One nice thing about taking a bus out of Manhattan is that once you leave Port Authority, you can take in the industrial/post-industrial landscape of northern New Jersey, which can seriously be quite breathtaking, particularly when you see Manhattan rising up in the distance like the Emerald City, or -- as here -- an elegant bridge hovering over the highways and marshlands. At first I thought it was the Bayonne Bridge, but I now realize it's not.
Here's another shot, which wasn't easy to get because of the jostling from the bus and the fact that we were driving at about 120 miles per hour. The bus driver was yelling at cars as we passed them -- for example: "move, dork boy!" -- which added some excitement to the drive.
Once we got a bit further south we passed the enormous gantries (I'm not sure if that's technically the correct word, but I was pleased with myself for remembering it) used to lift containers on and off the ships. It's easy to imagine these things roaming the earth destroying civilization in a sort of War of the Worlds scenario.
Behind me a woman was complaining loudly and bitterly about a tenant who wasn't paying rent and giving her migraines; I didn't mind; if anything, the bus is a good place to escape the psychological burden and material emptiness/opulence of the 1 percent that pervades so much of Manhattan.
I remembered when I worked for a few years as an industrial sales rep, which took me through similar landscapes all over New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. To see how the city is powered, or how things are made and transported in and out of the region is sort of like going to a farm to see how animals are bred and slaughtered, which would probably be a requirement for eating them if I were king of the universe.
All too often we want to zoom past in our cars, pretending that the less savory parts of modern life don't exist, much less acknowledging the beauty in these industrialized and barren foundations of our society.
« Three Pictures of Hell in New York City (Port Authority) | Main | Scenes from Ocean Grove, New Jersey »
11/26/2011
The comments to this entry are closed.
ORDER HERE
A RADICAL NEW MYTH ABOUT SEX, FAITH, AND THOSE OF US WHO WILL NEVER DIE
A young boy wanders into the woods of Harlem and witnesses the abduction of his sister by a glowing creature. Forty years later, now working as a New York City homicide detective, Gus is assigned to a case in which he unexpectedly succumbs to a vision that Helen is still alive. To find her, he embarks on an uorthodox investigation that leads to an ancient civilization of gods and the people determined to bring them back.
In this colossal new novel from the author of The Metropolis Case, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice collides with a new religion founded by three corporate office workers, creating something beautiful, illogical, and overwhelming. Part sex manifesto, part religious text, part Manhattan noir—with a dose of deadly serious, internet inspired satire—#gods is a sprawling inquest into the nature of faith and resistance in the modern world. With each turn of the page, #gods will leave you increasingly reborn.
Praise for #gods
“#gods is a mystery, an excavation of myths, an index of modern life, a gay coming-of-age story, an office satire, a lyrical fever dream, a conspiracy. One of the most ambitious novels in recent memory—and a wild, possibly transformative addition to the canon of gay literature—it contains multitudes, and seethes with brilliance.” —Mark Doten, author of The Infernal
“Matthew Gallaway’s #gods is a novel so brilliant, so funny, so full of strange and marvelous things, I couldn’t stop writing OMG WTF I <3 THIS SO MUCH in its margins. It’s rare to find a novel that so dazzlingly reinvigorates age-old meditations on faith and f&!*ing, art and eros. Luminous, enterprising, and sublimely cheeky, #gods tells the story, the myth, the dream of the human soul in all its glorious complexity.” —Suzanne Morrison, author of Yoga Bitch
“Matthew Gallaway’s storytelling manages to be both dreamy and serious; lean and luxurious. His words carry an incantatory power of mythic storytelling where beauty and savagery wrap around each other like bright threads in a gorgeous tapestry.” —Natasha Vargas-Cooper, author of Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America
“If the ancient gods were just like us, only more so, then the same could be said for this strange, wonderful book, in which the mundane sorrows and small triumphs of very ordinary lives glow ever so slightly around the edges, sometimes quite literally. At once an oddly romantic send-up of dead-end office culture and an offbeat supernatural procedural, #gods is terrifically weird, melancholy, sexy, and charming.” —Jacob Bacharach, author of The Bend of the World
'It’s to the credit of Matthew Gallaway’s enchanting, often funny first novel that it doesn’t require a corresponding degree of obsession from readers, but may leave them similarly transported: the book is so well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.'
-- The New York Times
Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine
Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.
Music Video: Remembrance of Things Past
Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.
Video: The Chaos Detective
The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.
Comments