Public Image Ltd. was an incredible influence on Desi, Desi, and Desi after The Ed Davis Band dissolved and we moved to New York; Byron (the lead guitarist) and I were both major fans. Some of my best songs were PIL knock-offs: Kill the Dogs, Destroyer Girlfriend, Poto and Cabengo and many others. As I wrote in a 1980 item, we loved those Jah Wobble subterranean grooves with the Keith Levene skronk guitar on top, and then Lydon's chanting on top of that. Though rap was starting to be huge in NYC, all my amelodic vocal stylings came from Johnny Rotten.

As a life-long collector of vinyl, PIL's Metal Box was one of my proudest acquisitions. I don't know how I ever got the money to buy it when I did; it was released late in 1979 when I had no money at all. I almost certainly diverted something from the rent, the kind of insanity collectors like me take for granted.

This collection business, which seems of exclusively male provenance, had captured me as early as seventh grade; I bought several Beatles 45s from a friend and never stopped acquiring. There is definitely an OCD component to the habit. When think about it at all I feel I'm protecting myself against some future scarcity. That scarcity hasn’t emerged, at least to date; along with most I did not see the massive digital stockpiles of melody that have transformed the business and tech of reproducing music. (I’m not any better at predicting the future now than I was back in the 60s.) I adapted myself to digital collecting; I keep about a terabyte of tunes on my internal SSD and back it up on an external hard drive. I also pay about four bucks a month for a service—iBroadcast—which I use primarily as another safe storage destination.

Both iBroadcast and the Plex universe allow me to stream any file I own into my hearing aids; recent updates in hearing aid tech make them sound as good as AirBuds. It's all wireless, of course, and I can listen to the collection from almost anywhere in the world. I hate streaming services like Spotify that attempt to predict my tastes; the algorithms are stupid and I have inordinate pride in my eclecticism. I also obsess over high data rates and careful compression; I can ensure that things sound better when I capture the audio myself.

I now face what for me is an emotional burden: ridding myself of thousands of LPs and 45s. The digital collection will simply disappear when I die, but the vinyl lasts longer than some civilizations; one can still buy a copy of a 45 I made about fifty years ago, Keith Richards' Dead, on Discogs for about thirty bucks. The current fad for vinyl will not last forever so I should dump this stuff now. I want to get rid of it all and not think about storage units and shelving and phono inputs on amplifiers. As of yet, though, I'm in emotional paralysis; I just can't do it.

I loved our building, but any century-old structure is going to develop problems. One of ours was the precipitation build-up under the row of industrial windows lining the exterior wall. In the 80s—when my lack of ready money was at its worst—I'd use pictures like this to buy more time in the housing courts.

The problems got much more serious when Bloomberg-era zoning changes kicked in across the street. The Bankside development began a year after we moved to 112 Lincoln, and over the months of construction we gradually lost our view of the Harlem River. Twenty feet of industrial windows were now filled with new skyscrapers.

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 histories 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? The multiple crises that brought the Dictator into power were an unusual set of circumstances. Why does my culture, the twenty-first century US, repeat so many of the same mistakes? Why does almost every culture we examine end up reenacting this suicide?

We encounter the banality of evil on a tour of 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, architectural cliches as a surrounding for torture, betrayal, imprisonment, death.

A sign nearby reads 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.

This particular set of markers was on the sidewalk across the street from our apartment. 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.

In 2025 I saw more of the stumbling stones in Vienna.

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, 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. Both the revival theaters and the second and third-run houses all disappeared. St. Marks Cinema closed, the beloved rattrap only a block from my apartment; there was a midnight show every night of the week with a permanent contact-high cloud over the seats. 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 hardcore fans of grindhouse are still rhapsodizing about that long strip of urine-and-semen-soaked palaces spread along 42nd 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 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.

I was visually interested in this tire shop a couple blocks north of my loft. I liked the blue wall and the piles of tires, and the idiosyncratic sculptures straddling the window. I made some pictures in January and came back towards the end the year when I discovered that behind the blue bricks was the studio of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, guys I'd read about in the Times.

The artists made plaster casts of neighborhood people, painted them, and installed them on buildings or put them in art shows. At one point their goal was to turn our mutual South Bronx locale into something more interesting than an archetype of urban decay. The fires that devastated much of the area in the 70s and the complete collapse of urban infrastructure attracted US Presidents and occasional articles on urban blight in the press.

The politicians always went to Charlotte Street—a couple of miles north of where we were in Mott Haven—and their talking points were always the same, always about some Fort Apache version of the Bronx. Jimmy Carter came in 1977 to promise federal help; Reagan came in 1979 to make fun of Carter and the whole idea of a government working to fight poverty. (As always with the GOP, what was needed was the private sector and tax cuts; he was heckled while posing for photos.) When the neighborhood finally did turn around later in the century it did so without assistance from Washington.

I vividly remember a night in my taxicab in the 80s. I'd taken a fare to the South Bronx: my mantra was anybody, anywhere, anytime, at least for the first few years I was driving. I was making my way along an access road adjacent to the Cross Bronx Expressway, the urban planning disaster Robert Moses brought to the city in his most irresponsible moment. The famously dystopian Bronx began with that damn freeway.

I was surrounded by trashed vacant lots and trashed buildings. It was the middle of the night and absolutely no one was around. The road curved around a corner and started down a steep slope; at the bottom was a water-filled crater. It looked deep; there was no way of knowing. It was big, maybe fifteen feet from one shore to the other. I had no choice but to drive backwards up the hill till I could turn around. I found my way out of that dream environment after a half-hour or so; I call it a dream because the experience still informs my sleep.