Day 12

When I was a kid there were still a lot of reruns on television that were in black and white, and of course there were old pictures in my parent's photo albums that were in black and white (in fact, one of my earliest baby pictures is black and white). So I knew quite early that old stuff didn't have color. At the same time, I was aware that some tv's weren't color, so that regardless of the film used, color or black and white, that set would only show it in monochrome. The reason I'm bringing this up is because, for whatever reason, I believed in my earliest years that the world itself had no color until the 60's.

Most of you reading this must be thinking, this guy was a real dolt as a kid. In my defense this thought was to my best recollection, around four years of age. I know it was before kindergarten. But I can remember wondering what it must have been like for my grandparents to live in a black and white world, a world whose sky and grass and houses were only varying shades of gray. And then one day, someone (I'm not sure who) came along and painted all of it, and I thought, what a wonderful time to experience: the day the world became color. When I told my mom this, she said very bluntly that it was just the film that had changed. The world has always been the same.

Looking back on this memory, though, I think my four year old mind was on to something. Now I wonder what it must have been like to live in a fully colored world, but all visual documentation of that world, both real and fictional, was black and white. I think it's why we now associate black and white film stock has having some artistic quality. Because it's not an exact representation of the world, but something more ethereal. I'm sure when they came out with color film, people found it sad in some sense, because it was a little too real. I feel, in some ways, the same about HD television. Why do I need to see the beads of sweat on that politician's upper lip? Why do I need to see the plastic surgery scars on that actress? But, because I'm a person who accepts that changing technology now moves faster than weather patterns, it's no big deal one way or the other. Most of what I watch now is not HD. In ten years (or five, or two), everything will be HD, not because I choose it, but because that will be the only choice.

In the end, it's all about how our ability to recreate and communicate our perceptions shapes our understanding of the world. It's why the ancient hunters who painted on the walls of Lascaux in France ritually shot arrows at the images before going out after the real thing. No one would do that now because it seems absurd, but people do use Google Earth to make sure they understand the exact location of Disneyland before driving there. Because we trust that it's as close to reality as we can get.

The rub comes in knowing if the technology shapes our understanding of reality or if we create technology to mirror what we already understand about reality. Did I think the world before the 1960's was black and white because the technology shaped that perception, or did I already begin to understand that a new, metaphorical, color had come into the world about the same time that it arrived on film.

I think the dilemma we're faced with now, is that technology moves faster than we can understand how it's affecting us. Look at something so mundane as movies: for the first third of my life, you could go to the theater and maybe if you were lucky, catch it in some revised version on television. Then came VHS rentals and purchases in the middle third of my life. Then suddenly, we've gone from VHS, to DVD, to Blu-Ray; from renting at a store, to renting from Netflix, to renting through I-tunes, to watching it online through streaming video, as well as being able to purchase it in any of those formats. Then there's the delivery: before you could watch it in a theater or at home on a tv. Now I can watch a movie anywhere on any number of devices, which will then be obsolete in five years or less. When I was a kid, I could only rely on people's descriptions and memories of films they had seen in the past. Now, when I tell my kids about something I watched when I was their age, they say, "Check YouTube, Dad. I want to see it."

In the same vein, as technologies become obsolete, we tend to ignore those past archives unless they're updated to a new media. I have a box of photos that were taken before 2003 that are never looked at. After 2003, we bought a digital camera and have taken literally thousands of pictures that we peruse at least several times a month. Does that make the events in our life prior to digital photography less improtant? Do the photographs taken on actual film and stored away in boxes seem more artistic or sacred?

I've seen students pass on research for papers, even if it's perfect for what they're writing about, because it's not available online in full-text. They just find something else that is available. And who's to blame them. When I was in college, I avoided microfiche like the plague and interlibrary loan was such a pain in the ass. Once, I helped my brother-in-law, Jon, write a paper using only the books we happened to have in the house. He got an A.

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make with all this. I love technology. I think Ctesibius building water clocks in ancient Alexandria is just as amazing as being able to watch live footage from Mars on my cell phone because it's humankind taking another tiny step toward the understanding of truth. But it seems that by letting technology decide for us which things will be remembered and studied, we're walking a dangerous path toward a dark age of our own creation. We consider ourselves the most informed generation in the history of humankind, which is true, if that information shows up on the first two pages of a Google search. Any knowledge past that is reserved for elite specialists. And if it's only available on microfiche, it's forever lost, the same as the scrolls containing the wisdom of the ancient world when the library at Alexandria burned to the ground.

Flight

Homage to Dick Cavett:

I can't imagine that there's a huge fanbase for Dick Cavett, but if there is, I have realized I may be part of it. I have a link to his NY Times blog, "Talk Show", which from the first entry, I've followed with great interest and enjoyment. Others have too, with about 400-500 comments on each post as evidence. And unlike most sites that feature posted comments, these are a good read as well. With most things I read online, I've had to make myself not scroll down and ignore what people write because it's full of hateful, bigoted, polarized bullshit, but Cavett's post draws comments of nostalgia, regard, intelligent disagreement, and other such civilized responses.

Then there are the interviews from the various incarnations of his television show, which are wonderful, and I can't imagine anyone now, except maybe Letterman, who could sit with such varied guests and somehow allow such a seemingly true picture to come from it. Who else has hosted a very insightful, yet barely coherent Sly Stone and had Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal nearly come to blows on his nationally televised show. If you look at the clips of Cavett's interviews on You Tube, you see the best and brightest of his generation: not just politicians, not just pop stars, not just literary icons, but all of them.

Cavett isn't what I'd consider a movie star, though he's been in many. The first one I saw him in was Beetlejuice, playing an art agent for Delia Deets's strange and supernatural sculpture. He delivers a perfect deadpan line as he's leaving the dinner party after having been possessed by Harry Belefonte's Bananna Boat Song about how as Delia's agent he's consistently lost money on her so he can tell her frankly and honestly that if she wants to scare people she should do it with her art. It's great comedy and so subtle it's easily missed, very much the way Cavett himself is overlooked.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by airplanes and flight. Early on it was only with military airplanes. I have a cousin, David, who I was close to growing up, whose dad had been an F-100 pilot in Vietnam and was shot down and killed when David was two years old. I think because of this, he threw himself into the subject of military aircraft. He taught me to notice the small differences between planes so that I could tell them apart and understand their purpose. I read books he gave me and we built plastic models together and so began my education on aviation. David was a very talented artist, and his models were very precise reproductions. I remember the pride he felt after completing a large model of an F-100 that had the same squadron markings on the tail as his father's. I remember him using a toothbrush to paint in the blackened cannon ports under the nose. I remember it being a solemn moment when he hung it from the ceiling of his basement room with fishing line. And I remember sensing his grief because it didn't bring him any closer to knowing his dad.

But I think the beginngs of my shift from duty filled patriot child of the cold war to a 21st century pacifist, began with looking outside aircraft as a military application and seeing flying as a near spiritual pursuit, which happened watching a documentary as a kid in the early 80's on the history of flight, narrated by Dick Cavett. It started with the legend of Icarus, then the balloons and gliders of the 18th and 19th centuries, the crazy designs of early motorized attempts, moving to Samuel Langley's Aerodrome which failed with much publicity only a week before the Wright Brother's quietly successful flight at Kitty Hawk. It was about the human desire to rise above the earthly plane. Not about raining down death from above. And all of it was explained by Cavett's calm and comforting voice.

The last scene was a man snow skiing down a mountain beneath a bright orange hang glider, while the soft notes of Pachelbel's Canon began to play. I'd never heard this piece of music before, and though it's become the cliche of sappy weddings and no one of any taste would admit to liking it, I can't hear it without thinking of this: the man with the hang glider slid quickly toward a precipice, and Cavett's voice spoke the last lines of narration (I can't remember them, but can remember my chest feeling full, tears on my cheeks) and the music rising as the earthbound man went over the snowy cliff, and instead of plummeting to certain death, continued upward into a alpine blue sky.

Forever after that, when I ponder humankind's yearning to leap into the heavens or hear the still lovely Canon in D, I think of Dick Cavett, as if it was his voice that led me to these revalations, like a father teaching his son that one's first views on something aren't necessarily the best. That instead of being excited by falling bombs and cannon fire and dogfights, it's all right to be a ten year old boy with tears in his eyes because he sees a small beauty in this world. That it's all right to be who I am, instead of what's expected.

Day 8

When I was a kid, I loved baseball. I started playing on an organized team in the first grade, and this wasn't t-ball or machine pitch or coach pitch, but real 9-player baseball. I played little league from the time I was 7 until I was 15, and played on the Junior High and High School teams as well. Two different years, I played on little league teams that went to the National Tournement. The first year we took fourth; the last we took second. It was kind of like the movie Hoosiers in the sense that in a small rural town there was nothing to do except play baseball.


Even when we weren't playing organized ball, we were constantly riding our bikes to someone's house to play with plastic balls and bats wrapped in black electrical tape. Each yard had different ground rules: over the hedge at Billy Gulledge's house was a homer; my house was open and included the neighbor's yard in the field of play. You could catch flies off of trees, powerlines, houses, or anything else as long as it was between the foul lines, which were marked by any number of landmarks like bare spots in the grass or the concrete of the back porch.


And then when I wasn't playing ball, I was thinking about it. I took a subscription to the Sporting News when I was probably 9 or 10 and memorized team stats. I'd record myself on a tape player announcing 9 innings of an imagined baseball game. I'd read old tattered novels from our school library with titles like 'Gutter Team', which essentially had the same plot as the movie 'Major League'. I had the fortune being ten years old when the movie 'The Natural' was released. I still get chills when Redford's character knocks the cover off the ball or busts the clock or shatters the lights in the fantastic firework ending. It's complete fantasy, and yet that's how you feel playing baseball.


But as I got older, I stopped following the game as closely, mainly because of time constraints. When I was a kid, I could take three hours out of my day and watch an entire baseball game, start to finish. If I have three hours free now, I'm not going to watch tv. I was able to hang on to the game a little longer with my first job out of grad school--a university press that ran a baseball writing series. We even published a later novel of Eliot Asinof, author of 'Eight Men Out'. Basically, all of the books were written by men who'd gone on to live their lives and yet still carried that boyish belief in the legend and mythology of baseball. Men like me.


Last month, I took my sons to see the Eugene Emeralds, our local San Diego Padres affiliate, and it seems to me that minor league baseball is where that legend is alive and well. It's hard to be sympathetic watching the pros. That isn't about baseball; it's about advertisement and marketing. Even the achievments of the last 15 years--like the homerun race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 98 was more about selling baseball to a new generation of ticket buyers than it was about greatness. It's the reason both of those guys were juiced during those years: because there was something at stake other than a game.


I think of Dizzy and Daffy Dean, famed brothers of the St. Louis Cardinals Gashouse Gang, and the fact that during the offseason, they would often get a factory job to pay the bills in order to play ball again come spring. I think of Cool Papa Bell, legend of the Negro Leagues, who was said to have been so fast he had to jump his own hit up the middle while going to second. I think of Phil Niekro, old man knuckleballer of the 70's who lacked the least shred of glamor, and yet still won ballgames. Would anyone of these make it in the majors today? Maybe, if they had the right agent.


But in the minors, that magic is there, because it's about the hope of something more. There's something at stake. It's not about whether you get another million tacked onto your contract, not yet anyway; it's about whether you get to spend one more day playing ball. For me it was about getting to sit in the stands and keep score on the scorecard and explain to my boys about why you don't swing on a 3-0 count or why it's a good thing to fly out on a sacrifice or why you learn to switch hit. For me too, it was about having another good day at the ballpark, surrounded by other people who loved the game, not because it was in a newly built facility or that it cost as much as a stay in a four star hotel.


I always felt a tinge of guilt on my turning away from baseball. Most people in the place I'm from remain passionate about sports into their dying days. My mother-in-law, who is not athletic at all, follows sports--baseball, football, basketball, tennis, swimming--religiously, with a clear understanding of the finer aspects of each. My grandpa Roy was a staunch University of Kentucky basketball fan, ignoring the scores on the 10 oclock news so he could watch the tape- delayed games afterward with suspense. My grandpa Gill, who was blind, listened to St. Louis baseball on the radio, with Mike Shannon and Jack Buck announcing, and to this day I think there's no better way to experience baseball other than being at the game. But for some reason, I wasn't able to keep up my commitment. Maybe there's a connection with this and my ability to keep my religious faith as well.


I think F. Scott Fizgerald articulated this in his essay "Ring", a send-off after Ring Lardner's death. Lardner was a literary figure who started in sports writing, and he was a close friend to both Scott and Zelda. Fitzgerald said, "It was never that he was completely sold on athletic virtuosity as the be-all and end-all of problems; the trouble was that he could find nothing finer. Imagine life conceived as a business of beautiful muscular organization--an arising, an effort, a good break, a sweat, a bath, a meal, a love, a sleep--imagine it achieved; then imagine trying to apply that standard to the horribly complicated mess of living, where nothing, even the greatest conceptions and workings and achievments, is else but messy, spotty, tortuous--and then one can imagine the confusion that Ring faced on coming out of the ball park." I understand that same confusion.


For me, when I watch sports now, that complicated mess of living is all too apparent. Steroids. Money. Media. Racism. Arrogance. Shallowness. That's what I see. So I go to Civic Stadium and pay six dollars to watch young guys in their early twenties play ball in the minors for the same money that I make at my job, watch them make great plays and bonehead errors in the same inning, all with a hope that somehow by buckling down and playing the game right, something better will come from it. That's the stuff that made baseball legendary. That's what made baseball life.

Day 3

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was "Superweasel". It was published the year I was born, 1974, when the environmental movement was taking off. The story is about a kid, Alvin Fernald, who's given an assignment by his teacher to come up with an idea to help the environment. Other kids are collecting newspapers for recycling and cleaning up vacant lots, but Alvin decides to become an environmental super hero, Superweasel, who takes on the city's biggest polluters. He dams a small river that a large factory is dumping waste into so that it backs up into the factory and causes the plant to shut down. He also, with the help of his best friend and his little sister, throws dead fish killed by the chemicals into the swimming pool of the company's owner. On another night, he climbs the smokestack of a manufacturer across town and blocks it so that smoke pours below, sending workers fleeing for fresh air. This continues and at the end of the book, he hangs up his costume, fish have come back to the river, and he gets an A on his report as the teacher is the only one who figures out his identity.

I can remember wishing I could do something like this. The adventure and the secrecy and going against the machine of the rich and powerful, but all for something so clearly important. I have a feeling a lot of kids my age felt the same. Then they grew up, and there's still a huge animosity toward being responsible toward the environment, and it seems like an environmental super hero is in order. But when they act on these things, suddenly there's a new name for Superweasel: Eco-terrorist.

I was speaking with someone the other day and they were saying something about the 'New Green Movement'. I thought to myself, it's been around as long as I have. Superweasel, The Lorax by Dr. Suess, the crying Indian commercial (who actually was an Italian immigrant who adopted a Native American persona early in his acting career). It's marketing. The green movement didn't start in most people's minds until they were able to label it, wrap it up, and sell it. Before it was only something to teach little kids in funny stories that of course aren't real. It's cute to protect the trees and the rivers and the animals, until you're old enough to understand that there is money to be made in their destruction.

When I was in grad school, I worked on my Father-in-law's farm to make money through the summer, and once a neighbor gave me this advice: "If you ever find an endangered animal or plant on your farm, kill it right then and there, because if the EPA finds out, it'll ruin your life." The fact that a small town family farmer has this attitude is proof we've failed in the moral dilemma Jimmy Carter warned us of in his Malaise Speech. It reads as if it was given in Denver a few days ago. As if, thirty years later, this is new stuff to us. Will we take a moral and responsible stand on how we do business and operate government and take care of the environment, or will we simply become a nation of consumers filling up the void of our lives with stuff? I guess you have the answer now, Mr. Carter.

But even with the 'new awareness' of all things green, the marketing whizzes and the spin doctors have tapped into this and are profiting beautifully. Here in Oregon, the Toyota Prius has become a symbol of that green consumerism. Never mind the issue of battery disposal. Never mind that the carbon footprint used in making those new cars is larger than the energy saved while driving it. It's an outward show that you care and are willing to spend money for the cause. It shows that when faced with a dire situation, our answer is to buy more stuff. It's a way to ease our consciences. Seven years ago, after 9-11, our answer to Al-qaeda was to buy things. Travel. Buy new cars. Spend your money in a vigilant act of patriotism. If there was an alien invasion, the ad agencies would have us running to the stores in droves.

Even on my most optimistic days, it seems hopeless. It makes me long for childhood, when keeping the air and the water clean and the trees green seemed like something as obvious as breathing, something outside the reach of profit margins and marketing. A time when waste was something you were admonished for instead of rewarded. When the heroes were Jimmy Carter and Superweasel. It's a good thing I still have my copy of that book from when I was a kid, because even if I wanted to buy it new in a modern show of support for environmental literature, it's out of print.

Day 1

I guess it's fitting that I'm starting this on a Wednesday as I was born on a Wednesday. The children's rhyme says that Wednesday's child is full of woe. I'm sure there are lots of people out there born on hump day that claim this isn't true, that it's prejudice against mid-week births. But I read it and tend to say, yeah, it's not far off. Even on my happiest of days, and there are many, there's an underlying melancholy beneath it all. My youngest son, Connor, was born on a Wednesday. He seems happy, though he's a loner and prefers to play by himself in the backyard, imagining some other world, talking to himself in hushed tones. He also has a brutal temper that appears from nothing in a split second. It's like looking in a mirror.

I was thinking about another children's rhyme the other day when I saw four crows in the street in front of our house. The one about counting blackbirds to see what their meaning is: one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a story that's never been told. Seven seems the most romantic, but you never see seven crows together. Mostly it's one. I had two Irish friends in grad school, Shane and Niamh, and one night at a party, standing under a covered porch in a downpour, they told me that in Ireland when you see a crow you always start looking for another one so that it becomes something other than sorrow. When we saw the crows in our street, my oldest son, Cormac, asked what four birds meant, so I went through the rhyme and said, four for a boy. He replied, "It's me. I'm the boy." I said, "Well, it could be Connor, or even me. I'm a boy." But he said calm and confident, "No dad. It's me." He was born on a Tuesday. Full of grace.