"Random Is My Life..."

Let the heeling begin.  I do a lot of these. So do other people.

Someone: Well you know God has a plan for your life-

Me: 

Johari Osayi Idusuyi: the hero who read through a Trump rally. 

A writer and student at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield, Illinois, Idusuyi found herself not only in the right place at the right time, but with the right book in hand: Citizen: An American Lyric is a critically acclaimed, award-winning work by Claudia Rankine that explores the pervasiveness of racism and micro-aggressions in America.   

“I think we were chosen for obvious reasons. We were minorities and there weren’t a lot of minorities there,” Idusuyi told Jezebel. “He also instructed us to sit in the middle, so we kind of already knew what this was.”

The 20-year-old student stressed that she went to the rally not as a plant, or with ill intent. She genuinely wanted to see Trump speak. Idusuyi said she had no interest in Trump. “But if you have the chance to see a presidential candidate, why not?” But when a few protesters interrupted the speech and the crowd collectively turned on them, Idusuyi got angry. “The way the supporters treated the protesters was really unbelievable and that’s what made me mad,” she said. “There was a man who snatched a lady’s [Barack Obama] hat. She was one of the protesters and was leaving and her hair just went with the hat. Then the man threw it into crowd and everybody cheered. I thought, ‘That’s bullying. That’s aggressive.’ I don’t think Trump handled it with grace.”

So she pulled out her copy of Claudia Rankine‘s award-winning book of poetry, Citizen and ignored the rest of the speech. That’s when an older couple, visibly irritated by Idusuyi’s action, poked her on the shoulder and said, “If you don’t wanna be here then leave.” A brief argument ensued, after which the older woman said she was glad Idusuyi wasn’t her daughter. 

photos by vincent laforet, who, after his pulitzer prize winning work covering the effects of american drone warfare in pakistan and the aftermath of hurricane katrina, decided to refocus his career on aerial landscapes (here las vegas, chicago, new york and london), which, given the heights taken in helicopters to achieve these shots (up to 11,000 feet), proved just as harrowing. 

“some veteran helicopter pilots actually refuse to go up there, they’re just not comfortable,” laforet said. “the first time i went up, it was scary, because i’ve never been that high [with] an open window or door, in a harness leaning out. and you see planes going right underneath you. your heart skips a beat. …a physicist explained a fall from that high up could last a terrifying forty one seconds.“ 

helicopters can be like flying blenders; they vibrate wildly, and laforet has to try to hold the camera steady while shooting at very low shutter speeds, often as the chopper goes into steep, banking turns.

notes laforet, "i’m looking down there and i’m trying to make order out of chaos, looking for patterns, geometry, colour, and light. …you literally perceive the depth, and the three dimensionality of the earth in a different way, and you see distances in a different manner, they look much smaller, much more within reach.”  

“there’s something very odd that happens when you go up in the air in that, ironically, it’s kind of intimate. …i think when you take a step back from anything, you see things more clearly. to take some distance from the street level view, and not getting lost in all the details that you see on the street level, you see that we’re all in this together.”