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Bubbly Street Cookie on Central Park South
I haven’t seen a Street Cookie in awhile… You know, the random object in the middle of the sidewalk that seems misplaced, weird or possessed. This is a Street Cookie because it story-tells with its image alone. An empty champagne bottle on swanky Central Park South. A statement of the surrounding real estate (it aint a 40-ounce). Was it a tourist who consumed it stumbling down the block to their hotel? Was it left by a silly, slightly overweight, over-tanned, under-age group of girls shouting from the sun-roof of a limo-Hummer? What was the consumer celebrating? New York New York? Wedding, prom, life, sorrow? What story landed that bottle directly in front of the tree? Was it planted there on purpose? It’s a Street Cookie, alright.
Rambo Street Cookie
Upper East Side, NYC September 2009
Don’t be fooled by the neighborhood. This sucker was waiting for me in a bush on posh Madison Avenue.
The sidewalks of Buenos Aires
A trip to Buenos Aires is what threw me to the Urban Odyssey side. The city’s sidewalks were the most impressionable character that I left with. Besides wondrous Street Cookie, the most memorable part of strolling down the sidewalks of Buenos Aires was the dog shit. It’s everywhere; brown little shrines left here and there. Their shapes were varied, from perfectly round droppings that made you think of spilled chocolate gumballs, and (even grosser, get ready), when it was smeared it reminded me of the dulce de leche found in almost every BA dessert. The sidewalks of Buenos Aires – continue reading …
Rainbow fish Street Cookie
Brooklyn Heights, NYC July 2009
Street Cookie didn’t do right by emerging from this sidewalk as a rainbow fish. How is it going to get around?
Alien Street Cookie Arrives in Inwood via Black Hole
This find was submitted by C-mixto in Inwood, NYC
Speaking of outer space, if this isn’t Street Cookie I don’t know what is. C-mixto submitted this photo reluctantly. He is not a fan of the Street Cookie thread, but was shaken by his find and might be a new believer. This is alien Street Cookie emerging from a black hole vortex. He came across it near Academy Street in Inwood.
Siciliano Street Cookie
Had my eye out for Street Cookie in Sicily. Surely in the land of Don Corleone Street Cookie would lurk. Spent a good deal of my excursions with a special eye on the sidewalk, looking for a face peering out from the concrete for some seemingly misplaced random object sitting lonely on the surface of the ground.
A true mafioso, Street Cookie was incognito. But I knew I found him in a market in the Sicilian city of Syracuse. Here he is: Siciliano Street Cookie – continue reading …
Street Cookie Legions: NYC Arrival
Watchers–check this shit out. Street Cookie has manifested itself on a NYC sidewalk pavement. Its NYC incarnation has a more local flavor, and it looks like Street Cookie had a rough night. Interdimensional travel must not be easy.
Cy and I passed this on Spring Street Sunday, tripping us both. He claimed to have witnessed the “drop off”, but really I know it’s Street Cookie’s work. Artist project (do I recall an artist who does this sort of thing?), voodoo or terrorist bomb? These are the three origins I considered as I nervously clicked away to provide you documentation.
Only a day later, when I recalled the doll’s haughty grin, did I realize it’s a legion of Street Cookie.
Watch out!
Street Cookie: Legions
This cookie isn’t going anywhere. It broke free from a sidewalk-concrete-other-dimension to speak to me with its demon eyes and herald in the arrival of this blog. It has the uncanny ability to haunt you once you set eyes on it. Street Cookie must come from the legion of demons that conjure strategized chaos. I unfortunately witnessed a fellow human being crack the other day, and the first thing that came to mind was this cookie. If any of you want to play a mean joke on me if I wind up in the looney bin one day- bring me a box of these cookies.
So here are some street cookie equivalents–characters or people that follow Street Cookie’s philosophy and spirit. Please add to this list!
V for Vendetta mask.
The Comedian’s pin from the Watchers (reflective of the Comedian himself)
Because LL says so: The Gingerbread Man from Shrek (who had a leg pulled off).
Imagine this image: little blonde haired girl on scooter rolling past Holy Name Church on Upper West Side, in a flowery spring dress to match the season and pink jelly sandals, with a skull mask over her face. Random, Twilight Zone shit that I’m not making up!
Street Cookie: Revelations
The street cookie I passed on a sidewalk of Buenos Aires has generated many theories. Divafish offered the scientific explanation that the red jelly is what holds the smiling face together while the rest of its fragile cookie frame crumbled to dust. LL offered a spiritual assessment on the state of the sidewalk cookie: twas karma that formed the cookie that way, and who are we to judge its form, and offer it any type of pity or praise? I delved deeper into what struck me so much about this cookie. I searched real hard why it demanded an explanation, where have I seen this cookie face before? I started to realize that it reminded me of a supernova. See its spiraling arms? For those who don’t know, a supernova is a stellar explosion, different than a nova, so take note JP and you’ll understand the origins of my name. A Nova is “a star that ejects some of its material in the form of a cloud and become more luminous in the process” (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn). So I’m in this Buenos Aires homey restaurant, trying to ignore the paintings on the wall of men with daggers knived into their hearts dripping with blood the same color of the red stew I’m being served (it’s a tango thing, I suppose). The man in the painting is almost smiling as his heart is being stabbed, an Argentinian Mona Lisa, and this reminds me of the cookie too. I left it at that, but six months later I’m still thinking of the cookie, whom I now assign celestial significance. And then the chasm of my nerdiness calls out, it whispers to me in a Yoda-like voice, You know where you’ve seen this street cookie before! Search your heart well… Dear readers, this cookie made an appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode 151, “Timescape”! Its origins are a lapse of temporal narcosis, time travel not being normal, when Captain Picard draws a smiley face in the cloud of a warp core breach as the Enterprise and a Romulan warbird are frozen in a state of absolute destruction.
So my readers, you’ve been subjected to a Trekkie moment, but now that I’ve given you more reflection on Street Cookie, I ask you for your words or pictures: have you ever seen a smiley face on something in the throes of chaos, catastrophe or cataclysm, a gesture utterly displaced from its apocalyptic surroundings?
Street Cookie
The discovery
Let’s start this off with what pushed this blog into script. One of those crazy moments where time slows down, as if to give you opportunity to observe something significant, or something you’re going to make significant. I passed by this cookie on a sidewalk in Buenos Aires, Argentina last year. Cy and I were on our way to a traditional eatery, Ña Serapia, one of those hole-in-the-wall eateries that scrape out delicious food from dimly lit kitchens and soiled pots. The cookie was just sitting there on the street all alone, not looking anything like a cookie at all. Imagine walking down the street and seeing two red eyes staring out at your from the pavement with a wicked smile. I’ve never done drugs but imagine this is the shit you’d see: a concrete demon, the sidewalk smiling at you like, “Awww shit!”.
Here’s what trips me about this cookie, besides how alone and unbothered it was to the crowds passing by: most of it is crushed (it’s cookie dust, really, not a cookie) except for its face! Physicists, engineers, detectives and smarty-pants: tell me how this cookie can be so crushed (look at it!) while its smiling face is intact? Not a crack, look at its cool smile. Why is this cookie still smiling when the rest of it is in shatters?
