The heat is on...

It's been mostly more of the same, but hotter, since my last entry.

Two races: Pride 5 miles in Central Park (second in my age group) and the very hot Queens 10K on Sunday (third in my AG).

I'm still enjoying my own mini film festival: "Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present" was amazing. The documentary traced her career but focused on her piece for the MoMA retrospective in 2010, when for about ten weeks she sat all day in a chair without speaking. About 750,000 people visited the exhibition, and many of those who sat opposite her for a while were moved to tears. 

"Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League of New York" was a documentary about a group of photographers working in New York during the 1930s and 1940s. 

In the documentary "Kumare", filmmaker Vikram Gandhi posed as an Indian guru in Arizona.  

I saw a new print of "Annie Hall" at Film Forum. I've seen it many, many times, but it was fun to see it in New York in a re-release and to recognise many of the locations.

"Thelma" (Philippines) was disappointing. This movie about a young woman who became a runner in order to help her family felt like a TV soap. It was laboured and melodramatic.

I spent an afternoon back at Brooklyn Preparatory High School last week, where I had spoken at a careers day a month or so ago. With a teacher, I helped review portfolios of work done by three boys aged 16–17. The boys peer-reviewed each other, and we ended up with a final mark for each student that reflected all our assessments. A very interesting process.

One personal goal I've had for a while was to walk from 220th Street, at the top of Manhattan, down Broadway to Battery Park, at the southern tip, in one day. (Broadway actually continues up into the Bronx and further north into Westchester County and far beyond...) Broadway has many "faces" other than the Theatre District, and I wanted to see how they all flow into and out of each other.

My phone/camera battery died at around 105th Street, where I took a break for lunch. I still wanted to do the whole walk in one day, so I carried on (it took about six hours in total), but I re-walked the sections from 97th Street to Houston, and Houston to Battery Park, over the next two days with a working camera. It was a fun excursion and filled in some bits of Manhattan I didn't know very well.

Mornings from Monday to Thursday have been spent training in Central Park with the 5:30 crew. It's already a little darker at 5:10 when I leave home...

Saw a terrific retrospective exhibition of portrait photography and video works by the Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra at the Guggenheim yesterday.