November 22, 1963

I remember almost every detail of that Friday, and how nothing was ever the same after.

From my friend Jonathan, who understands these things.

Manhattan Memory

I recently stumbled across this photo and it immediately transported me back to a time in the late 1990s, when I worked as a financial contractor for a publisher in midtown Manhattan and commuted via Amtrak from Boston.

The photo captures my circumscribed work week from noon Monday to noon Friday: the office building I worked in, Penn Station, and my hotel. This was before the old Post Office (the beautiful classic building on the left) became the Moynihan Train Hall, so when my train arrived, I exited Penn Station at street level from beneath Madison Square Garden (the round building) and walked across Thirty First Street to my office somewhere within that stack of buildings at the bottom, right across from the Garden. After work, I checked into my hotel (the white building at the top left).

The job was challenging and fun, and having all of Manhattan to walk after work was wonderful.

Lisa Larsen – Syracuse University, 1949

I love photography, and think I’m pretty good at it. Hundreds of photos I’ve taken, from the late 1960s when I bought my first real camera - a Nikon Nikkormat - to the advent (for me) of digital photography in the late 1980s languish on contact sheets and on slides, waiting for me to get my ass in gear and digitize them.

I also love how the always-at-hand cameras in our mobile phones make in-the-moment photos available whenever we want them. But back when this photo was taken, it took a lot more to frame, focus and capture the joy of the moment, while keeping the subject of the photo unaware that she was being photographed.

When You Talk About Destruction …

I’m reading Jonathan Taplin’s The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life, and in describing John Lennon’s take on the end-of-Sixties violence replacing early-Sixties non-violence, he references Lennon’s lyrics to Revolution:

Can I possibly be the only one who remembers the version of Revolution where Lennon sings “Don’t you know that you can count me out … in …”? This ambiguity always seems to be missing from such discussions.