Alexander Stuart

P hotographs Copyright  ©  2015 A lexander Chow-Stuart. Glorious fun flying a beautiful kite that a complete stranger gave to Hudson, Paradise and their best friends. He also gave them an intricate kite shaped like a ship with sails. Hopefully pictures of that to follow in future - it's more difficult to fly! P hotograph Copyright  ©  2015 A lexander Chow-Stuart.

One of my all-time favorite songs from Nina Simone, written by Randy Newman: Baltimore. This video features great photographs of the city from 1969 by Ty Waller, who says: "Baltimore through my lens around 1969. The photos of the police on E. Chase Street were taken the day after MLK's assassination. They were sent to protect us from us. Of course this was long before the riverfront revitilization. That is why you see a few pictures of drunks and beggars. don't think that exists..." Respect to everyone in Baltimore today working toward peace!

Sad that today is the 23rd anniversary of the beginning of the LA riots . Earlier, I watched video of the Rodney King beating, and what was truly alarming was that, terrible as it was, it didn't look as aggressive as some recent footage of police beatings that I have seen. The situation in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in a police van , and police violence and racism across America in general, suggest that little has improved since 1991, when King's beating occurred, or 1992, when his police assailants were  unexpectedly cleared by a jury, and the LA riots began in response. It’s by no means one-sided. I have driven with police officers in the most dangerous parts of Miami, and witnessed the aftermath of a man shot in the head on a Friday night - a civilian shot by another civilian. My main memory was that a young female police officer on the scene felt nauseous because she had never seen a man dying before. But the seemingly endless incidents of v

I was sad to finish Peter Ackroyd's brief biography of Charlie Chaplin , for a whole variety of reasons, some quite personal, others simply that the book left me even more intrigued about one of the world's - and certainly cinema's - most famous men than when I started reading it.  I could not, in the end, decide whether Ackroyd actually liked Chaplin or not, and neither perhaps could he.  Chaplin's origins in south London were so harsh that it is hard not to feel sympathy, indeed empathy, for him and to forgive, to a large (though decreasing, as his life progressed) degree the way he responded to the world.  He was entirely his own man - Ackroyd says at one point that he never liked to wear a watch or know what time it was (neither do I), nor even what day of the week it was (I suspect that might be a slight exaggeration, but I share that wish, too). He created, over a period of years, the best know