SUBWAY READING

NYC Subway 6 Train (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I board the subway every morning.  And when I do, I'm frequently not in the best frame of mind.  Blame it on the cheap instant coffee I drink or the hoards of people around me sucking all the oxygen out of the atmosphere, but I'm not always the happiest of campers.  I always bring reading material with me, but if it's too crowded, I don't have room to read it.  As you can tell from that last sentence, when I read, it's real stuff, like newspapers or books.  That's because I refuse to read anything longer than an email address on a screen the size of a postage stamp. (For those of you too young to read anything on a screen bigger than a postage stamp, "postage stamps" are little colored pieces of paper people used to put on bigger pieces of paper when they wanted to send messages to other people without having to put them in a bottle and throw them out to sea.) In fact, sometimes it's so crowded even the postage-stamp-sized screen-readers don't have room to hold up their postage-stamp-sized screened devices. Sometimes we're squeezed together so tightly we all look like overweight, overdressed versions of The River Dancers without the rhythmic stomping (and a lot of unrhythmic toe stomping). 

On those days, I entertain myself by reading the ads on the subway car walls. Some days, it can be as involving as a novel.  To show you what I mean, let me take you through the ads that I saw on just one morning a couple of weeks ago. The ads will be annotated with the comments I made about them in my head, which is where I most frequently make comments.

Ad #1
Ad: "The Gift of Happiness - Jobs come and go,"
Me: Do they know something I don't? (My morning haze tends to make me a little paranoid.)
Ad: "physical beauty fades,"
Me: Give me a break! It's 8am on a Monday morning!  (See paranoia reference above.)
Ad: "markets rise and fall,"
Me: I wouldn't know. I never have enough money to invest in them. (Before my second cup of coffee, my self pity runs a close second to my paranoia. After my second cup, it's self righteous indignation alternating with juvenile humor until I clock out.) 
Ad: "but the benefits of philosophy last a lifetime."
Me: Really?  'Cause I know a lot of philosophy majors who have even less money to invest in the markets than I do.
Ad: "The School of Practical Philosophy"
Me: Talk about a contradiction in terms. Maybe instead of Plato they teach how to unclog drains.

Ad #2
Ad: "At age 80, who doesn't need a face lift?"
Me: Ok, now this is getting personal. (Continue to see paranoia reference above).
Ad: "We're refurbishing the F and G stations."
Me: Nice try, but I'm not buyin' it.(Continue to see paranoia reference above, coupled with self righteous indignation.)

Ad #3 This was actually part of the MTA's "Poetry in Motion," with posted poems.
Poem:"The Good Life - When some peope talk about money, they speak as if it were a mysterious lover who went out to buy milk and never came back..."
Me: As if?!
  
Ad#4
Ad: "Spinlister, the global bike share.  Let your bike pay for your dates."
Me: Great! Now I have to flashback to my single days?

Ad#5
Ad: Protect-A-Bed.  Beware of bedbugs! Protect yourself!
Me: More flashbacks to my single days?

Ad #6
Ad: Bramsonart College - create you own games!
Me: Will these references to my single days never cease?!

Ad #7
Movie poster: "Love is Strange"
Me: Now I have to be reminded of married life?

Ad #8
Ad: Finger painting  play dates in east Village are tough. Bounty is tougher. New York tough."
Me: I'll tell you what's tough. Being called old,poor, possibly unemployed and with a checkered past in front of a bunch of overweight, overdressed unsynchronized River Dancer wannabees before I've had my second cup of coffee. If I see one more annoying ad, I'm going to do some very serious, motionless glaring.

Ad #9
Ad: Do you smile in your selfies? If not, come see Arnold Jankowitz, DDS.
Me:Oh, I'm smiling. And glaring. Seriously.

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STOP THE MOTION, I WANT TO GET OFF

Bugs Bunny's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve never created animation (does a wheel with three pictures on it and a pin in the middle count?) and I’ve generally thought that, as an adult, I no longer had any interest in cartoons.  All that changed last week, when I went to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria.  Most of the exhibits there involved animation, covering both the technical and creative sides of the field.  Chuck Jones, creator of many classic cartoons like Road Runner and Bugs Bunny was featured prominently. What I realized when I went through the exhibit is that the classic cartoons, whether the Road Runner, Bugs Bunny or Bullwinkle, are not just for little children, but for big ones, who (allegedly) are much more discerning and  better behaved.  Several of the cartoons were showing, and as I watched, I realized how smart they really are.

I even had a chance to become an animator – well, a stop motion animation maker – kind of.  There was a section at the museum that supplied some backgrounds and movable pieces that one could place on a computer screen and take 12 consecutive shots.  The computer would digitally edit them together,and voila! You had your own home (or museum-) made stop-motion film!  The films were a lot of fun to make (I made two), but had an interesting feature.  After clicking the “record” button, if you didn't move your hand away fast enough, the shot would show your hand moving the pieces. I had to do one of my films over twice before I had the timing down well enough so that my hand didn’t show in any of the shots.

The museum had another fun interactive feature.  It would record a sort of video of a person moving and then make a flip book out of it that the person could purchase.  For those of you who don’t know what  flip book is, it’ a book with a series of pictures that, when you flip them, give the optical illusion that the figure in the pictures is moving.  I had a video of me throwing a kiss at the camera.  Well, that’s what it was supposed to look like.  Instead, it kind of looked like I had just coughed or sneezed and was throwing my germs out to the camera. What can I say.  I don’t have a lot of experience being Miss America or a winner on American idol. I was going to purchase my flip book anyway, but forgot to.  Then again, had the salesperson seen it, museum personnel might have tried to quarantine me.

Just to show you that I wasn't making up my two brilliant stop motion films, here they are (don't blink or you might miss them):

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