Month: January 2023
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Twenty Three Week Three
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Sen. Nate Blouin, D-Salt Lake City, as the Senate gives final passage to a bill aiming to crack down on the ability of doctors to prescribe hormone therapy for minors who are transgender, at the Capitol building in Salt Lake City on Friday January 20, 2023. At right is intern Ari Webb, whose statement Blouin read during the vote. Many moments fly by. This one hit. I was photographing from the Senate gallery as Sen. Nate Blouin read a statement by Ari Webb during the voting on and passing of another anti-transgender bill in the Utah Senate. A quote from Bryan Schott’s article in The Salt Lake Tribune:
“This is a reminder of the fact that people like me are not accepted by the majority of this body. This is not a partisan issue. No one is trying to indoctrinate your kids into the trans community that would welcome them with open arms. I would not be alive if I had not been able to transition, and I am lucky that my attempts to take my life before that time failed,” Webb wrote.
Media: How Eric Adams Started Mentoring a Con Man (longform). How “Battle Royale” took over video games (longform). Overreach (book):
The people are not stupid. They watch and laugh nervously and see how low the actors will go
The PEZ Outlaw (film) treats its quirky characters with a loving hand. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (film), something I should have seen last year.
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Overreach by Owen Matthews | Goodreads
Dmitry Bukov: It’s like a theatre… today’s Russian does what is expected of him. Sometimes he applauds, sometimes he wolf-whistles. But he is not required to actually believe. Everyone knows that the man on the stage is not Prince Hamlet but Laurence Olivier. Nobody believes that what is happening on the stage is actually true. Do you think anyone believes what is being said on TV talk shows? But [after the invasion] the theatre is coming more like a circus. The people are not stupid. They watch and laugh nervously and see how low the actors will go.
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How “Battle Royale” Took Over Video Games | The New Yorker
How “Battle Royale” Took Over Video Games
With a simple, ingenious formula, a Japanese novel has inspired some of the most successful games in history.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-battle-royale-took-over-video-games
In the mid-nineteen-nineties, Koushun Takami was dozing on his futon on the island of Shikoku, Japan, when he was visited by an apparition: a maniacal schoolteacher addressing a group of students. “All right, class, listen up,” Takami heard the teacher say. “Today, I’m going to have you all kill each other.” Takami was in his twenties, and he had recently quit his job as a reporter for a local newspaper to become a novelist. As a literature student at Osaka University, he had started and abandoned several horror-infused detective stories. But the well had long since run dry; he had left his job with neither a plan nor a plot in mind. The visitation wasn’t a haunting; it was an epiphany.
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Light and Dark – 2023
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How Eric Adams Started Mentoring a Con Man | The New Yorker
How Eric Adams Started Mentoring a Con Man
The mayor’s friends and allies have puzzled over his relationship with Lamor Whitehead, a fraudster Brooklyn church leader.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/how-eric-adams-started-mentoring-a-con-man
Bruan, who was already negotiating Abdullah’s surrender with the N.Y.P.D., believes that Whitehead’s intrusion alarmed the authorities, prompting officers to pounce on Abdullah, guns drawn, outside a Legal Aid office downtown, where he had gone to meet with Bruan before surrendering. After Abdullah was taken away, Whitehead got into an argument with Bruan. “Stay away from my client,” she told him, to which Whitehead had responded, “What did you say, you dumb bitch?”
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Twenty Three Week Two
The archives say the week was this:
- basketball game
- public meeting
- night photos along state street
- patch of land
- basketball game
- rally
Media: Landlocked (film) was the kind of film you can’t forget (in the best way). Sick (film) takes you back to early COVID-19 quarantine and adds a human killer. Saw Avatar: The Way of Water (film) in the theater. And to catch the backstory of a MySpace outsider influencer, My Name is Jonah (film)
From the notebook: Watching Sicario (film) again. There’s this brilliant exchange, something like this:
“Tell me how the cartels work.”
“You’re asking me to describe how a watch works. Better to focus on what time it is.”
