What a cool idea. Photographing people having a happy conversation is difficult because normal conversation involves a lot of sounds that scrunch up people's mouths. Nicole Young came up with this idea to have the people pretend they are talking, but the only two words allowed are "hey" and "yes." This brings a lot more smiley looks into the scene.
I'm looking forward to trying this next time I need a shot of two people happily talking.
Here's two things I love love love about big Zoom conferences:
1. You're never forced to sit next to people who are talking and laughing with each other, distracting you while you're trying to listen to the presentations. Whenever I tell them to shush they give me the look I once saw on Linda Blair's face in "The Exorcist." And they assume this mega-scowl for the duration of the session.
2. The Q&A is usually written. Thus, we are no longer subjected to all of those "questions" that begin "I'll keep this short," but turn out to be five-minute speeches disguised as questions. I've never hurt another soul in my entire life, but I've come closest to violating that rule when these people won't shut-the-fuck-up. And most of these fake questions are by people who look like they don't have any friends. There! I said it. OK, I'm done. I feel better now.
I've often argued that we need to refocus, to consciously move back toward the central mission of Martin Luther King:
“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
~From MLK's “I have a dream” speech
It's distressing to see so many loud voices arguing for the opposite, demanding that we need to become ever more conscious of "race" and claiming that we have made no meaningful progress since the Civil War or since the early 1960s.
Basing anything on "race" is always a massively erroneous and ultimately destructive miscategorization. It will lead to endless strife and mistrust because "race" tells us nothing meaningful about any of the people with whom we share this planet. There is only one way to get to know each other: Taking the time to learn about each other, one at a time. Using "race" as a proxy as a shortcut for this hard work is inevitably destructive. In its simplistic detachment from real-world facts, sorting people based on "color" is akin to basing public policy on phrenology or astrology.
The above is a short prelude for a recent proposal regarding prioritizing people for the COVID vaccine, pointed out by Andrew Sullivan:
It's amazing to watch the "progressive" media slip away and abandon one of the biggest First Amendment threats of our time. Not too long ago, progressive media outlets gave full-throated support for Assange. Are there any progressive voices still speaking out for a pardon for Julian Assange? There would be, except that thinking has clearly become a team sport these days.
Woke-thought, especially in the form of Critical Race Theory, has drilled deeply into many of our primary sense-making institutions: schools, government, corporations and news media. Cancel culture is its enforcement arm as you can read in many places including this website. Wokesters refuse to subject their ideas to public scrutiny, as Coleman Hughes recently discovered. How do we turn this ship around? How do we publicly and effectively shame people whose version of morality is to shove each other into color categories and treat some of those colors with scorn?
How do we pressure those who espouse these types of principles? Is there an end in sight?
James Lindsay, who created the above graphic (and who created the website New Discourses) recently wrote an article titled, "Wokeness will bring a second Renaissance," in which he argues that artists have just about had their fill of all of this political correctness:
What is it that artists across the arts have had enough of? Woke colonization. Woke censorship. Woke culture. Woke hegemony. Woke complaining. Woke negativity about everything. Wokeness. Period.Artists are telling me more and more frequently that they’ve had it with Woke control over their professions and their outlets. This is an interesting circumstance because artists who feel silenced, repressed, controlled, and dominated will, as reliably as day follows night in the morning, begin to produce incredible works of powerful, defiant, and subversive art. They will make art that will communicate the injustice of this oppression in a way that does something no amount of intellectual explaining can possibly do. They will make art to connect with people—and to connect people to the oppression they sense but don’t know how to make sense of. . . . What I’m hearing from artists is a cry to produce the beautiful again. The stirring. The unsettling. The hilarious. To get out of this stifling environment and throw off stagnation.
James argues that art is organic and artists are unstoppable. He believes that help is on the way in the form of art..
I'm more than ready for this to happen.