An American album

On our penultimate day together in New York a couple of weeks ago, we decided to do something different and unplanned. “Let’s go to the very end of the subway line,” I said, “to Coney Island.” Beng, Demi, and I were staying with Beng’s sister Mimi in Queens, and the F line traveled all the way to the tip of Brooklyn, where Coney Island was.

I’ve been visiting New York fairly often since I first flew into JFK 30 years ago, but I’d never been to Coney Island, a beachside amusement park that teems with locals and tourists in the summer and which I’d seen in the movies and newsreels many times. When you think of the old-style rollercoaster running on wooden tracks and of a Ferris wheel decked out in lights, along with dogs and children running into the surf, you’d be looking at a picture of Coney Island, as American an icon as they come.

We were going there at the wrong time, in the wrong season at dusk, in late autumn but no matter. I wanted to take the long subway ride all 77 minutes of it between 75th Avenue in Queens and Stillwell Avenue on Coney Island as a kind of capstone to my brief vacation. Because this ride was so long  it went aboveground as well as undergroundit was a great opportunity to see parts of the city I never would have thought of visiting, otherwise.

For all the horror stories you hear about the New York City subway, the same $2.25 single-journey ticket will take you from one end of the line to the other, as much as it will from one station to the next, unlike London’s Underground which works on the basis of six concentric zones, a single ride for which could cost you more than $6 within just one zone. Of course, the smart tourist or visitor will use cheaper day or weekly passes, and armed with these, we ventured up and down New York, finally funding ourselves in Coney Island.

As we expected, everything was at a standstill when we got there; the Ferris wheel and the rollercoaster stood in stark silhouette against the dying sun, which cast a chrome-yellow glow on everything. In the distance, red neon signs invited us to partake of another American moment at Nathan’s Famous Frankfurters, where the annual hotdog-eating contest still takes place. Properly stuffed, we went out to the Boardwalk, and caught the sunset there.

The silence and indeed the serenity of the moment seemed incongruous against the backdrop of a circus, but it was surprisingly refreshing, allowing us to collect our thoughts. Our daughter Demi was flying back to California the next morning, and I myself would be flying home the day after, and we all took pictures of one another with a kind of desperate glee, wishing the sun would linger just a while longer on the purpling horizon.

To cheer us up, Mimi then treated us to a new and rousing Broadway musical, The Scottsboro Boys, the electric energy of which revived our spirits (and whose theme of racial oppression reminded us that life could be far worse than spending a lazy afternoon by the ocean).

And then, walking back to our subway stop, we ran into James Earl Jones stepping out into his limo from his performance in the Broadway version of Driving Miss Daisy, which he topbills with Vanessa Redgrave. Looking nothing like Darth Vader, he smiled and waved at the small crowd that had gathered around the theater exit. Demi heard nothing from me for the rest of the evening but a throaty “Demi, I am your father,” but I don’t think she minded.

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I’m cutting this travelogue short to make room for some pictures that I took on this trip. I know how boring it is to look at other people’s vacation snapshots, but bear with me for a moment, because I want to share a discovery with you.

It’s no big secret and I’m sure it disgusts some people (and if you’re one of them, read no further) that I’ll buy anything with an Apple logo on it. Not surprisingly, soon after its release a few months ago, I got an iPhone 4 not because I needed another phone or another gadget, but because I was curious about what it could do.

Let me get right to the point: the best thing about the iPhone 4 is its camera. Of course it’s also a phone and an iPod, in which respects it’s not too shabby, but I never expected to be using the IP4 so much as a camera more than anything else. Indeed, on this last visit to the US, I used the IP4 almost exclusively to take over 400 shots; the Nikon DSLR stayed at home, and the Leica rangefinder stayed in my bag. The IP4 has only a 5-megapixel camera, but it’s proof positive that photography isn’t just about megapixels. If you want to be technical about it, the IP4 also offers an HDR (high dynamic range) version of your shots, and shoots remarkably crisp high-definition video.

I’m not the world’s greatest photographer by any stretch, but I hope these pictures help to convince you that if you want a phone that can truly double up as your road camera, the iPhone 4 is it.

And did I tell you about FaceTime, which makes free video calling a breeze with literally one click, and about apps like Diptic, with which you can organize your shots into frames? Maybe next time.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.