Full title: "Stupid, Pointless, Pathetic Pictures Taken While Bored Silly, Stuck in Traffic"...

A UPS Store, hand trucks at the ready...

Spotted behind a booth at a pizzeria...

Emptying out a restaurant, piling up the remains of the day...

She's sitting on top of the world, or at least a light fixture...

At Anthony's Pizza and Pasta, if you get the right table, you have the best of both worlds...

This picture is about what you can't see...

While "UPSy-Daisy" makes very little sense, I trust the picture will...

Plenty of both in this unlikely juxtaposition...

Well, not diving, exactly, but peeking over the edge outside a restaurant being gutted...

Emptying out a restaurant turns up all manner of quotidian supplies...

Is it a weathervane, a propeller, a lazy Susan, a cable reel, a rotary shovel, a Swiss Army knife, a blender, a high-tech nutcracker, a Roto-Rooter, or a satellite dish?

In case of fire or other emergencies, including being tapped out, this alcove is the place to be...

A few minutes after these pictures were taken, cross-country skiers came schussing down the beach...

The sun barely penetrates the clouds, the parking meters are buried in snow, and the pavement shines...

In the snow, at the Congress Hall Hotel in Cape May...

With Cape May blanketed, this sign brought on shivers and chuckles...

Facing the beach in Cape May...

People in Cape May were saying they hadn't seen so much snow "since...ever!" Cross-country skiers were spotted schussing across the beach. Mounds of plowed snow reached six, seven feet in the air. Yet the mood was warm, because people who braved the white expanses were there to celebrate Valentine's Day, come what may...

Behind the scenes at a big butcher shop...

Location: Morristown

Location: Morristown

At a repair garage in Morristown, a truck says "Ahh"...

Location: Princeton University campus...

By the side of Route 206, near Belle Mead...

On the Princeton University campus, even the manhole covers have a pedigree...

An old-fashioned sign directed patrons to the rest rooms at this French restaurant...

My sister-in-law was sitting in the lounge chair beside her hospital bed, waiting to be released, and we were talking about her recuperation when I looked down...

Lest there be any confusion during surgery, someone comes beforehand to mark the patient's hand to indicate on which side of the body the procedure is to be performed...

From the tailor's driver seat, two headless figures form her offensive line...

Photographer Emmet Gowin, who retired from the Princeton University faculty last month after 36 years teaching photography, trained and inspired many students, so it's fitting that some of their work forms a tribute to him in the current exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum, "Emmet Gowin: A Collective Portrait."

Tailor shop windows, busy working environments, are theaters of the hyper-particular...

A telephone pole on a flatbed by the side of Route 206 near Belle Mead...

There are kisses and there are kisses. That photographs can be kisses is not an obvious idea, but you could imagine a list of ways that could get long before it came to the type of kiss embodied in the life and work of Emmet Gowin, who is retiring from Princeton University after 36 years of teaching photography and is the subject of a retrospective show at the Princeton University Art Museum through February 21.

The holidays linger in Palmer Square in Princeton...

Speared by a red vertical, against a white wall, blue barrels...

A peek in the drawer of a Central Power & Light utility truck...

Peering into the guts of a utility truck..isn't that what anyone would do, walking down the street?

I came across a utility truck in Morristown yesterday. The operator was checking voltages in underground cables. I asked him what this big yellow box on the back of his truck was for...

The tailor sits here...

No heavy lifting today, as compared to the last two days of PS. Just a view of a tailor's shop I happen to frequent...

I'm worried that something I said in yesterday's Plain Sight might spread bad writing rather than make it easier for people to write well. I'd like to qualify my remark...

The Dave Eggers-like title of today's Plain Sight in fact comes from an even more famous writer from a century ago, Marcel Proust, on the subject of writer's block. What does that have to do with photography and today's photo? Nothing, but I happen to be reading "Swann's Way" and came across this funny quote...

A fringe of ice silences this teapot, which clearly could not stand the heat and got out of the kitchen...

One of the more elaborate late-lingering Christmas displays seen around is this diorama on the Green in Morristown...

Freezing temperatures stopped water in its tracks, creating a stalactite at the end of a drainpipe.

We've moved on, but not all the decorations have...

White-collar collars of all colors, a community's collective answer to the question, which shirt today?

There was very little peace, and what there was of prosperity was deep but obscenely narrow. So we march on, determined to get into shape (see this month's cover story!) for the age of full-body scanners...

Baby, it's cold outside--and inside, too, if you happen to be working on a construction project like the condos on the Green in Morristown. Solution? Pipe in the heat...

The Hudson and the East. Traversing both and continuing into the Midwood section of Brooklyn (a largely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, ironically) brings you to one of the most famous pizzerias in New York, Di Fara. A definite schlep, but worth it...

Or, behold the bread! For pizza this good is indeed the staff of life...

It was only a few weeks ago, around Thanksgiving, when winter still seemed a ways away. The wind hadn't yet turned fierce and ripped the last brittle leaves from the trees. It was still possible to step outside under the mid-day sun in shirtsleeves...

The TNT Ramblers--an acoustic rock, folk, blues group--played recently, as they do every month, at Toni's Soup Kitchen in Montclair during a Saturday luncheon...

Around the corner from the main shopping street in Chatham, a building's exposed flank spoke of wear wrought by the elements...

That was the punchline of an old Lenny Bruce routine in which a Genie mans a soda fountain and a customer says, "Make me a malted." Anyway, at this soda fountain it looks like you can safely order a malted without becoming one.

The oven at Anthony's Pizza and Pasta on the Green in Morristown can handle eight large pies at once. In other words, it's a biggie. It runs at 550 degrees, and requires some serious ductwork to vent the excess heat...

A homespun bit of interior decorating in a men's room painted a buttery sunshine...

An oxymoron, sure, but this utility truck did bring to mind a kind of white noise or a representational canvas tilting into geometric abstraction...

At play in the fields of electromagnetism...

If you're close enough to read this sign...

Your faithful pizza explorer made it to Neptune City, where restaurants instead of a fork should give you a trident. Neptune, of course, is the home of the estimable Pete & Elda's...

Doing my due diligence for our upcoming pizza issue, I'm scouting the best pizza joints in the state. Just went to Bayonne on a reader's recommendation to experience the thin crust pie at Venice Restaurant. It was excellent, but so was this little corridor between the bar and the outdoor seating area...

At Grissini Restaurant in Englewood Cliffs, a special chef comes in once a week to make several gallons of tomato sauce--the owner, 71-year-old Tony DelGatto. The proof of this particular pudding is in the smelling...

With a break in the drizzly weather, I was overdue for a trip to the car wash. Then a funny thing happened...

Recently I toured the Thumann's deli plant in Carlstadt for a story for our December issue, whose cover theme is NJ ROOTS: AN ETHNIC PORTRAIT OF THE GARDEN STATE. The Thumanns (whose name, owing to marriage, is now Burke) are one of 12 families profiled in the issue...

This ghost missed the party, and wound up in a doctor's office...

Looking through a smiling face to the construction materials behind...

The chain-link fence around the new luxury condo development on the Green in Morristown is alive with people whose beauty is only skin deep...

Out with the old at a condo development under construction...

This Jersey City brownstone has quite a stoop to conquer tomorrow night...

I took this picture in Jersey City on October 13, and the display had already been up for awhile...

Renovations often look worse for a long time before they start to look better...

Don't know why these were hanging up, and my bad for not asking. But they sure introduced a sober note as the tumblers tumbled and the agitators agitated and the people folded their laundry...

Well, yes, I was...

Drove by this panel truck the other day, and snapped this picture. Mondrian, eat your heart out...

Yesterday's commute was a bear. Traffic bumper to bumper for a mile or more, from 280 to 80 to 287. About a 30-minute delay, most of it spent not moving at all. The only thing to do--for me, anyway--was reach for the camera and roll down a window...

The front of this shoe repairman's shop was blocked off for reconstruction of the building's facade, so all customers were directed to the back...

Can't quite make out the name of this painting company, but wonder how they got an old mailbox to use? It sure isn't an official one...

After almost a year of shopping, dithering, shopping, finding reasons not to buy, shopping some more, flirting with Cash for Clunkers, backing off, brooding, and finally buying (well, leasing), we got a new car last week. Now, in addition to pinching pennies, I am pinching myself...

The Spirit Cruise boats pull in to Chelsea Piers...

This boot was made for walking, and that's just what it did. It stepped into the concrete, left a mark that can't be hid...

Where 18-wheel cowboys corral their 10-wheel mounts...

Anyone remember Mister Magoo (whose voice was Jim Backus)? Or am I dating myself? The latter, I know. Anyway, this one's for him...

Just a few hundred yards from the Lincoln Park Driving Range in Jersey City, Duncan Avenue dead ends at the Hackensack River, just above where it and the Passaic River empty into Newark Bay. It's quite a sight...

I recently met fellow photographer (though he's a pro) and golfer (though he's a low-handicapper) Chris Lane at what may be the funkiest driving range I've ever hit balls at--On Route 440 in Jersey City, with a backdrop no other driving range can claim--the Pulaski Skyway...

So I was walking down Brackett Street in Portland, Maine, last week, when I stopped to photograph an interesting sandwich of houses...

During the four days I spent in Portland, Maine last week, I noticed that all the electric meters are on the outside of the houses, which in the neighborhood (near Longfellow Square) where I was staying were all small, multi-family dwellings...

I mean "fishin'" figuratively, in that the only thing I cast was a credit card, but I did eat a lot of seafood during my four days in Maine. If you're up in Kennebunkport...

Plain Sight will take a breather as I head to Portland, Maine for a family wedding and a few days of R&R. Back Wednesday, Sept. 2. Meanwhile, a few vacationy images...

...there's a way (to make a bad pun). And not even an accurate one, since the theme of this junkyard in Jersey City is old tires, not wheels. For a look at a really big wheel, um, tire, click...

Behind a bed & breakfast in Great Barrington, Mass., I came across this scene. which went poof about 15 minutes later when a car parked right in front of the sheet of glass...

I said Tuesday's group of hot rod pictures would be the last. Well, I lied...

We bid a fond farewell to the Morristown hot rod rally with these pictures...

When we left Tony Gaglio yesterday, he had sold his beloved 1951 purple Mercury Monarch, missed it so much he asked the buyer to sell it back to him, and had been turned down flat. Now for the rest of the story...

Tony Gaglio loved his 1951 Mercury. Then, in a moment of weakness, he succumbed to a generous offer for the car, and rashly sold it. He went out and bought a 1949 Merc', and he had a lot of work done on it in an attempt to duplicate the feel of his treasured '51. "But I just couldn't get it the way I wanted it," he says. So then...

Hot rodders are very touchy about certain things, and about their basic convictions wear their hearts on their sleeves, or rather their windows, spare tire covers, and saddle bags.

Details, details. Hot rods are all about the details. Continuing yesterday's coverage of a hot rod rally on the Green in Morristown...

A passel of hot rods, chrome exhaust pipes rumbling, ringed the Morristown Green last week for a show and tell. Plain Sight was there...

Over the weekend, Plain Sight looked up at the elevated entrance to a plumbing supply store. As promised, here is the view from the other side...

Sustainable, shmainable. At the end of the day, or even before, my eye is drawn to what my eye is drawn to. And, yes, I found it at the Griggstown Quail Farm during the Sustenance Events fundraiser for Slow Food New Jersey. My kind of sustenance...

Margaret Noon's Sustenance Events company recenty held a benefit for the New Jersey Slow Food movement at the Griggstown Quail Farm, near Princeton. Prior to an excellent four-course dinner under a white tent in a vast grassy field, the patrons received a tour of the farm and were introduced to some of its feathered inhabitants...

I don't have a thing for FedEx trucks, but something about this one caught my eye while the driver was making a delivery...

Kathryn Bigelow's riveting movie, The Hurt Locker, about a U.S. Army bomb squad in Iraq, has the verisimilitude of a documentary. The title is bomb squad slang for the world of pain the soldiers will be in if they fail to "clear" one of the roadside improvised explosive devices they spend their days tracking down and disarming.

Somewhat closer to home, I visited another, much milder kind of hurt locker...

At the center of town, the clock above a bank is beautiful. So what if it doesn't work...

Odd to peel the whole banana before taking a bite, especially a trombone of a banana like this one, unless you were going to slice it into cornflakes or something. But whatever works.

Having finished his dough, master pizza chef Antonino Esposito, visiting restaurant A Mano in Ridgewood from Naples, Italy, demonstrated the correct way to turn a bowl full of whole peeled Italian tomatoes (pomodoro) into sauce for his classic Neapolitan-style pizza...

Antonino Esposito, a star of the Food Network in Italy and a renowned pizza chef of the style practiced in Naples, gave a demonstration at A Mano in Ridgewood yesterday...

On a recent trip to the zoo, the lions and zebras gazed out from soda dispensers--and a young father entertained his baby in a stroller with a green serpent...

George Washington was embroiled in conversation with Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette while at their feet a child of the future was taking notes...

Walking down the street I passed a variety store with an odd juxtaposition in the window...

When you're in Union, there is only one place to go for hot dogs--the Galloping Hill Inn. No matter that it isn't really an inn. It looks more like a diner with a big takeout area in the back, which is where the action is.

Where two lumbering old machines go to rust away, unless someone should want to call them out of retirement, the Mets, for example...

A side street, a patch of green, and late afternoon sun...

You can find all manner of things here, but first you have to pay your respects to the owl...

They say you should never look at a restaurant's kitchen if you want to feel good about eating there.

But what about the back of a restaurant?

This space heater on a restaurant patio is just hanging out this summer, not doing any work for the next couple of months as flowers bloom beside it...

At an auto body shop, this broken construction block seemed to beckon me into its tucked-away temple...

On an office window sill, a shrine to pastimes...

Oh, the compromising positions you get into working on your car...

..if you violate these rules.

I was walking from the parking lot to the office when I noticed, in the middle of the sidewalk, this neat, perfectly round mound with a tiny hole in the middle. It had not been there the day before. Strangely, not an ant in sight...

Even in the shadows, he catches your eye...

Here's how it's done in Jersey City...

Ever wonder what Santa's elves do in the off-season?

Where these signs of the times go when the market is slow?

We pulled into this unpromising station for a tank of gas, and while it was pumping, my wife found three stylish straw sunhats inside...

From this vantage point a block away, with an interestingly cordoned motorcycle in the foreground, yes you can...

Through these portals pass people hungry for Mexican food...

At a newly renovated car wash in Verona, this tableau of American values...

My cat is so old, in people years, that he should be playing pinochle in Miami Beach. Here is what the vet said is ailing him...

Okay, that kind of joke probably was not what this youngster was telling. But just after school in downtown Jersey City, she held her audience rapt for at least a minute after this picture was taken...

At this pig roast, they served some mighty fine swine, making hogs of us all...

I have a series of pictures I call "Souls Have Shapes." The title comes from the first stanza of a poem, "My Sisters," by Stanley Kunitz:

Who whispered, souls have shapes?/ So does the wind, I say./ But I don't know,/ I only feel things blow.

Most of you are too young to remember this song by the J. Geils Band, but it was a hit when I was in college in Boston, which is where the band is from. I hadn't thought of the song or the band until just now, when I sat down to post today's Plain Sight picture...

Anyone recruiting for the U.S. Olympic weightlifting team might want to track this fellow down...

All of us see things every day that we take for granted will look exactly the same tomorrow. But as I like to say, still life never sleeps.

Sometimes I just like to stare at the evidence...

My wife and I are heading to Connecticut this weekend to watch our son, Michael, graduate from Wesleyan on Sunday. I am taking off in another sense, too. Michael spent a few days on Cape Cod with friends recently, and he emailed me this photograph he took in an alley near where they were staying. Check it out. The kid's got an eye, and a sensibility.

Until yesterday and today, spring looked and felt a lot like what you see here. Click below to see full picture...

Maybe it's a vestige of boyhood, but I'm a sucker for a backhoe, with its digging tools fore and aft and its cockpit full of levers. And especially so when juxtaposed against something interesting, as here...

I don't know about you, but I feel better knowing the person drawing my blood is wearing a latex-free, powder-free, ambidextrous, Med Pride vinyl examination glove and has a little play sunflower attached to her station.

One thing I like about blood tests--probably the only thing--is the colorful paraphernalia, especially the specimen vials with their color-coded caps and mysterious preservative gel at the round end...

Awaiting the tourniquet and needle for a blood test, I did what anyone with a camera would do--look for pictures.

Catch 'em while you can. The dogwood blossoms will be on the ground before you can bark up the wrong tree.

A vacant storefront gets a makeover, here in the early stages of the process...

In the lobby of a busy hotel, a dark ascent to a landing in the sun...

Santa has his sleigh, landscapers have their trailers. It seems, now that it's May, the landscapers make as many stops as Santa does on Christmas Eve. Except reindeer don't create a racket like edgers, leaf blowers, shredders and riding mowers do.

Come to think of it, do reindeer make any noise at all? They would probably trim the grass free of charge, and the way the temperature has been, it's not too warm for them.

At Steel Pier in Atlantic City, a vendor dispenses Boardwalk vittles...

Why risk spilling soup on a beautiful pair of boots? Instead, they rest atop a locker in a  restaurant's back room until the employee's shift ends.

Late afternoon sun does something even for entrances not ready for their closeup...

If on the inside it looks like a diner, serves like a diner, charges like a diner and satisfies like a diner, but occupies just part of a plain brick building on a street corner in Cape May, it is a diner, and a darn good one at that.

Before there was SPF, there were these...

There's more to the peninsula that is Cape May County than the Wildwoods and Cape May. Drive northwest from Cape May and you find yourself among the towns facing the Delaware Bay...

And so we come to the end of our series on the pre-season amusement park, shot at Morey's Piers in Wildwood. We close with one of the most iconic of all rides...

Through these portals at Morey's Piers pass Curly Fries, made with fresh potatoes. In the heat of midsummer, the aroma alone is worth the trip.

I loved these as a little kid, but even then it irked me that no matter what I did with the steering wheel the car continued to move mulishly in the same plodding circle.

What goes up must come down, whether it's the roller coaster or the metal weight that, if you're strong enough, rings the bell when you slam the sledgehammer down.

Step right up and buy a ticket to ride...once Morey's Piers opens for the season, that is.

Morey's Piers in Wildwood, before the season opens--silent, still, pristine...

Stillness is even more still in a place that is the antithesis of still--an amusement park.

Here the first in a series of pictures taken walking around Morey's Piers in Wildwood before it opens for the season.

Ah, the robin's chirp, the daffodil's bloom, the leaf blower's ceaseless whine. A sure sign of spring is the return of landscapers' trucks to suburban neighborhoods, gathering up winter's flotsam and jetsam...

In today's resonant finale, we look back at the stairwell and all the neatly hung household cleaning implements it contains, each a tiny soul awaiting its moment in the schmutz...

In today's exciting episode, we reach the top of the stairs and look back...

Friends in Long Branch have just moved into their first home—a beautifui and cozy one in Craftsman style. One of my favorite parts of the house is the back stairs from the basement to the kitchen.

Assisted living and better nursing homes make these the good old days for many elderly Jerseyans...

Sometimes I just can't resist traffic cones, especially errant ones. I cropped them out of this thumbnail, so you'll just have to click to the full picture to see them.

In the laundry room of a home in Long Branch, this tableau brought to mind an ocean liner and its escorts, a sovereign and its retainers...

A day at the dentist. Sip, swirl, spit. Ptooey in pink...

Vacant stores are an unfortunate sign of the times as unemployment hits a scary 8.2% in New Jersey...

Excessive cuteness makes my teeth hurt, but in this case my tooth already hurt for another reason, and I found the tableau in the dentist's examining room amusing.

I keep my camera on the passenger seat of my car just in case I see something at a red light. I often do.

Pictures that require shooting out the driver's window are the easiest. Shooting through the windshield is trickier. Hardest is shooting through the passenger window, as here...

Rarely does a building look as made from the kind of blocks I used to play with as a kid as this one does...

Yesterday's late afternoon sun begged to be beheld and basked in, and on St. Patrick's Day what better place than by a bright green door?

I drove by the body shop to see about getting my 20-year-old BMW repainted, but they were closed. No problem, I had my 40D with me...

It served me well for half a century, but when it comes to sore molars, the squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease, it gets the hook...

Plain Sight's ten-photograph series on a trip through the car wash concludes with a lone figure waiting for her vehicle...

All good things come to an end, including the drag line at the car wash...

Having your car washed is an old-fashioned pleasure in at least two ways: it's a mechanical process (you can actually watch what's happening step-by-step, as opposed to the invisibility, the inscutability of digital), and it requires manual labor by human beings at the beginning and end of the process. For example, the initial drying...

I originally promised six Wash Cycle pictures, but hey, I seem to be on a roll, so it's on to bonus time.

In today's Plain Sight, midway through the tunnel of scrub at Palace Car Wash in Montclair, we encounter...the dancing sponges!

One of the pleasures of having your car washed is that the process has a distinct beginning, middle and end, like life itself. Watching your car inch through that tunnel of scrub, with its fulsome sprays and blinking lights, and emerge in the sunshine dripping as from a baptism, is to participate in a kind of secular born-again ritual.

Click to see whole picture...

,,,to bring you a snowstorm. We'll get back to The Wash Cycle 5 when cars start lining up outside car washes again.

Today we move from clothing to cars. First, the residue of brisk business paints the pavement.

Village Laundry in Upper Montclair has some serious hangups.

Who says a laundromat can't venture into the deep waters of interior decoration?

The entrance to Village Laundry in Upper Montclair, seen from within, begins Plain Sight's six-part series on two very different sudsing spots.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner has his version, which has been criticized as vague, and so does this Montclair hardware store. Its version is not vague so much as contradictory.

click next line to see full picture...

Be it ever so humble, a table and chairs on the front porch is still pretty inviting.

Was Christo in Morristown last week?

It was a rush to the bottom as two leaders met behind the Saunders Hardware Store in Upper Montclair.

My aches and pains are nothing compared to those this man unkinks in my 20-year-old BMW, whose 189,000 miles dwarf even the large number of annums on my odometer.

On a sunny winter day you can see slush-spattered vehicles lining up halfway down the block to be vaccumed, hosed, blow-dried and buffed. No coins please. Leave a greenback in the old-fashioned mail box strategically placed within reach as you step out the exit and head toward your still-dripping mount.

Johnny's in the basement, mixing up the medicine...Today's picture (the whole image, not the thumbnail here) reminds me of that line from Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." It wasn't the basement or the same kind of medicine, but it was strong stuff.

Just a random piece of road near Chatham, but with snow falling and the branches sheathed in crystal kind of beautiful.

Two squat brick buildings inject autumnal color into a gray-and-white scene behind locked chain-link gates.

The Magley real estate office in Chatham, and its brethren in the background, inject blocks of color into a gray and white world.

Another day, another TV interview promoting our February "Recession Pricing" restaurant issue. Evidently it takes someone with a ladder to do the dishes at WMBC-TV in West Caldwell.

They don't call it cable TV for nothing.

No excuse for tardiness here...

I've been making the rounds of television stations lately, talking about our February Dining issue. This was the studio at Time Warner Cable in Palisades Park.

The view from inside a storage closet at the Pierro Gallery in South Orange. What was I doing in a storage closet at the Pierro Gallery in South Orange? You'll have to click to find out.

In what untrammeled part of the state was this snowy landscape photographed?

The NJM editorial staff convened at the Grasshopper off the Green pub, just down the block from our Morristown offices, to witness history and eat lunch.

In Meadowland Park in South Orange, a lone spot of green keeps the hardy happy.

If you're like me, you never walk past a pickup truck without taking a peek at what's in the bed. You see some  interesting things that way.

What I did on my winter vacation--browsed the big open-air Albert Cuypmarkt in Amsterdam. That would be well east of the Holland Tunnel...in Holland, where this Jersey Boy felt right at home

Just back from a week's vacation in Amsterdam, where I found one ageless American icon ringing a Dutch bell.

Plain Sight, a Jersey Photo Blog, first blinked its eye at the world on Wed, Apr 23.

To celebrate its first calendar year--and the fact that I am on vacation until Monday, January 12--here is a slideshow of some of my favorite images, drawn from the more than 200 pictures I posted in 2008.

The scene on Myrtle Avenue in Montclair late during a recent filming of a commercial at one of the gracious old homes where production companies like to shoot commercials and the residents are paid very well and everything is put back together afterward better than it ever was beforehand. Sweet deal.

Last week, before the snow melted, I came across this pickup truck parked in front of one of Morristown's vintage homes. The truck itself, or the gas pumping apparatus on it, was itself kind of vintage.

The gang's all here. Now, can we get 56 eyelids open at the same time, with 28 eyeballs looking into the lens?

How to photograph 28 people in one living room at my family's annual Hanukah party.

Through this door pass students in thrall to the classical masks.

Actress Amanda Bynes has a hang up in the Waldwick High School cafeteria.

Walking along Glenridge Avenue in Montclair, I stopped to enjoy the geometry of storefronts.

It's rare to see a vacant lot in the thickly settled northern suburbs anymore. When you do see one, the contrast between something and nothing is striking.

Yes, right in downtown Montclair, outside the Wellmont Theater. Residents are peeved that the trailers eat up parking spaces, and they have a case. But from a photographer's point of view, the trailers are kind of cool.

In this age of personal pan pizzas,  personal digital assistants and Smart Cars barely bigger than a suitcase, the mini-bulldozer has become a construction site mascot.

Though the Wellmont Theater in Montclair has been open more than a month, renovation mop-up remains.

I'm glad I happened by before the clean-up, because the search for order in disorder is one of photography's great pleasures.

At a lonely table for one, late at a wedding in Long Branch, burning the candle literally at one end, figuratively at both.

Talk about a windshield filler. Such is the view from the driver's seat as I sat behind a dump truck at a red light in West Orange.

I've seen them in driveways, but I didn't know quite how those Portable On Demand Storage bins were dropped off and picked up until I found myself behind a PODS truck at a traffic light in Morristown.

Is it fair to shower a man with congratulatory confetti when he is the one who has to clean it up?

What's a nice boy from New Jersey doing dreaming of England at the end of Thanksgiving weekend?

String and a hook make the last roundup for a passel of bacalao at Corrado's in Clifton.

...doesn't mean you're safe on Thanksgiving. Especially at Corrado's in Clifton.

After the chafing dishes have been swept away, the wedding cake has been cut and the crowd has migrated to the dance floor, leave it to Mr. Lugubrious to find an altar of conjugal emptiness.

A wedding in Long Branch brings to mind John Updike's wonderful brief essay, "Women Dancing."

A Morristown alley, a brick-and-mortar relic and a new automobile -- perfect together.

An auto repair shop takes on a Raymond Chandler aura under glancing headlights.

The royal road to the unconscious? Not quite, but a certain old-fashioned dignity, middle-class grandeur, Hollywood's red carpet transposed to a minor key on a quiet side street in Montclair...

The haphazard leftovers of urban planning, or the lack of it. But at least it's green.

Strange things you see while waiting in the examining room.

I don't mean this cute little kid, and I'm not casting aspersions on our praiseworthy Top Docs, either. But click and I think you will agree with my characterization.

It may seem I'm speaking in tongues, but sadly  I'm simply succumbing to sophomoric silliness (and my.soft spot for same starting sounds, aka alliteration).

Yesterday's plain sight was Funnel Alley. Reverse that and you have today's Plain Sight.

How many shapes do alleys come in? Has there ever been one exactly like this?

A moment of silence for a piece of summer furniture--dashed, wet and alone, out of sorts and out of season. I'm getting misty-eyed. Or is that the rain?

If the sign looks like this, you haven't lost, you've won. Buon appetito!

click "read the rest of this post" to see full picture.

Metal-framed, arch-shaped storage tents are becoming more common, but to me there is still something exotic and mysterious about them. They have an almost Christo meets Joe Sixpack quality.

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On the bulletin board, behind a coat rack, at a company in Cedar Knolls, Morris County.

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for leaving my camera at home during a quick stop at my mechanic's place in Caldwell to drop off my car. All I had with me was my brand new iPhone.

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Some pictures I take I know why I like. Some I can only hazard a guess. This is one of those.

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I was interviewed at a New Jersey radio station earlier this month, and it brought back memories of my days (make that nights, late nights) hosting a jazz show on WBUR-FM, the Boston University NPR affiliate, when I was in college.

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Some have already folded their canopies for the season, others will end the last weekend of this month. But a few continue into November. And at least two go year 'round.

An oasis in a parking lot, a place to sit and eat and watch the ivy twine.

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The TV series had drama and suspense. This wire has mystery.

...What the back of a garden center looks like?

Neither have I.

That is, until I accidentally wandered into one....

Soon every front porch will have its own organic gargoyle sporting the only gap-toothed grins that don't need orthodonture.

15,000 pounds of porgies, fresh out of Casco Bay, off Portland, Maine, are trucked to a warehouse on Custom House Wharf in Portland, where they will become lobster bait--and seagull supper.

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Rush hour traffic jams on I-287 are good for at least one thing...

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My wife and I pulled into the parking lot of Sickles Market in Little Silver 15 minutes before it closed on Sunday evening.

In July, NJM wrote about the 100th anniversary of this immaculate, family-run farm, food market and plant nursery (click here to read the story). Now at last was my chance to see it. But as we pulled into a parking spot, the descending sun announced a 15-minute special of its own.

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Across the street from Holsten's, where Tony Soprano went for his last double dip, stands a sunny corner storefront where I take my dry cleaning and have pants taken in or let out, depending on how many Holsten's visits I've recently racked up or been able to resist..

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Pushing past the shrubs, we emerged on the rocks of Trundy Point, overlooking Casco Bay, just south of Portland, Maine.

Fond as I am of the Jersey Shore, I had to admit, "We're not in the Garden State anymore."

Leaving the road, we crossed a bit of sandy beach and climbed a rocky outcrop thickly covered with wild berry bushes and shrubbery. A narrow path led toward a break in the bushes, beyond which Casco Bay spread to the ocean under a dramatic sky.

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Plain Sight is back in the enveloping embrace, or clutches, of home. As promised, or warned, a few  visual mementoes of my trip to Portland, Maine...

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Plain Sight is on vacation, 340 miles from New Jersey, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

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Plain Sight is loading the big rig for a small trip.

Actually, it will be a small rig, but a big trip.

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A secular altar tilted at the sun...

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Incandescent bulbs in the sunlight, a milky way of the midway...

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Yesterday, Plain Sight looked into the mirror-smooth surface of a concert tour bus parked in Morristown. Today, what I saw when I aimed the camera in the other direction.

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The side of this concert tour bus reflected its mirror reflecting the sky and a few down to Earth things as well.

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I was walking to my car in a parking lot on Church Street in Montclair. I have parked in this lot hundreds of times, but each time I look at the same white brick wall to see how the light is hitting it and whether something, in some way, is new.

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The sun was low in the sky when I pulled into Hot Dog Johnny's, the roadfood landmark on Route 46 in Buttzville, a few miles east of the Delaware River in Warren County.

The sun cast an orange glow over the green and orange awning, the several Harleys in the parking lot and the forearm of the young man in the passenger seat of the car next to mine.

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It depends on which side of the point-and-shoot you're on.

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On a bench on the promenade at Pier Village in Long Branch, a mother and daughter had a heart-to-heart while the menfolk did what menfolk do, at least if you ask the women.

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As seasonal as the weekenders who bask beneath them, palm trees on the Jersey Shore have to be replanted each summer, just ahead of the snowbirds who follow them north.

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My stroll up the Long Branch boardwalk next brought me to a bench where a young woman in a funny hat was taking pictures of her husband and twin boys as they munched on floppy white bread sandwiches. Clouds had covered the sun, but their radiance was undimmed.

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As I passed the refreshment stand (see yesterday's Plain Sight) and continued my stroll up the Long Branch boardwalk, a boy ran after me, waving a white piece of paper...

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Justine Pecora, a sophomore at Caldwell College, has spent the summer selling soft pretzels and ice cream and drinks and candy to people on the Long Branch boardwalk. It's a hard job, but there are compensations...

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Sleep on a park bench, even at high noon, and a cop is likely to tap you on the shoulder and tell you to move on.

Do the same thing on the boardwalk and you are left to your sweet dreams...

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You feel you will mess with the dude's vibe if you ask him to okay your beach badge.

Skateboarders get in free if they can grind the handrail alongside the stairs to the beach.

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While this fellow took the measure of the waves, two young women stood on the boardwalk, lost in thought.

Click below to see full picture.

And nearly wordless.

Join me tonight, Sat Aug 9, between 5 and 10 pm, for the opening reception of the new photography exhibit at Andy Foster's Gallery 51 in Montclair.

I'm in the show along with five other photographers, all interesting and accomplished.

Thank you gift for anyone who mentions PLAIN SIGHT....

Once the hygienist lowers you to the horizontal, there is not much to look at other than the dental hygienist herself (very rude) or the dental light shining above your head....

When I say I take my camera everywhere, I mean everywhere, even to the dentist's office.

You have a lot of time of your hands when the hygienist goes to process the digital x-rays. But if those hands are holding a camera...

After the wind and rain, the snake dance in Montclair...

For me, tarps are all the same yet all different.

This one involves a construction site in Morristown. Construction sites have fascinated me since I was a boy.

Somewhere around the turn of the millenium the blue polyethylene tarp became the universal symbol of suburban exterior home improvement. Now every house painter is a pocket Christo.

It's fine by me. I like my McMansions wrapped.

Yesterday's Plain Sight left off with a question:

What does the dancing frankfurter Doo-Wop Doggy have in common with the original "Blonde Bombshell," Jean Harlow?

No sequins on his buns, but this dude was definitely rockin' , even if it was one of the wurst Elvis impersonations ever.

At last it can be told--or, rather, it has to be, because I promised no more digressions.

Back on Thursday, I was taking pictures of an interesting truck in a parking lot in Morristown when I heard a stern voice say, "Can I Help You?"

Here, finally, is what happened next...

Yesterday's post was about taking pictures of an interesting truck in Morristown and being halted by the words, "Can I help you?"

That led to a digression about a similar but darker tale--from Jersey City in the early 1980's--of photographing what I realized too late was a Mob hangout. The post grew too long to return to the Morristown incident.

So now, to borrow a phrase from Paul Harvey, a broadcaster whose voice could dramatize the peeling of a banana, here is "The rest of the story..."

WARNING: This post includes a photograph that almost got me arrested.

As a guy who takes pictures wherever he goes--which is to say not on assignment and not by invitation, though also not by trespassing--I hear these words from time to time.

"Can I help you?" is, of course, a polite way of saying, "Who the hell do you think you are taking pictures of my [fill in the blank]?"

I heard them again this morning.

A hard rain is gonna fall, said the weather forecast. And it did. At Ploch's Garden Center in Clifton, the flowers took it on the chin.

Hot night. Where is it cool?

In a diner on Broad Avenue in Palisades Park.

Where is it cooler?

Much of what you are about to see are known in baking as "laminated pastries."

Sounds like something you would break a tooth on but could leave out in the rain for weeks.

The truth, in this case, may not set you free, but it will melt in your mouth.

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) is the story of a donkey.

It is one of the most sad and strangely beautiful movies I have ever seen. It was written and directed by the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, who Roger Ebert once called "a saint of the cinema."

I love all Bresson's movies, but Balthazar may be my favorite. (It's on Netflix.)

The movie has nothing to do with Balthazar Bakery, Plain Sight's tour of which continues today. But it gives me a rare excuse to mention this haunting movie filled with tenderness and cruelty and the unforgettable sound of one forlorn donkey (named Balthazar) braying.

Whenever I am in Englewood, or just passing by on Route 4, if I can steal a few moments I try to stop at Balthazar on South Dean Street. There you will find both retail shop and the facility (visible through the glass walls of the retail shop) where all their superlative breads, breakfast pastries, and desserts are baked.

Tonight is baseball's All-Star Game, signalling the halfway point of the season. When you see store signs like this one, does it mean that summer is half over?

Many of the pictures I've taken over the years are of things that don't move. Landscapes or still lifes. But they do change. Sometimes overnight.

Friday's Plain Sight picture was a case in point.

I park my car in the same Morristown municipal parking lot--10J--every day, and usually in the same spot.

But when I left work and arrived at my car at--just a sec, I'll look up the EXIF information--exactly 6:48:22 p.m., it didn't look the way it usually does.

Lots of places are fun to traipse around after a storm. Parks are great, especially when it's foggy. Playgrounds can be magical.

But one of my favorites is construction sites.

In a doctor's examining room in Hackensack yesterday, this hierarchy of objects, on a counter top, isolated from everything else...

"Journey to Tuscany," an exhibit of recent photos by Highland Park artist Mark Chernin, will open at The Heldrich Hotel in New Brunswick this Friday from 6 to 8 pm.

Would this be Table Hopping if there were only visuals, no victuals?

Not on your life!

On the Fifth of July, we drove up to Rhode Island to visit my mom. Drove home the same night.

But wherever you go, there you are.

Put another way, photography is both discovery and recognition.

A few pictures I brought back from my trip...

Yes, it's true. New Jersey Monthly editors occasionally leave the state, but only when absolutely necessary--in my case, Fourth of July weekend--and only after mounting flashing neon signs on our cars reading, "New Jersey and You: Perfect Together!" or "Have you eaten a Jersey tomato lately?"

See what a stir that caused outside Warwick, Rhode Island.

What could be more American than "We deliver"?

Only what surrounds it in this picture.

On this Independence Day, as every day, the Stars and Stripes may turn up anywhere, even in nooks and crannies.

It's flag week at Plain Sight. Three days to the Fourth.

This flag nearly made me shudder when I saw it.

It wasn't waving as I passed by the other day, at the intersection of Bloomfield Avenue, Fairfield Avenue, and Clinton Road in Caldwell. The air was so calm and humid, the flag wasn't even wavering.

But it will, and soon enough to remind us the fourth arrives in four days.

Standing in front of something with a camera in your hands is no time to rationalize why you are drawn to it.

That can come later, when you decide whether the picture worked--that is, whether it transfers to two dimensions something of what you experienced in three (plus time.)

But that still doesn't explain why you were drawn to it.

Just off Bergenline Avenue in Union City, the sun startled me, pushing forward this assemblage of discarded objects against a backdrop of unexpected swimming pool colors.

Standing today in a spotless room stocked with vital fluids and equipment for delivering them, I had a flashback.

Just five and a half weeks ago, I spent several hours in a strangely similar room, having essential fluids dripped into my body from plastic packs hung from prongs on metal poles just like you see here.

It may not be the last roundup, but it does feel like the last for the day.

Git along little downtown Montclair dogies.

Red light. Montclair.

Construction curtains looming like a hull with cockeyed portholes.

I've always loved the tiny backyards of Shore houses---just big enough for a picnic table with an umbrella, a charcoal grill and a clothesline you have to duck under.

But even more tranquil to me are the paved spaces between the houses..

I was thinking it was time to head home when the streetlights came on. And then the yellow lights in the brick building.

I took the hint.

It was beginning to get dark. Something flickering like a cartoon caught my eye from the corner of a demolished room. It sucked in the last bit of sun, glinting above the cathedral on the west side of the demolition site.

Walking around the site, I came to a kind of loading dock.

Not all parts of the Summit site are being demolished. Some are just undergoing a late spring cleaning.

Last week I previewed a visit to an institutional site in Summit where an old wing of a building is being torn down. The question then and now is, can you identify the site?

Unofficial staff mascot and summer intern Roscoe J. Cat is ready for his close up. Keep an eye peeled for him over the next couple of weeks in Editor's Picks.

Hard job selling insurance ten feet off the ground, day after day.

Aside from the stiff neck, the poor creature can't even turn around to locate the source of that powerful aroma of salami just 20 yards behind him on Branford Place in Newark.

As the New Jersey National Guard gears up for its biggest foreign deployment since World War II, Hobby's Deli in Newark is gearing up to support them. You can help.

Most thumbnails, unlike the one at left, show you the complete picture, except smaller.

The daily Plain Sight thumbnail is different. It's always a detail cropped from the full picture. Today's thumbnail represents only about two or three percent of the entire picture.

To see the whole thing, click below.

Eastern Oil on Bloomfield Avenue in Montclair is known for its low prices and its discounts for cash. Cars are always maneuvering around each other like baby water buffalo to sidle up to  the mama pumps.

But yesterday morning, only four of Eastern's twelve nozzles had any gas to give.

Three days of temperatures in and above the 90's--with one more to go, today.

Brutal.

Where to escape the down-pounding heat?

Down the Shore.

Hybrid cars are all the rage, so why not try a different kind of hybrid, one combining photographs and the spirit of two popular children's books? Namely....

The Where's Waldo? series by Martin Handford (which you don't have to be a child to enjoy) and The Everywhere Cat, a 1970 classic by William Corbin and Consuelo Joems.

In coming weeks look for Roscoe J. Cat here in Plain Sight and also on the right side of this page, in Editor's Picks. Can you find him today?

Was it something in the water at the Skyway Diner? Nope.

Did the glaring sun cause a flashback to late Beatles songs? (Before it became associated with heartburn, didn't acid-reflux mean a psychedlic flashback you felt in your gut? Maybe the transformation of the term is Janis Joplin's fault, for singing "take another little piece of my heart.")

No, I'm afraid the answer is I just went a little goofy.

Today we move indoors again, from the shelter of the black steel Pulaski Skyway to the, well, um, men's room of the Skyway Diner.

For some reason, this photograph makes me think of what Humphrey Bogart said to Ingrid Bergman in the last scene of Casablanca:

"It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.''

Like the Boardwalk, with its miles of herringbone wooden beams, the Pulaski Skyway, connecting Newark and Jersey City, offers seclusion and mystery under its miles of steel beams and concrete pillars.

Went for a haircut Saturday in Montclair.

Rain pelting the patio beyond the salon, but by the time I emerged so had the sun.

One wet magazine, though.

The clouds parted and the sun rained down on puddles.

Driving along First Street in Newark yesterday,

returning from a doctor's appointment,

came to a red light.

"In A Mellotone," a great 1939 Ellington tune, is also what I'm striving for today, on doctor's orders.

So without further ado, let's return to the subject this blog began with back in March.

In 2005, my father, Mel Levin, who was suffering from Alzheimer's, fell while walking with my mother, Roz, in their West Orange neighborhood.

He was not seriously injured, but he spent the next several days in confusion and pain in a room in St. Barnabus Hospital in Livingston.

...than to ever let a woman in my life!" I first heard that hilariously mysogynistic song from My Fair Lady when I was about eight and my parents brought home the soundtrack recording from the Broadway theater.

That minds could joke about going to the dentist only confirmed my sense that life was full of temptations and pitfalls I could barely imagine. Back then, shadows on my bedroom wall--let alone knowing I had a dentist's appointment the next day--could keep me awake for hours.

I made it through the first five days after my freak accident fairly well. I had what my doctors called a  "minor concussion," meaning I could expect several days or more of headaches and sleeplessness. Well, nothing unusual about that!

I was in my doctor's office in Springfield, shirt off, waiting for a checkup, when I realized I was not alone.

It's been a medical week, and car accidents offer few laughs.

So let's look at something really funny, like root canal.

Not from the patient's point of view, though nitrous oxide, novocaine and favorite CDs on the headphones do help.

But how does the endodontist keep a straight face?

"Paula" posted a question about whether I am still on speaking terms with my next-door neighbor, who backed into me with his SUV while I was mowing my lawn on Sunday, sending me to the hospital in an ambulance with my neck in a brace.

How this freak accident happened I attempted to describe in Tuesday and Wednesday's Plain Sight.

The answer to Paula's question is...

Luck is when you have been struck by a car backing down a driveway (see yesterday's post), suffered a mild concussion, a hairline skull fracture, various contusions and abrasions, and yet are not in such terrible shape that you can't look at your surroundings with interest.

No, this picture is not upside down. But if you are lying on your back on a gurney in a Level 1 Trauma Center, and your neck is in a brace, as mine was, about all you can do is tilt the camera up and backwards.

...it's rhubarb season.

Strawberries have their place, but their place is not with rhubarb.

I won't call it culinary cowardice, but the knee jerk reflex to dumb down the unique and refreshing tang of rhubarb, one of spring's greatest gifts, by combining it with strawberries turned to mush abuses both 'barb and berry.

Why do I have this thing about trucks? Not all trucks, just ones that for some reason arrest my attention. Like this one down the Shore, that I followed for a block or two until I could get close enough to take a picture.

Yes, May has been cool and rainy, with just a few gorgeous days, but we must keep things in perspective.

In a Morristown parking lot, an SUV sprouts fangs and sings, "I Am The Walrus."

It's a little unnerving to be stared at by the creature that will provide your dinner...

Maybe the water was too hot.

A Salvadoran restaurant just opened a block from our office. I went there for takeout at lunchtime Wednesday.

Ordered a guanabana shake and a pupusa, which is a Salvadoran tortilla, thicker than a pancake and filled with cheese, which melts as the tortilla is griddled. What to do while waiting?

Look at what's hidden in plain sight, of course.

The traffic and the drivers are one thing, but wilder yet is what lies just over the shoulder of our Jersey Interstate Highways.

One of my favorite places to contemplate nature is at the intersection of I-80 and I-280 in (approximately) Pine Brook, where traffic often slows to a crawl, making it easy to roll down a window and pull out the camera.

A few days ago, in posting some pictures from my bathroom series, "I'll Be Right Back...", I promised not to gross anyone out.

Though this picture has nothing to do with bathrooms, I cannot make that promise today.

How about all four?

Photography isn't always about seizing "the decisive moment" or even recognizing that one has just done so.

Sometimes it's about having the patience of a grazing animal or the stubborness of one that refuses to seek a greener pasture--just yet. The line between stubborn and dumb can be pretty thin, as we often see in our politics.

But whatever drives you on or holds you back can finally tumble you into clover. Which is how I wound up taking the photo I posted yesterday of a busboy sitting on a shoeshine stand in a men's room, thumbs flickering over his handheld device. (Oops, that doesn't sound right.)

A busboy found a good way to get off his feet as a long evening wound down Monday night at the Birchwood Manor in Whippany.

They're everywhere. Strange beings with serpent's heads, raising their steely necks above the rooftops of our cities and towns.

Run for your lives!

That's the title of a series of pictures I started in 2002. This picture was taken Friday during our visit to New Brunswick.

The full title of the series is, "I'll Be Right Back: Visits to Men's Rooms and Bathrooms."

I promise not to gross you out.

An interesting afternoon in New Brunswick with Rutgers University staff and archivists, who are helping us find material for our July cover story, THEN AND NOW.

But getting out of New Brunswick at 4 PM on a Friday on Route 18 South....

You'll see a lot of these as this blog continues--things that stop me, that seem to have a spirit, that I can stand in front of a long time, until I lose my concentration or feel that the kind and indulgent person waiting in the car may soon lose her patience.

Oil prices fell Wednesday, the AP reported, after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates and a government report said U.S. fuel supplies unexpectedly fell last week.

The most famous scarecrow of all time was Ray Bolger in The Wizard of Oz, but in these parts we have a bigger problem, geese, and are still trying to find effective ways of scaring them.

Windshield wipers were challenged throughout the day Monday, as were umbrellas, galoshes and all the rest of the stay-dry paraphrenalia.

From behind the wheel of my car, traffic looked like this...

Waiting for a takeout order is a good time to zone out, read a paper, or, if you're like me, start looking at one's surroundings closely and hopefully. I use the word in the old-fashioned sense. I will never give in on hopefully.

At about 100 paces from our office door, Anthony's Pizza and Pasta is not only the closest food shop to our office, but a good one, making fresh tasty subs. The looking around is also quite good.

Forsythia are in bloom. A stubborn plant, it heralds spring in its brassy garish way, flourishing where people want it, where they never wanted it, where no one remembers it even exists.

Pitted against neglect and decay, as here, it mocks our indifference to what we have left behind.

Raise your hand if you're against sprawl. Unruly, unchecked, unregulated growth. It's everywhere, it's stubborn, and it's in our face.

But at this time of year we are reminded of another type of sprawl, just as stubborn and in our face.

Bless its heart.

The poet William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand. Well, how about in a thingamajig on top of a rusty metal fence in Edgemont Park in Montclair?

A handsome coffee parlor named Greenberry's opened a few doors from our office on the Morristown Green over the winter. Dark wood panelling, comfy armchairs, friendly baristas, designer chocolates....sound familiar?

The Greenberry's chain started in Virginia in 1992, and Morristown is its first outpost in New Jersey. Their point of distinction seems to be that they don't overroast their coffee like a certain viral franchise we could name.

The photo you see here was not  taken at Greenberry's (heaven forbid), but at its polar opposite, a one-of-a-kind place around the corner called Jersey Boy Bagels.

With all due respect to Forrest Gump, a box of chocolates just can't compare to a pickup truck for that "you never know what you're gonna get" quality.

This one was parked in Wallington, a few blocks from a very good Polish restaurant, Krakus. (Have the pickle soup. Seriously.)

As you'll see as this photo blog continues, I love pickup trucks. Maybe because they have beds. This one was parked yesterday near our office in Morristown.

The telephone poles were taller than the trees in the new West Orange neighborhood my family moved to in 1963.