On my way home from Hunter College

Picture so much better as size gets bigger.

Heard and felt the melody's sweeping and moving waves. Whipped out camera spotting him. IRT Subway Station, N, R, 6th Avenue.

"Solo violin performances in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to MTA subway platforms."

Also from his website: “A graduate of The Juilliard School, he has been soloist with orchestras in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. His numerous television appearances include The Tonight Show, Prime Time Live, The Morning Show, and VH1′s Behind the Music. Jim’s film credits include One True Thing, starring William Hurt and Meryl Streep.”

Said his daughter was enrolling at Hunter to be an anthropology major.

Saw the tripod. Then the production crew. Then this thought: Students on a shoot.

Wrong.

Moved closer, trying to be unintrusive.

Sore spot! She, bristling, turned, moved to block this photographer's view! No words exchanged.

Kept circling, bobbing and weaving, until a desired shot. Not sure what disturbed them but the image on the white jacket clarified that they weren't H-students.

I “stumbled” upon them as I was leaving campus for the day. Thus, this counts as a “Commute.”

Looking South on Sixth Avenue, Herald Square.

After arriving at the Herald Square area about 1:30 p.m. from a doctor’s appointment – I biked in from Second Avenue and East 36th Street – and planning to hop the PATH back to Jersey City, and then seeing all the NYPDs coming into the area and POs roping off corners, and wondering what catastrophe was in the works until I heard a PO bark at a bunch of people to “move back” and maybe hearing something like, QMfE, “You don’t want to be near here … bomb,” or something like that, I started scurrying for a good shot.

So, as I was scurryng, I shot a bunch of images that might prove interesting later just to make sure I had something in the event that I couldn’t get anything that I really wanted: Like a bomb-sniffing German Shepherd or one of those moving mechanical robotic bomb dismantling devices like R2D2 or, I know this makes me sound like a nut, smoke and flames.

The POs were blocking off large swaths of the square. That meant I would l have to widen my scurrying.

.

I felt a chill when this image reminded me of those crowds watching before stampeding as the WTC towers began to fall. The words "blast radius" from The Hurt Locker I had watched the previous night poured into my brain. I moved on.

Sixth Avenue & 33rd Street, looking north.

Eventually, I realized that more scurrying was needed, that I would have to loop around to get near Eighth Avenue and more. I wasn’t up to it.

So, the event was a good reminder that there are people out there who want to kill New Yorkers and this could be the season for them – crazy Americans, crazy foreigners, crazy New Yorkers, et. al – to get their jollies. Ho-ho-ho.

I hopped the PATH home.

A news media report here.

… When They Wrap Themselves Around the Pole

And many of my students wouldn’t even “see” this scene.

How savvy, I thought.

I should have stayed as long as he was to be there to see what was to happen next but I wanted to be on time for my class. Would NYPD roust him?  How did the idea come about? Much better than trying to find comfort in those anti-roosting seats [in the background] to discourage the homeless from napping. Yet, something inside me wanted to scream.