The Journey So Far - A Simple Piece

I call this musical piece Melancholia, but not in the meaning of sadness.  Like the Blues, melancholy is a feeling that goes away when the music is played.  

Walking around New York City puts me in that paradoxical situation where I am surrounded by people yet am alone.  I wanted the video to give the sense of wandering isolated in the canyons of the city, even with some risk, and with a heightened sense of awareness. 

Going through my photos I was surprised by how many images were captured empty of people.  Where are they? Home? Work?  In the restaurants?  There are 8 million people here. I thought there would be more of a crush.

 

Subways figure largely in my everyday life.  They are the cheap link from one part of the City to the other for me and are an incredible path to exploration. There is always something new to see when I come up to street level in a new part of the City.  

Down in the tunnels there are always musicians playing.  One tall, old man had rice and beans in painted water bottles and was still there in the hallway shaking them in rhythm singing Paul Simon tunes when I came home six hours later.  
 

A Jazz Trio is often at my home station, West 4^th; Keyboard, Standup Bass and Drums, sometimes joined by a Tenor Sax.  At Union Square is an ever changing mélange of Street and Robot Dancers, Cellists, Chinese Erhu Players, Mallet Harps, Fiddles and Banjos.  They are, more often than not, good performances.  I think of Union Square as the Carnegie Hall of the underground.  One can only play there after much practice, practice, practice. 

I take no pictures of these musicians because I haven’t thrown money into their buckets.  I feel it would be stealing from them taking their image without a sou and I would be broke if I put money in all the deserving pots. 

Most of the people on the subway cars are like everyone else, but of course there are always exceptions.  Just yesterday, around noon, a woman was on the Lincoln Center platform wearing a perfectly cut fur coat over her pleated knee length skirt, in stockings and black stage shoes.  On her perfectly coiffed hair was a Burgundy hat with feathers falling over her face.  The way she kept looking around and moving, birdlike, with her eyes darting here and there while forcing an uncomfortable smile looking as though she was trying to show us she was perfectly comfortable, I couldn’t tell if she was in costume or lost. 

New York is a cacophonous kaleidoscope where languages, music, color, angles, noises, scents, and energies of every sort spill into the street in microsecond rhythms.  Ever changing and unexpected, around every corner is a new frame in the motion picture I live within. 

 Some references:

Music Inn World Instruments  -  The most phenomenally magical music store I have ever walked in to.
The Man Gilding in the Window
Zinc Bar on 3rd Street 
Village Vanguard
The Stained Glass View of the Hudson and the Highline