Anyhoo…

When last we met, my shooting partner and I were approaching our first indoor accommodations in quite some time, following a long stint of shooting our way through most of Big Sur and the Sierras. A fun ride, but the prospect of a real bed and a hot shower loomed large. Our destination was the small town of Bridgeport, not far from the northern edge of Yosemite, an area we presumed would be fairly hopping in rally August, the height of the high season for Yosemite tourists. We had felt pretty fortunate to be able to snag an actual hotel room, but after a late departure from Yosemite proper, it was doubtful we would reach the hotel at anything even remotely approaching a reasonable hour. In the waning light of the high Sierras and the patchwork quilt that is cellular service in the area, I made a quick call to the hotel to let the powers that be know of our delay.

No luck. Judging by the voice on the answering machine (and I use that term specifically, because the clicking and whirring noises during the message made it clear that voicemail was a technology that would have been considered an almost otherworldly advance with unimaginably futuristic implication to whoever left the message I was listening to. The voice was old. Very old. I imagined him taking a day or so to carefully step out of his coffin in order to make his way to the machine, figure out how the danged thing worked, and with any spare reserves of air left in his long deceased lungs, rasp out a request to leave… (wheeze)… a (cough)… message (clunk)… after the… (wheeze) beep.

Odd.

I explained who I was, where we were and that we would be a late arrival, and apologized. Hey, we had done our best. time to settle in for a long evening of staring at each other on the way to Bridgeport. Three hours later, having memorized each lien in eahother’s aces, along with every possible place to hide a quarter in the rental car, Bridgeport revealed itself on the horizon. Sort of. Downtown Bridgeport on a Saturday night is not the center of the universe. I’m not sure it’s even the center of the Bridgeport. While there weren’t exactly public works crews literally rolling up the sidewalks as we pulled onto the main drag, it wouldn’t have surprised us at all if that had been the case. Business after business with the equivalent of their courtesy lights on. Very quiet is what I’m saying. At the hotel, when we found it, we noted with some dismay that there was not a single light on outside.

More odd.

As we got out of the car and mounted the porch steps, we saw an envelope taped to the doorknob. On it was scrawled “#6.” Inside the envelope were two keys.

“Think that’s for us?” I said.

“Only one way to find out,” Bobby said, taking both keys and trying them in the locke. The second one worked. Peering inside, we saw a dim foyer.

“OK,” he said. “Let’s get out stuff.”

“Don’t you thin k it’s a little strange that nobody’s come outside to se who just unlocked the front door?” I said in a whisper. It seemed a little strange to be whispering at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night alongside a public street, but human beings are remarkably adaptable animals. It seemed appropriate.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Bobby said. “Come on, let’s ditch our stuff in the room. I’m starving.”

I had to agree. Our emergency rations at this point consisted of three bananas well past the yellow stag, two packs of jerky and a roll of cinnamon flavored dental floss. Grabbing our more stealable gear, we breached the foyer.

The front desk was unmanned. A single light with a Tiffany shade, the kind you imagine Scrooge McDuck hunched over while counting coins to throw into the dollar sign embossed sacks on the floor, hunched on the coiner. There was not a sound anywhere, but I have to admit that I jumped a bit when the air conditioner kicked on somewhere down the hall.

“Do we check in?” I said.

“”How do you suggest we do that?”

A good point, and well made. In the near total darkness, we made our way up the narrowest, steepest stairs I’ve ever seen that weren’t in an M C Escher drawing. The darkness, however, was not total enough to obscure the fact the ratty carpet tacked to the stairs was well past its prime, probably last having been cleaned when that young whippersnapper Kerouac was hammering out copy by the pound onto a roll of butcher paper, but it was a qualitative match for the cranberry red carpet on the second floor, and I use the adjective “can berry” on purpose because comparing it to blood is just too easy. At the far end of the hall, we saw a door with a big brass “6” on it.

“We’re going to die tonight, aren’t we?” I said.

“Maybe,” Bobby said. “Come on, let’s find something to eat.”

Bridgeport did not disappoint when it came to dining options, in the sense that it exactly matched our expectations at this point by not having any. Wandering into the one bar that was open and seeing it occupied by the forlorn female bartender you see in every movie that has ever run out of ideas, the one wiping down the one corner of the bar again and again, she told us the kitchen had closed at 7. Natch.

“Might be some food at the gas station. If it’s open,” came a voice from the far corner of the bar, where the other half of this archetypal scene – the two lonely sad sacks nursing beers and not talking to eau other – had taken up residence. I was pretty sure Edward Hopper was hiding in the shadows with an easel and a look of grim satisfaction.

Muttering our thanks, we left the bar, only to confirm the gas station was, as was the custom, closed, and would not have had any food even if it were open. I’m not sure when the last time I saw gas pumps with actual dials was, but it’s been a while.

We trudged back to the hotel, and while I know creative writing teachers like to have their students avoid using words like that when they should use less obstructive words like the perfectly serviceable “walked,” I’m telling you, we trudged. We had forgotten to lock the hotel before we left, but hey, it’s not like the deed was in our names. and the place seemed to be in the same shape we left it. Without a word, bobby crawled into one of the beds and pulled the sheet, the one sheet, over his head. IMe? I enjoyed a good flossing and called it a night not long after that.

Morning came quickly and was not much better. We were up before sunrise again, and this seemed like an especially good idea, not because of the lure of the magic hour, but because our strong feelings were that sunlight would not be this hotel’s friend. Or a blacklight. The three or four trifles of water that emerged somewhat reluctantly from the shower were not welcoming in any sense of the word. We were clean,, but only in the sense we wren’t as dirty as yesterday.

The slowly approaching sunrise that greeted us as we emerged on the porch was wan and seemed slightly apologetic, as if it were saying it was really sorry that this was the world it had to greet us with, and that it would try to make it  up to us later. Agan, nobody was at the reception desk, although we noticed that there was a sign out card. with, and by God this is true, a survey.

“Did you pay for this room online?” Bobby said.

“Yeah.”

“Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

I had to agree. I felt more exhausted when we left than when we arrived, but that may have just been the dental floss talking.

There was coffee on the wind. Our senses had become so finely attuned to the whiff of any sustenance by now that the aroma beckons to us like the tendrils of pie from a windowsill in a Petunia Pig cartoon. there was a  bakery about three blocks away and we practically made Bobby and Michael sized holes in the plate glass as we stumbled in and practically cleared out the pastry rack. thirty minutes later, we were on our way to the nearby hot springs for the next shoot.

In the time that has passed since that night, we have reflected on the fact that we had entered, slept in and departed a hotel without ever seeing another human being. We remind ourselves it wasn’t technically breaking and entering because we had a key and had paid for the privilege, but still…

Someday, and  I  absolutely convinced of this, I’m going to meet someone from Bridgeport and when I share this story, I completely expect the response to be as follows: a long, puzzled and quizzical look, and after a long pause, “but… that place has been closed for thirty years.” This is not even up for debate. I’m sure there was some awful incident, and the remaining ghosts have somehow learned how to use hotels.com for their amusement. I don’t know why they didn’t nab us, but perhaps they found something wanting in us and decided to let us enjoy the award winning cobweb art, the crepy hallway and the shadowy stairs which, if they were in an amusement park, would have a name like “The Paralyzer,” or “The Widowmaker,” and wouldchortle with Lovecraftian delight as we tossed on the mattresses last used before the brutal slayings of that nice family from Sheboygan who just wanted to see El Capitan and maybe a grizzly bear or two, but found something rather more unpleasant in Bridgeport instead. Perhaps they just wanted to get the word out. Bridgeport? Keep movin, buddy.

Whatever the reason, next time, I’m staying in Fresno.

I have been to the Shining hotel, and with all due respect to Stephen King, who did after all,create the place, it’s nowhere near Colorado. It’s in a small town not far from the northeast edge of Yosemite called Bridgeport, and if Jack Torance isn’t a resident, I’m pretty sure he has a timeshare on the second floor.

Last summer, my shooting partner and I were wrapping up a three week stint of what can only be called a dream assignment. We were shooting travel videos for a startup travel website planning a 2014 soft launch before the major rollout. The site creator needed as many videos of attractions and activities in California as we could produce, and we happily obliged. Over the course of the late summer, we shot our way down the California coast and back up through the Sierras. By the time we pulled into Bridgeport, we and shot close to seventy five videos.

We had also made what can charitably be called the tactical mistake of camping most of our way through the assignment. In our minds eyes, we entertained visions of shooting the most breathtaking spots in California by day, relaxing by a campfire by night. Buffalo would roam, deer and antelope would play, and there would be nary a discouraging word.

The magic hour always got in the way.

The  “magic hour” is so-named because it’s the best time of day to get the magical play of light and shadow that produces the perfect shot. It’s that hour right around sunrise, and the corresponding one around sunset. The  closer the sun is to its apex, the flatter the light, the harder the shadows, the less dimensional is the shot. The lure of the magic hour is strong, and in an assignment that had us shooting all day, every day, we wanted to have at least two sites a day containing those beautiful shots from the magic hour.

This of course meant we would be setting and striking camp in the dark for days at a time, and getting precious little sleep in the interim. I might add that places to recharge camera batteries do not seem to be a priority for the National Park Service. Go figure.

As the lights of the greater metropolitan Bridgeport area began to appear, the siren song of the first hotel we had stayed in since what seemed like a time well before we had learned to read beckoned like the caress of a lover or the toy at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. We had booked the hotel online weeks ago as a reward for a job well done, and the screen shots were fairly etched in our brains. A charming Victorian with cozy rooms. comfy beds and showers. for the love of God, showers. The close we got, the hotter that shower became. Perhaps we would even be welcomed by the world weary yet disarming friendliness of a rustic innkeeper, awaiting our aerial with a fresh pot of coffee and tales of travelers pst.

You know where this is going.

TO BE CONTIENS…

There’s this famous story about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. As the story is usually told, Beethoven was completely deaf by this point in his life, but his lifetime of familiarity with the complexities of conducting an orchestra put him front and center for the inaugural performance of the Ninth on May 7, 1824.  Conducting his final masterpiece with the passion and intensity that defined so much of his life, guiding the orchestra through the hills and valleys of each movements, he was unable to hear the notes he had so carefully crafted. At the conclusion of the last movement, he lowered his arms, doubt in his heart and in his mind that he had achieved his purpose. It took his assistant physically turning him to the audience for him to realize his efforts had succeeded, and to see the thunderous applause and the prolonged ovation his masterpiece was receiving for him to realize the performance had been a success.

As is always the case with a story that approaches mythology, there is some truth to this story, but also a lot of hyperbole. As the story is described above… well, that’s not quite the way it happened. While Beethoven was present for the performance of his Ninth, he was standing in the wings of Vienna’s Theater Am Kamtnertor, his artistic fate was in the hands of another conductor. Beethoven had long since stopped conducting orchestras, having suffered what can only be called a series of embarrassing outcomes during his last efforts on the stage. Several times, he found himself several measures ahead of his orchestra and at other times, several measures behind, guiding his musicians into passages they had either long since completed, or rushing them into passages they shouldn’t be arriving at for several minutes. He would tamp the woodwinds into levels to low to follow, or would push the percussion section to a booming crescendo that overwhelmed everything else. His orchestras had long since learned to ignore him if they wanted to be at all successful in their performances. Facing a number of these humiliations, Beethoven finally made the decision to abandon the role of conductor. By the time the Ninth premiered, the only place for Beethoven to stand was in the alcove next to the stage.

And yet, Beethoven’s Ninth is considered one of the finest pieces of composition in the history of classical music. It has the same degree of finesse, complexity and ingenuity that marks so many of Beethoven’s masterworks. That his hand guided the creation but not the presentation of his artistic vision seems incidental today.

To me, this is the key to the Beethoven story. The conductor was off the stage, but the composer never left it, and I think the true story is even more compelling than the mythology, even if the only reason (although I would say there are many) is because the lesson that is so applicable and useful for anyone, even those… or especially those of us (yours truly comes very quickly to mind) who do not rise to the Beethoven level of genius, is this: the truth buried within the Beethoven biography is that when one component of Beethoven’s musical life faded into history, the lifetime of experience and passion that was part of his DNA did not disappear. Everything in Beethoven’s hearing life was still of use to him. It was more difficult, without any doubt, but his life’s work still had quite a bit of mileage remaining. The notes were in his mind, and marching them into position must have seemed impossible, and I would make this bet in any casino that would take it – I’m sure there were times when he wondered why he was even bothering. However, where it counted, in his imagination and in the constructs of his creativity, he knew exactly how to use every skill he had ever learned, and to push the boundaries even further. When he was ushered onto the stage after the conclusion of the Ninth, the reaction of his audience was not to pity the man with baton no longer in hand, but to cheer for the masterpiece he had scored.

We could all use a little Beethoven when we feel uninspired, or exhausted, or disillusioned, or otherwise just feel like giving up.   I’m just saying that dreaming is a good idea, and doing what you dream is an even better idea.

I think the single distinguishing characteristic about my professional life… aside from how very professional it often is not… is how many unusual habits I’ve picked up along the way.  The fact I don’t seem to know how to point, for example, or count, for yet another example in any way even approaching  normal comes to mind.

I spent roughly five months of my twenties working at Walt Disney World.  Just five months.  I still use the two finger sweeping gesture I learned there when I want to indicate where something is, rather than the eminently normal one finger jab.  They drill the jab right out of you.  The idea is that when you’re showing somebody how to get somewhere, you don’t want guests (always guests at the WDW, never customers) to think you’re pointing at them.  A sweep of the fingers is less offensive.  An entire generation of new Disney cast members has been born, learned to walk, talk and drive, and has started drinking to excess for a shorter amount of time than I’ve been using the two finger sweep instead of pointing.

Counting down from three to one.  I haven’t set foot in a newsroom in almost a dozen years, and the reasons for doing a silent last third of the countdown don’t even apply in that industry anymore once everything went digital, but after standing in front of a camera to do a standup and invoking the magic incantation, “standup in three… two…” and leaving off the “one” so that the editor can set his in point for the edit on the fly by listening for when you stop counting, I seem to have lost the ability to count down to one like a normal human when trying to take pictures at family gatherings, log flume rides or children’s birthday parties.  “Why didn’t you say the number one?”  I have been asked this more times than I can count, and the reason I can’t count is because… well, I can’t count.

At least I don’t answer my home phone by saying “newsroom” anymore.  It took about a year to drop that habit after I left the business, but I’m finally back to “hello.”  However, there are still times when I hear the “breed breed” of a Nokia two way phone and I almost say out loud “This is Michael, go ahead.”  Insidious business, news.

I only bring this up because I was reminded once again just how difficult it is to plunk down a divider line between the different chapters of a person’s life.  Old habits die hard.  If, as Dickens might have said during one of his more Copperfield-esque passages, this is the chapter in which I try to create a third act and learn new mental muscle memories, it seems I have a certain obligation to figure out how to incorporate those firs two acts and well worn habits into the mix.

The crowdsourcing campaign is about to begin.  For anyone familiar with journalistic no-no’s, this is also known as Burying the Lead. Next week, we’ll cover the Potter Box.  Anyhoo, In addition to budgeting, training and the whole shmear of organizing this project, there’s the little matter of the trailer video I’m creating to promote it all.

Working with a photog again, particularly one who establishes his chops at one of the local stations,. It was, for the afternoon, a return to The Life.  I almost found myself reaching into my jacket pocket for my pack of  Camel Reds.  The news van was the only place where smoking was acceptable.  Not permissible, but acceptable. It also didn’t seem to matter I wasn’t an actual reporter in this particular photog’s newsroom… or in any newsroom.  We have, however, covered the same stories, had the same grievances, shared the same gallows humor, and if there were a ten year long temporal archipelago between his stories and mine,  it didn’t seem to come up or make any kind of a difference.

The really disturbing part, though, was how easy it can be to slip into assuming, or at least noticing the worst about people, and how this creeps into your attitude about the world in general.  News does that to you. When you don’t just cover one story about a police officer trying to catch sexual predators by posing as a teenage girl in internet chat rooms and that officer later gets arrested for taking the same bait himself, and you don’t cover this story once, but several times over the course of your career, you get a bit jaded when it comes to the thin blue line.  When every newsroom has at least one person who wishes aloud for a good plane crash so he or she can have something to do, your standard of acceptable behavior tends to become a little fuzzy.  There are only so many city council members caught smoking and selling crack you can cover before you just get tired of assuming the best of people.

That’s why the second act of my life has been so cathartic.  You say you want me to interview children about what it would like to be adopted?  Absolutely.  Your no-kill animal shelter needs a PSA to help feral cats find a loving home?  I’m in.  Your mentoring program resulted in more than one hundred high school graduates?  Where do I put the camera?  I spent my twenties wading through snow, behind hurricanes and and around the periphery of every gruesome crime scene you care to imagine.  That I spent my thirties with the same tools but around different stories was a form of therapy I don’t think they teach you in Psych 101.

So…. this third act.  What is it exactly.

I’m so glad that the second bit of big news this week does in fact find a way to thread the needle.  I’m happy to report the Australia leg of the Palette Project will most likely be in support of a fantastic new nonprofit called Employment Link.  Now, I don’t want to speak too soon because the proverbial dotted line still needs more than dots on it, but my goal over the next few weeks is to make sure that the Palette Project as a film and that I as an individual can be an advocacy partner to support their mission.  What I wrote abovve about trying to find the good guys after years of reporting on the bad ones?  These people at Employment Link – they’re the good guys.  This is an organization that creates employment resources and training for people with disabilities.  I’ve been interested in this organization ever since I got hooked up with their for-profit arm, a company called  Adaptive Technology Services.  This is the company that first assured me if there was any way for me to hold onto any of the skills I’ve developed over the last twenty five years, they were going to work with me to find a way to make it happen.  Portable CCT’s that help me use field mixers?  There’s a way.  Electronic pens that record your voice and link the file with dime sized pads you can put on everything from different wattage Arri bulbs to P2 media cards – tabs that, when touched by the pen, let that pen speak to you and tell you what you’re touching?  Make it so.  Optical character recognition apps that read everything from the menu at a diner to log notes in the field?  Well dang, beam me up.

As I’ve written previously, this is the key.  The key, of course, is not to be the story, but the storyteller.  Inasmuch as this film exists because of the perspective I bring to it, it finishes because of the stories we’re finding along the way.  Today, I can say that the first stories are actually, truly, not about me, and the reporter in me likes that.  Unequivocally, the first leg of the trip is on behalf of a cause.  that cause is the goal that everyone deserves the chance to do meaningful work.  Employment Link believes there is a way.  So do I.  What Silvana, the executive director of Employment Link, reminded me of is that although mine is an unusual job… it’s a job, and it’s a business.  A business with a crew and a schedule and obligations.  Self employment, in other words.  I’ve been reminded that this is an experience that, at its core, I should share with others who are trying to do the same thing.

So in this effort to fuse urgency and action with outreach and awareness, the results of the Australia leg are easy to set.  We want to create jobs.  I’ll be working between now and March 8, our tentative departure date, to raise awareness  for this issue.  Support for this film is now also about support for this cause… and spoiler alert, there will be other causes.  This is leg one and step one, and there’s a vision here.

Pun absolutely intended.

What is fear, anyway?

The most interesting thing about fear, in my opinion, is that it’s an emotion that has no opposite number. Every word I can think of that comes close to the opposite of fear – contentment, boredom, lassitude and so forth – they come close, but not nearly close enough. I think it’s because how we deal with fear, and perhaps more importantly, how we think about it once it’s in the rearview mirror, does so much to define whatever we do next, after those particular marker buoys in our lives.

None of those fear inducing events are what you expect. I can tell you from firsthand experience what fear is like from the perspective of every sense you care to mention. When you’re on top of a grain elevator taking pictures of a levee holding back the floodwaters of the Missouri River and the levee breaks, fear is Continue reading “Fear Itself” →