The Old Croton Aqueduct was part of the drinking water conduit for old New York. Reservoirs upstate fed into the Croton Reservoir in Westchester County and from there down the aqueduct to the city. The tunnels and the pumphouses are no longer in use; occasionally a tour group enters the abandoned Ossining pumphouse and climbs down the stairs to the brick tunnels. It is a spectacular space.

I was pleased enough with one of the photos to use a cropped version as the cover art for my Why Am I Awake? collection.

“Ice Pop” was hung in the 2013 “Identity” show at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO.

We'd caught the Bollywood fever and were deep in the proselytizing phase. C and I made an arrangement with the library in Ossining to run a series of six classic Hindi films over as many months. We agonized for weeks until settling on the six titles seen in the poster above.

We made short promo vids for every film that we showed. At that point we’d been into Hindi cinema for almost a decade. It’s one of the only times in my life where I’ve seen an obscure interest end up making cash, in this case the job C got when her publishing house began to fall apart. Her knowledge of Bollywood was useful to her new employer.

We’d graduated from Saraswati Grocery, the mom-and-pop spice shop up in Fishkill where we'd rented Hindi films, initially on VHS, later on DVD. I recall the first two titles we we got: Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) and Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994). These were both recommended to us by mom-and-pop, and in 2024 I still have tunes from Hum Aapke running through my head. To date, as Indians might say, an idiom I find perfect and charming.

C and I made trips to India in 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2019. We dragged H along on the first three, and C went on to do many more by herself. On on very first trip we were lucky enough to get onto a location for Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, and also visited the studio set of a much smaller-scale film, My Name is Anthony Gonsalves. Aag later turned out to be a colossal bomb (a so-called Flop-E-Azam, a pun from Om Shanti Om on the name of India's biggest historical epic Mughal-E-Azam), but we did get to meet Varma and get our pictures taken with Sushmita Sen. She was very sweet with H, who didn’t really know who she was: a former Miss Universe and an icon for millions.

My Name is Anthony Gonsalves is a crime-comedy-romance—another box-office bomb—that owes its title to a tune from a 1977 film, Amar Akbar Anthony, a huge hit for director-extraordinaire Manmohan Desai. Amar Akbar starred Amitabh Bachchan; while showing Amitabh’s face on the screen I sometimes ask my film classes to identify him. I had a student raised in Lahore who grew up with the face, but the star is always a stranger to everyone else. He is probably the most well-known movie star in the world. All Indians know him (that’s a fifth of the world’s billions right there) and his fame is widespread almost everywhere except the United States.

The “Anthony Gonsalves” tune that is picturized on Amitabh in Amar Akbar is one of several well-known songs from the film; at the time Bollywood created most of the hits on Indian radio. As we were driving away from the studio in a van full of Indians H began to sing “My name is Anthony Gonsalves,” the first line of this song that she'd often heard around the house. By the second line the whole rest of the van was singing along.