Guy was on the Major Deegan going south. Another car hit him and he went straight over the guardrail and landed, badly, on 134th Street around the corner from us. The 40th Precinct kept the wreackage for weeks in one of the parking slots on 138th Street.

The third version of Arnold Böcklin's painting, purchased by Hitler and now found in the Alte Nationalgalerie. Prints were all the rage in Berlin in the Weimar years, but it's been seen or mentioned in books, films, other paintings, theatre, ballet—it's a core image of the 20th century. I've seen the one in NYC at the Met but I mostly know the image from the title sequence of Val Lewton's eponymous, haunting, 1945 film.

The entire city seemed haunted by death. Perhaps because I was becoming ill, perhaps because of the unusual heat wave, perhaps because of all those Nazi movies I saw in my youth, or all the history books I've read since—whatever caused this feeling, it never went away. The Germans are an extraordinary people and Germany itself a model of the democratic socialist state. In so many ways, it is a government that tries to take care of its citizens. But I kept thinking, how did it happen here? I know the multiple crises that brought the Dictator into power were an unusual set of circumstances; but if so how can my culture, the twenty-first century US, repeat so many of the same mistakes?

We toured the Stasi facilities, former headquarters of the former secret police of the former German Democratic Republic (1949-1990). It's an almost comically typical fifties office building: the curtains, the wall color, the linoleum floors like that in my grandmother’s kitchen. Clichéd architecture for torture, betrayal, imprisonment, death.

The sign nearby says Demolished and abandoned piers from the main driveway to Gestapo headquarters, which were left after the clearing of the site (1957-63), with remnants of the metal fittings. All the transports of prisoners to the Gestapo house prison passed through this east-gate.

Artist Gunter Demnig began installing these in Cologne in 1992 as a memorial to Holocaust victims. There are now over seventy-thousand of these markers installed throughout Europe; each is engraved by hand.

Eliza Apperly in The Guardian: The inscription on each stone begins Here lived, followed by the victim’s name, date of birth, and fate: internment, suicide, exile or, in the vast majority of cases, deportation and murder.

These stolpersteines were on the sidewalk across the street from where we stayed. To me this is a much more powerful remembrance than a plaque or a stone memorial or a comprehensive exhibit, even a whole museum of lists and photographs and oral histories. I thought of the victims pulled out of their homes in the middle of the night: this home, this building right here, this doorway, this street.

Most of the dead at Sachsenhausen were killed with the usual combination of forced labor, disease, starvation, and later, gas. The SS used the facilities to experiment with new, more efficient techniques of slaughter. Occasionally prisoners were still shot or hanged; they would exit the door on the far right and were marched to the end of the trench on the left. The wooden log wall behind the executed prevented ricochets.

After the war the Soviets used the camp to kill another twelve-thousand prisoners by starving them to death.

On exhibit at Tempelhof Airfield: a Douglas C-54 Skymaster, derived from the civilian DC-4. This became the primary supply plane for US forces in 1948-49 during the Berlin Airlift. Berliners called them "rosinenbombers" (raisin bombers); they were known to the US public as candy bombers after American media learned of pilots dropping chocolate bars with handkerchief parachutes.

I really felt bad the day we went to Templehof; the day after that, even worse. I was still testing negative but I was back in the Bronx before I realized I'd finally gotten covid.

Over a weekend Carolyn and I watched Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy. We'd both seen the first—Pathar Panchali, from 1955—and at least parts of the second (Aparajito, 1956); we jumped at the chance to see them in company with Apur Sansar, which completed the triptych in 1959. The Metrograph, to date the most-recently opened art house in Manhattan, ran a six-film Satyajit Ray retrospective. It was a half-hour ride on the subway and we ate at Ping's in Chinatown afterwards.

Manhattan's revival/art house scene was a big part of my move to NYC back in 1979. I'd been living in Cincinnati and there weren't many opportunities to see anything outside of the latest Hollywood fare. Columbus, where I'd grown up, was a far better place for old movies despite its reputation as some sort of cowtown compared to Cincinnati or Cleveland. But except for LA—maybe—no city in the country had as many theaters as New York.

The whole scene fell apart in the 90s with rising real-estate prices and the arrival of VHS. The Bleecker Street Cinema closed, the Thalia closed, the Carnegie, the Biograph, the New Yorker, the 8th Street Playhouse, Theatre 80—all of them gone. The second and third-run houses all disappeared, too. St. Mark's was closed, beloved rattrap a block from my apartment; they had a midnight show every night of the week with a permanent contact-high cloud over the seats. Hardcore fans of movies in New York, of course, can't forget that long strip of urine-and-semen-soaked houses along 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth: the Lyric, the Selwyn, the Times Square, the Rialto, the Victory, the Harris, the Harem, the Apollo—I was in and out of many of them, sometimes in the middle of the night. Like in an after-hours club, the idea of day became abstract once you were inside. Three movies for a couple bucks, 24/7.

In 2022 the Metrograph and the IFC have great schedules along with the older art-fare survivors: the Film Forum, the Quad, and the Anthology Film Archives. At the Museum of the Moving Image I saw a good print of the ’39 Prisoner of Zenda in a James Wong Howe festival. Lincoln Center has state-of-the art curating for their programs and impeccable projection; its film festival, along with the newer Tribecca festival, is world-class and I finally have enough loose cash to buy tickets. New York City cinema is finding itself again.