When Train Riders Moved Away From Passenger, This Woman Held His Hand

“He needed someone to touch.”

02/11/2016 11:07 am ET | Updated Feb 11, 2016

• Elyse WanshelTrends Writer, The Huffington Post

A tiny bit of compassion can have a huge impact.

Two weeks ago, Ehab Taha, a 26-year-old from Canada, was riding public transit in Metro Vancouver when a large man he described on Facebook as “suffering from drug abuse and\or mental health issues” became aggressive in his train car.

The man was alarming fellow passengers “with erratic movements, cursing, shouting” until a 70-year-old woman decided to reach out and help him by extending her hand and grabbing his.

EHAB TAHA

“At the end, he said ‘Thanks, Grandma,’ and walked away,” Taha told HuffPost Canada.

The sweet gesture soothed the man. Eventually he sank to the floor of the train as tears flooded his eyes.

“It was quite incredible how much he calmed down in a split moment,” Taha toldHuffPost Canada. “It was the most touching thing I’ve ever seen.”

Moved by “the incredible display of humanity,” Taha snapped a picture of the two holding hands and posted it to Facebook.

“I spoke to the woman after this incident and she simply said, ‘I’m a mother and he needed someone to touch.’ And she started to cry,” he wrote in the caption for the photo.

Although the woman felt a great amount of empathy for the man, like most, she was initially petrified to interfere.

“She was very brave,” Taha hold HuffPost Canada. “She even mentioned that she thought about what would happen if he stabbed her with the pen — because he had one in his hand — but she said it was more important he didn’t feel alone.”

#metro_canada#subway#acts_of_kindness#ana_christy#beatnikhiway.com#drug_abusive

 

Old man, who was probably shrooming, terrorizes NYC subway with dildo

 

In News by Jamie Peck / April 8, 2015

Follow: @jamie_elizabeth

Many New Yorkers’ worst fears came to pass on Saturday when an elderly man perpetrated a dildo attack on a subway car full of unsuspecting passengers.

According to eyewitness Aymann Ismail, around 9 p.m. the penile terrorist, who appeared to be having a fairly good time already, boarded the train and whipped it out for some young men trying to take selfies with him:

An older man of indeterminate ethnic origin [but probably East Asian?] boarded the train at Atlantic Avenue; the man seemed “fucked up on some kind of drug,” loose-limbed and sloppy. Some young men sitting next to him began making fun of him. One of the dudes took out his phone to snap a selfie with the older guy. At that point, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a massive dildo. The young guys and other people nearby ran away, laughing.

Perhaps emboldened by this validation, he continued brandishing the large, flexible, black dildo:

The man then started waving the big black dong around, pointing it at people and pretending to jerk it off. The man also kept standing up and clenching his butt cheeks.

Finally, he developed a more advanced protocol to maximize the delight inflicted on each new wave of incoming train friends:

Every time the train pulled into a station, he’d put the dildo away, sit quietly, let people board, then whip it out and wave it around, startling the new passengers.

“It honestly doesn’t look like any dildo I’ve ever seen,” noted Animal’s house sex toy expert. Spooky.

While I don’t feel qualified to comment on the dildo’s potentially extraterrestrial origins, my extensive psychonautic background leads me to conclude that Dr. Dong here was shrooming his face off. There’s only one substance on this planet that produces just such a combination of feral giggling, sly strategizing, and generous desire to include those around you in your beautifully hilarious–if tragically ephemeral–world. Compare his stance and expression to that of an associate of mine after ingesting a known dose of psilocybin. In this man’s mind, he’s a wise elf on a journey to Arcadia, armed with only a magic snake to protect him.

God speed you, fair elf lord. May your quest be ever fruitful and may you not end up in central booking.

[Animal New York | Photo and GIF: Aymann Ismail]

seeing the subway

 

 

 

 

 

 
Subway-01.jpgByron Company, “Queensboro Tunnel” (1918 ), from the the Museum of the City of New York.

 

Seeing the Subway
Posted by Jessie Wender

Looking on Instagram, it’s hard not to see at least a picture a day from the New York City subway. Photographers armed with iPhones shoot from the hip, casually glancing at the screen of their phone or pushing in front of fellow-passengers to capture dancers on a moving train. The subway has long been a subject for photographers, from early anonymous photographs of its construction to images of passengers in repose, beautiful graffiti, homeless dwellers, the casual rider, and its majestic architecture. This week, we’re taking a look at pictures of the New York subway, often by artists with bodies of work devoted to the subject. Next week, we’ll look at underground systems around the world.
“Between 1938 and 1941 Evans photographed passengers in the New York City Subway with a camera cleverly hidden inside his coat,” according to the Metropolitan’s Web site. “With the focus and exposure of his 35mm Contax predetermined, Evans was completely free to attend to the transient expressions and conduct of his fellow passengers.” Evans said of photographing on the train: “These anonymous people who come and go in the cities and who move on the land; it is on what they look like now; what is in their faces and in the windows and the streets beside and around them, what they are wearing and what they are riding in, and how they are gesturing that we need to concentrate, consciously, with the camera.”
Subway-03.jpgStanley Kubrick, “Life and Love on the New York City Subway (Couple Sleeping on a Subway)” (1946)/Courtesy collections of the Museum of the City of New York.
“Stanley took thousands of images for Look Magazine between 1945 and 1950,” Phil Grosz, from SK Film Archives, told me. “He sold the first image at age sixteen.” The Museum of the City of New York writes, “Many of the shots are candid portraits of people seemingly unaware of any camera, perhaps indicating the use of some sort of spy or buttonhole camera.”
Subway-04.jpegEnrico Natali, from the book “New York Subway, 1960” published in by Nazraeli Press in association with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
“This photograph is from a series taken in the New York subway during a four-month period in 1960,” Natali told me. “At the time, although I worked professionally as a photographer, I didn’t take it seriously as a profession. I did it because it was fun. I had worked for Antron Bruehl, a high-end commercial photographer, where we did top-of-the-line advertising photographs. It was interesting, but, quite truthfully, I despised advertising and most of the people associated with it, most particularly the art directors. So I thought maybe photojournalism would be more to my taste, and decided to shoot a few stories and learn how to do it. Since I lived in the depths of Brooklyn and rode the subway to where I worked in Manhattan, it seemed reasonable to make the subway my first project. I became so involved in the work that for a time I all but lived in the subway. One night, looking over the photographs, I had the realization that they were larger than I was, that photography was my vocation, and America my subject.”
Subway-05.jpgJon Naar, “Times Square Shuttle” (1973), from the book “The Birth of Graffiti.”
“In the winter of 1972, I was assigned by Pentagram Design London to photograph a brochure on N.Y.C.,” Naar told me. “The hot topic was the spray-can-graffiti phenomenon, and I became the first professional photographer to document it. My ten-day shoot resulted in in the iconic book ‘The Faith of Graffiti,’ with an introduction by Norman Mailer.”
Subway-06.jpgMartha Cooper
“In the late seventies, I was working on a personal photo project documenting kids on the Lower East Side playing with toys they made from trash,” Cooper told me. “One boy showed me sketches in his notebook, and explained that he was practicing his nickname to paint on a wall. When I expressed interest, he offered to introduce me to a ‘king.’ The king turned out to be Dondi, and I became obsessed with graffiti. From Dondi and his crew, I heard many stories about the exploits of subway writers. Finally, in 1980, I accompanied them on a mission to the New Lots yards, in Brooklyn. In this photo, Dondi is completing a top-to-bottom car he titled ‘Children of the Grave Part 3,’ because there had been two previous versions. This shot was taken at sunrise, following a night of spray painting. Because the subway cars were parked in parallel rows, the writers could brace themselves between them and reach the top. This was probably the most exciting night of my life, and this is my all-time favorite photo.”
Subway-07.jpgBruce Davidson (1980)/Courtesy Magnum.
“The subway has even more meaning today than in the past, for we live in turbulent and tense times, where humanity can be both amazing and horrific,” Bruce Davidson writes in “Notes on the Subway,” the 2003 rerelease of his book “Subway.” “Although nearly 25 years have passed and the subway itself has changed and improved, we are not always aware of our past, what awaits us, or the passage of time. I explored the six hundred miles of subway tracks, uncovering layers of live in a bestial and beautiful subterranean world. Today the world is riding the rails on a subway to unknown destinations, where social strife and suicidal sadism are trapped in the same train with ordinary people trying best to live their lives. The gruesome biological, chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction ride along with us. The train has long left the station and again, we find ourselves hanging on together.”
Subway-08.jpgMargaret Morton, “Bernard, the Tunnel” (1993).
“Between 1991 and 1996, I photographed the homeless individuals who lived in the tunnel that stretches for two and a half miles beneath Riverside Park,” Morton told me. “Bernard Isaac, who made his home in the tunnel for eleven years, was known by many of the forty-five members of this underground community as Lord of the Tunnel. ‘The Tunnel’ is a book of my photographs and oral histories of the residents and the homes that they created for themselves underground.”