For me, last year was sort of a surprise year. I thought the pandemic would end and, somehow, the world would return to what I think of as usual, but, thinking about it, I’ve felt that the world would return to normal for a long time, and it never has. The great Ulysses S Grant said, “War is progressive because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive.” I want to add, Everything is progressive, built on the past, but new.

Today is not a new start; it is the continuation of the long line of what went before. 2022 didn’t start fresh, and 2023 won’t either. The Russo-Ukrainian War will continue, Covid19 will continue, last year will continue, hell, Tom Brady will probably continue to play football (maybe forever). But everything will also be different.

I was listening to a New Yorker podcast yesterday, and they were talking about their most memorable cultural experiences from last year, none of which I had even heard of. One writer recommended Horse by Geraldine Brooks, which, among other things, is about the long tail of racial prejudice still with us. Another is East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” by Philippe Sands, which traces the radicle world philosophy used in the Nuremberg trials to two Jewish thinkers from Eastern Europe. The third and last one was the movie The Rescue, about the 2018 rescue of a young Thai soccer team trapped in a cave. The film is by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin of Free Solo fame.

For me, the two most memorable cultural experiences were The Patient starring Steve Carrel and created by Joel Fields &; Joe Weisberg. It is a ten-episode mini-series, each about thirtyish minutes long, for a total of about five hours. I highly recommend it. Still, my most memorable experience is listening to Ukraine: The Latest every weekday morning. It is by several writers in the British newspaper The Telegraph, and I listen to it on Spotify.

As an sort of an aside, I had no idea that The Telegraph is a conservative newspaper and I wouldn’t have known except that I read a review that pointed that out. Not knowing has been great because I have ended up judging what they are reporting on their constant rather than some preconceived idea of their slant. End aside.

Finally, I want to leave with a joke that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy  told David Letterman in a subway station ninety feet underground in Kyiv. Zelenskyy said “Want to hear a Jewish joke?” and I guess it is a Jewish joke although I’m not sure why.

“Two Jewish guys from Odesa meet up, one asks the other: ‘So what’s the situation? What are people saying?”
“And he goes, ‘What are people saying? They are saying it’s a war.”
“What kind of war?”
“Russia is fighting NATO.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, yes! Russia is fighting NATO.”
“So how’s it going?”
“Well, 70,000 Russian soldiers are dead. The missile stockpile has almost been depleted. A lot of equipment is damaged, blown up.”
“And what about NATO?”
“What about NATO? NATO hasn’t even arrived yet.”

During an asthma attack, the airways become swollen and inflamed. The muscles around the airways contract and the airways produce extra mucus, causing the breathing (bronchial) tubes to narrow. MAYO CLINAC Website

Prednisone is a glucocorticoid medication mostly used to suppress the immune system and decrease inflammation. Wikipedia. 

Corticosteroids, often known as steroids, are an anti-inflammatory medicine. NHS inform.

I got up the Wednesday morning before Christmas, and I could hardly breathe, gasping for air like a beached fish, feeling like I was drowning. It was scary, and it only got a little better as the day went on. On Thursday, the cycle repeated itself. For a week. I didn’t think I would die, but I was miserable, gasping for air all through Christmas. Not feeling good enough – but not feely bad enough either, a sweet spot, I guess, with constant high-grade misery – to Google the problem.

I think I sort of reverted to an eight year old wanting Mommy to fix it. Curling up and sleeping most of the day, waiting. And she did, sort of. Tuesday, my pulmonologist was back from Christmas Holiday and, among other things, she prescribed a blast – well, 4 teeny, tiny pills, but it felt like a blast when I woke up this morning – of Prednisone. So, while I don’t feel great, I feel much better and I didn’t feel great a month ago when I started Pulmonary Rehab. I guess it is most accurate to say I feel comparatively great.

I feel more New Yeary than Christmasy. Still, I grew up with the Holiday this time of year as Christmas, with Merry Christmas! as the universal greeting. Whether you are a Pagan celebrating Solstice, Jewish celebrating Hanukkah, a Buddhist celebrating a late Bodhi Day, or somebody like me just celebrating the secular holiday, I hope you have a very Merry Christmas.

I

Britannica Dictionary definition of ART. 1. [noncount] : something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings.

Bencher: An individual who takes photographs of graffiti. The term originated in New York when the graffiti writers and non-graffiti writers would sit on benches at train stations waiting for the trains to go by to take pictures and admire graffiti. Glossary of graffiti from Wikipedia.

Putting aside the question of What is Art and who gets to define it? for a while, something has been happening to blank city walls almost everywhere. I don’t mean graffiti-like Summer in the Granary, below, which is from a different tradition; I mean much more traditional painting, possibly commissioned and probably with an actual permit. I saw my first exterior wall painting – for lack of a better descriptor – in 1976, in Palo Alto, of all places. There were several – eventually, nine – approximately life-size figures painted on walls around town. Two I remember were an alien in a flying saucer crashed into a bank wall and two burglars escaping down the side of a building. This was before Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley and the figures seemed cute and wholesome.

Except for that, I don’t really remember any street art until I was driving by some wall paintings on 6th Street in San Francisco. They had already been defaced but I was instantly attracted – for lack of a better word – to it. Now I see wall art everywhere. Well, maybe not everywhere but almost everywhere, all over Paris, even Elko Nevada. Salt Lake City is full of Street Art and proud of it. Especially in the Granary District where we were staying, all we had to do is walk out the front door and wander the long way through the neighborhood on our way to getting coffee.

We ended our wall painting walk trying to guess the various luminaries at the SLC Pepper wall painting (with life-size figures). This remake by Jan Haworth, who collaborated on the original Beatles’ Sgt Pepper cover, features a lot more women and people of color. It was paid for by Zions Bank for us to enjoy.

When we were in Salt Lake City, we stayed at the evo Hotel, which advertised itself as a new kind of gathering place for our community….a laid-back hotel with a rooftop bar. When we first checked in, I thought, This is so cool; we are sooo with it. The hotel shares what were formally five brick warehouses, with a climbing gym – that was free to hotel guests – and two evo stores that offer roughly the same kind of clothes and equipment as REI.

The hotel is about 35 minutes from the lifts at Part City and is designed as a place to stay during the ski season without being an actual resort. We were there during slack season, so the hotel was pretty empty, and it would probably feel different if it was full of skiers. The basic philosophy seems to be having smaller rooms with more public space, like the room above, overlooking one of several climbing walls and the “rooftop bar” that overlooks the street. Our room was small and didn’t have a window, a desk, or reliable WiFi. That would have been OK – not ideal, but OK – except that the public desks did not have reliable WiFi either.

The hotel is in a rundown warehouse area that was rapidly gentrifying. Very rapidly.

Not having good WiFi – good being defined as reliable – is worse in an empty hotel with rooms without windows. The empty part was a problem with the Natural History Museum and The City Library. The enormous Lobby of the Natural History Museum, which, according to Ennead, was inspired by Utah’s distinctive slot canyons, a dramatic central public space…organizes the visitor experience….and uplifts and inspires. The problem was that the space was empty. That’s great in a slot canyon but, even in a very busy building, gives a feeling of disuse and neglect (a little like looking into an empty conference room in a busy hotel).

The Library’s Lobby and Plaza, which, according to Safdie Architects, is an “urban room,” a public space open through the waking hours, [which] attracts every facet of Salt Lake City’s community, was also virtually empty except for a couple of homeless people (from now on called “unhoused” people). It gave the place a slightly creepy feeling. I want to point out that the Safdie website shows both of these area being well used and they probably are on a warm Sunday afternoon.

These empty spaces alone with Salt Lake City’s extra wide streets and new construction, don’t so much give the impression of abandonment as the party quite hasn’t started yet.

Salt Lake City surprised and sometimes delighted us. It was unexpectedly interesting. Salt Lake was founded by Brigham Young and the Mormons who were following him. Those early believers laid the streets out on a rigid north-south grid- just like Escalante, only way bigger – and they have to be wide enough to turn an ox-drawn wagon around, both of which contribute to a slightly different feel than, say, San Jose. Salt Lake is both grubbier than I expected, with lots of homeless people, and booming, with the construction of new apartments almost everywhere.

As an aside, I wonder if a booming local economy and homelessness are connected. I hope not. End aside.

Salt Lake also feels more Liberal than I expected, with a woman mayor – the city’s third woman mayor, BTW – although on thinking about it, the Liberalism might be an illusion. I think it feels more Liberal to me because I associate Liberal with concern for the greater Community, as opposed to living in a gated community, and Salt Lake City’s many new public buildings and parks exude Liberal Civic Pride.

In the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, almost due east from downtown – and I’m defining downtown as Temple Square – is the Natural History Museum of Utah overlooking Salt Lake City like the Lawrence Hall of Science over Berkeley and the Bay. I’ve read, and Linda Melton has reminded me that the tallest buildings in a village or a town or – even/especially, take your pick – a cosmopolitan city reflect the place’s values. In that way, this building which is high on a hill overlooking Salt Lake is a statement building saying Science is valued here, which somehow warms my soul.

The Museum is designed by Ennead – that’s all, Ennead, just Ennead – who have offices in both New York and Shanghai and seem to be a sort of a co-op specializing in museum and public buildings. They have designed a 427,000 square-foot natural history museum for the Yangtze River Estuary Chinese Sturgeon Nature Preserve, the Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park and Museum of Rowan University in New Jersey, the Wuxi Museum and Art Park near Shanghai, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University near us – actually two buildings at Stanford – and the University of Michigan, Biological Sciences Building and Museum of Natural History (for starters).

The Lobby is enormous, with a wall of windows overlooking Salt Lake City and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. At the back of the Lobby is an excellent topo map of Utah. I love maps like this, and I could have stayed there all day. With all this going for it and its excellent pedigree, I wished I liked the museum more. My lukewarm opinion might be influenced by the fact that we went through the museum backward. The Museum is a strange hybrid of an old-timey-style museum at the bottom and a new-style museum on top. When we bought our tickets, they told us that most people take the elevator to the top but walking up the ramp from the bottom would give us the exhibits in chronological order. We chose chronological order and walked into the largest collections of dinosaur fossils I’ve ever seen. It was overwhelming, and by the time we got to the skimpy section on early man, three floors up, we were pretty burned out.

There were two things about the museum that annoyed disturbed surprised us. When we walked up the ramp to the museum, we ran across very noticeable lines in the concrete walks and retaining walls with numbers. The lines seemed random, with some lines straight and some curved. We asked several of the museum staff what they were, but nobody knew, and one guy even asked his supervisor, who also didn’t know. Now, come on! somebody put the lines and numbers there for a reason, and they are the opening sequence of a museum visit, our visit, anyway. Later, while we were staring at a giant skeleton, one of the guys we had asked about the mystery lines came up to us and pointed out that there was only one real fossil in the display, the rest were copies, and we could tell which one by its exoskeleton. Because the copies were lighter than the stone original, they could stand up on their own.

BTW, Michele and I think the lines represent the contour lines of the original, pre-graded, site.

The second building in our building walk day was The City Library, designed by Safdie Architects in conjunction with VCBO Architecture. Looking at the VCBO website, I think the heavy lifting was done by Safdie Architects, whose list of famous public and semi-public buildings starting with Montreal’s Habitat, built in 1967, is legendary. Fifty years later, they are still going strong. Safdie Architects’ oeuvre includes buildings like Alice Walton’s – of the Walton family – Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the 1.3 million square foot Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore, Exploration Place Museum and Educational Center in Wichita, Kansas, and the United States Institute of Peace Headquarters in Washington. Moshe Safdie is the founder, but according to their website, Safdie Architects is an extended family of partners and colleagues. I think all of these new, much younger, partners and colleagues are why the firm is still so creative.  

The City Library is stunning, playing a reflective glass building against a huge curved colonnade, with a five story open space between them. The colonnade has shops on the first floor and four floors of reading areas above, with stairs leading from the plaza to the top of the library on top. The elevators connected the floors are behind glass elevator shafts and are kinetic sculptures.

Coming-up, we’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work that well.

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