The Electric Egg Cream

A guy calling himself “Jimmy Justice” is a self-styled “cop-arazzi” who prowls the streets of New York City and searches for law enforcement officials who may be breaking the very laws they’re paid to enforce. His weapon is a video camera and Johnny targets illegally parked government vehicles (particularly those of traffic cops) that are double-parked, blocking bus stops, sitting in “No Parking” Zones or (his pet peeve) blocking fire hydrants.

Jimmy sends his best footage to YouTube and has become something of a celebrity, pointing out the best of the worst offenders. He’s a big, stocky man who often acts like a big, stocky kid with his abrasive manner and holier-than-thou attitude. He could be viewed as a hero eager to see injustice held to account or as a villain exploiting a bad situation to feed his own delusions of grandeur. If anything, he’s a product of the digital age we live in where anyone with a camcorder can become an instant on-the-scene reporter.

Due to several instances of alleged police brutality over the past year, even Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has come to recognize the importance of these caught on video images. Kelly is planning a way for people who have videos of suspected criminal behavior by the police to send them through a 911 hotline to the proper authorities. For at least 25 years, the commercial availability of video cameras has brought countless cases of misconduct by city officials to public attention…this 911 hotline could become very hot indeed: there are many Jimmy Justices out there.

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Gone are those happy vagabond times in New York City when the starving artist lifestyle was where it was at for those lost in search of themselves. In that idealistic utopia of body and soul, anyone who helped themselves but took too much, risked ostracized despair. To starve was a badge of defiance and it was tantamount to heresy to eat more than his/her daily allotment of good will, communal harmony and intellectual nourishment rich in Dostoyevsky and the like. When the legendary and decrepit  Greenwich Village commune dissolved into gentrification in the 80s, the decrepit but infamous Brooklyn neighborhoods of  Greenpoint and Williamsburg became new havens for starving artists.

For over twenty years, things were going just fine through these seedy dwellings and bedraggled boondocks where starving artists could be left alone to creatively starve in peace. With a maximum of public assistance and a modicum of evident if doubtful  employment, starving artists could wile away their days in cosmetic careers and their evenings in frenetic delights…in the spirit of that old Greenwich Village mode of being all dressed-up with nowhere to go but appearing to be going someplace nevertheless.

Unfortunately for these latter day beatniks, the real estate market (as NYC’s need for more housing and more affluent residents increased), is also viewing such neighborhoods as Greenpoint and Williamsburg as attractive places to starve for people who could afford to richly starve. As it did with Greenwich Village, realtors are marketing these once seedy/bedraggled neighborhoods as trendy and glamorous. Current starving residents, in spite of their artistic endeavors, are suddenly realizing that they’re unable to afford to starve without starving to death.

While new starving artists arrive in their BMWs, rents that had gone from $500 to $1500 a month for modest starvation are now over $3500 and quickly approaching $5000 a month for gourmet-enhanced, bohemian starvation. Even though a major part of this area stands on the edges and stench of a sewerage treatment plant, it’s cheap and sordid but fashionably expensive; the BMWs keep rolling in faster than the high-rises could rise up. But many people have always starved for status, which is, after all, an aspect of Art.

clipped from nymag.com First Look: Inside JetBlue’s Food Court

This is JetBlue’s new dining experience at JFK Airport. A gorgeous feast for the eyes and possibly one for the stomach as well. It could put a person into a sort of “Fly Me To the Moon” state of consciousness, and I’m sure that it will do so until something better comes along in a few weeks.

When I was a child, I stumbled upon a photograph in Life magazine that appeared to be that of a beautiful girl peacefully asleep. The fact that she was fully-dressed, if rather disheveled, and while this moment lay frozen in time as well as crumpled in space, her face caught my attention and suspended any notion of horror: an expression of composure that was astounding. I was five- or six-years old and death was still unknown to me…a love that could drive a person to its gates, unimaginable.

Her name was Evelyn McHale; she was only 23-years old (the NY Times reported that she was 20). On May 1, 1947, she jumped off the Empire State Building’s observation deck on the 86th floor. She landed on a United Nations limousine parked at the curb at Thirty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, the impact staving the car’s metal body and shattering its windows. A photographer by the name of Robert Wiles, who was standing across the street, rushed to the scene. His photograph, less than four minutes after her fall,  made Evelyn immortal amidst the pages of Life and anywhere else it appeared; its horrific beauty was unforgettable.

She left behind an unfinished note which she crossed out; the typical overtone of suicide contained within its few words: “He’s much better off without me … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody.”  Apparently there wasn’t anything special about Evelyn’s life (her gray coat and a pocketbook containing family photos and a few dollars were found lying on the spot from where she jumped)…nothing special in her life but eternally beautiful in her death.

Source: “The Most Beautiful Suicide”

In 2007, six years after the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD was set to introduce advanced radiation detectors to protect the city. These are small devices which specially trained police would carry in knapsacks to patrol prime terrorist targets. Named the “KO Kit” after their developer Detective David Kao, the detectors were to be complemented with isotope-identifying gear that have a wider range of detection than those currently in use by the police.

With the NYPD in its high-tech groove, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was proposing an entire shebang of explosives detectors and security cameras installed throughout NYC. In addition to this, a special fleet of helicopters were to be outfitted with license-plate reading equipment and various networks of radiation detectors were to be set-up at the city’s ports and roadways. [New York Post; 6/07/07]

This was the story last year and many of the proposals are apparently now being implemented by the NYPD…all of this fine and dandy, but:

While this is going on down here, to the north of the city at four nuclear reactors, National Guard troops who had stood guard since 9/11 are being withdrawn this summer. According to Eric Durr, a spokesman for the state Division of Military and Naval Concerns, there “wasn’t any money in the state budget for keeping the troops at nuclear power plants.” [The National Terror Alert]

The Indian Point nuclear reactor, one of the four reactors in this state, stands less then forty miles up the majestic Hudson River. If a paramilitary group of terrorists were to gain access to this reactor, the future of NYC would be rather shitty. A matter of concern for decades, accusations of lack security (even nonexistent security) and other unsafe conditions, Indian Point is viewed as the greatest threat to the city…even excluding terrorists. At least 100,000, within a ten to forty mile radius, could die as a result of radiation poisoning if something untoward were to occur up there: the Chernobyl of the USA.

However, it’s a great time to be in the security business: there’s always a buyer, at equitable rates of exchange, for one’s high-tech products while allowing for much clearer and present dangers to take care of themselves.

The first half of the 19th century saw major advancements in the field of astronomy…but also, amidst the starry-eyed excitement, extraordinary speculations. As knowledge of the solar system increased, attracting scientific and popular attention, science oftentimes  gave way to science fiction as theories and hypotheses became all the rage among scientific luminaries and charlatans alike.

Two leading examples from this period of overly-ambitious intellects were Professor Franz von Paula Gruithuisen and the Reverend Thomas Dick.

In a paper published in 1824 entitled “Distinct Traces of Lunar Inhabitants, Especially of One of Their Colossal Buildings,”  Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, Professor of Astronomy at Munich University, claimed to have discovered various shades of color on the Moon which he correlated with vegetation zones on its surface. He also claimed to have observed a patterned series of lines and geometrical shapes that he believed were indicative of roads, fortifications and cities.

The Reverend Thomas Dick, aka “The Christian Philosopher” after the title of his first book, “computed” that the Solar System contained 21,891,974,404,480 (21trillion+) inhabitants; the Moon alone, by his computations, would contain 4,200,000,000 residents (this would be quite a crowd for Facebook). His writings were extremely popular in America and even members of the intellectual elite, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, were fans of  Dick’s writings.

AND THEN…

On August 25, 1835, the first of six articles appeared in the Sun, New York City’s fledgling and faltering conservative newspaper. The paper reported that Life had been found on the Moon and attributed the discovery to the eminent British astronomer Sir John Herschel; the headline reading:

GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES

LATELY MADE

BY SIR JOHN HERSCHEL, L.L.D. F.R.S. &c.

At the Cape of Good Hope

[From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science]

Reporter Richard A. Locke* explained how Herschel devised a telescope that could magnify objects 42,000 times their size and was suddenly observing everything from 16 species of animals to 38 species of trees to 76 plants on the lunar surface. The astronomer could also see bat-like humanoids, four-feet high and a “slight improvement on that of a large orangutan,” wandering around. Locke went on to say how Herschel also observed a 60-foot high amethysts alongside a sapphire temple.

The public was fascinated with these incredible accounts which confirmed the gist of what they may have already imagined or were ready to believe.  That’s exactly what Locke was counting on and he took extended liberties with the truth and exploited the current appeal of wild intergalactic stories to boost the Sun’s declining circulation.

Even though it was true that Herschel was using a powerful telescope, it was thousands of time less powerful than described. While an Edinburgh Journal of Science did exist, it had folded in 1833…two years before Herschel’s “headline” appeared in it. Locke merely contrived the entire “discovery,” not only to increase sales of his newspaper but to satirize the wild (if sincere) claims of men such as Gruithuisen and Dick. In what came to be known as the The Great Moon Hoax,” Locke met sensationalism with sensationalism and indeed used the Moon to save the Sun…that part of the story was entirely true.

*Authorship of the article has been attributed to Richard Adams Locke, a Cambridge-educated reporter who, in August 1835, was working for the Sun. Locke never publicly admitted to being the author, while rumours persisted that others were involved. Two other men have been noted in connection with the hoax: Jean-Nicolas Nicollet, a French astronomer traveling in America at the time (though he was in Mississippi, not New York, when the moon-hoax issues appeared), and Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine. However, there is not any good evidence to indicate that anyone but Locke was the author of the hoax. (Wikipedia)

(A great source for various tales of the Moon is Starry Skies at starryskies.com ; the moon tale “When The Moon Saved the Sun” was the source for this post.)

Note: The current New York Sun should not be confused with the Sun of this post which ceased publication in 1950; the newspapers had nothing to do with one another.)