telescreen.org

This awesome video of insane traffic in India could only be made better by one thing:  dubbing "Baby Elephant Walk" under it.

I confess that I've never given much thought to assembling a go-bag, but after reading Adam Greenfield's essay on the subject, I just might try get prepared.

This is just heartbreaking.  The world's largest (or formerly the world's largest) stained-glass window is destined for the Dumpster, all because American Airlines has no corporate memory.  (Sure, they rock the retrojets hard, but this is/was a bona fide American landmark.)

I'll be passing through JFK in a week or so; I hope that they're still working on this.  It'd be awesome to snag a piece.

From yesterday's Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

Security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.

The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.

'Cause nothing bad ever happens in Dallas, right?

This is an odd story -- not least because Obama received Secret Service protection earlier than any other presidential candidate ever has, almost nine months before the Iowa caucuses.  Why are they stopping now?

Isolation wards, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

I've got another piece up on NewYorkology.com -- a little while ago, I toured the normally-off-limits abandoned hospital on the south side of Ellis Island and interviewed a representative from Save Ellis Island, which is working to restore the buildings.  My writeup is here, and I've got a Flickr set of more pictures.

Gazing at Liberty, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

Just a quick note to let you know that I've got a review of the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island ferry service up on NewYorkology.

On his (excellent) NYT blog, Dick Cavett wrote a wonderfully elegiac post about Bobby Fischer:

We ordinary mortals can only try to imagine what it might feel like to be both young and so greatly gifted at a complex art. And to be better at it than any other living being, past or present. There are plenty of geniuses and lots of famous people, but few are both. Is anyone really capable of surviving such a double burden? . . .

For me, watching the Fischer shows after all this time contained quite a few surprises. For example, I winced watching the first one when I heard myself use the word “paranoid.” That awful word that in the later, bad years became almost part of Bobby’s name. But back then it passed unnoticed.

On the post-Spassky show it was Bobby himself who uttered the p-word. I re-winced. He claimed that Harold C. Schonberg, then the Times’ music and chess critic, “said I was paranoid.” Somehow the joker in me came up with, “No he didn’t. You’re imagining it.”

Happily he got the joke — a beat before the audience did — and laughed heartily. (People who who knew him were in disbelief that he could actually laugh and be funny on the show.)

He didn’t know it, but I had spotted him earlier that day. We were walking to my studio at the same time, but from opposite directions. He towered over passersby who would stop in their tracks and gaze worshipfully. From a distance, you could see the consonants in his name on their lips: B, F. He seemed unaware of them, with his ever-present little transistor radio clapped to his ear like a teenager.

He had come to like soul music, he said.

Go read it, and savor it, especially the knockout closing.

(via Tony at DSO Records, who's been en fuego lately.)

Yet again:  photography is not a crime.  Not when NewYorkology editor Amy Langfield tries to take a picture of a building from a public street, and not when art teacher Katherin McInnis tries to shoot video from a public sidewalk.  (Memo to the cop in that latter story: implying that someone's assumed political position is what led to police attention and harassment is, I'd imagine, a very good way to get yourself named as the respondent in a First Amendment lawsuit.)

So this afternoon at 3pm, I'll be out at Atlantic Yards, taking pictures and exercising my First Amendment rights.  Hope to see you there.

It's not you.  It's me.

Parental visits and general lassitude (I think he was in the service with Generals Hospital, Delivery, and Quarters) have meant that I haven't been around much.  Back now. 

What've I missed?