I, Me, Mine

“It’s all about me.  It’s all about me.  I am the guy next to you on a plane with the big mouth and the pea-sized brain.  Speaking you see, incessantly, all about me.”

                                                                                          -It’s All About Me, Sean Morey

So a plane crashes at the San Francisco airport.  After the second-guessing of highly skilled pilots with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of flight time and training; after the horrible death of a teenage girl long after the wreckage was no longer a threat to her; and after the absolutely and unbelievably racist prank involving the pilot’s names was played on a local television station, it came out that an executive from Facebook released a statement, via an e-mail to USA Today, that she was nearly on that plane.  Oh wait, that actually happened in the first couple of hours.

            Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, a billionaire and recent author of the book Lean In (surprise, surprise) felt that the world at large needed to know how close we had come to losing her greatness on that morning.  I suppose I should mention how close I came to my life ending on the Titanic.  Considering my station in life, had I been on that ship I would have been traveling in steerage, where the loss of life was many times higher than those in the first class (Facebook Exec Class?).  Only the fact that I was born nearly 50 years after the sinking in a country other than the one where the ship was boarded saved my life.  Whew!

            Last week Justin Bieber, that flavor of the month whose month seems to be going on far too long, stuck it to the man by urinating into a mop bucket as he exited a New York night club through its kitchen.  And by “the man” I mean the janitor who had to clean up after him.  Bieber also sprayed a photo of Bill Clinton with cleaning fluid in that same kitchen and yelled, “Fuck you Bill Clinton.”  While I’m impressed that Bieber knows who Bill Clinton is, or at least can identify him by a photograph, I doubt he could come up with a reason the former President deserved a Fuck You from a teenage idol just one unsupervised evening away from an overdose.  Any why is it that Stevie Ray Vaughn steps onto a helicopter and is gone forever while the Justin Biebers of the world dodge early death and continue to vomit their dreck upon the world year after year?  I’m not suggesting that Bieber deserves to die but if God is listening and has plans to take another musician in a plane crash anyway…

            A couple of days ago a man named David John McCormick appeared in court in San Francisco on charges of communicating a false distress, failing to heave to, and assaulting a federal officer.  What McCormick did was radio the Coast Guard and say his friend had fallen overboard in the fog of San Francisco Bay, for some reason in an Australian accent even though he is not Australian.  When the Coast Guard found him on his sailboat and said they were coming aboard he said his boat is a “peace ship” and that he had “ordinance” on board, before he cut his anchor line and took off.  Showing an incredible amount of patience, the Coast Guard followed him for 6 hours before they boarded and arrested him.  Even more incredibly the boarding office who was struck three times by McCormick never hit him back but instead handcuffed him and after putting him in a life vest, took him into custody.  To put his into perspective, imagine calling 911 and when the cops, firemen, and emergency medical technicians show up (Coast Guard members act as all three sometimes) you slam the door in their faces, threaten them with “ordinance” and punch the cop.

            What do these three have in common?  They all are exhibiting classic behavior of Narcissism.  They individually believe that their own importance in the world outweighs those with real tragedies, those who work hard just to stay afloat, and those who have dedicated themselves to helping the first two when they need it most.  Narcissism gets its name from the Greek myth of Narcissus who was so enamored of his appearance that when an enemy showed him his own reflection in a pool of water, he promptly sat down, whereupon he stared at himself until he died.  Perhaps we could take up a collection to get these three some mirrors.

Film

Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah.

                                           -Kodachrome, Paul Simon

            There was a time when I was a boy that I wanted to be one of three things; an astronaut, a forest ranger, or a photographer.  Or perhaps an astronaut-ranger who takes pictures. Any who, I didn’t make it to space or ever wear a Smokey Bear hat as part of my work clothes, my private life is another matter, but years and years later I got back into photography.  Mostly because of digital cameras.

            I liked how with digital cameras you found out right away whether your lighting, focus, and framing where what you were trying to do.  I liked how I wasn’t restricted to 12, 24, or 36 pictures at a time.  I also liked how I could change film speed and white balance with the flick of a switch, and what white balance meant.

            I don’t miss film photography.  I remember in high school I got the opportunity to photograph the football team practicing with the chance that one of my shots might end up in the yearbook.  But I didn’t load the film properly; I didn’t catch the film’s sprockets on the camera’s gears so every time I thought I was advancing to the next frame, the current frame was just sitting in the same place. When I got to photograph number 100 or so without reloading I thought that I had either made a mistake or somehow was using a magical endless roll of film.  When I rewound the film it pulled it all into the canister where my skills at that time meant I couldn’t get to it.  By then the team had left the field and it was too late for me to start over.  I delivered zero shots from that day so I got zero shots in the yearbook.

            I doubt if Ansel Adams had anything to fear from my photography prowess - I wonder if he ever did the miss the sprocket thing - but I can look back and remember some of the special quirks about film photography.  In the photography course I took in college the instructor said to buy film that is just about to expire, because the manufacturer has set the expiration date far earlier than it needs to be, but mostly because it’s usually on sale.  (Just like my auto shop teacher in high school said when buying motor oil, get your car’s weight on sale).  With film you had to read the box; there was nothing worst than shooting a roll of slide film when you didn’t have a slide projector.  Between Kodak and Fuji film I always chose Kodak.  Probably because the yellow box reminded me of the boxes Matchbox Cars came in when I was a kid. The green Fuji seemed too new, too upstart-y.

            There are still photographers who use film.  They insist that the quality is better.  They say that not being able to review photographs on the fly forces them to take a more critical look at composition of each shot.  It’s likely that film is not going away completely but that market is a very pale shadow of what it used to be.  Case in point would be the implosion of the Kodak Park buildings in Rochester, N.Y., Oct. 6, 2007.  It was attended by many former employees, most of whom documented it, ironically, on their digital cameras.