The Wire Re-Imagined as a Classic Video Role-Playing Game

in Television | September 10th, 2012

If some­one has insis­tent­ly rec­om­mend­ed that you watch the whole of The Wire, David Simon’s tele­vi­sion series of Bal­ti­more­an insti­tu­tion­al dys­func­tion, that per­son has — let’s face it — prob­a­bly been a thir­ty­ish white guy. But we thir­ty­ish white guys do have our iso­lat­ed moments of cul­tur­al astute­ness, of which, accord­ing to all the legit­i­mate crit­ics, enthus­ing over The Wire counts as one. But we also go into volup­tuous Prous­t­ian rap­tures at the sight of our favorite old video games, so you’d do well to take us with a grain of salt. The above video from Col­lege­Hu­mor, a site that knows its audi­ence, trans­pos­es the social­ly crit­i­cal, bor­der­line-nihilis­tic action of The Wire into the pix­el-inten­sive, usu­al­ly moral­ly sim­plis­tic form of a con­sole role-play­ing game from the late eight­ies or ear­ly nineties. This will make a cer­tain over­lap in the cul­tur­al Venn dia­gram quite excit­ed indeed, and no doubt pro­vide a source of strange fas­ci­na­tion to the rest.

The play­er takes the role, for the most part, of trou­bled Bal­ti­more Police Depart­ment Detec­tive Jim­my McNul­ty, whose equip­pable items include “gun,” “badge,” “whiskey,” and “hair gel.” When he elects to “fight the sys­tem,” a turn-based bat­tle launch­es, pit­ting McNul­ty against the sys­tem’s lit­er­al embod­i­ment, a pha­lanx of invin­ci­ble bureau­crats. The game ren­ders a drug deal as the kind of store you’d vis­it in The Leg­end of Zel­da. Items avail­able: “crack,” “hero­in,” and “mana potion.” One stage even turns into some­thing of a graph­ic adven­ture, where the play­er, in search of evi­dence, clicks com­mands like “inspect,” “take,” and “hit,” although every pos­si­ble action seems to result in noth­ing more than curs­ing from either McNul­ty or his part­ner Bunk More­land. Clear­ly, this video con­tains a wealth of laughs for the Wire (or vin­tage role-play­ing game) diehard. If you’ve put off get­ting into the show, per­haps the prospect of get­ting these inside jokes will con­vince you to take the plunge. And putting in a few hours with the ear­ly Final Fan­ta­sy titles won’t hurt.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gats­by, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Clas­sic Crit­i­cism of Amer­i­ca (NSFW)

The Wire as Great Vic­to­ri­an Nov­el

Bill Moy­ers with The Wire’s David Simon

The Wire: Four Sea­sons in Four Min­utes

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Second Known Photo of Emily Dickinson Emerges

in Photography, Poetry | September 5th, 2012

Until now, we’ve only had one authen­ti­cat­ed pho­to of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry poet, Emi­ly Dick­in­son (1830–1886). The pho­to (above), tak­en when she was only 16 years old, shows Dick­in­son as a young­ster in high school cir­ca 1847, well before her lit­er­ary career came into full bloom. That has been the only visu­al trace of her to date.

But now, as The Guardian reports, Amherst Col­lege thinks it has dis­cov­ered an 1859 daguerreo­type show­ing the poet with her friend Kate Scott Turn­er. When this new­ly-dis­cov­ered image was tak­en, Emi­ly (on the left below) was 28 years old and like­ly writ­ing her mys­te­ri­ous mas­ter let­ters, as one Metafil­ter read­er points out.

Poems by Emi­ly Dick­in­son can be found in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books, along with lots of oth­er great works.

Herbie Hancock: All That’s Jazz!

in Music | September 3rd, 2012

“I think I was sup­posed to play jazz,” says Her­bie Han­cock. Han­cock is one of the most not­ed jazz musi­cians of all time. He was born in Chica­go in 1940, and it became appar­ent ear­ly on that he was a child piano prodi­gy. Her­bie per­formed a Mozart piano con­cert with the Chica­go Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra at age 11, then start­ed play­ing jazz in high school and lat­er dou­ble-majored in music and elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing at Grin­nell Col­lege. His fas­ci­na­tion with musi­cal gad­gets led him to become one of the first jazz pianists to work with elec­tron­ic key­boards. And his land­mark albums blurred the bound­aries of music, effort­less­ly mix­ing jazz with funk, soul, rhythm and the blues, for­ev­er chang­ing the face of jazz. As Miles Davis once said, “Her­bie was the step after Bud Pow­ell and Thelo­nious Monk, and I haven’t heard any­body yet who has come after him.”

The doc­u­men­tary above — Her­bie Han­cock: All That’s Jazz — was pro­duced for KCET’s sig­na­ture news series “SoCal Con­nect­ed.” It retraces the most impor­tant steps in Han­cock­’s career and shows us his home, the office where his award-win­ning music is com­posed and his pri­vate rit­u­als. Very few peo­ple know that Her­bie is a very reli­gious per­son — he has been a prac­tic­ing Bud­dhist for over forty years.

Bonus mate­r­i­al:

• Cor­re­spon­dent Michael Okwu shares what it was like to spend time with Her­bie Han­cock.
• A won­der­ful per­for­mance of Her­bie’s famous “Can­teloupe Island” with Pat Methe­ny.

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

Ray Bradbury: “The Things That You Love Should Be Things That You Do.” “Books Teach Us That”

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | August 31st, 2012

“I sup­pose you’re won­der­ing why I’ve called you all here,” says Ray Brad­bury above, in a lengthy inter­view with the The Big Read project spon­sored by the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts. Break­ing the ice with this stock phrase, Bradbury–author of Fahren­heit 451, The Illus­trat­ed Man, The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles, and sev­er­al dozen more fan­ta­sy and sci-fi nov­els and short sto­ry col­lec­tions (and some tru­ly chill­ing hor­ror)–begins to talk about… Love. Specif­i­cal­ly a love of books. “Love,” he says, “is at the cen­ter of your life. The things that you do should be things that you love, and the things that you love, should be things that you do.” That’s what books teach us, he says, and it becomes his mantra.

Brad­bury, who passed away in June, was cer­tain­ly an ear­ly inspi­ra­tion for me, and sev­er­al mil­lion oth­er book­ish kids whose warmest mem­o­ries involve dis­cov­er­ing some strange, life-alter­ing book on the shelf of a library. As he recounts his child­hood expe­ri­ences with books, he’s such an enthu­si­as­tic boost­er for pub­lic libraries that you may find your­self writ­ing a check to your local branch in the first ten min­utes of his talk.  And it’s easy to see why his most famous nov­el sprang from what must have been a very press­ing fear of the loss of books. Brad­bury was large­ly self-taught. Unable to afford col­lege, he pur­sued his fierce ambi­tion to become a writer imme­di­ate­ly out of high school and pub­lished his first short sto­ry, “Hollerbochen’s Dilem­ma,” at the age of nine­teen. As he says above, he became a writer because, “I dis­cov­ered that I was alive.” But I’m not doing it jus­tice. You have to watch him tell it to real­ly feel the thrill of this epiphany.

The Big Read’s mis­sion is to cre­ate a “Nation of Read­ers,” and to do so, it posts free audio guides for clas­sics such as Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gats­by. They also fea­ture video inter­views with oth­er authors, like Amy Tan, Ernest J. Gaines, and Tobias Wolff. Each of the inter­views is fan­tas­tic, and the read­ers’ guides are superb as well. Bradbury’s, for exam­ple, nar­rat­ed by poet and author Dana Gioia, also fea­tures sci-fi giants Orson Scott Card and Ursu­la K. Le Guin, as well as sev­er­al oth­er writ­ers who were inspired by his work.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Henry Rollins Pitches Education as the Key to Restoring Democracy

in Education, Life, Politics | August 22nd, 2012

Hen­ry Rollins had dropped out of col­lege and was work­ing at a Haa­gen-Dazs in Wash­ing­ton, DC when he joined the sem­i­nal L.A. hard­core punk band Black Flag in 1981, a career move that would shape the rest of the singer/author/actor/activist’s life. And although he left high­er edu­ca­tion for a more indi­vid­u­al­ized path, Rollins has a very high regard for the poten­tial of a good edu­ca­tion to change peo­ple’s lives.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Rollins’ moti­va­tion­al Big Think talk to young peo­ple on the dan­gers of resent­ment. In the short, but equal­ly inspir­ing, talk above–from the same set of inter­views–Rollins describes edu­ca­tion as the engine of a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety, “the great equal­iz­er.” For Rollins, edu­ca­tion is the key to a “more vig­or­ous democ­ra­cy.” And although he makes some arguable claims about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of edu­ca­tion­al reform to sub­stan­tial­ly dimin­ish the effects of insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism and pover­ty, his view of what an edu­ca­tion should be cor­re­sponds to what edu­ca­tion­al reform­ers have stressed for decades—that mov­ing to a focus on crit­i­cal think­ing, rather than “teach­ing to the test,” is a shift that needs to hap­pen in order for stu­dents to become curi­ous, inten­tion­al, and inde­pen­dent learn­ers and, ulti­mate­ly, free and inde­pen­dent cit­i­zens.

Rollins spec­u­lates that cer­tain polit­i­cal actors and vest­ed inter­ests delib­er­ate­ly block edu­ca­tion­al reform to main­tain the sta­tus quo. Whether or not you accept his analy­sis, there’s no deny­ing that the state of pri­ma­ry, sec­ondary, and high­er edu­ca­tion in the U.S. is dire, and the func­tion­al effi­ca­cy of our demo­c­ra­t­ic process seems con­stant­ly in jeop­ardy. Allud­ing to the dic­tum attrib­uted to Thomas Jef­fer­son (who may not have actu­al­ly writ­ten this) that “An edu­cat­ed cit­i­zen­ry is a vital req­ui­site for our sur­vival as a free peo­ple,” Rollins believes that edu­ca­tion­al reforms offer “the way out” of our cur­rent polit­i­cal grid­lock and of the despair­ing sit­u­a­tions under­priv­i­leged peo­ple are born into. I think he makes a pret­ty com­pelling case in just under four min­utes.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Mnozil Brass: Europe’s Most Imaginative Brass Band

in Comedy, Music | August 17th, 2012

Here’s some­thing fun. And a bit weird. Mnozil Brass is an Aus­tri­an septet that com­bines musi­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty with absur­dist the­atre. The group’s name means “noz­zle,” and refers to the Mnozil Pub, a lit­tle place near the Vien­na Col­lege of Music where the found­ing mem­bers used to get togeth­er to drink and play music. Since form­ing in 1992, and the group’s enter­tain­ing mix­ture of music and clown­ing has grown steadi­ly in pop­u­lar­i­ty. Above is a skit called “Slow Motion” from Mnozil Brass’s new DVD, Mag­ic Moments. Think of it as a sort of “spaghet­ti west­ern music recital.” There are sev­er­al more sam­ples below, to give you a sense of the luna­cy:

The William Tell Over­ture:

Lone­ly Boy:

Bohemi­an Rhap­sody:

Kids (and Less Savvy Marketers) Imagine the Internet in 1995

in Business, Technology | August 17th, 2012

In 1995, a group of 5^th grade kids in Hele­na, Mon­tana got togeth­er and made a PSA for the Inter­net (above). And, man, were they hip, with their tech­no music and their “by the time I’m in col­lege, the inter­net will be your tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place.” In the annals of overblown pre­dic­tions and tech­no­log­i­cal hubris, mid-nineties inter­net-fever will go down as the ulti­mate excep­tion. These kids even antic­i­pat­ed the cute cat mania that would infect the inter­net for­ev­er. Of course, none of them could have fore­seen the Twit­ter rev­o­lu­tion, the Face­book decline, rub­bable gifs, or spher­i­cal panoram­ic views of Mars, but that’s just quib­bling.

It real­ly is aston­ish­ing to look back a mere sev­en­teen years at what a prim­i­tive tech­nol­o­gy the inter­net was. Of course it wasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly evi­dent at the time that the online world would indeed become our “tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place,” and some naysay­ers, like astronomer and hack­er-catch­er Clif­ford Stoll, called BS on the hype. In a 1995 Newsweek arti­cle titled “The Inter­net? Bah!,” Stoll wrote:

The truth is no online data­base will replace your dai­ly news­pa­per, no CD-ROM can take the place of a com­pe­tent teacher and no com­put­er net­work will change the way gov­ern­ment works.

In 2010, Stoll was forced to retract, com­ment­ing on Boing Boing cov­er­age of his sour­puss skep­ti­cism with:

“Of my many mis­takes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as pub­lic as my 1995 howler.

But who could blame him? This was the age of such clunky Web ser­vices as AOL, which promis­es much in a 95 ad below, but ulti­mate­ly deliv­ered lit­tle.

Not all web adver­tis­ing in 1995 looks so dat­ed and sil­ly. AOL’s com­peti­tor Prodi­gy, which fared even worse, cer­tain­ly had a bet­ter ad agency. Their 95 ad below, fea­tur­ing Bar­ry White, is a romp.

All of this reflec­tion war­rants more wis­dom from a chas­tened Clif­ford Stoll, who in a 2006 TED talk says: “If you real­ly want to know about the future, don’t ask a tech­nol­o­gist, a sci­en­tist, a physi­cist. No! Don’t ask some­body who’s writ­ing code. No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in 20 years, ask a kinder­garten teacher.”

via Pre­fix

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

E.M. Forster: Why I Stopped Writing Novels (1958)

in Literature, Writing | August 9th, 2012

E.M. Forster’s lat­er years are some­thing of a rid­dle. After pub­lish­ing five nov­els, includ­ing the clas­sics A Pas­sage to India and Howards End, Forster stopped writ­ing fic­tion at the age of 45. He lived qui­et­ly for anoth­er 46 years and con­tin­ued to write essays, short biogra­phies and lit­er­ary jour­nal­ism — but no more nov­els.

The issues behind it are com­pli­cat­ed, says Forster in this excerpt from a 1958 BBC inter­view. “But I think one of the rea­sons why I stopped writ­ing nov­els,” he says, “is that the social aspect of the world changed so very much. I’d been accus­tomed to write about the old van­ished world with its homes and its fam­i­ly life and its com­par­a­tive peace. All of that went. And though I can think about it I can­not put it into fic­tion form.”

At the time of the inter­view Forster was an hon­orary fel­low at King’s Col­lege, Cam­bridge, where he lived the final 24 years of his life. He speaks of his life at Cam­bridge, and of his own lim­i­ta­tions as a writer, with a sin­cer­i­ty and human­i­ty that read­ers will rec­og­nize from his books.

Has Science Refuted Religion? Sean Carroll and Michael Shermer vs. Dinesh D’Souza and Ian Hutchinson

in Religion, Science | July 26th, 2012

Just yes­ter­day, I sat across from a fel­low wear­ing a t‑shirt embla­zoned with the image of a gun-wield­ing Jesus blow­ing away Charles Dar­win above the words “EVOLVE THIS!” At first I assumed he wore it to emphat­i­cal­ly sig­nal his belief that reli­gion, specif­i­cal­ly Chris­tian­i­ty, refutes sci­ence, specif­i­cal­ly bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion. Then, remem­ber­ing that Jesus prob­a­bly would­n’t have used a hand­gun even had they been avail­able in his day, I took the shirt as a mock­ery of the blunter vari­eties of cre­ation­ist rhetoric. Look­ing it up lat­er, I found out that the shirt comes from the movie Paul, so the wear­er prob­a­bly meant noth­ing more than to express his appre­ci­a­tion for what I under­stand to be one of 2011’s most under­rat­ed come­dies. Yet the ques­tion lingers: has sci­ence refut­ed reli­gion, or is it the oth­er way around? The inter­net age pro­vides us access to a vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed num­ber of these debates, although you’ll often search in vain for match­es of cogent, well-artic­u­lat­ed argu­ments. Just take a look at the sci­ence-reli­gion squab­bles cur­rent­ly roil­ing in YouTube com­ment sec­tions. Keep out of the com­ments, then, and stick to the videos, such as the debate above. In two hours com­pris­ing short seg­ments of argu­ment, rebut­tal, cross-exam­i­na­tion, and audi­ence ques­tions, the pro­gram pits Skep­tic mag­a­zine pub­lish­er Michael Sher­mer and Cal­tech cos­mol­o­gist Sean Car­roll against MIT physi­cist Ian Hutchin­son and King’s Col­lege pres­i­dent Dinesh D’Souza. In an unusu­al­ly order­ly, well-dis­ci­plined debate of this type, all four weigh in on one cen­tral propo­si­tion: “Has sci­ence refut­ed reli­gion?” Car­roll says that sci­ence, a “real­i­ty check” on human bias­es, offers the only expla­na­tions that work. Hutchin­son blames not sci­ence but some­thing he calls “sci­en­tism,” a belief in the absolute suprema­cy of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge, for a vari­ety of social and intel­lec­tu­al ills. Sher­mer describes reli­gious belief as an evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly deter­mined char­ac­ter­is­tic of human beings, and an increas­ing­ly use­less one at that. D’Souza upbraids sci­ence for fail­ing not only to find answers to ques­tions about human pur­pose and life’s mean­ing, but for throw­ing up its hands when pre­sent­ed them. All this offers a good bit of human dra­ma as well, but in good fun; when I inter­viewed Sher­mer, a habitué of such debates, he men­tioned often enjoy­ing tak­ing his osten­si­bly sworn intel­lec­tu­al ene­mies to beers and piz­za after­ward. Relat­ed Con­tent: Richard Dawkins & John Lennox Debate Sci­ence & Athe­ism Does God Exist? Christo­pher Hitchens Debates Chris­t­ian Philoso­pher William Lane Craig Ani­mat­ed: Stephen Fry & Ann Wid­de­combe Debate the Catholic Church Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Bob Egan, Detective Extraordinaire, Finds the Real Locations of Iconic Album Covers

in Music | July 24th, 2012

By day, Bob Egan is a mild-man­nered com­mer­cial real estate agent in New York City. By night, and on week­ends, he trans­forms him­self into some­thing of a pop cul­ture detec­tive, search­ing out the loca­tions of famous record album cov­ers and oth­er famous pop images. About a year ago he start­ed a Web site, PopSpot­sNYC, to share his find­ings, and the site has been grow­ing in pop­u­lar­i­ty ever since.

Egan’s fas­ci­na­tion with album cov­er loca­tions began in 1977, when he moved to his first apart­ment in Green­wich Vil­lage and dis­cov­ered he was only a block away from the place on Jones Street where The Free­wheel­in’ Bob Dylan cov­er pho­to­graph was shot in 1963, which showed Dylan walk­ing arm-in-arm with his girl­friend, Suze Roto­lo, on a cold Feb­ru­ary day.

“Liv­ing in Green­wich Vil­lage in the late 70s,” Egan told Open Cul­ture, “I was sur­round­ed by sites I had read about in col­lege: Bleeck­er and Mac­dou­gal, The Bot­tom Line, the Mudd Club, CBG­B’s, etc. I was soak­ing up infor­ma­tion for years lat­er, I guess, because it was­n’t until the mid 90s that I first went into Bleeck­er Bob’s and asked if they knew where the cov­er of Blonde on Blonde was shot. When they did­n’t know, I said, Well why not find out myself?”

The Blonde on Blonde loca­tion remains a mys­tery, but Egan has tracked down a num­ber of oth­er Dylan cov­er loca­tions, includ­ing High­way 61 Revis­it­ed (the front steps of a town house on Gramer­cy Park West), Anoth­er Side of Bob Dylan (the cor­ner of 52nd Street and Broad­way), and the sin­gle “I Want You” (a ware­house dis­trict on Jacob Street that was torn down long ago).

The Jacob Street loca­tion, also the site of a July 30, 1966 Sat­ur­day Evening Post cov­er of Dylan, was one of the hard­est to find. “I searched through every curved street in New York and final­ly found it online in an old pho­to from the library,” Egan said. “The entire street, which was next to the Brook­lyn Bridge, had been demol­ished 50 years ago, but I final­ly clicked on a library image and found myself star­ing straight into the exact spot Dylan was in the pho­to. I let out a whoop!”

Egan has found the exact loca­tions of record albums and oth­er famous images of a num­ber of artists, includ­ing Bruce Spring­steen, Neil Young, The Who, and Simon & Gar­funkel. The choic­es reflect his taste in music. “I grew up dur­ing the clas­sic rock era,” Egan said. “My ‘musi­cal com­fort food’ is Dylan, Van Mor­ri­son, Lou Reed, and The Grate­ful Dead.”

Even though the Grate­ful Dead was a West Coast group, Egan makes use of online tools like Google Street View and Bing Bird’s Eye to explore loca­tions from his New York home. The 1970 album “Work­ing­man’s Dead” is one of Egan’s cur­rent projects. “The Dead pho­to was sup­pos­ed­ly tak­en next to a bus stop in the Mis­sion Dis­trict of San Fran­cis­co,” said Egan. “I bought a vin­tage map of the bus route from 1969 from the San Fran­cis­co tran­sit muse­um and searched all the bus routes through the Mis­sion with Street View, but still haven’t found it.”

When we asked Egan what dri­ves his obses­sion, he said, “I think of it like this: If I went to Eng­land and some­one asked me if I want­ed to see West­min­ster Abbey or Abbey Road, I’d take Abbey Road.”

Below are sev­er­al exam­ples of Egan’s detec­tive work. To see more, and to read the sto­ry behind each loca­tion, vis­it PopSpotsNYC.com.

The album cov­er that start­ed it all for Egan was The Free­wheel­in’ Bob Dylan, fea­tur­ing Don Hun­stein’s pho­to of Dylan and his girl­friend Suze Roto­lo walk­ing through snow at the north end of Jones Street, in Green­wich Vil­lage. 

The loca­tion of the cov­er pho­to of Dylan’s 1965 album High­way 61 Revis­it­ed posed a chal­lenge. Egan always assumed that Daniel Kramer’s pho­to of Dylan was tak­en indoors, but he even­tu­al­ly tracked it down to the front steps of a town house on Gramer­cy Park West that was the home of Dylan’s man­ag­er, Albert Gross­man. The per­son stand­ing behind Dylan in the pho­to, hold­ing a cam­era by its strap, is the singer’s friend Bob Neuwirth.

What could be more British than the 1979 cov­er of The Kids Are Alright, by The Who? Actu­al­ly, Art Kane’s pho­to was tak­en in Amer­i­ca, at the lit­tle-known Carl Schurz Mon­u­ment in the Morn­ing­side Heights area of New York City. Egan gives direc­tions on how to find the place at his Web site.

Egan found the pre­cise loca­tion of Hen­ry Park­er’s cov­er pho­to for Simon & Gar­funkel’s 1965 debut album, Wednes­day Mourn­ing 3 A.M.: the low­er sub­way plat­form at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street, for the out­bound E and F lines.

Leo Fried­man’s cov­er pho­to­graph from the orig­i­nal 1957 cast record­ing of West Side Sto­ry shows char­ac­ters Maria (Car­ol Lawrence) and Tony (Lar­ry Kent) run­ning through the Hel­l’s Kitchen neigh­bor­hood of New York. The loca­tion was actu­al­ly one of Egan’s eas­i­er dis­cov­er­ies. “How did I find it,” he says on his Web site? “Pret­ty sim­ple. If you look close­ly at the garbage can to the left of Maria–the address is right on it! 418 West 56th Street.” (All images cour­tesy Bob Egan/PopSpotsNYC.com)