My dear friend Patti sent me this link today: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/arts/design/17lesy.html?ex=1141534800&en=e71b406000623cea&ei=5070

It was fascinating reading, not least because of the shabby way the Library of Congress treated Angelo Rizzuto’s wishes. I find it completely appalling that a bequest could have been so summarily dismissed and the desires of Mr Rizzuto ignored.

What seems apparent from the article (and I am now intrigued to find out more) is that Mr Rizzuto’s work is a fascinating insight into New York and its people in the 50s and early 60s. There are only a handful of images on the NY Times’ site but they are hugely compelling. I can see a purchase of ‘Angel’s World’ coming on at some stage in the future of my world.

This landed in my inbox at an opportune moment – falling on fertile ground as they say….I have now been writing this diary for four days short of three years so I have been doing a lot of soul searching about how well my time has been spent during this long odyssey. One day will people look back on this and think I’ve made a good representation of life in my era? What about all those other photo-a-day galleries that exist here on pbase and elsewhere? Will they be looked on as a microcosm of life in the noughties? Will some journalist in the future look at what we’ve done and think it was worth anything? I really hope so. I’ve invested heavily in this diary in terms of time and emotion. I hope it doesn’t go to waste.

I know that I am going to struggle with an image for this, although one is forming in my mind as I type…..unusually I am writing before getting my image. It’s strange how the chance reading of an article has changed the way I do my ‘stuff’. After some hesitation, I think I may have put my finger on why this has unsettled me so – it’s the bleak language of Michael Lesy that has moved me. His assertion that people described Rizzuto was a ‘naked fool’ and he, himself a ‘charletan’. Mr Lesy believes that academics don’t understand the heart.

That’s something to feel deeply sad about.

Technical note – this is a photograph, no photoshop trickery, hand through cut in black velvet and through the front and back of the now nearly dead heart. Real match, real flame.

So today’s entry is for Angelo Rizzuto – a deeply disturbed man whose heart is apparent in his photography.

Last year, I was on my way to the USA