Assignment: A nice note

Is there something you've been aching to tell a neighbor or business on your block? Sometimes it's so hard to get up the nerve. The assignment: write an anonymous note to a home or business in your neighborhood (nothing negative!) Take a picture of your note, and write why you left it. Maybe you've always admired your landlady's well-behaved poodle. Maybe you've never told the cook at your local diner just how good her french fries are. Here's your chance.

update: sad photo made happy

Heart dish is now full.

more sad photos.

Boss ran out of chocolates in her heart shaped bowl.  They were replaced by cheap potato chips.

Sir Georg Solti did not die that long ago.  Maybe that is why the birds are still upset with him.

lunch in the south loop.

Lunch break near Michigan avenue redefines efficiency.  Every suit knows the rules as orders become a number with a signed receipt added to the needle stabbed pile.  Sandwiches are eaten while looking out the window from a barstool and every top button is undone.  Seated women take off one heel and scratch the other ankle, a small glimpse of the relief to come once the workday concludes.  Meals are too big to finish comfortably and just too small to put the last bit in the office refrigerator.  

Unless, of course, it is the semi-seasonal company picnic.  Then an extra half-hour for lunch is taken.  When this happens, I do not get to take a nap.

The South Loop is an ecosystem of migrant tourists, established predators and bright eyed, innocent, recent college graduates.

lunch in chelsea

I work at a contemporary art magazine in the biggest building on the biggest block in Chelsea. Stuck in a Richard Meier-designed loft between 11th Ave. and the West Side Highway, there really isn't anywhere to go for lunch.

Every day, about one o'clock, I pull a brown bag out of the drawer. My boyfriend works at a new hipster cafe in Williamsburg, and he brings home leftover croissants and danish. Lunch today is a pan au chocolat. I eat at my desk as the editorial staff flutter in and out of their desks, popping in and out between the office and the edgy galleries around the block. Munch munch, day-old chocolate. "The installation at Tony Shifrazi is simultaneously of the moment as well as an ancient artifact of the New York scene of the 80s" someone says. I wipe some chocolate off my lip. Someone chimes in "the group show at Gavin Brown is maddening. These summer shows are consistently sub-par." I pull out my juice box. I bend the straw while pushing it through the aluminum hole on top. A girl across the way pins her hair up. "And those Chapman brothers are tried and tired. Their Freudian visual metaphors are in the sphere of graphic inadequacy." I don't think I've ever seen these people eat.

response, sad photos

An empty pool on Fulton Street. Saw this on a hot day, the kind of day that makes you need a swim real bad.















Some kid lost half his Sponge Bob popsicle on the hottest day of the summer.















Struggling corner store. Those cows should be ashamed.




















Trying to find an apartment in New York City has got to be the saddest thing in the world.















Watch your step, 'ple'. I wish this sign were clearer. I think someone really might not remember to watch their step.















The "best." Maybe they are quoting their nana.

Assignment VI

Simple. Write about what lunch hour looks like in the neighborhood where you work.

response/assignment V

This sad sight was spotted on the blue line of the "L" train in Chicago at 6:45 a.m, July 3rd, 2008. The frustrated commuter tried the first lines of a Sudoku with a strategy that was described on the scene as "depressing," by a later commuter comrade. The attempt was described as, "attack and scratch away," by the same commuter. The free paper was left on the chair. Chicago resident and self-proclaimed Sudoku guru Jerry Carlson explained, "This seems to be a classic case of the unexamined life. Sudoku, like an impressionist painting, should be viewed from a distance. Only then can true beauty be found."




Nothing for lunch. Nothing for dinner. All that's left is diet coke and xerox after xerox after xerox from here unto the bluest of fluorescently lit eternity.




Democracy in America in the 21st century.