With its temperate clime and ocean-kissing caresses, Hawaii has always called me. Having been raised on the East Coast, the lush archipelago felt remote and fantastical as the only reference I had of Hawaii as a kid was when the Brady Bunch, in 1972, jumped the shark and encountered a lot of bad juju there. Still I appreciated the fact that our youngest U.S. state is the most geographically isolated string of rock on the globe and has a cultural and racial diversity that gives most alpha cities reason to pause. I just could not foresee going to one of the most beautiful places in the world in a state of shock, more like one of suspended belief, following my dad's death. Baldwin Beach on Maui's North Coast Dennis Kilduff died on March 2nd and I flew home the next morning and was thrown into the heady whirlwinds of funeral planning, greeting family, friends and guests and "catching up." As anyone who has been through this before, this ...
Gosh, where do we start with this one? Photograph: Alamy Our class had taken a field trip to the British Library Digital Labs Symposium which ended up being like an awards show for the most cutting-edge projects associated with local research groups. There was free food, an explicit call to "network" (a term that gives me the willies when spoken aloud), and a number of creative projects. The keynote speaker who kicked things off at the ripe hour of 10 a...
Jet lag and a feeling of loneliness did not leave me with a favorable first impression of Amsterdam whose uniform grayness and tight sense of organization I felt respectable but suffocating. It didn't help that I got lambasted on the 17 tram by an unhinged derelict. In San Francisco we have our fair share of crazies on the MUNI but they are usually berating the universe in general. This French-speaking guy directed his ire on me and my one regret was moving to another part of the tram rather than sticking up for myself. Adding to the insult was a humid density to the City of Canals, similar to a bad day in New York (not surprising given their shared history) of heaving throngs and claustrophobic architecture, boorish tourists and locals clad in black. An obligatory trip to the Sex Museum and a "coffeshop" in Rembrandt Park proved to be elusive distractions –– I left the latter because of the horrific R & B blasting from the strategica...
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