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 0f 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.

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 C and I watched the three films in 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 the third, Apur Sansar, which completed the triptych in 1959. The most-recently opened art house in Manhattan, the Metrograph (2016) 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.

We both obsessed over Indian films since around the turn of the century. Bollywood movies rented from a local mom-and-pop spice shop were our entree into the most vibrant film industry on the planet (plus a wonderful intro to Bollywood section in a copy of Film Comment). These were very commercial pictures with plenty of singing and dancing and they still hold a special place for us. Even in Mumbai, though, there are fewer songs and even fewer dances in films every year. The filmmakers and the international conglomerates that finance them have become more concerned with global audiences. Hindi film has become a lot less idiosyncratic, not that there aren't at least one or two great features every year.

Even while thrilling to Amitabh Bachan and Shahrukh Khan, however, we also began to explore more nuanced fare made by Calcutta-bred directors like Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, and Satyajit Ray. Roy and Dutt made the move to Bombay—and Hindi—and brought new levels of sophistication to Bollywood; Ray stayed in Calcutta and put India on the world map with his Bengali masterpieces. He became the face of Indian cinema, in fact, and the only Indian filmmaker to play in US art houses. I recall sitting in the first row at the first Guru Dutt retrospective in NYC; there were about twenty of us at Lincoln Center in the spacious Walter Reade. By 2022 nothing had changed. For the most part Asian film meant movies from Korea, Japan, or China.

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 and the weed was de rigueur. And never 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 at least a few of them, sometimes in the middle of the night. Grindhouse, anyone?

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. 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 a few tickets. Recently opened venues like the two Nighthawk cinemas and the two Alamo Drafthouses art show mostly Hollywood stuff, but also find room for older films, foreign films, and newer art films. New York City cinema is finding itself again.