There is so much outdoors stuff to do here, and the air is so ridiculously clear – but I have to work every day.

Also, Utah does feel a little like a foreign country, with temples everywhere. And everyone is so white!

Also, this morning in the hotel elevator, I actually heard someone un-ironically using the word “Frisco” when referring to San Francisco. Do people actually do that? Maybe he also says, “Califor-nye-ey”.

I feel like every time I fly, airports and planes keep adding more and more screens – they can’t figure out the new place to stick them into, turning the place into a source of sensory cacophony from every direction. Is this really what people want? 

Don’t they actually want a calm, quiet place, instead – maybe with barely perceptable Brian Eno piped in? Am I an exception somehow, and it’s the market responding to what people want?

Lounges in theory exist to shield you from screens and sensory overload – but they are only for rich people or frequent travelers, but what makes people designing these spaces think that regular folks wouldn’t want fewer screens, too?

Reading about, and especially seeing photos of, small children being separated at the border is like being stabbed. Every single time.

And hearing justifications for it from all these well-fed and groomed women and men is just nauseating. Yes, I know worse things happened , like Australia’s Lost Generation – but I fully expect – hope – US Congress issuing apology for this some years down the road, and we all (US taxpayers) will be paying well justified compensation to these children and their parents, though it would be more fair for it to come out from every Trump voter’s Social Security check instead. And for Steven Miller, that little prick, I hope him to rot in a (humanely-run) federal jail for the rest of his life.

notesonphotography:

“…the aboriginal people of Tiwi Islands, off northern Australia, would put photographs away following a death. If accidentally viewed, they would be turned upside down, folded into four or hidden away. Later, at a time agreed by the survivors as part of the post-funeral rites, the taboo on the photographs would be lifted.”

—

Photography and Death

Audrey Linkman

A U.K. friend from an old life is in town for 24 hours, and I meet her, and her friends, at a rooftop hotel bar somewhere in what apparently is a new hotel district north of Madison Square. There is the Empire State Building prominently visible, but also a construction crane for yet another hotel that will hide most of it in a month or two. A couple of her friends are a married gay couple who own an art gallery near where she used to live when she lived here, and I hear all about their several year old courtship across Paris, LA, Turkey, Scotland and London replete with drama and betrayal. We have a Trini among us, so we talk about Caribbean countries for a bit, and also how homophobic they all are, and how the US never cared, and how beautiful Grenadians are, with their green eyes, and what it’s like to be in the carnival, walking miles in high heels. Their friend is an Aussie with a boring day job, in finance of course, who wants to write children’s books. The DJ knows what she is doing – she is pretty good, but it’s hard to have a conversation. There is another, bigger, party – someone’s birthday, and they all flew in from London for it – which I find strange, but that’s how they roll in UK, my friend says. I mean, they have all these European cities to choose from, and they fly all the way here? Is the pizza here really better than in Naples? A strange conversation with one of the people from that other party, and she wants to dance with me – and afterwards my friend says – you know she was trying to pick you up, right? I didn’t, and I didn’t care to, but it’s good for your ego, she says. I guess it must be, and i suppose it is. She was pretty cute, too. I show my friend and her one other friend who remains the way to a cheap Korean place I know in K-town, Woorjip, which is very crowded this time of the night – it’s only midnight – but I have to go home – in all likelihood the wakeup is in five hours, and it takes an hour to get home. I have nothing to do on the train but recount the night because it will all be forgotten tomorrow. The train is full of people talking to each other – it feels like a party – which is never the case when I usually take the train at the usual time. The number of people who talk dwindles, and by the time my station is close, the train is quiet again.