Tag: Brooklyn

Brooklyn Bound

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BROOKLYN BOUND

Last week we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. We first took the subway from Christopher Street to Chambers St. and changed lines exiting at Clark Street in Brooklyn.   We walked down the hill to the Brooklyn Bridge Park for a pit stop, but also checked out the Manhattan Bridge from underneath and stood on the riverbank and gazed across the water.

The Brooklyn Bridge is an icon, solid and robust with its gray stone arches. It’s easier to walk than the Golden Gate in San Francisco because pedestrians and cyclists are on a separate level above the cars. It was a sunny, coolish day, and we spent about 40 minutes in all walking it, given that we had to stop to take photos along the way.

  

                                                      Back in Manhattan we walked past City Hall, stopped in that park, and then walked past the new Lower Manhattan transit center, past Ground Zero, and then went left toward the Hudson River. Ultimately, we walked the entire way back from Chambers Street to our apartment near Pier 45. Very good exercise!

The next day we took the Metro again, this time to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, another place we hadn’t visited.  The lilacs were done, the cherry blossoms long past, but the roses were in full bloom! The Stanford Rose Garden includes many different species and colors of roses from historic ones to more contemporary tea roses.  It was a riot of color.

To be different, the C.P. suggested we take the shuttle train from the garden stop to get the C train. We waited a bit for the shuttle and then waited some more for the C to Manhattan. Two stops later, the train halted—signal problem ahead. Five minutes later it was announced the signal problem was also a switch problem with a switch stuck in the middle. No A or C trains were going north to Manhattan with no indication of how long the delay would be.

Realizing this was a problem, we exited to the street and were able to get Uber within about 10 minutes. We saw more of Brooklyn than we had intended and it cost a lot more, but we were back in the hood in about 30 minutes. Thus we had our own experience with deteriorating service on the subway!

Note:  All photos  ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).  Header image taken in Stanford Rose Garden.

Tidy Tidbits: Film Fare

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ON THE BIG SCREEN

There are a lot of adjectives that don’t apply to Spotlight, the new film about the Boston Globe’s uncovering of the Catholic Church’s role in hiding sexual abuse by priests.   It is not sensational, nor is it graphic in its depiction, nor is it fast-paced.  Rather it is a compelling and absorbing story of the journalistic process and of a new editor, Marty Baron, who cared less about whom he and his reporters might offend.  The dogged persistent work of the four members of the Spotlight team turned up a mind-boggling number of involved priests, several lawyers who aided in the cover-up, and direct involvement by the cardinal.  You know the ending, but well worth seeing!

Brooklyn is a beautiful film.  It has a simple plot–a young woman leaves her village in Ireland to go live and work in Brooklyn and slowly makes a life for herself, all the while feeling the tug of home.  Eventually, she has to choose between the new world and the familiar one.  No violence, no explosions, no car chases, just good storytelling.  The movie is based on Com Toibin’s lovely novel of the same name and is faithful to it.

ON THE SMALL SCREEN

I thought the first season of Broadchurch, a British detective series was excellent, but so is the second!  We noticed it on Amazon Fire and so paid the $19.99 to watch and watch we did. We got hooked and completed all 8 episodes in a weekend.  (Two days later it was available on streaming Netflix.)  This season wraps up the case of Joe Miller with his trial and re-opens the failed Sandbrook case which was what brought DI Inspector Hardy to this small Dorset town in the first place.

What, for me, makes this series so fascinating is the attention paid to the feelings and reactions of all the players, including the townspeople and the lawyers.  Here, there are two competing lawyers in court, one the former mentor of the other, one dealing with a son in prison, the other facing the end of her professional life alone.  Charlotte Rampling plays the more experienced barrister and she is amazing to watch.   This is television at its finest!