The Fly Is Undeterred

First of all, let me say right off the bat that I’ve been wrong before. When I was first informed about the nature of email, and blogging, I thought they were ridiculous concepts. I wasn’t remotely interested. I enjoyed sitting down to write long letters. I’ve since discovered that my letters were long because they were ponderous and boring. I didn’t understand why anyone would bother writing what amounted to a diary on the Internet. Surely a personal journal is by its very nature a private matter, to be found after death and published to great posthumous fame. Or tossed out in the trash. Heck, the first time I saw a web page for a new car, I couldn’t believe it.

And yet, and yet. Here I am, compulsive emailer, sometimes blogger and owner of many websites, some a lot smaller in concept than a new car. So my track record is not good on predicting future trends. I admit that. But (and you knew there would be one, didn’t you?), I am currently drawing the line at the current craze lumped under the messy heading “social networking”. For anyone reading this (heh) who’s even more of a Luddite than I am, it’s the frantic desire to connect to everyone you know and deliver the minutiae of your life, literally moment by moment. Socal Networking takes many forms, starting with mobile phones.

I remember the first time I saw someone with a portable phone in a restaurant; a fellow in a group with a somewhat bulky bag slung under his shoulder, and a handset that looked like a walkie-talkie out of WWII, except in black instead of camouflage. And of course it rang as they were sitting at dinner, and he got to show everyone around what a trend-setter he was. It seems laughable now, when everybody walks around like zombies, talking to themselves about where they are in the mall (“I’m walking by the bookstore now, and nearly up to the shoe store. Now I’ve passed the shoe store and can see the vitamin shop off to my right…”).  Those who are not actually speaking are instead texting out into the void.

I have nothing to say to anyone that’s so important. I don’t have a mobile, which sends people who try to get me to change my mobile service into paroxysms. I suspect they don’t believe me. After going on about how they can save me money, and how concerned they are that I’m spending so much, their concern evaporates when  I suggest that they pay for me to have a mobile, so I can save a lot more.

The next step in the social networking universe was sites to share information, such as Digg. I still don’t understand how this works. If I like a website for whatever reason, I click a button. Somehow this informs other people, who I assume are just clueless, and a site can be more or less put into a bottle and cast adrift on a great social network ocean. Who actually goes to these sites, other than spammers? Hmm, I wonder if there are any good movie review websites? I’ll surf over to Digg and find out. Why not go to a search engine and type “movie reviews”? The system just seems cumbersome and over-complex.

After that, the world went nuts for Twitter. You can tweet, or type a 150-character message which other people can be informed about. People can subscribe to your tweets, so every time you announce that you’ve gone to the bathroom, or espied a bodacious babe, someone on the other side of the world can keep abreast of it. How dull is your life that you have to get up-to-the-minute bulletins about someone else like this? The most common tweet would seem to be: I am tweeting. The content may be different, but the message is the same. And I don’t care. I do have a Twitter account, but mainly to reserve the name. I’ve never sent a tweet, nor am I subscribed to receive any.

Finally, the nadir of social networking is now Facebook. When the Internet first became popular, there were great concerns about being tracked by legions of faceless Big Brothers. The privacy of the populace must be protected at all costs! The privacy was of course, mainly to look at online porn, which is no doubt why lawmakers were so eager to embrace privacy restrictions. But now you have Facebook, where people rush in a great mania to proclaim their private information in excruciating detail. Can websites of banking and medical details that are open to anyone be far behind? Why would anybody want a Facebook account? The irony is that in giving up their anonymity, people may be just another commodity, where any individual is shielded from glare by the overwheming crush of sheer numbers.

This idea of course, is utter nonsense. Computers can effortlessly weed any single person out of the chaos of the multitude. Governments have computers, and so do criminals. And with laptops full of personal information being lost almost daily on some street somewhere, we are probably already in an age where nobody can hide. Centuries ago, the idea of privacy was unheard of. Even the rich and noble lived surrounded by entourages. The poor simply huddled together for warmth like they always do.  The Internet is a true revolution in our lifetimes. I use it daily, and have come to depend on it for many things. But not social networking. In the great march of progress for our species after a million years, the concept of ‘privacy’ may be one day seen as just a passing conceit, put paid by the Internet.

But I still won’t get a Facebook page.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a child of the 60′s. It was my decade, and it shaped the person I became many years later. I was too young to recall where I was the day Kennedy was shot, but I do remember the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. I grew up very close to the Space Center in Florida, so of course I remember the moon landing. I remember the launch, watching it go up into a beautiful sunny sky, and thinking to myself “I must remember this”.

The 1960′s, from my perspective, started with the death of JFK, leading quickly to Beatlemania. They ended on election night in 1972, with the defeat of George McGovern, and any chance the youth of America felt they had in putting their convictions to the test. Nixon continued to reign, and everybody hunkered down and put themselves first for awhile.

While I was only a child for the entire decade (having instead to spend my teenage years in the 70′s, living with Disco), watching footage from that era leaves me feeling very nostalgic. I accepted the world around me like any youngster, be it Beverly Hills, Hanoi, Biloxi or Beruit. The long hair, the clothing, most of all the music, filling me, leaving its imprint upon my soul. I had a Nehru jacket at seven (with black-frame glasses and about a quarter-inch of hair closely-cropped around my skull). Woodstock passed me by, but the film now is oddly familiar in a way that Lollapalooza never could have been.

By the 80′s of course, the world had moved on to corporate greed and the ‘me generation’. By today’s standards even that was a gentle, naive time. I’ve seen the sixties dream torn to shreds, first by Watergate, then cocaine, punk, crack, Reagan, Bush, 9/11 and Iraq. People who missed it all roll their eyes when talk turns to old hippies, probably much like we lampooned ‘rebels’ in the 50′, or those wacky young men in the Roaring Twenties, with their Dagwood Bumstead hair and raccoon coats, swallowing goldfish or piling into phone booths. Kids today are so much more hip (or so they like to think).

But I don’t care. The idealism of those days still burns inside of me, and I’m sure many others. Even if the leaders grew old and disillusioned, the kids who hung out with them, watching and wanting to be like them, still carry the torch they dropped so long ago. Some years ago I recall reading a magazine article about parents who were also Beatles fans, and how they were ‘living Beatle lives, and raising Beatle kids’. And that’s true, I’ve seen that with my own eyes. It makes me terribly proud for some reason, that in the face of all the postmodern doubt about the world, families are still telling their kids about a band that once, long ago, ruled the world.

In spite of all the terrible bad around us today, the small glimmer of hope that shone on the faces of kids with flowers in their hair is still here with us, even if most of the hair is gone. I believe in the sixies dream, and always will, until my last breath. I am a child of the 60′s; peace and love.

Have you ever actually watched the Teletubbies? I have, many times, and even before I had a child. When I first saw the show, it was in a UK college dorm room around the late 90′s, not long after the show first premiered. It was like a train wreck, horrible, but I couldn’t stop watching it. It seemed mindless, a demented fantasy that somehow ended up being made, like Springtime for Hitler from The Producers. But I couldn’t take my eyes from it.

Some years later, I watched it again, after it had been shown in America, and denounced by Jerry Falwell of all people, for promoting homosexuality (because one of the Teletubbies, Tinky-Winky, carried a purse but had no definite sexual identity). I had a different take upon it by then. It struck me as an attempt to recapture the beautiful innocence of childhood, before the world took it away forever, as it does for nearly all of us. Most of the time I would actually cry by the end, as I felt it reach into my heart and call out to that long-ago-lost child whose memories I carry with me every day.

Then of course, the merchandising came, and I drifted away again, back to adult concerns.

One thing I’ve always thought about the Teletubbies, however, is that I firmly believe that in part the show is based on H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Teletubbies are the Eloi – the simple, dumber descendants of ourselves, far into the future. Wells’s time traveler goes forward and meets the Eloi, who are smaller, nonsexual beings who seem to have no real language, living a life of paradise without work or illness. Technology exists, but they cannot utilize it or create it. They are like children in a world created for them. But they cannot really learn, or grow or evolve. In short, Teletubbies.

Now of course, I have a child, and so I watch it yet again. She seems to like it very much, altho she prefers In the Night Garden, which is a sort of second-generation version (Teletubbies TNG, if you prefer). Maybe one day she’ll think back to it the same way I think back to Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, or dear beloved Captain Kangaroo. Altho I didn’t notice back in the day how appallingly bad the production values were (thank you, YouTube). I guess she won’t have that problem in 30+ years, thanks to DVDs or whatever will replace them.

But I do wonder what her take will be – beloved childhood icons, dopy marketing figures, or a dark vision of the future of the human race?

It’s been nearly 10 months since my last post, which is probably not important since nobody reads this blog anyway. But I’ve been off doing a number of things, one of which has been genealogy. I’ve had quite the fun time turning myself into a busy researcher, hunting online for records, links and photographs of grave stones. Even as a child, I always had a fascination with the dead; it’s much more personal when it’s the dead you’re descended from.

It has been a totally fascinating journey into the past, a history of farmers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, housewives and more. I discovered my Great-Great-Great Grandmother, who died when the pipe she was smoking caught her clothes on fire. She was around 100 at the time. Or the Great-Great Grandfather who lost two daughters, ages 6 and 12, in the same month to scarlet fever. The photograph of a Great-Great-Great Grandfather taken when he was probably in his late 20′s. He looks amazingly like me. Or vice-versa. How strange to see my own face staring back at me from a century or more. I also discovered the Grandfather I never knew, who divorced my Grandmother fifteen years before I was born. He died in 1978 and it wasn’t until late last year I finally saw a photograph of him.

As a boy, I always wondered where I came from. What were my ancestors like? My family never really talked much about the distant past, so I had a lot of questions. I know so much more now to pass on to my own child, when she’s ready to ask the questions. When you pore over census records, chronicling the children lost, the long and successful marriages, the wives who died young, the men who lived through terrible wars, it’s hard not to see yourself as nothing more than the current link. Their blood all flows through my veins, so I’m the part of them that has survived. I feel responsible in a way, to carry those bloodlines forward, to try and remember the centuries of laughter and tears for those who can no longer do so. If they were up there somewhere watching me, those lines of Grandparents, I wonder what they would think of the world today.

A hundred years from now, will someone carry on the history I’ve started, with my own name concisely summing up in a little box all that I’ve lived and experienced? Two dates neatly bookending a life; is that all at the end? At least I know that despite their certain flaws, on the whole they were a group of people I’m proud of, and when I’m a tidy footnote in the pages of history, I will be in good company. I hope those that follow me will be equally proud.

My high school class is celebrating a reunion this year, so I’ve been getting the nonsense in the mail from the “reunion committee”, which I picture as several ditzy girls from my class sitting around a folding table, sending reminders to all and sundry. The image has balloons and confetti too, for some reason.

Anyway, I filled out a bio for the ‘Memory book’, but as usual have no plans to attend. I’m too far away, even if I really wanted to go. But for the first time in a long while, it made me curious about how the rest of my classmates have been doing the past (blank) years. So I went to one of those ‘alumni’ sites where you can sign up and read or email ghosts from the past. I paid my $10.00 fee (and am still getting email reminders to join up and show my ‘alumni pride’), and went exploring. The problem is that these sites don’t have everybody. There’s always that strange guy, or that cute girl, or someone that you’d really like to know about (that is, make sure they’re not doing better than you!). But I read what they had, and it was very depressing.

Most of my class seems to be married with kids, living ordinary lives. And that was what bothered me – weren’t we going to be the ones who were going to change the world? Sure, every class says that, but we were special! What happened to all those hopes and dreams from graduation? Life, I suppose. It also bothered me that a lot of them have kids who are now older than they were the last time I saw them. This group of 17- and 18-year olds now have children in their twenties. Huh? It’s hard not to feel that as a group, we’ve been lapped, and are now out of the race.

I actually wrote to one girl (girl; a middle-aged woman with two kids, 18 & 13) I knew. We shared quite a few classrooms together, but never spoke much or became more than just vaguely aware of each other. Of course this girl (let’s call her ‘Beth’) was in a higher ‘caste’ than I was all throughout our school years together. She was also pretty smart, and I always considered her a real mental rival. She could spell ‘gymnasium’ in fifth grade, which was impressive at the time. So I sent Beth a friendly email, saying hi after all this time, I remember this and that, read your bio on the site, here’s what’s up with me. She wrote back the next day with a very bland ‘Oh I enjoy hearing from anyone from our class, I’m this that, yada yada’. This girl who was such a genius all through elementary school, middle school, high school… is a dental hygienist. Not that it’s not a good and important job, but somehow I expected more from her. I wrote her again with more memories, and a thought that while we were never in any sense of the word ‘friends’ in school, now that so much time has gone by, maybe we could email each other once in a while and say hi, here’s the latest, and so on.

My feeling on that is as time goes by, we all grow ever more distant from the people and events that shaped us. It would be nice to be in touch with someone who remembers the same teachers, the same faces, the same culture. I’m finding as I get older that to my great surprise, I miss that more and more over the years. Beth and I spent many years of our childhood together but separate in the same classrooms. It would be nice to put aside the childish feelings that kept us from being pals and enjoy the common experiences we had in those rooms so many years ago.

I guess to nobody’s great amazement, Beth never wrote back. Maybe she felt I was trying to hit on her, or set myself up for being the stalker she’s never wanted. Maybe I thought after all this time, we could move beyond playground resentments or superior feelings. Once more I was too naive for my own good. I haven’t written anyone else.

Last night I dreamt I was back at high school, on the last day, and we were getting our yearbooks. The books seemed full of pages about various people, with several of them getting a multi-page layout. Finally I found a page with a grid that filled almost all the space, showing what events or activities everyone was involved with. On the far right side of the page was a column of photographs of the students. It seemed to be more important to note what everyone was doing than what they looked like, or who they actually were. In the dream I felt all the loneliness and futility that high school was. The feeling that I missed something important. I woke up somewhat depressed, and was in a funk most of the morning.

Is it any wonder I don’t go to the reunions?

What’s this world coming to if we can’t find a single lost little girl? Dammit Dammit Dammit Dammit. After nearly a month, where is she? No wonder we can’t fight the ‘war on terror’ or stop the drug trade. We may deserve whatever we get.

I guess I really am getting old if I think that music today is deplorable. I stopped listening to the radio about three or four years ago, and don’t miss it. Most of what I listen to is from my collection (several hundred CDs) or music made by myself or people I know. I have several friends who have CDs that should be available world-wide, but don’t. Such is the nature of the biz. I’ll get to them another time, because they deserve some mention.

For now, I’m listening to much older music. I’ve grown to appreciate what would be considered “classical”, altho most of what I like really isn’t “classical”. It’s baroque, it’s medieval, it’s ancient, it’s Renaissance, it’s Elizabethan. I find it takes me back to those days, perhaps literally. If you believe in past lives, then it’s nothing new, just remembering a glint of sunlight on a lock of golden hair. If not, then it’s just good music; truly timeless.

At the moment I’m listening to one of my favourite discs -
On the Banks of Helicon: Early Music of Scotland by the Baltimore Consort. It’s a collection of songs and instrumentals, mostly from the mid-15th to mid-16th century (the newest song is from 1719). It would have been considered ‘folk’ music of its day, and you can hear echos of it in Appalachian music such as Bluegrass and the like (brought over to the hills by emigrated Scots in the 18th and 19th centuries). The title of this entry is one of the selections on the disc.

Listening to their music reminds me that once this was their world, when they were alive and experiencing it. Now it’s our world, and yet we can still hear the songs they sang. I get the same feeling when I look at old paintings or architecture. Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to cathedrals. I don’t go to any church, but I enjoy walking the naves and aisles that people long dead once trod through. It’s an amazing thing to wonder if all these things will still be here in the 25th century, long after we’re gone, and it’s somebody else’s world. I really hope so.

I’m a 60′s child. I was born in the Sixties, grew up in the Sixties, I remember the first moon landing. The music of that era still resonates in my bones. You’d be hard pressed to find a non-Beatles song that best sums it up like Scott Mackenzie’s When You Go To San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair). Written, by the way, by the late great John Phillips of Mamas & the Papas fame.

Anyway, I was musing the other day about the people of my generation. What the hell happened to us? As we are now rapidly approaching the deep end of ‘middle age’, it seems we have somehow lost our way. Or perhaps never really got started. It seems that so many people I went to school with never really ‘became’ anything. We just grew up and started getting old. What about our dreams? We were going to do so much, and now we’re stuck with a moron in the White House, the world is labouring under the illusion of the ‘war on terror’, and most of us are content to watch American Idol. Huh?

Not everyone fell through the cracks – I have a very good friend who became an accountant. While not the most glamorous job title, he works for a very large and well-known company. They pay him pretty @#$% well, and he’s constantly traveling around to look at client’s books. Said clients will wine and dine him, and he makes a pretty comfortable living. But he’s an exception. Too many others just twiddle away their time. Me too, I guess. Another fellow I know has lived on both coasts pursuing an acting career. Except for a few shots as “guy leaning on bar in background” on some tv shows, he seems to spend most of his time partying (and lying about his age). A girl I used to date is living alone now that her daughter is in college. She looks like a Grandmother. I saw a recent picture and didn’t recognize her. Another is singing with a tired looking band in a bar in Georgia.

Maybe this happens to every generation – they come out ready to rock the world, and in the end just whimper away to eke out an existence until death mercifully claims them. Maybe I’m indignant because it’s finally happening to us. Maybe I’m frustrated because I recall all those idyllic summer days and know we’re getting a bit short on those. Maybe I should have been an accountant.

Have you ever noticed how something looks authentic just because you read it on the web? For example, if I say:

Recent studies have shown that while hair and fingernails on corpses do not actually continue to grow, they do seem to grimace if you shout in their ear loud enough.

That seemed pretty true, right?

Anyway…

I read today about the death of writer Kurt Vonnegut at age 84. A pretty fair run, but even tho I only read one of his books, I always liked old Kurt. Perhaps it was because he looked like a writer. He was pretty famous for a (then) living author, and he didn’t just come across as any old Joe Blow. He seemed a pretty interesting character. So I’m sorry to see him go.

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In a related topic, I sort of met George Plimpton once. I know, you’re saying, “Who’s George Plimpton?”. Oddly enough, I always thought he was somewhat well-known, which shows what I know. If you did know who he was, good for you. You’re one of the smarter people reading this.

Anyway, I was working in retail at a catalog showroom back in the mid-80′s. Mr. Plimpton walks in, and buys a pair of binoculars. My boss (who knew who he was), actually spoke to him, while I looked on in amazement, like you always do when you’re in the presence of someone who’s famous for anything. Somehow I ended up with the little order form where he printed out his name. I’ve still got it somewhere. The reason it comes to mind now is because of course, Plimpton has also passed away (altho it was some years ago). It’s a little sad when I tell people how I (almost) met George Plimpton, and they look at me blankly and say, “Who?”.

In these Warholian days of “celebs” and “idols”, people who were known for genuine achivements seem a rarity.