I headed out for dinner around 8 last night. For once I wasn’t lugging my backpack, just the fanny pack. Wearing my Asics trail running shoes, I felt light, again reflecting on the skills of running being useful in navigating city streets. Also thinking that being mobile is one of the greatest abilities to possess, being able to walk as one gets, um, older.

Running friends: pay attention to the cartilage in your knees. I quit running before I was down to bone-on-bone and I was thanking my lucky stars as I moved along at a pretty fast pace last night. I want to be able to walk as long as I’m breathing. It was a warm night and as I went up 5th Ave, there was a rosy sunset glow over the Hudson, looking west down the numbered streets.

It’s now early morning and Howlin Wolf is singing, “I’m built for comfort, ain’t built for speed…” via Sirius radio on my iPad. Last night I had Linguine Nero, pasta made with squid ink, ay Cafe Pescatore, a great Italian restaurant on 2nd and 50th and 2 glasses of Nero Davila red wine. Ummm!

Here are some shots from last night:

From Boing Boing, posted by Cory Doctorow yesterday (Perfect timing for me, since I’m taking off this weekend for the Book Expo America convention and a week in NYC, one of my great loves.)

“How To Be a Retronaut has a large gallery of images from Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York, a new book by James and Karla Murray that documents the vanishing golden-age shop signs of New York City, including interviews with the shop owners. The Associated Press review says, ‘They tell the story of the 20th century in New York, with wisps of the 19th and hints of the 21st. If you want to understand the aesthetics of the country’s most famous city at street level, this is the best way to do it short of actually going there.’

“During the eight years it took James and Karla Murray to complete this project, one third of the stores they featured have closed”

   – Newsweek

https://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/05/the-disappearing-face-of-new-york/

These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations.

The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.

https://www.angelfire.com/ak2/intelligencerreport/color_photos.html

From Lew Lewandowski