MINUTE OF MONTH NO. 20 OCTOBER 2021
Channel: Sarah Bay Gachot
Date: 2023-01-13

#minuteofmonth No. 20, October 2021, we landed in Rhode Island for awhile for some rest and relaxation that really turned out to be that, despite a block of work that set in for the first week or so. Sometimes our job, ghostwriting expressions of “dynamic, vibrant, compelling, and engaging” visions (those are words I use a lot in my work - apologies, English language. . . ) on how to sell automobiles, beauty products, and online services, to convince people on philanthropic causes, or how to produce halftime shows, thousands of words at a time, can become a kind of hypnosis, setting myself down at the computer and not moving for five, six, or more hours at a time, consulted by zoom calls from Los Angeles, Toronto, Madrid, even Costa Rica this month, making notes and absorbing the voice at hand, organizing notes, putting the words in order, elaborating, cleaning up. . . . The people I work for ask me where I am and I tell them where I am. They ask what I’m doing there, and if I really answered I would say, I really don’t know. It’s a place to rest. And there were some other places this month towards the end and in the middle. I dipped down to New York for one of my long, long, longtime friend’s birthdays, basked in her family-like presence. You’ll see a visit to the Brooklyn Museum and a video piece by Lorraine O’Grady called “Landscape (Western Hemisphere),” 2010/11, that the curators have included in their exhibition of 19th Century American art along with other Black and Indigenous contemporary artists to point to who’s missing from previous ideas of what 19th Century American art is. Then back to Rhode Island on the Cross Sound Ferry between Orient Point, Long Island, and New London, Connecticut. I was on the John H. You’ll see the Susan Anne and Cape Henlopen at sea, and the reason I don’t like the Susan Anne is because the exhaust pipes are in the front, which mucks up the deck experience. From there, we visited more longtime friends in Philadelphia, as this is where I grew up, and strolled and celebrated around and in the new neighborhood and home of one, then visited all her murals around the city — the airplane not the birds — actually just a handful because she is powerhouse amazing and is doing beautiful things for Philadelphia. And the third longtime friend was there too from New York, making our quad complete. From Philadelphia we decided we needed to visit the two Beauforts, North Carolina and South Carolina, back to back, because . . . they have the same name. But they are pronounced differently: BOHfurt and BYOOfurt, respectively. I’ve written here about the history of the latter last time we stayed there, which was a year ago, because it’s very interesting, but I didn’t know until now that both are named for Henry Somerset, the Second Duke of Beaufort, UK, who lived in the 17th century and never visited either. Then we went to Darien, Georgia, where we’ve never been before, a town close to the coast, many shimp boats and a festive fish restaurant, which you could almost designate “shack” but for that they really make it a nice dining experience, close to Brunswick, St. Simons, and Jekyll Island. But that’s for next month, as these #minuteofmonth are an exercise in using at least a clip from every video I make in a month, because somewhere along the way I wondered what I was going to do with all the videos. Photographs are more understandable to me. I use them to remember where I have been, give them to people as evidence and in attempts to share something funny, beautiful, or confoundingly absurd, and, of course, post them here, sometimes with words attached. Videos seem less sharable unless they are corralled and made sense of in a sequence. They become this. Until next month. Originally posted on: 
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CWGIYIhJ958/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link