Marking time in October 2004

Health versus Roads

A Sydney newspaper article reveals a piece of single-minded planning.

The NSW Roads and Traffic Authority is proposing to build a motorway tunnel that will take land from parks and open space. But the state’s chief health officer has warned:

Considering the impact of the proposal on physical activity, health impacts of reduced physical activity, such as obesity, should be addressed.

No, no, says the boss of planning:

We … have to stop wasting money on studies and investigations that bear no proof in respect of sound land use planning.

Now, unless we’re planning to walk on it [the M4 east], I cannot understand what value that [an obesity study] will have but it will cost $3 million.

Good thinking?

Avedon postscript

On The New Yorker website is Adam Gopnik’s short obit. for Richard Avedon. Here is the opening para.:

To know Dick Avedon was to know the sun. He radiated out, early and daily, on a circle of friends and family and colleagues, who drew on his light and warmth for sustenance. When he died, last week, at the age of eighty-one, some light seemed to go out in many lives and around many pleasures. For, though he was incandescent in his presence, he was surprisingly domestic in his enthusiasms; he believed in family as passionately as he believed in art, and could leave an hour-long conversation about Goya’s horrors to talk with the same avidity about how to light a room or roast a leg of lamb.

Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon, photographer, has died on the job at the age of 81. I have admired his stark black and white portraits since I saw his oversized book Nothing personal (with text by James Baldwin, 1964).