This composite image hung in the 2014 Photocentric show at the Garrison Art Center. I had a whole series of images taken poolside in a chaise lounge as H climbed in and out of a very cold swimming pool (notice no one else is in the water). I had the idea of masking each of these images of the swimmer, putting them in different layers, and then creating one swimming pool layer underneath them all. I only had to cheat a couple of times; there is a missing leg or two but I won’t say where.

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Photoshop ace Pelle Cass, whose work gave me so many ideas!

This extraordinary conversion of our deck brought joy into my heart every single day I lived in this house. The artist was Terence Donovan, a long-time friend. I watched his projects change from intensely-observed photo realism to a much looser expressionist brush to gorgeous photos of nature and people. For a while he had a studio on Main Street in Cold Spring that was one of my Putnam County travel destinations; I'd always see something new

Color consultation was done with C, but the giant ohm symbol right outside the door was Terence conferring a decade of good luck on our home. The ohm required mixing each color on the fly as he painted, producing a slightly darker tone for each area inside the symbol; the overall effect was a subtle shadow that presented the symbol but never overpowered. What a gift!

The deck was rust-colored when we bought the place and had to be returned to that state when we sold it. We were afraid there wasn't much enthusiasm for this shock of color among potential buyers.

This is the last of the fabulous neon that once adorned Jade Mountain, a Cantonese place that opened at Second Avenue and 13th Street in 1931. The James Whale Frankenstein was probably playing in theaters around the city, maybe even at one of the many places in the Yiddish entertainment district a few blocks south. The Chow Mein sign was the only thing left of the place when I passed by in 2010; it had closed in 2007 when owner Rggie Chan was killed in a bicycle accident while filling in for a delivery guy.

In 1941 Jade Mountain held a fund-raising lunch for refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Entertainment was provided by the Almanac Singers, a group that included future Weavers Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. It was Seeger's first paying gig. Years later I ran sound for him and Odetta at another fund-raiser, up at the University Settlement camp in Beacon, NY.

When I first moved to NYC in '79, Jade Mountain was one avenue block from where I was staying. It was the first place I dined in the city. The vibe was dusty and faded old New York, and I fell in love immediately. The booths had aged yellow vinyl and there were water stains on the walls and ceiling. Grime was deeply worked into the floor. No music played.

What perverse impulse then and now makes me prefer a place like this? Maybe it's that romantic idea of the real New York, always and forever roach-infested and falling apart, the kind of place that gets described in the vernacular as a joint.

Someone might have asked me for this list. Maybe it was just me attempting a new beginning, a brand new attempt to order my world, with the computer desktop first on the to-do list. I don't know why I did it but I found it in the Documents folder in a working txt file from 2010. A lot of files from the period have become corrupted or unrecognizable to new operating systems. I bought my first computer in 1989, an Apple II cx. I used Photoshop, Performer, FileMaker, and Text. I have some very old files, almost prehistoric in OS terms.

It’s still a nice solid list, though a lot of it reflects the received taste of my college years, 1971 through 1976; there's a clear pattern in the entries. My only defense is that quite a few of these films were important to me from childhood and adolescence, long before I was exposed to the academic canon which, after all, had only begun to develop during the Great Revival of the 60s. In addition, like all cineastes of the seventies, I was shaped forever by that bible Andrew Sarris published in 1968, The American Cinema.

Note: I know Atlantis the Lost Continent is a typical George Pal film and therefore not particularly good. But I was so desperate to see it that night at the drive-in that I promised to sit without complaint (or moaning, or sobbing) through the first program on the bill, First Man into Space, a movie that really scared me. For the next two years when I let the dog out through the screen door, I expected the bloodsucking, crater-covered, and doomed astronaut to be standing on the back porch. The film has pathos that takes one by surprise, plus there's that nice Marshall Thompson. I was eight.

Note: Sometimes I think Robbe-Grillet was a rabbit hole that fascinated me in a way that revealed my essential lack of depth, like when I went to four Yes concerts in twenty-four months. The two biggest influences were his book of essays, For A New Novel, and certainly his movie with Alan Resnais. I wrote two screenplays in college; both were bad and both were remixes of Robbe-Grillet. I used to threaten my growing daughter with a forced watch of Last Year at Marienbad. Now she comes to me recommending Jeanne Dielman; as the hippies used to say, what goes around comes around.

Note: Though a great favorite, It Came From Beneath the Sea has far too many shots of military vehicles interminably crossing the frame (as does another classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still, though at least it has the advantage of a Bernard Herrmann underscore.) If I had to put one Harryhausen on this list—and I did—it would have been Jason and the Argonauts, coincidentally another Herrmann assignment.

Note: The Hindi stuff! By 2010 I knew enough about Indian cinema to move beyond Satyjit Ray. (In truth I only caught up with the great Bengali director in the last ten years.) Unfortunately Ray has been a great wall, through no fault of his own, to Western appreciation of Hindi cinema. People think getting through the Apu Trilogy is all you need to know about the Indians. Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt (both out of Calcutta by way of Bombay) made seminal flicks that are like great lost Hollywood films, movies of the importance and style of a Sunset Boulevard or a Citizen Kane. Many were not on the list in 2010 because I just hadn't seen them yet, like Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, Sujata, Pyassa, and Madhumati.

Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
King Kong (1933, Cooper and Schodesack)
Devdas (1955, Bimal Roy)
The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks)
La Dolce Vita (1960, Federico Fellini)
Last Year at Marienbad (1961, Alain Renais)
Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959, Guru Dutt)
The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges)
The Importance of Being Earnest (1952, Anthony Asquith)
The Godfather I and II (1972 and 1974, Coppola)
Atlantis the Lost Continent (1961, Pal)
First Man Into Space (1959, Robert Day)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935, Whale)
It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955, Robert Gordon)
The Thing (1951, Nyby/Hawks)
The Night of the Hunter (1955, Laughton)
Nightmare Alley (1947, Edmund Goulding)
Thunder Road (1958, Arthur Ripley)
L'Immortelle (1963, Alain Robbe-Grillet)
Raja Hindustani (1996, Dharmesh Darshan)
Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock)
Diabolique (1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu, 1939, Renoir)
Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bete, 1946, Cocteau)
The Music Man (1962, Morton DaCosta)
Charade (1963, Stanley Donen)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1963, Robert Mulligan)
Gone With the Wind (I know, I know! will discuss! 1940, Fleming, Vidor, Cukor, plus)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Aldrich)
Black Narcissus (1947, Powell and Pressburger)
I Know Where I'm Going (1945, Powell and Pressburger)
An Affair to Remember (1957, Leo McCarey)
A Star is Born (1954, George Cukor)
Fellini Satyricon (1969, Federico Fellini)
Om Shanti Om (2007, Farah Khan)
The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorcese)