A few pictures of Donna, Lulu, Brendan, Alison, Mike, Monika, Clive, and Mary from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Open Hours on Friday. Save the date for the real Open House on April 26-27. For more about the other artists, go here.

Ruth Sergel's Chalk Project 2008 memorializes the 146 victims (mostly women) who died in the March 25, 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, one of the worst fires in NYC history and the start of modern labor safety law movement. For the last couple of years, she has recruited volunteers to fan out over the city to chalk the names of the victims in front of the houses where they lived. Most of the young women lived in tenements on the Lower East Side, but four lived near my apartment in Prospect Heights, so Julie, me, and my friend Ranbir headed on a walk from Park Slope, through Columbia Terrace and onto Red Hook to chalk their names on the sidewalk.

Originally released as classified information in November of 2007, the full report is now available, redacted, of course, for general consumption. An analysis of 600,000 captured documents released 6 years after the drumbeat for war began, the report concludes, surprise, surprise, that there was no evidence found to support Saddam, as he's referred to by first name only in the report, was actively linked to external terrorist groups like al Qaeda or was developing WMD to attack the U.S. The timid conclusion on page 45 of the 94 page report says, that although Saddam had threatened the U.S. and Bush I specifically ("We can send people to Washington . . . a person with explosive belt around him could throw himself on Bush's car.") before the 1st Gulf War,

"the evidence is less clear in terms of Saddam's declared will at the time of OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM in 2003. Even with access to significant parts of the regime's most secretive archive, the answer to the question of Saddam's will in the final months in power remains elusive. Potentially, more significant documents and media files are awaiting analysis or are even yet to be discovered."

Sunset over New Jersey Turnpike reststop, sponsored by Levitra.

Julie's belly at 17 weeks.

Framing—what else is street photography about? Windows within windows. Rectangles within rectangles. A grid of views. A bento box of subjects.

Raghubir Singh, who took the above picture, is my favorite Indian photographer. He made a great book of pictures called A Way into India, which featured the Ambassador, India's ubiquitous version of the VW, as object and frame for his peregrinations through his colorful homeland. Check out some of his pictures here.

First a holocaust memoir turns out to be a total fabrication (Misha Defonseca's Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years), now an L.A. gang orphan story turns out to be fiction as well. Margaret B. Jones' Love and Consequences fooled a lot of reviewers for the best reasons: it was well written and compelling. In Defonseca's case, she was not found out until the book was already a bestseller and a movie. For Jones, we'll see how her career fares, especially since the publisher has cancelled her book tour and is recalling the book. (I wonder if you can sue for the mental anguish caused by memoir deception--WRITERS: a possible short story idea?). It's amazing how well a book can sell when it's labeled as a memoir, but when it's fiction, it's assumed to bear little resemblance to reality and is given much less attention. Reality sells. Though I haven't read her book, Defonseca's supposed raised-by-wolves childhood was probably no less vivid than a great book of powerful fiction thought to be based on some version of the author's youth: Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird.