they removed a light fixture from one of the street poles (it fell and seriously injured someone several years ago).

You can see most of the floats that go by, at least when they have elevated areas.

In the above, you can see part of the “wall of dads” that later appeared. But here’s my favorite “dad-duty” guy. He’s got two big boys and he’s hoisting them at the same time.

You can barely see the poor guy.

But the balloons are the hit of the parade, without them it wouldn’t be the Macy’s Parade.

Ukranian March – Holomodor

November 17, 2007

My main source of information on upcoming events in NYC has failed me again (http://www.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/index.jsp) . They got almost every single point wrong. Okay, they got the day right, and they got the nationality right.

Here’s the announcement:

I was a bit askance at it from the beginning. There’s no such thing as an “all day” parade. But, I figured that if I went out around 11am and walked around the path (5th Avenue above 30th Street and 7th Avenue from 15th Street), I’d find out a little more about it. No problem. It was a nice day for walking and I thought I’d just pick up lunch while out and, even if the start were delayed until late, like 2pm, I’d survive. I suspected it was nothing but a street fair, but that’d be okay if it were oriented toward the Ukraine.

So I went out. Once I got to Fifth Avenue, I knew it wasn’t a parade. There was no sign of any of the barriers that get put up the night before any parade. So, I decided I’d go for that nice long walk though Chelsea and maybe see something a little new.

I followed the path southward and kept seeing…nothing. I traced the entire route of the “parade”. And. Saw. Nothing. By the time I got to 15th Street, I gave up any hope of even a street fair. So, I resigned myself to just a little wandering and went around and about the area and then decided to wander eastward and go up through the East Side. Just a nice long pleasant walk in the cool temperature of the day. Very pleasant, if a bit boring.

And then I reached 3rd Avenue and saw something.

I couldn’t read the signs, but something told me this was the Ukranian Parade. I started walking northward and easily outpaced the marchers. They stretched up a long, long way so I certainly never got to the front of them, but I did find out that it was the Ukranians.

It wasn’t a “parade”. It was a protest march.

And they were restricted by the police to one lane of 3rd Avenue.

They were protesting Joseph Stalin and the enforced collectivization and starvation of the Ukraine during the 1930s. This was the 75th Anniversery of that event, known formally as the Holomodor.

The era was in the darkest days of the American Depression (which actually spanned the whole world), but we had it so much easier than the Ukraine. In that event, as many as 10 million died in the attempt to bring socialism/communism to fruition. From Wikipedia: children as young as 12 could be executed for gathering corn that was missed during the harvest. It was that generation’s “killing fields” and there is no excuse for it.

The marchers certainly held no qualms over the blame: Stalin and the Russians.

And there were symbolic demonstrations.

The above was the first in a procession.

I walked beside and with the procession for about 15 blocks. I talked with some of the women who were handing out literature on the event. They hadn’t been aware of the NYC event calendar error. They said the march had always been planned for 3rd Avenue and that they had started at 11am from 7th Street, not 7th Avenue.

This being New York, they didn’t really understand why I hadn’t checked out the Ukrainian web sites. Well, I had googled the parade, but it hadn’t turned up anything. Maybe if I had known it was the 75th Anniversary of the famine and if I had googled a march instead of a parade, I’d have known. Maybe I should have just dialed 311 for information. Nah, that’s not the sort of thing I do.

The protest was an attempt to get the US to declare the Holomodor a genocidal event. It’s not going to happen. Look at the big international fiasco that happened when Congress wanted to classify the Armenian Genocide by the Turks a genocide and condemn (rightfully) the Turkish refusal to recognize it.

-H

Categories: Events, Manhattan, Wanderings

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