The view of the lights from Flatbush and Bergen, a very similar view I had of the towers when I left for a photoshoot and the first plane had just hit the north tower...

In a kind of Borgesian rewriting of history, United Artists has apparently doctored old photographs of Claus von Stauffenberg, the attempted assassin of Hitler, so they resemble better Tom Cruise who is playing the German hero in a film called Valkyrie slated to open in February of 2009. Read about the controversy and how it ties in to Scientology here.

According to this article in the NYT,The Iraq Petroleum Company is back! Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, and BP will return to Kirkuk, Mosul, and other petroleum-rich areas, starting June 30th. The British, Dutch, French, and U.S. companies are returning to what was once part of the Ottoman Empire, after 47 years of being locked out in 1961 when General Qassem nationalized Iraq's oil, a program completed by our man, Saddam Hussein in 1971. The foreign oil companies were given very nice no-bid contracts to begin extraction, almost certainly giving them a nice position to pump out a lot more when the contracts end in two years. With oil at $140 a barrel, the price of war is cheap in comparison. With the leveraged investment of 4100 dead U. S. soldiers, tens of thousands wounded, about 100K dead Iraqis, and a half trillion dollars of taxpayers' money, big oil should be poised to make some very nice profits.

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.