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” →

One of the fringe benefits that comes with being a reporter – because it’s definitely not the dental plan – is the job is all about knowing what to do. It has very little to do with knowing what to be.

Reporting is also very much about repetition. No matter where you live and no matter which market you call home base, there’s going to be a lot of repetition. You’re going to stand outside the courthouse at eleven o’clock at night to talk about what happened inside the courthouse at eleven o’clock that morning. You’re going to knock on the door of someone who has been the victim of something terrible, and then you’re going to ask them how they feel. You’re going to do the story about the woman who gave birth on Labor Day, the transplant recipient who has something to be thankful for on Thanksgiving and the strange food you can find on a stick at the state fair. These scripts exist in every newsroom archive in America, and there will be times when you joke about how the producer should just store news Mad Libs in the file directory to save time. This joke, too, has been made hundreds of times. It’s all about the process of learning what to do so that when it happens again, you can run on auto pilot until you figure out how to deal with the particularities.

Sometimes the variations are funny, even in the context of something terrible. I’ve heard people compare the sound of a tornado to that of a freight train so many times that when I had to cover an actual freight train wreck and the woman who lived in the adjacent neighborhood said the derailment sounded just like a tornado… well that’s just a big slice of funny.

Sometimes, you can see the sound bite from two towns over. It doesn’t matter who the next serial killer will be or what he does. There will be a neighbor who describes him as a man who was “kind of  a quiet guy, kept to himself, didn’t get out much.” There should be a hotkey on our laptops for this phrase, and it can sit right next to the ones for “a parent’s worst nightmare and “You won’t believe…”

Knowing what to do… reportorial muscle memory… often got me through the day. What to be, though. That’s a bit trickier.  What happens is that you completely define who you are via what you do.  So it’s really not at all surprising that if you talk to any newsroom expat, they’ll tell you, no matter how many years removed they are from the business, they still definite themselves as a journalist. They could be doing public relations for a company that produces pantsuits made of kittens, and which are hand stitched by Malaysian three year olds, but they’ll still tell you that, at heart, they’re journalists. Being a journalist – it’s going to leave a mark.

Which is why the last several months have been so disconcerting. OK, yeah, the potentially losing my vision thing… there’s that too. Still, finding a community to belong to that has nothing to do with everything I’ve always known how to do. That’s a heavy lift.

The working title of the expedition is “The Palette Project.” For now, this seems the best way to describe the idea of dipping into the world one color at a time. Preparation, so far, is very much about learning… or relearning. Navigating my world with enough confidence that people don’t rush to help. Feeling confident on a trail. Earning responsibility and the trust of others. As I’ve said before, it’s grabbing back the mantle of adulthood that one would think, once you have it, you don’t need to claim it again, but that appears to be the case

I truly love the sailing classes I’m taking because the crew with perfect eyesight is not only willing but eager to entrust those of us who are blind and visually impaired with the real responsibility of keeping them safe. Sailing a racing keelboat, I’m learning, is not the same as operating a cruising boat. There are real dangers aboard. While the two-thousand pound keel will keep the boat itself from capsizing, the mainsail is larger and the boom sits much closer to the deck.

 

Trusting the blind skipper not to unexpectedly tack into the wind (or out of it) and send the boom flying across the deck, and trusting the mainsail operator not to let the sheet out so far that the sail loses tension and starts to jibe, to swing uncontrollably. It’s a big deal. Throw in the stress of a six man crew for an actual race. There are blind racing crews out there, and I mean to join one of them, but even in a non racing context, the randomness of wind pockets, bad weather or plain old miscommunication makes me marvel that the sighted crew is so comfortable with us being on board at all, let alone puts us in charge of the work that keeps them steady and safe. It’s a testament to their simple decency as human beings.

It also leads me to feel deeply troubled about something I wrote earlier.

What I wrote was I didn’t want to be a member of a blind hiking group. I wanted to be a member of a hiking group. Period. The implication in that sentiment… that any activity that involved more than one person with a handicap was a pity gesture. A fun but meaningless outing for the special kids. An activity more about letting the organizers feel good about themselves without making a bit of difference in fostering independence.

What I’m coming to realize is the blind helmsman, the paraplegic kayaker and even, or especially the child with Down’s Syndrome at the Cheesecake Factory get-together are absolutely unequivocally equal in every respect, because these are the people who are out there doing something.   They are saying in their own words, in our own words, that they… that we have a place in the world. That we have just as much right and the ability as anyone to push ourselves as far as our bodies will take us.

 

To me, the idea of withdrawing from the world in the face of a handicap is a concept so foreign as to have no meaning. When I lost the sight in one eye at thirteen and first realized I was living on borrowed time with the other, it never occurred to me to change anything about my life or my future, because it didn’t occur to anyone I’d ever known. No teacher, no friend, and certainly not my family. That this was not universal never once occurred to me.

I’ve since heard some stories and seen others firsthand so disheartening that they make me weave between disbelief on one side and infuriation on the other. Of the parents who petitioned a municipality to install a street sign to warn drivers a blind child lived on the block. Of the blind teenager who, when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, replied that he would collect SSI. Of the blind woman in her twenties who never learned how to wash her clothes or clean her home because it was assumed these skills were beyond her. Of the thirty year old man who has been losing his sight since the age of five, but who can’t cross the street without trying to follow the shape of the person next to him and, in his words, “hope that person doesn’t have a death wish.” In my book, these people who have never been taught that using a cane, learning Braille, or relying on every other sense that we as human beings are so fortunate to have is somehow more shameful than risking your life or living in filth is abuse. Pure and simple.

This is why my being in any way disparaging of anyone with a handicap who says yes to anything that results in independence and ability is something about which I feel particularly shameful. It’s not that anyone with a handicap should get an award for simply waking up in the morning and managing to get out of bed. I’ve said all that needs to be said about the need for altered perceptions and raising expectations. It’s that the blind hiking group that I implicitly mocked… those are the people who are pushing the boundaries. Not of everyone else, but their own.

 

When you’re a journalist, the ideal is to be objective… to be for nothing. You don’t take sides and you don’t plant your flag. Being a part of anything is discouraged because you never known when you might have to cover that person, that group, that cause… the story that comes out of nowhere. Within the business itself, it’s a calling and I like to think there was even, at times, something noble about it… that act of placing yourself beyond impropriety in the service of a story that can be trusted. In that world, I’m proud to say I drank the Kool-Aid and went back for seconds.

Today, however, the challenge for me, as it is for any former journalist is how to do what everyone else does without a second thought… to stand for something. While next week is all about big announcements and big plans, it’s also about building a community.

I just have this one last comment to make first… that I’ve been coming to realize that so much of what the expedition – the Palette Project, if you will – is not about what I want to do, but what I want to be. It’s about standing for something.

And I think that something is just simple dignity.