Category: NFN

I find fascinating the transformation that public speakers go through – the gradual changes from “private mode,” to focussing on the event, to appearing before the audience and delivering the presentation, to winding down again. And, for a number of obvious reasons (historical, sociological, and practical), I find the changes even more interesting with female speakers. This photograph from before a presentation at a large scale event, Los Angeles Century City, InterContinental Hotel, 2009.

With five Manhattanites crammed into one car in Los Angeles, conversation inevitably revolves around the completely different use of your car in Manhattan. Driving around Beverly Hills, one of my fellow NYC-native passengers remarked that he bought a new car three years ago, and managed to drive 19.000 miles since (including trips to his in-laws in fly-over land, which make up for most of the milage). In L.A., our driver said, “you do that in one day.” After only three days there, the number seems quite plausible to me.

This image from Berkeley. San Francisco may be my favorite new town, simply for the fact that the airport feels a little like the one in Salzburg – when I left for L.A. sometime Saturday afternoon, there was *not a single other airplane taxying to the runway*. This is what commercial air travel must have been like in the 1950ies…