Some Thoughts from Child-hood

I have just started reading Julia Child’s My Life in France. It is a beautiful book full of luscious description of a time that is no longer. Opening in the late 1940s, the first chapter depicts her experience as a young, naïve American having her initiatory meal in a restaurant in Rouen. She and her new husband, Paul, feast on a lovingly described lunch of salade verte, baguette, oysters on the half shell, sole meuniere, strong black pressed coffee, fromage blanc, and a bottle of Pouilly Fume. Child touts it as “the most exciting meal of my life,” accentuated, no doubt by its distinction as her very first lunch in her newly adopted homeland, a place that suited her to a T.

In the introduction, which includes a charming photo of the young couple sitting side-by-side in their cozy study, Child relates how she and Paul meticulously documented their time in France for friends and relatives via a series of photos, datebooks, letters, sketches, poems, and cards. Paul handwrote his brother 3- to 6-page journalistic accounts every week, incorporating sketches, photos, and mini-collages out of ticket stubs and newsprint. Also a faithful correspondent, Julia added her own typewritten versions about what she’d been cooking and the human drama unfolding in her new French home. I imagine the delight the recipients must have taken in receiving these items, made with such creativity and care, much as I recall the pains taken by my mother and aunt, both artists, to handpaint and assemble collaged greeting cards for every holiday during the 1950s and 60s.

The middle of our last century was a comparatively sensual and sensuous time. Little in our world was “virtual.” TV programs, perhaps, but TV was still a novelty and had a certain delineated quality, as video had not yet become a ubiquitous presence. Other than that, just about everything happened in ways that we could see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. And slowly—much more slowly.

When I consider the wild popularity of Julia Child’s book (and personage) in 2009 America, it’s hard not to imagine that some of it derives from our culture’s steadily inching away from the sensual, tactile world. A recent study found that the average American adult spends 8 1/2 hours/ day in front of a screen, including (mostly, sadly) TV, computers, mobile phones, and other devices. I have always loved how books look and feel, visually and tactilely. So much is now being done on screens that we have fewer and fewer experiences that involve apprehending in 3-D. For example, I love holding them, smelling them when they’re new, seeing how cozy they make a room when stacked end-to-end on a tall wooden bookcase. The art on their covers, the fonts used in printing, the texture of the paper and its sometimes-deckled edges that press rough and sensuously against a fingertip. There is something about hearing the crackle as you open a new hardcover for the first time that extends beyond the promise of the knowledge that lies therein or the kindred soul you may just meet inside. And that something has to do with the physical object itself.

I am saddened to see that so many people have purchased Kindles and other e-books and seem to like them. This summer I bumped into one and its owner while eating breakfast in Mendocino County. I could tell just by looking at him that he was a genre reader—most likely sci-fi—and so consumed books the way some of us consume cereal. He was really in it for the story; the wrapper was unimportant. And so, he loved his Kindle (while admitting that he also loved books—and had shelves-ful back home). We spent quite a while debating the relative pros and cons of the device and its impact on the book business. And no doubt, it’s had a huge impact on the business that may only get worse as prices drop and young people decide that their entire world must be virtually lived.

But for me, it comes back to a larger question. What will we have in the end if the entire world is flattened onto a computer screen? And are we so compelled toward those backlit images that real life, with its lesser controllability and order, has taken a backseat? As a world, we have become “busy.” Computers were originally designed to “save time” and “make things easier.” And certainly, in many instances, they do. Yet, people never seemed as busy to me as we have since we became obsessed with our electronic toys.

We are being manipulated, sold an ever-greater bill of cybergoods due in part to our human propensity toward grasping—wanting ever more. Like hamsters on a wheel, we try to wring juice from this digital experience and wonder why, despite all our virtual “connecting,” at the end of the day we feel more exhausted than satisfied.

Tangible things and experiences, human interactions and sensual pleasures enrich our lives in ways that computer-generated experiences do not. Having a meal like Julia Child describes satisfies so much in us beyond merely the exquisite delight to our tongue. Going outside on a fall day when the leaves are at their peak, smelling smoke arising from fireplaces as dusk descends, hearing ducks flying overhead honking righteously on their migration south. These are realms into which our keyboards can never lead. It’s sad to think that someone would choose a sterile electronic device over a real book. And equally sad that so much of what is “real” in life has flattened into a randomly generated series of pixels.

I will leave you with a photo of Julia Child's kitchen, which has gone the way of the Smithsonian. Perhaps that's a statement in and of itself. Perhaps when End of Days hits, they'll find us all huddled in that Institution, ogling our former possessions and remembering what it felt like to be at play in three-dimensional space, cuddling objects we could actually see, touch, hear, smell, and taste.

"Hand in Glove," Humboldt County, CA

Eureka, CA, is a dirty, dingy, chain motel-y nonsequitur in the hippie State of Jefferson. Logging, mining, fishing--and a picture-perfect, satiny flapper girl in an antique shop window just east of the bay. Sometimes a mannequin fetish and a few late-afternoon reflections are all you need.

Dude, where's my car? Guess I left it in the trunk...

When I was 10, I discovered in my grandmother’s boxes in the attic (repository of endless treasure), a slick, old B&W postcard of the “Drive-Thru Tree,” nestled deep within the 40-mile Avenue of the Giants, near Redwood National Park in far-northern CA. For a kid who’d never been west of Pennsylvania, this set up all kinds of mental images: a vast and limitless West full of gargantuan possibilities, jumbo natural wonders, and trees so tall they gave NYC skyscrapers a run for their money. I had of course heard Woody Guthrie’s folk tune about the ribbon of highway leading to such marvels, and I knew I wanted a piece of it. The idea of a West so fabulous that one could drive through a tree trunk introduced a whole new sense of scale. In trees—and everything else.

This summer, on my way north from San Luis Obispo back to Oregon, I finally realized my dream of wandering through the Land o’ the Giants. Better yet, I spent more than an hour photographing THE Drive-Thru Tree (actually, there are 3 in this area), in Myers Flat. And though many of my photos are speckled with raindrops, I must say the attraction did not disappoint. While a lighting nightmare for my camera, laying down inside the base of a tree is a wonderful feeling. Less so when cars are driving through. And because this tree has been hollowed like a pumpkin, it offers both containment and perspective.

During my visit, I wandered over to the Shrine Drive-Thru Tree Gift Shop, a bleak, fluorescently lighted, harvest-gold-carpeted room selling various shellacked wooden tchochkes and a few postcards, including a couple of the Step-Thru Stump, which I also documented with my Mavica. In the end, I settled for the postcard that came free with admission, handed to me by a 60ish lady with a strong accent. We spoke for a few moments, and I asked her if she were from Italy. She told me that her roots were in Spain, via a small country called El Salvador, and asked me if I had heard of it. I was loathe to explain to her that, during the Reagan era, some of us American do-gooders fervently desired to visit her country and neighboring Nicaragua and support, even "liberate," their war-ravaged people. I decided against explaining to her that I had once romanticized Central America as a place where great poets and artists dwelled in beautiful, lush, natural environments (at least until Somoza got there). We spent a few minutes talking about her journey northward, and how she had married her North American husband, the proprietor of the Drive-Thru Tree and Ancillary Stumps and Wooded Attractions. Sounding terribly depressed, she mostly stared away from me or looked at the floor as we spoke. After several decades in the US, her English was still quite broken.

I thought to myself, what odd karma to have been born in wartime El Salvador and end up selling trinkets at the gift shop of the Drive-Thru Tree, in a remote town in the midst of a megaforest, in a place that rains constantly and where there’s very little to do or see other than gi-normous conifers and people peering up at them and exclaiming, “Oh, wow.” I wondered how she’d even begun to explain the concept of “roadside attraction” to her relatives back in Central America. “Johnny struck it big in Vegas last weekend, so now we’re gonna move to Avenue of the Giants and buy the Drive-Thru Tree!”

To her relatives, this might seem the height of bourgeois luxury, the very essence of having attained LARGE-scale success in Estados Unidos. Clearly she had penetrated the A List, the B List--and even the Tree List! Partying with Jackie and Ari Onassis on the "Christina O" every week. Or maybe they just give her a hard time for not being privileged enough to own the Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree, Dyerville’s World’s Biggest Tree, or the crème de la creme, the Immortal Tree (complete with Burl ‘n’ Drift Novelty Gifts).

Photo of the Day

Another moment in Ft. Bragg in early September. I spent a long time in this Nepalese man's shop looking for some nice beads with which to make malas. I was shocked to see all the packaging that said, "Made in China," and asked him if he had anything that wasn't, as the last thing I wanted to be wearing was a mala bearing a Chinese imprimatur. He looked at me totally unfazed, seeming like he'd hurried across that river in Egypt on his way to America. "Ah! It's all made in China! If you worried about that, you wouldn't have any clothes on your back!" he said, almost mockingly, in thickly accented English. Surely I did not have to educate a man with Tibetan gift items littering his shop on the state of Tibet v. China. Was his jadedness a form of battle fatigue, or does every culture spawn businessmen trying to make a buck, even if it's over the dead bodies of their friends, families, monks and nuns? I left empty-handed, sad, a bit queasy, thinking about my godson Tenzin, with a few extra prayers for his future and that of his country, which even the Dalai Lama can't seem to save.

Photo of the Day

"Refinery Angel"
Ft. Bragg, CA

A most refined burial, I must say. This is one of my favorite shots of all time. When you're standing in this cemetery, this Pied Piper-like angel really does appear to be walking out of the redwood. I hope poor Gino Cristani isn't too sad that these days his final resting place is a bit...crude.
Ft. Bragg is surprisingly photogenic. Its funky, gritty old streets house a million potential images, in lively contrast to the dramatic, sublime views from neighboring Mendocino, 10 minutes down the road. It's easy to fall in love with this area. I hope to return there this summer with a lot of film (and the discipline not to find a nice little rental...).

The Depersonalization of Deli

[NB: I'm happy to report that this piece appeared on NPR.org the week of 10/21/09!] In the summer of 1981, I spent my days behind a red neon lox in the window of a kosher Jewish delicatessen 10 miles outside of midtown Manhattan. My job description included short-order cook, cashier, and in a pinch, Russian dressing-maker. Probably the best parts of that job were my cohorts, a crew of butchers, kosher deli owners, and waitresses who made the place into a screenplay that should be sitting in my drawer. Donald, the head butcher, more than a little resembled Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and brought the house down each Friday afternoon, just before shabbos, when he stood in the doorway wielding his largest butcher’s knife over his head, shrieking, “Honey, I’m home!”

Even by 1981 standards, the deli was very old school, mostly catering to the alter kockers who had made urban Clifton, NJ, their home for the past 4 or 5 decades, after moving from Brooklyn to the suburbs to raise families. Morris, one of the owners, had emigrated from Poland in the 1950s and still bore a number from Auschwitz on his forearm. He said very little to 18-year-old me except, “Heideleh! Make Russian!” Which was my cue to hit the back room with the ketchup, relish, mayo and a long spoon. His partner, Nathan, another Ashkenazi, from the Ukraine, was far chattier, putting his arm around my shoulder and offering me nibbles of whatever was good that day: the kasha, the whitefish salad, the sable. By the end of the summer, he had so familiarized himself with my palate that he knew exactly what to give me as a going-away present: a ½ pound of fresh sturgeon.

Every shift, I would cook hot dogs and liver steaks, each to custom order, while listening to the customers alternately telling us jokes or kvetching about their day. The blue-haired ladies made a beeline toward Donald, who sliced their meats and flirted with them shamelessly. A few minutes later, out they strode with 3 pounds of fresh coldcuts and a tub of macaroni salad tucked under their arm, blushing, primping their hair a bit, and smiling. Their husbands, meanwhile, had stopped to hock strawberry blonde “Lyn the Shiksa,” who gave them big goyische smiles and, every once in a while, a free bar of halvah to her favorites. When business was slow, Donald and his assistant, Ronnie, would toss slabs of meat back and forth between them, or threaten to order a pepperoni pizza, making the owners come running, waving their fists in the air.

Fast forward to August 2009. I now live in suburban CA, just 2,943 miles from midtown Manhattan (and on some days, you can feel every one of them). My friend asks me to pick her up a sandwich at the Vons supermarket. I go up to a guy making sandwiches, but am greeted with a deafening silence. One of the other customers advises me that orders must be placed at a computer terminal near the front door. I stand in front of the black terminal, a selection of sandwich photos before my eyes. There is no Donald, no Morris, no Nathan—just a flat screen bearing flat sandwiches. To be fair to the machine, I am given a hundred options for my sandwich: lettuce or no, tomato or no, toasted bread or no. And since my friend has been quite specific, I get to scroll down through several screens, carefully selecting the substitutions and omissions she’s requested. The screen blankly assents to whatever I choose to add or subtract, without opining, as Donald would have, “What?! No pickle? I don’t know, Mrs. Feinberg—are you sure you’re a Jew?”

Finally, I submit my order into the aethers and stroll over to the counter, where 3 young men are struggling to read a ticket and assemble one roast beef on rye. This Morris would have never abided. “Whatsa matter with you? Gimme that, I’ll make it!” the 67-year-old would have demanded. The Vons’ sandwich boys’ anxiety becomes my anxiety, and I become overwhelmed and text my friend. “There are 3 guys on your sandwich,” I say. “Well, by all means, get them off! We don’t want that!” she replies.

Then I glance around and everyone else is on their BlackBerrys, too. Whatever just happened to waiting patiently and kibitzing? I think. In Clifton, NJ, by now, grandsons would have been asked after, grandbabies’ photos would have been whipped out, Obama’s healthcare plan would have been hotly debated, and someone’s bubbe would have been trying to fix up the cute young waitress with her Schatze. Here at the Vons, the Japanese woman to my right is buried in a text message, the guy next to me has his iPod turned up so loud I can hear the Red Hot Chili Peppers' every bassline, and the mother with her 2 kids in a stroller is yapping loudly on a cell phone. We are having a war to see who can be the least present—and we are all winning.

I glance over the counter to try and grasp how this whole operation is run—where my order comes in and how it translates into a turkey sandwich on ciabatta. I see one long stream of tape issuing from another machine. A supervisor who is trying to read it to them and translate the computer jargon. And 3 guys scratching their ballcaps, who look like they would be ever so much happier if a pushy gal from just outside NYC got in their faces and said, “Hey! Turkey on a roll, no bacon, and put mayo on it, not ranch. You got that? No ranch! And hurry up, I gotta get outta here, my friend’s waiting, can you kick it out?” And I would have been just the girl to do it.

Communication: 1973 Versus 2009

Last night I watched Ang Lee’s film The Ice Storm for at least the fifth time. It had been awhile since I’d last seen it, and with every viewing, I’m struck by just how loaded with dead-on metaphor Rick Moody’s story is, and just how ably Lee (who was growing up in Taiwan when the film was set and from whom we cannot expect such prescience around the subtleties of American culture) has rendered it on screen. For anyone who has not seen it, The Ice Storm tells is the story of 2 neighboring families living in a tony Connecticut suburb circa 1973. This was an era in which the lid had been blown off the pot of simmering 1950s and 60s repression, marriage therapy had made it to the suburbs, and all that had previously been politely stored underground was now fizzing to the surface. This could appear quite a feat of op art to its denizens, whose M.O. had been the down low. And who would most stand in the line of fire of all this too-little, too-late awareness? The children, of course.

Looking back at this era from the vantage point of 36 years, of 3 1/2 decades of technology, psychological sophistication, the birth of the Internet, and the rise of New Media, it is striking how much these characters’ world view differs from our current time of “too much information.” If it’s a TMI world today, 1973 suburbia was definitely a world of TLI: too little information. In this landscape, couples barely communicated with one another for years on end. In one scene, a father comes home from a business trip, and after a rather bizarre conversation with his 14-year-old son, asks his wife, “Is Mikey OK? He seems a little out of it…” To which his wife responds, “Mikey’s been out of it since birth.”

Young Mikey is actually quite likely schizophrenic, or at least schizotypal. The notion that his parents would not have had a conversation about his behavior until after his 14th birthday is just one example of how these couples, and families, are so very disconnected. These days, there would have been teacher and school conferences, psychologists’ reports, extensive information available on the Internet, books, support groups, listservs, medications, playgroups, etc. It would be highly unlikely in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in the NY metro area that such a child would slip through the cracks as merely “out of it.”

And, as Moody graphically relates, the cost of such unconsciousness can be high. The boy is ultimately killed by a jolt from a telephone wire that comes crashing down during a severe ice storm. It is, of course, a metaphor for the toll exacted by the psychic ice storm of denial that surrounded him.

Yet, for all of their communication challenges, the 1970s did have a completely different, entirely more interpersonally related feeling to them. You could venture into a public place and actually have a random conversation with a stranger, as no one was preoccupied with his or her electronic device. Parents actually spoke with their children on the playground, instead of pushing them to go play so they could fidget with their Blackberrys. People spent time interacting with each other, not in the anonymizing field of cyberspace. There was simply a lot more “face time,” time when one could gaze into the eyes of another human being, which is a key ingredient of forming attachments and maintaining psychological health.

But as enjoyable as it is to wax nostalgic for the precomputer age, it is almost painful to go back and watch this chapter in The Ice Storm. It is Thanksgiving weekend, 1973. The Watergate trials have been airing all summer, Nixon has just delivered his “I am not a crook” speech, crafting a highly debatable prelude to his impeachment 7 months later. TV broadcasts are the primary means these characters have for learning about what is happening in Washington. And just one of them, a 14-year-old girl, is bright and engaged enough to even be watching; the rest have shut it out as “too much.”

Otherwise, it is a quiet world indeed. No one has yet jacked in to the matrix. There are no computers. No cell phones. No Blackberries. No texting. No emails. No blogs. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Google. And believe it or not, the son off at prep doesn’t even have a landline.

And no one is talking—certainly not about anything meaningful. In one hilarious scene, a father attempts to have a “heart-to-heart talk” to discuss sex with his 16-year-old son. He sputters through it, spouting a series of nonsequiturs and meaningless statements that do nothing but make his son squirm. Clearly these people have never talked about anything deeper than the weather. And they wonder why their kids are having problems. (Though I do have to shake his hand for even trying. Back in 1973, my own father's verbal tools of "communication" comprised 4 key phrases: "Get me the screwdriver, NOW!" "Shut the hell up," "Tell your mother to get down here," and "Stop eating--you're too fat already." The nonverbal ones were worse.)

Flash forward 36 years to our oh-so-evolved, wired-to-the-gills universe, in which research and communication tools beyond our wildest imaginings occupy huge chunks of our homes and schedules. We seem to chatter with each other night and day, with IMing, Facebook comments, Twitter notes, incessant emails, text messages, and a constant barrage of items that seem to require instant responses. Certainly the Internet has opened our eyes to so many world events, connected us with so many people who share similar interests, brought us incredible research tools and access to people all over the globe. It is, obviously, one of the most amazing pieces of technology ever invented, hands down.

However, is all the New Media actually improving our communication—or is it simply a pendulum swing in the opposite direction? Do we feel closer to humanity because we have emailed 20 people today than if we had sat down with 10 neighbors and shared a meal? Are we better able to communicate our thoughts to our partners because we have time and space to write them down, or do we alienate them because they can’t see our faces, hear our tone of voice, and watch our gestures as we speak? Do I feel more loved because 120 people have agreed to be my Facebook friends than I used to when I sat around with 15 of my buddies from college and talked over pizza? I’m not sure I do…

I think there’s a lot of quantity out there—and a lot of confusion between quantity with quality. It’s a longer topic about the whole digital age that I plan to address in the next entry. A smokescreen that can make us believe we’re getting something—but then why do we still feel like we’ve been handed a cheap shortcut? Maybe because we have.

I think it’s ultimately wonderful to possess tools and equally important to use them well—to stay connected with people in the traditional ways: through face-to-face contact whenever possible, through voice over just the written word, and through lengthier exchanges over simply a text, e-card, or other abbreviated form that we busy people try to pass off as significant, from-the-heart communication. We are still creatures that crave the tangible world. We like to touch and feel and smell and hear and engage our senses. We like to feel love--and it’s mighty hard to feel that in any depth through a computer screen. And we are fascinated by watching the human face, with all its expressions giving meaning to the words, which have been proven only 7% of a factor in overall communication. A sobering statistic, that, especially for us writers. But in the big picture, talk is cheap, and words can only say so much, despite what we in our text-heavy society may imagine.

Tonight I was reading an article on Salon.com about a woman's "addiction" to Twitter, and the letters that followed were, as usual, simply fascinating. One letter writer, whose handle was rainbirdreader, wrote, "In my 20 year career, I've seen a huge rise in the number of kids who need speech therapy and are slow to talk in recent years because their electronic toy toting parents ARE NOT TALKING TO THEM! Dull as it may be, part of parenting a young child is to talk them through their day, using our parent language to describe the people and places around them so they can eventually learn to recognize vocabulary words and start reading. The brain experts are now saying that oral vocabulary, either through conversation or stories, actually GROW KIDS BRAINS. The television doesn't register on the human brain the same way the human voice does, apparently, and kids are particularly tuned into their mother's voice...big surprise. So if you are the life of the party, start taking your children on adventures and using all the vocabulary in your vast arsenal to help them learn about their world. Believe me, you don't get that time back. I can tell by age three who has been read to and talked to by their parents because there is a light in a kids eye when they are engaged, absorbed and verbal that nothing can ever replace. Those early conversations about groceries, parks, playgrounds, cleaning, cooking, etc. are the foundation for the all the learning yet to come and teach kids HOW TO HAVE A CONVERSATION."