Drifting. I am at the corner of Houston and Mott St. I want to let go of the rudder for a while and see what happens. I'm not in a hurry. This is important: I'm not going to go in order to go somewhere. Going in its own right is my aim. Time is to be felt differently; I will allow more to pass. I will proceed less pragmatically.

3:34pm

Have I found a blind-spot in urbanist topography? Between 275A and 279 Mott Street is an empty lot. 
A Beefeater ad on Houston says "Live a Little".
 

Mercer St. and Bleecker: I can see Quinn's point: I turn my thoughts - if not off - at least down. I'm on the random, slow stroll. Become an eye, a receptor of multiple impressions, the switchboard of observations, silencing myself to listen.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On Bleecker and LaGuardia: There is a recycle machine - cash for bottles. A whole society of vagabonds, jobless and homeless people crowd in busy activity around the exchange machines. Pushing carts, empty or full, with goods to be recycled. Bottles, cans, debris. Busy traders in their own stock exchange.
 

It's 3:57pm.

I'm on McDougal Street now. Old Brownstone houses colored from red to sand to brown to pink. Trees on the pavement. Colored shop fronts. A van rides by playing bass-heavy hip hop. Bums push their carts, stagger along on their crutches, mumble incoherencies. A colorful scene of tattoo shops, piercers, T-shirt stores, music stores, Tarot readers, cafes, small private stores.
 
 

Cute. A couple is horsing around. Clerks are dropping out on the street for cigarette breaks, stains on the pavement. Signs of life.
 
 
 
 

Is this Utopia? Or rather Heterotopia? A kernel of spirited life in a ghoulish Big Apple?
 
 

This notebook page is smudged. Another uncanny coincidence: Earlier, I have noted the temporal nature of pencil writing only to discover later on that my written observations were becoming illegible. As I drifted through boiling-hot NY, the notebook face up in my rucksack, the page adjacent to my back slowly became smudged. This is what it says:

I'm forced to advance slowly. I still carry my luggage and my rucksack. It's fumbling work back and forth with the camera and the notebook. Three girls just passed. One said "Hello Baby!" into her mobile phone and looked at me from behind her shades. A dread-locked dog just sniffed me. I'm at 116 McDougal.
 
 

McDougal and West 3rd Street.
 
 
 

There are Kunst- und Wunderhaeuser here. Antitheses to the disciplinary museums. Brickabrack storages, old eccentricities and simply garbage. It is the collection of material that poses the mirror-image of the various creatures roaming McDougal: Thin, crazy old ladies with brimming hats and pendulum necklaces, tattooed silverwear-sporting biker boys.