Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks

Duwand Works for Good Humor, Inc by Lashon Daley

Duwand wasn’t the must disgruntled employee at Good Humor, Inc. His position as a Quality Control Inspector at the conveyor belt had its benefits. He was never asked to lift anything like the stock boys who wore back braces, nor was he ever blamed for anything– his supervisor was held responsible for all of his mistakes and those of the other 19 employees just like him.

Duwand’s job description stated 2 things: 1) Verify that Good Humor, Inc. is properly spelled and punctuated on each ice cream sandwich package wrapper and 2) Notify your supervisor when it is not.

From the age of 14, Duwand worked for Good Humor, Inc. at the conveyor belt. Since 1929, when the company opened its New York distribution center, Duwand read and re-read the words Good Humor, Inc. 5,980,003 times. He could spell it backwards in 4 seconds. He created 213 words from the letters and composed several different jingles based on its spelling. My ice cream has a first name, it’s G-o-o-od…

So after forty-three years of uneventful service, it caught all of Good Humor, Inc.’s 147 New York employees by surprise when Duwand drove a fleet of Good Humor, Inc. ice cream trucks off of a pier. › Continue reading

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Tags: Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Rockaways

Monday, February 7th, 2011 Authors, Body of Water, Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Lashon Daley, Objects, Rockaway 1 Comment

You Will Not Find Her at the Bottom of the River On Whose Shores Your Life Has Been Squandered, by David Hollander

Well then down you go. Spiraling into darkness with the regulator hissing and the funk of the Hudson clinging to your suit like rime, the spotlight held at arm’s length and advancing its bad joke into a slurry of black mud and pollution, the bubbles racing from your mouth toward a theoretical surface as you penetrate deeper into that living darkness which cinctures the earth and makes a mockery of your personal ephemera, of the husband you no longer recognize, of the advanced degrees that belie your fecklessness, of the psychotropic prescriptions that mediate your pain, of her empty crib with its bone-white spindles, of the lewd smile of the young man at the dive shop, of the dappled morning sunlight outside your bedroom window and the ferocious joy it has occasionally instilled, of your fear of spiders and your fear of bridges and your fear of stained glass cathedrals—the darkness making a mockery of love.

Your heart punching at the wetsuit as you sink to the bottom of this urban river on whose shores your life has been squandered, this river which preserves that original conundrum from which the entire cosmology was birthed in an unfathomable instant of fire, pushed from some icy womb of Nothingness so as to spread out virus-like and then die its slow death. The depth gauge glows green in the murk, fifty feet, then sixty and then yes, as promised, here is the oily bottom rising up to meet you and you lay your belly down in the earth’s black blood, indulging in the deep gulps of air you’ve been counseled against taking, your body hot and electric within the suit as if the neoprene enclosed only pulsing organs and circulatory twine. You peer out across the riverbottom and down a corridor of visibility above which the particulate matter hovers like smoke in a housefire, then you kick hard once and glide out above the planet’s bottom where creatures deformed by metropolitan poisons live out their sorry half-witted lives.

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Tags: Freight train, Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Grand Piano, Oil, Surfaced, Teredos & Gribbles, The Princess Anne

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 Authors, David Hollander, Freight train, Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Grand Piano, Objects, Teredos & Gribbles, The Princess Anne No Comments

Beside by Nicole Haroutunian

Artist Statement

BESIDE is an edition of 2o. The images are printed with ink on a Gocco B6 press and the text is printed in Futura with East River water on a Chandler & Price Pilot Press. The envelope is handmade and soaked in East River water. Additional text and waves drawn in blue ink were later added to the prints and can be seen here.

When I began BESIDE, I hoped to print on handmade paper created from scraps scavenged from NYC’s riverbanks. But, after a month of walking up and down the Hudson, hopping fences to get close to the East River, I only had collected a scant bagful of scraps—not nearly enough for four prints in an edition of twenty. What better reason to have to reconceive the project, though—the riverbanks just aren’t that dirty anymore. Even when I decided to print using East River water instead, I was amazed that the water I collected, dipped off a rock in Williamsburg, had no discernable smell, no weird cast or color. So, rather than obscuring my images of objects—teredoes and gribbles, shopping carts and grand pianos, ice cream trucks and Formica dinettes, wharf rats and drowned giraffes—the text emphasizes their strange side-by-side presence in the city’s underwater landscape, making their identities all the more clear.

About the Artist

Nicole Haroutunian is an editor of Underwater New York. Her bio can be found here.

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Tags: Coney Island Creek, East River, Formica dinette, Giraffe, Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Grand Piano, Nicole Haroutunian, Rockaway, Shopping cart, Teredos & Gribbles, The Narrows, Wharf rats