NYC - THROB!

Tuesday, Manhattan,10:20 pm. Who cares? 

I'm over it. Yeah, the place throbs hot 24/7. So do a lot of cities. But frankly NYC's showing darkening age lines. Much of the skyline's a backdrop for Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin imagined that haunting piece in 1924. 

The British novelist L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."

New York's like that - a visit to the 20s. Not as high as other cities anymore... neither in buildings nor creativity. It's not as clean as other places... neither in in streets nor imagination. It's a city of scuffed shoes, frayed collars, cheap-suited-babble, and crumbling pretensions. A narrative about hardscrapple romantics held up between bookends of homeless and trust bunnies. 

They do things differently there, but unless you squinch your eyes and imagine the clarinet glissando into Gershwin's plaintive rhapsody... New York throbs not so much with excitement but more like the paper thin skin that tops a throbbing-fat boil.

It's old news.

GEEK STUFF: Canon 7D Mk.II,  EF-S17-85mm, ISO 1500, Hand held. Post processing in PS CC 2019. Multiple layers/liquify filters/brushes - custom tools. Tried not to just grab NYC's searing glare and smell, but its bends-making density, and the cacophonic din as well. 

No Bull - Mbarara Bustles

Patiently Awaiting the Stoplight

Here's the early afternoon midweek epicenter of Mbarara - the largest central place in Uganda's SouthWest. Growth? Founded in 1901, Mbarara's 2001 population was about 69,000, 82,000 in 2010 and  in 2014 about 84,000 making it the country's fastest growing city and 3rd largest after Kampala and Kira. Why so busy on a typical afternoon? Hey, the reason for Mbarara is its position as a a key transportation hub for long distance trucks destined for and coming from Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Yep, that's a 20% population growth rate in around a decade, right? In demographic terms, Uganda's a young country its streets swirling with children, teenagers, and young adults. 

GEEK STUFF: Snapped this with my Canon 7D through its EF-S: 17-85mm glass. Post processed in PS 2018CC with a bunch of my own tools to emphasize the action of this scene under the equatorial mid-day, way-high contrast sun. No bull about it, Mbarara bustles - huh?

Comfrust Madrid

Twin streams pierce the lingering darkness of Madrid's AM drive-time where the sun comes late but rains come early. The morning's metal muddle squirms from both directions - as if one flow is seduced to fill the hole the other's created. A sort of equilibrium of ballast. Pity that the soft stuff within those machines won't trade homesites so that the morning snarl goes flaccid. 

GEEK STUFF:  How'd I do it? Well I pointed my 7D Mark II's Canon EFS 17-85mm through a bus windshield to grab the scene. Then in PSCC-2018 the image was kneaded with an array of tools I created along with those from Topaz and Alien Skin so that each of its parts could be first plucked for independent attention then reassembled to highlight my question about commute-frustration (comfrust?).

How badly did the Apian Way clog from morning traffic into ancient Rome? Were the arteries of classical Athens clogged with squirming streams of carts, riders, and carriages? Did Egypt or Mesopotamia need traffic cops? Is congestion a symptom of civilization's  success or its curse. Certainly it is a tax that seizes hours/days/months/years of life. In a way, that's the harshest tax of all.