I watched two classic 1970s New York City movies this week -- Taxi Driver and The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three. And I liked the latter a lot more than the former.

Pelham is by far the best Quentin Tarantino film ever made, and he was 11 years old when it came out. It's a classic thriller about the hijacking of a subway train -- identified by the location and time of its departure in the Bronx -- with a stellar cast and fantastic shots of early 1970s New York. Great scenes in Union Square and along Lafayette Street and Fourth Avenue, and a car crash staged next to the cube on Astor Place, when there was a "Gourmet Treats" store where the Starbucks is now.

And of course, a lot of wonderful subway footage from the era when subway signs were not color-coded, and were hand-cranked. And the fare was 35 cents. The best line (of many contenders), from an irascible train dispatcher: "Screw the goddamn passengers! What the hell did they expect for their lousy 35 cents -- to live forever?"

And one of the single best endings of any movie, ever. Oh! And a whiny egotistic mayor who is a dead ringer for Ed Koch, years before anyone had ever even heard of him.

Meanwhile, Taxi Driver is a disturbing film that's not much fun to watch. Aside from the nostalgia shots of the city, the part I enjoyed most was seeing Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster so young, long before they were superstars. The acting is superb, but they've all made much better movies and so has Scorcese. The writing and direction are heavy-handed, and I don't find the "grit" of 1970s New York all that romantic or interesting. These characters are nowhere near as compelling as Hoffman and Voight in Midnight Cowboy; they have no sweetness or innocence or depth. Overall you just want to take a shower after seeing it.

Tags: movies, subways

You may remember that one of my songs for February Album Writing Month was "The Subway Sings Somewhere, which combined field recordings of the NYC subway with harmonica and guitar and various loops and electronic treatments to create a song based on the musical tones made by the newer subway trains. Most people identify those tones as the opening notes of "Somewhere," from West Side Story.



The day I made the field recordings (on the way to Staten Island for my dad's birthday), I also shot some video, and today I finally got around to editing them into a video to go with the song. It includes (starting at the two-minute mark) a complete view of "Masstransiscope,” an animated piece by artist and filmmaker Bill Brand that can be seen on the Manhattan-bound BMT tracks between Dekalb Avenue and the Manhattan Bridge.

The abandoned subway station shown at the end is the Cortlandt Street stop on the R/W, one of the World Trade Center stops abandoned after 9/11. I used to get off the train there every day to go to work.

Tags: songs, subways

Today's song is The Subway Sings Somewhere, the latest addition to my new genre of music, "electromonica." Although this is probably closer to "industromonica."

New York City's newer computerized subway cars, first introduced about five years ago, have a new kind of power transformer that, when the train starts up, makes a series of tones that sound very musical, with which this song opens. People identify them most often as the opening notes to "Somewhere," from West Side Story.

Every few years, The New York Times notices this, and runs a bunch of articles, most recently a front-page column by the normally more enterprising Jim Dwyer. They've been writing about this at least since 2002 but I guess he didn't bother to read back.

Anyway, this seemed like a good excuse for a song. (In February, everything is a good excuse for a song.) If you can call this a song. It's mostly made up of sounds I recorded in the subway yesterday, mixed with some loops and heavily treated harmonica. Most of the rhythm bed is looped track noise. I'm having fun and doing a lot of experimentation this year for FAWM, and while I'm not exactly sure this works, I very much enjoyed doing it. A video may be along to accompany it later in the week.

Tags: songs, subways

The old South Ferry station on the IRT is about to be replaced with a new, larger station, so yesterday I roped mary_wroth into a brief photo expedition to the old station.

I grew up in the public-transit wastelands of Staten Island, which even though it's part of New York City is the only county in a 50-mile radius without a direct rail link to Manhattan. So, South Ferry was the closest thing I had to a subway stop; after a bus ride of anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, and a half-hour ferry ride, I could head down the stairs to the cramped, curved platform, only big enough to fit the front half of a subway train, and take the the Seventh Avenue Local (that's what my dad and grandfather called it; when I first started riding the trains the standardized color scheme didn't exist yet and the number/letter system was used inconsistently) to magical places worlds away from my semi-suburban neighborhood.

It took me to 14th Street, where Baird Searles' Science Fiction Shop was located, and the main branch of Barnes and Noble (a bookstore heaven to a kid who only knew the Paperback Booksmith and Waldenbooks in the mall; this was several decades before the advent of the superstores) was just a short walk away. To 33rd Street, to go to the wargame/D&D heaven of the Compleat Strategist. To Christopher Street, for an afternoon rummaging through the bins at Second Coming and the Record Runner and other stores long gone and forgotten even by me. (And no, Bleecker Bob's, while still open, was never on the list -- it was an infamous clip joint where $3.99 albums sold for $25 and the staff was rude.)

The unusual aspects of the station -- the moving grates that covered the gap between the curved platform and the car door, the horrendous screech of the wheels as the train came into the curve -- were all things I associated firmly with The Subway. I learned to walk between cars very early so that I could walk up to the first five cars if I got on at the back of the train. None of this was strange to me, although most subway riders have probably never experienced them. The only other station with the moving grates and the curves is Union Square and I don't think any other platform in the system is too short for a full train. And there's really no reason to use the South Ferry station if you're not going to take the ferry.

It will be gone soon, replaced with a new station that's bigger and brighter and can fit a full train, and has a connection to the Whitehall Street BMT station. Anyone who uses the station regularly will be much happier with the new one, but I'll always be nostalgic for the old one. And oh so very glad that I don't have to use it anymore.

Tags: photos, subways

On a crowded rush-hour IRT local, I said to this woman, "You're going to hurt someone with that thing," pointing to the six-inch hatpin with a sharp tip protruding at eye-level from her hat.

"I've been told that several times today," she said with a bright smile. "It's an antique." And she went back to reading her tourist map.

Tags: stupidity, subways

This great piece of what the Times calls "Op-Art," by Evan Eisenberg, is for some reason not at all available online, so I'm reproducing it here. The image is large but worth it. (Update: The Times fixed their site and you can now see the article and image here. Still included below but with a link to the real image.)

( No diversions scheduled. We are aware of the situation and hope to correct it in the near future. )

Separately, the City section's Q&A column addressed something that came up in conversation with rosefox the other day: the differing width of IRT (the numbered lines) subway cars and cars on the lettered lines of the IND and BMT. The former are two feet narrower than the latter, something that as a child I refused to believe when my father told me about it, until I actually looked at the cars and then wondered, "How did I not notice this before?"

Tags: subways

As someone who's been riding the subways for more than 30 years, and commuting on them for about 20 years, I've been asking myself recently, "Did the subways always collapse completely every time it rains?" I don't remember the magnitude of disruption that we've seen today, or several times this year, happening very often if at all years ago.

This morning, every single line in the city (great screen shot of the MTA's site, courtesy nyhamsterhouse) was disrupted by an intense, but not unprecedented storm. Newsday is reporting that 1.5" rain was falling per hour overnight (from the National Weather Service). And the entire subway system is flooded out and not working.

So I spent some time this morning searching back through the New York Times archives, and I found that my memory is accurate. System-wide disruptions caused by rain are much more frequent, and more severe, than they used to be. Storms like today's and worse have happened in the past with much less effect.

( It didn't used to be like this! )

Tags: nyc, politics, subways

Just in time for its conclusion, I've written a song about the transit strike. The song is still pertinent, though, since the issues raised by the strike aren't going to go away when service returns.

I've taken some creative license but for the most part, the song is true. It came out of conversation with my family over the weekend, being bothered by the disproportionately hostile reactions to the strikers, and listening to a lot of Johnny Cash. Both the rhythm and the attitude of this song owe a great deal to The Man In Black.

( Lyrics )

You can hear it, and download it for free, at www.kenficara.com

Tags: music, nyc, politics, songs, subways

My grandfather worked multiple manual-labor jobs for much of his youth, and finally "made it" when he got a job for NYC Transit as a token booth clerk. He bought a house and raised his son on that salary and sent him to college, the first one in the family. His son also got a job at NYC Transit, and raised two kids on that salary, and sent both of them to college. My grandmother, widowed for more than ten years, has a house to live in and decent health care because of her husband's benefits. My father has a secure retirement because of those benefits. I have a decent job and a college education because NYC Transit paid a decent salary to my parents and grandparents.

There are lots of children out there who will not be able to say any of the above. Most of their parents work for private companies or other organizations that, like my employer, have hacked away brutally at retirement and medical benefits to the point that our old age will be less comfortable than that of our parents. Those children have already lost.

But the parents of some of those children are fighting right now to hold onto decent pay and decent benefits. The fact that many of us have long since given up that fight does not mean those workers are wrong, it just means that they're the last ones standing. And the fact that they're fighting for the things that my parents had, and that I benefited greatly from, means that I cannot in good conscience do anything but support them.

Tags: nyc, politics, subways