The Great Gray Prairie

It's 2020.09.01 on the lunar calendar today.

Did you know that you can set the iPhone display to grayscale? It's sort of like being in an upside-down version of

The Giver

, where you realize you're not special—being as easily manipulated by ads, visuals, and algorithms as the next person—and opt out of color to maintain some degree of autonomy. It has made my phone less stimulating, leading to a decrease in the amount of time spent on it. On the other hand, it's been taking me longer to find apps because I can't identify them as easily anymore.

I recall a music teacher saying she didn't know

The Wizard of Oz

 was in color until years after the release because her family had a black and white TV. What a pleasant shock that must have been to rediscover the movie on a color screen and see Dorothy step out into a world of Technicolor. My screen has unexpectedly created opportunities for such surprises on a smaller scale: I ordered a bag of Lays with less sodium on my phone, fully expecting it to be a yellow bag, and upon pickup realized it was ... blue!

Still Dreaming of Home

My album videos accompanied an 

exhibit of work by a contemporary Korean textile artist

 at a new art gallery in LA this past month. And back in March, my work inspired an arts workshop at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where participants created multimedia collages and poems following a discussion on identity and culture spurred by a viewing of "Dream of Home." It's been cool to hear about the album, along with the videos, taking a life of its own without me and touching to hear that it continues to resonate with people. By the way, the

full album is on YouTube

in the order I would have put the songs in if we weren't in an era of streaming tracks.

Social distancing continues and life feels like a mush of sameness, "nothing but the great gray prairie on every side" in L. Frank Baum's words. One of my tactics to recover the vibrancy, intention, and will I seem to have lost somewhere is to sign off social media. One of my baby sister's friends wondered what she could have accomplished if she hadn't signed up for Facebook in seventh grade. That made me laugh and got me feeling old/wise for holding out on a smart phone, giving myself almost a quarter century to focus on whatever I was working on without the internet in the palm of my hands.

In high school, I didn't even have a phone and carried around clocks that I would set on my desk and in the practice room. In college, I recall Facebook being rolled out to a handful of schools, a platform for pokes and groups of real-life friends. Now it's for harvesting data and pushing ads, and it's not alone in its mission ... Speaking of Big Tech, I would encourage you to vote NO on Prop 22 if you're in California. Uber and Lyft pouring $180+ million into a misleading ad campaign in support of the measure is infuriating—why not use that money to support the drivers and allow them to make fair wages so they can make a living?!

Watching documentary-drama The Social Dilemma on "how social media is reprogramming civilization" 👀