For those unfamiliar, Coney is no longer an island. A creek separating the peninsula from the mainland was filled long ago and what had been the southernmost barrier island of Long Island was integrated and tamed. Its name is widely accepted to be of Dutch origin and would mean Rabbit Island. These are long extinct. Man is cruel. And hungry.

Yet if summertime Coney Island is a wildly animated place with its amusement park, aquarium and beaches, come fall the madness subsides. Doors are closed, metal curtains lowered and locked, rides deserted and the beaches, left empty. A cold wind blows, garbage piles up on abandoned streets and the wild cats become braver.

At that point, if your eyes are curious and your mind awake, a walk about turns into a pleasant expedition across a strange land. Walls remain painted in loud colors and complex murals, old signs await in silence the return of summer, rare people hurry past, the waterfront sleeps. You’re in the other Coney Island.

On my last visit, with sunset in mind, I set out for the Easternmost tip of Coney Island, walking down Neptune Ave and onto the beach as soon as I could reach it. On my way back from the point, as darkness was gaining, bizarre « No Trespassing » signs seemed to restrict access off the beach, but I found a gap and ventured back into a residential neighborhood. Strange high fences were cutting right through the area and I couldn’t figure out why. The houses looked identical on both sides yet razor wire separated them. A few people gave me suspicious looks as I walked along hurriedly with my photo back-back.

Eventually, I reached a heavily fortified checkpoint - and realized I was coming in from the inside of the restricted zone. I approached a policeman at the gate and apologetically asked where on Earth I was. « This is a gated community, » he said. « So I’m in the wrong place? » I asked. He smiled and nodded. I looked up. The huge sign crowning the entrance said « Seagate ». I’d never heard of such a community in New York. My suspicion rose exponentially as I analyzed the implications of such a thing. But since I was persona non grata, I thanked and moved on.

Further research has revealed a self-contained municipality founded around 1900 and allowed its own laws and police force. It’s about 10 blocks long by 5 blocks wide and includes everything west of W 37th St. If you are a resident, you need a permit to enter, all your beaches are private (a major crime if you ask me, waterfront should never be private) and if you’re expecting visitors from the real world, you must report them to Control or they won’t be allowed in! Weird. Has anyone seen Les rivières pourpres (The Crimson Rivers)? Remember the Faculty, living in autarky and selecting their... But I’m getting carried away.

The bottom line is this: Coney Island is full of surprises, some good, some bad. That alone, in my opinion, justifies a visit. And of course, there’re all the cats. Wild, it would seem, and given food by good-hearted souls. Cats, as you can imagine, know no gates. How lucky they are.

The following is a longish photo essay on the « other » Coney Island. Piers, beaches, sand, signs, doors, colors, cats and skies. The few people shots go back to early fall. The rest are from this week. Enjoy!

By late autumn, one grows weary of slapping around frantically - and often missing. Fly swaps are messy and leave red stains on the walls. So let me give you a trick that has done wonders for me lately, especially for the late night buggers that won’t let us sleep - a mosquito buzzing around your head in a dark silent room is like the sound of bombers approaching London during WW2. Or so I imagine.

So my trick in two words: shaving cream!

No, seriously! It’s instant mosquito glue. Rub around a bit of cream on the palm of one hand and merely wave your hand close to the insect. Make sure to be in its path as it takes off. It’ll stay stuck as surely as if the shaving cream was contact glue. Wash your hand up. You’re done.

« Dying, that doesn’t frighten me...
It’s losing my life that would make me sad. »

Le grand Marcel Pagnol

Like a fog bank over complicated shores, existential static renders simple navigation tricky and makes my ship vulnerable to shoals. It blurs perspective and adds a grainy texture to the sequence of events that make life. That static is born from routine and the repetitive small tugs of trouble at my sleeves. I become annoyed and concentrate on the sleeve rather than on wearing the coat with grace and confidence. When perspective is lost, it is replaced by a series of uninterrupted obstacles challenging me like a horse on a difficult course.

The approach of Christmas, bureaucracy bearing down on sore shoulders, a sense of purposelessness, receiving a lot and not being able to give much back, miscellaneous computer issues, a cold and another and some laziness, urban distraction, much to see and do, still, well these all contribute to the static.

I do promise the blogging rhythm will eventually pick up, but first it will slow down even further - you see, growing nearer every day on a shimmering horizon is our next episode of travels. Quebec and South Africa are booked and hooked, and there’s yet another road trip brewing.

Then at our return to the US, critically important and exceptionally busy days await. So it will be a while. But posting will resume. In the meantime, I will do my very best to keep the blog from going into random mode. Have mercy.

Note: QRN sur Bretzelburg was an album of the Spirou et Fantasio comics series by Franquin and Greg. It featured the fantastic Marsupilami and was set in a fantasy European dictatorship-kingdom. The term QRN is taken from the old radio-communications « Q » code and means there is static in the transmission.

So when we rented a car and headed north a few weeks ago to show Marie’s mom our countryside, the abstraction had not yet taken shape as we left the city. Our Brooklyn trees were lazily rehearsing their fall appearance, still dressed in dull tones and sheepish tints. We picked our passenger up at the infamous Inn on 23rd and left Manhattan in the same stride, joining the Henry Hudson Parkway in very manageable traffic. I had planned to customarily follow I87 north as indicated by the Establishment of Google Maps and various other sources but Marie convinced me at the last minute to trash my plan and cross into Jersey at the George Washington Bridge. The sooner away from the city, the better, she figured.

She was so right. As soon as we’d crossed the river and turned north onto the Palisades Parkway, the largest American city instantly vanished around us replaced by a perfectly paved highway slicing its way through thick woods that were no longer promising but delivering the fall colors we’d hoped for. We weren’t going far and took our time on the road, stopping at a family farm stall and picnicking at their very garden table, still confused by our New York armor and attempting to reconcile such friendly and open simplicity. We hadn’t heard honking in a couple of hours and were sliding into a languorous stupor.

By the time we reached Woodstock, the kaleidoscope had become really exciting. We were pointing right and left like children at a zoo and maples were competing with oaks for our attention. We drove into the small town with curious eyes, uninitiated visitors awarded audience to a legend. We had turned into tourists again, in this eternal cycle that enhances our curiosity and tolerance levels while we travel and explore the world, but returns us to a defensive stance as we get back closer to home.

Our shelter for the next few nights was located just outside of town, surrounded by beautiful trees and flanked by a chilly stream that flowed light and clear: a simple motel-style inn, but well kept, pretty, clean and incredibly quiet. This was another world, a mere two or three hours from the madness of New York. We might as well have been on another planet.

The next couple of days were lazily laced with delicious meals, sumptuous picnics, scenic drives, mountain streams, incredible fall colors, the wind in the trees, birds chirping, cats, peace signs and a growing desire to stay forever. Then we relocated not very far on the outskirts of Kingston, to an old stone house turned B&B where the wooden floors creaked endlessly and walls were as thick as a fort’s.

We explored some more, met some fog and rain - both surprisingly turning the landscape into an even prettier gallery, drove far into the silent Catskill Mountains and like Gollum foraging deep into the Earth for an untold time, we were forgotten to the world.

But the short trip still had to come to an end and soon we were aiming south towards home, immersed into rapidly thickening traffic on the eastern bank of the Hudson. Honking resumed, the world spun around us in an urban frenzy, we had returned to the City.

But our eyes were filled with bright reds and yellows, our minds with awe and our ears with the brushing of leaves in the wind and the message of raindrops in a perfect silence. So near and yet so far, there remains a countryside to New York City, an antidote to brutal civilization and endless opportunity. May it live forever and provide us with sanity in times of need.

And yet may it instill in us the ability to appreciate in contrast the harsh striking beauty of Manhattan’s urban core and the hyper-futuristic displays of Times Square, gone far beyond salvage, out of reality and into science-fiction, into extremes so maddening they are elegant, into a corruption of space and an aggression of the senses that force us to grow into mutants, to become better than we might be and to cope and adjust and appreciate what we still have - and most of all to tolerate one another because, for better and for worse,

this is the apogee of civilization.

...

Update 5: No more invites available for the time being, I’ll wait until the ones I sent have been activated, which hasn’t happened yet. I guess the latest wave (pardon the pun) of invites released to current users overwhelmed the team. Be patient, they will arrive...

On a different topic, I am now running Windows 7 and enjoying it very much so far.

Update 4: Still looking for a deal on Windows 7, 32 bit Home Premium... Any students out there not needing to upgrade or blessed with a Mac?

Update 3: Patience everyone, none of the invites I sent have been processed yet. As I said, it might take a few days. You’ll get an email from wave-noreply with the subject « Your invitation to preview Google Wave ». Make sure to check your spam folder as some people have reported finding that email in the spam...

Update 2: Those of you who have already received my invite are welcome to drop me a wave for testing purposes...
vmounier ( a t ) googlewave ( d o t ) com

Update: Ok, invites are going fast, so I’m going to up the game a bit. I’d really like to upgrade my laptop to Windows 7. If anybody can get me a good deal, there’s still an invite waiting.

For lack investigating time, I can’t say I’ve played with Google Wave much since its limited release a few weeks ago. I would describe Wave as a fusion of email, chat, social networking and online cooperation tool. It retains Gmail’s famous conversation-based style and indeed, like Gmail years ago, it is being made available as a beta to a select crowd via an invite-led viral campaign.

I’m not much of social networking freak myself, so my testing of Wave will be aleatory. I wish it was somehow integrated with Gmail, which would in my eyes make it much more useful. Still, Google is storming the web with cloud applications and communications tools, and with Google Voice having just been launched and the Chrome OS soon to follow, one can be sure that Wave fits snugly into a grand scheme that would, and probably will, consecrate Google as the leading worldwide online player.

Their task was digging to anchor the foundations of the future Brooklyn Bridge towers into the bottom of the East River, incarcerated for hours below the surface in enormous watertight pressurized caissons. Their average progress rate on a hopeful descent towards firm bedrock was a mere 6 inches a week. It was the end of the 19th century. Crossing the bridge would later cost 5 cents.

DCS, also called the bends, can be described as the formation of air bubbles inside the body following depressurization. Recreational and commercial divers are thoroughly familiar with the risks associated with pressure changes, but theoretically, DCS can also affect someone flying in an unpressurized aircraft and astronauts - the latter probably being more than happy to assume this slight risk in exchange for space walks...

In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge construction, at least three men died of DCS; but records were poorly kept and other casualties might easily have gone unnoticed. Washington Roebbling, the mastermind behind the project left in charge after his father’s early passing, was struck himself and left incapacitated. He finished supervising the 13 year-long process from his house, his wife insuring the liaison with the engineers.

When it was opened, the Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the whole Wild Wide World. Today it is just the longest bridge to be called Brooklyn. Was it worth dying for? Not unless you’re a visionary - and these workers most certainly weren’t, quite the opposite. Their vision must have been that of bread on a cheap table, period. But because of their sacrifice and the dedication and hard labour of so many others, we now have a cool way to walk from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back, enjoying one of the most spectacular cityscapes worldwide. In fact, the only place I can think of that would top the skyline view from the Brooklyn Bridge is the magnificent Bay of Honk Kong.

We now have a cool way to walk, as I think I just wrote in my modern English. The folks who built this bridge would not even have understood what I mean by that. Cool? Why, is it a bit cold up there? And once enlightened, they would have remained skeptical. How could we call such a marvel of engineering, the fruit of 13 years of incredibly hard work involving over 20 casualties and requiring 3600 miles of cable wire - « cool »?

Easy. You just need to be a 21st century child. To have seen a man walk on the moon. To have flown across the ocean in a giant coach along with 300 others just below the speed of sound in 5 hours. To have been granted a view through space to an event horizon located over 46 billion light-years away. To have explored the human anatomy from a front-row perspective with miniaturized cameras. To have decoded the human genome. To be able to write this today in New York and have you read it from half-way across the globe, instantly, on your iPhone.

We are a spoiled species. We tend to take it all for granted. Still, the Brooklyn Bridge is so freakin’  cool.

Getting there without wheels isn’t so casual. It involved in my case a remote subway station, lots of walking and advanced dead reckoning. I had spotted the very nice perspective from the Kosciuszko Bridge on I-278 (above), on our way back from the Long Island nurseries, and even though the overpass had no pedestrian path I’d decided to come back and scout the vicinity for a similar view of distant Manhattan behind a hilly foreground of memories.

It turned out the best angle was to be found within the cemetery itself (below.) I walked around for a long time, alone, and shot many a silly picture of the Manhattan buildings emerging behind a forest of graves. It’s a beautiful - if a bit strange - sight that probably very few New Yorkers have enjoyed.

Until it’s too late, that is.

As I sip my coffee at a terrace, a warm autumn day lighting up the wide Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd, Harlem is asleep around me. Its Dutch roots forgotten, the renaissance of the 20’s a pale memory, later crime and drug records having painfully been filed and put aside, the city finally seems at peace. She speaks in hushed tones, subdued by heavy gentrification and a new found love for peace.

A man with a perfect Easter Island statue profile walks by wearing a brightly coloured African suit and open sandals, hurrying on some mid-day errand. I imagine him having a deep voice and maybe speaking some French. He doesn’t fit my expectations of this place. But then again nothing does.

The young black woman who served me my double espresso with a bright smile wore her baby behind her in a cradle board while working behind the coffee shop counter. People are sitting at small tables around me and inside, sharing cups and laptop computers, wearing headphones and microphones, smiling blindly to distant interlocutors.

The streets are indeed surprisingly wide in Harlem, as Marie had described them. The southern parts almost have a Parisian feel with their long avenues of nice buildings looking like hôtels particuliers, with the exception of those ugly street-facing fire escapes, which - thank god - were never invented in Europe.

I look around me while rubbing my eyes. The scene seems password-protected, and I haven’t cracked the code. What am I not seeing? Something is missing, something previously written to a chapter of my preconceptions by history and media and now having been lost in a new superficial reality.

I should come back when my imagination is healthier. And my head. Maybe, then, will I see through the curtain and figure out where Harlem has gone.