My second straw hat, which as I write is nearing the end of it's useful life. It's been with me to India, the Netherlands, Argentina, Las Vegas—all over the place. My hair was disappearing and a history of skin cancer in my family (ninety-eight percent pallid Western European) mandated the wearing of a hat. I hated it. I defined myself with the fulsome curls piled atop my head from college on, as long as the contemporary job situation allowed. I thought guys with hats were like Mike Love, early adopters determined to hide baldness and still have a rock-star look. Pathetic. And now I'm one of those guys. Please god, at least let it look like a Don Draper hat.

I wrote a song about my previous hat, lost while I tried to get a picture at Niagara Falls.

As of this writing (10/23) I'm still teaching film at Westchester Community College. I've been teaching at the WCC since 2003, shortly after I was canned from my last corporate gig at Time.com. I've enjoyed my time there. The socialist in me appreciates community college like it appreciates public transit and public health and the discrete bike lanes of the Netherlands. It should be free to all citizens and isn't, but at least it's not as crushingly expensive as the alternatives.

WCC has campuses throughout Westchester at Valhalla, Peekskill, Mount Vernon, and the Cross County Center (a shopping mall off two major freeways) in Yonkers. I've taught mostly in Peekskill though currently I'm headquarted in Yonkers. This photo captures the forbidding nature of a mall as seen from a bus stop. Riding the bus from Manhattan to Yonkers is very similar to riding a bus in LA; I'm usually the only white guy. I remember a meme showing Paul McCartney on a commuter train in the UK. A caption read “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”

In the summer after the death of George Floyd the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were all over the country. I saw one in Manhattan at close range and thought it was disciplined and enthusiastic. Back in my neighborhood a crowd of protestors outside the 40th Precinct was “tea-kettled.” This is a maneuver where cops block both ends of a block and then declare anyone trapped between the barricades of violating an order to disperse. When the Republicans stuck a finger in the eye of New York by holding a presidential convention in Madison Square Garden, protestors were swept up there in the same manner. Many arrests were made and most of the prisoners were quickly released, but the cops had made their point and gotten the sign-holding bastards off the street.

Black Lives Matter was giving local New York media an apoplectic fit; people got scared, especially those watching TV or reading the Murdoch-owned New York Post. Some local businesses put boards or signs in their windows; a vacant storefront on Alexander looked like it was expecting a hurricane. In the end the event never got as far as the stretch of Bruckner where this event-planner had his office.

A skull cup stolen from the Kahiki, America's Finest Polynesian Supper Club. I believe it was used for Zombies, one of the great Tiki rum drinks. Columbus, OH, somehow had one of the largest and most elegant Tiki bars in the country. It was a special-occasions sort of place where a gong would be struck as four "Polynesians" holding a palette would be bring you an erupting "Volcano" (serving at least at four). There were live birds and a rain-forest that would actually rain every twenty minutes or so. The food wasn't that great—I remember an indifferent sweet and sour pork—but the atmosphere was several thousand miles from Columbus.

It was about one in the morning. The loft where I lived was the former Esty piano factory—the Clocktower, they called it—and the windows were big. I could see roman candles spouting on 134th between Lincoln and the Third Avenue Bridge. After a while the group setting them off disappeared into a former bar halfway up the block. About two AM I noticed smoke, then large flames partially blocked from view by the buildings on the south side of the block. Two cars were on fire. It didn't spread to the buildings, though the flames were suddenly huge. A fire engine or two showed up, blocking Lincoln, and put out the fire. I went over the next morning and this was what I saw. It was the Fourth of July.

The figure caught in the late afternoon light is the Bollywood star Waheeda Rehman. It's not the best likeness; she's on a poster we have for the Guru Dutt film Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers) and like most posters from the period, it's hand-painted and this painter liked 'em fat. In the film Dutt plays a director who makes Waheeda a star, falls in love with her, leaves his wife, and then loses both Waheeda and his daughter. His career falls apart and he becomes a drunk; the film is his flashback as he sits on an empty soundstage during the last night of his life. Like Laughton's Night of the Hunter it was a box-office flop; like Laughton, Dutt never directed another film.

Kaagaz Ke Phool was shot in both Cinemascope and Academy ratios by the brilliant, innovation-on-a-shoestring V. K. Murthy. It was India's first film in 'scope, and there was only one 'scope print. (That was the legend, at least; film obsessionists always “print the legend.”) It was enough to send us the 7,860 miles to Pune for an unsubbed private showing at the National Film Archive of India. At the end seven-year-old H was sobbing:

“We told it you it would be sad!”
“Yeah, but not that sad!”