The New Guard: The Moment and The Message

Tags

Ave Maria, new guard, photography, Schubert, Selfies, selfies at funerals, singing at weddings, wedding photos

No discussion of the new guard – the new paradigms created by the intersection of technology, commerce, and youth—would be complete without a nod to the changing nature of photography.  I’d like to thank Andrew Reynolds, from Andrew’s View of the Week, and 2 Helpful Guys for spurring some of my thinking about this topic.

My friend asked me to sing at his wedding last summer, and I happily agreed.  Over the years I’ve done quite a bit of public singing, and although I don’t do it much anymore, I still consider singing as a service I can offer, a way to fulfill my responsibility to the community.  My guess is that I’ve sung at close to fifty weddings, so I didn’t think much could surprise me. You stand up and sing at the beginning, or while folks are supposed to be praying, or during the unity candle.  A photographer takes a few photos during the wedding from a discreet distance and may ask for a photo of you and the accompanist afterwards.  You stay for the reception if you know the couple. If they’ve paid you then you take off after the wedding.  Done and dusted.  I had no reason to expect anything unusual from this wedding.

The bride requested Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” You’ve all heard it.  If you look it up on YouTube, you’ll notice approximately six million renditions of the Ave, most of which are by the big dogs of opera. These big opera dogs make money with their voices. I make money by sitting in the floor with a bunch of twelve year olds, talking to them about their work.  I’ve spent more time than I can count cutting out stars, gluing and stapling things to classroom posters. I have not spent a great deal of time learning the complexities of the “Ave Maria.”  It’s the kind of piece that singers work on with their coaches for years before performing in public. But my friend wanted this piece, so I retrieved my years of training and went to work. I vocalized daily and brushed up on my Latin diction, because they requested this language as opposed to Schubert’s German version. I recorded myself, wincing as I listened to each new version and tried to improve on the rough spots.  I worked, I tell you, I worked.

After weeks of practice at home and a few minutes with the accompanist the night before, Super Husband and I slicked up and arrived at the church early.  The Ave demands an early start, at the very least.  As soon as the bridal party attained the altar, the pianist, a nice man who worked at a Catholic school, began lacing Schubert’s opening arpeggios.

As I started to sing, the bride’s whole family got out of their seats to take pictures of me with their phones. I’ve never used the flash on my camera phone, but they knew how to use theirs.  Puffs of light tinged my retinas in an irregular pattern.  An elderly relative had a real camera with one of those Jimmy Olson type flash bulbs.  He rotated around me at tonsil-viewing distance and clicked at least twenty pictures of my face as I venerated the mother of Christ.  My face, that wild demon child who will not obey my brain, fought me every step, and the corners of my mouth headed into smile territory, ooching higher with every flash of the mini-bulbs from camera phones.

I can tell you that Schubert did not have the paparazzi in mind when he wrote the “Ave Maria.” This is a lyrical tour de force with a  high tessitura and a broad range.  “Why Me, Lord,” it ain’t.  I don’t know where this reserve of musical calm came from, but I finished the piece without embarrassing myself too badly and sat down with great relief and a feeling of having been slightly—not violated, exactly, but broached. I had the hot head and emptiness of a recent outpouring, and the discomfort of handing over some of my personal territory without my permission.  Not saying I completely understand what Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie go through at the airport, but a smidge of empathy now resides, ya know?

Since I have personally experienced the thrill of being photo-buzzed by a group of frenzied spectators, I’ve now begun to take more notice of this picture-in-picture phenomenon.  It’s everywhere, and if you don’t believe me, witness the phenomenon of selfies at funerals.  If funeral selfies were a sound, they’d make the whooshing noise you hear as all decorum (and some would say decency) flies out the window.  It’s like we no longer know when to stay in the moment and when to stop and allow ourselves to experience. Where did the art of remembering go?

As I watch a moment like the one below (I’m not judging by the way, I had my camera out, too) it feels like laying salt on the road of your mind by trying to prophylactic-ally take pictures of something you haven’t experienced because you are afraid you’ll forget about the experience before you’ve had it.

Now, everyone’s a photographer !

What’s with this new guard practice of  logging insta, nano, and micro moments?  Why is it so important to catalog every sigh? Do we think that if we empty our present by objectifying it to the nth degree, that it will somehow make the future less bleak?

How did we come to the place where the moment is more important than the message? And how can we get the message back? I’m asking.

PauserPrompt: Old Songs

Tags

flash fiction, oud, refugee, short fiction, writing prompts

PUD (Week 2)

Here are the words I pulled from my Personal Universe Deck this week: man, salt, novel, beach,discourse,baby. 

Old Songs

New, the way the shadow closed over her chest, the way she opened her eyes in surprise just before father placed his hand over her mouth and motioned for silence.  New, the moon casting its shadows over the rows of tents as father led her toward the central lane.

“It’s late,” Anjum said as Baba pulled her along.

Baba’s paced only quickened. As they walked, Anjum separated the sounds she heard; the shushing waves of the Mediterranean, the far off cry of a lone gull, her father’s boots scrabbling over the dirt road, her own heartbeat in her ears.  She made a rhythm of all of it.  She’d made music out of the repetitious all of her short life.  Her music, the novel she wrote herself each morning to make sense of the bombs, the shouts, the quickening of her mother’s cries.  Hurriedly packing suitcases.  Cooking rice for strangers in the dead of the night, her mother giving three quick shakes, resting, three quick shakes, resting, as the grains browned in the one pan they brought from the old house.

Old, the life she had before. In school she raised her hand and the teacher called on her to speak.  Anjum knew school answers, answers to give when the question was asked.  Now the only answer was the rhythm.  The questions ran away before Anjum could catch them.  Old, Anjum played in the shadow of her parents’ tent with her little brother.  He should still know how to play, she thought.  I play for him.

Anjum’s Oud lay on the bed she left behind in the room with solid walls.  She prayed that it would be there for her if she ever went home.  One day if she ever went back to her old home.  Once, Anjum asked her mother about going home, but the salt had risen in Mama’s eyes, and Anjum had quit asking. She was never going back to the old home again, never playing her instrument again, never singing the old songs to the old men in her home town again.  She knew this was true.  She knew it by the way the adults cut conversations and slanted their eyes when she came near.

As they hurried along the road, others joined them.  Anjum saw they were walking toward the main relief tent. Daily, Anjum stood in the tent holding a plate of food from the hands of strangers.  She sat at one of the long tables and ate with all the others. Her little brother often remarked on the food, saying, “It’s good today,” or “I liked yesterday’s better.”  She ate what was in front of her. Her taste buds had flown out of her mouth at the same time as the songs.

Baba pulled her into the middle of the tent, and to her surprise the room, now full of grown-ups, quieted.  He looked to Anjum and pointed.  There, in the center of the tent, an old man sat upon a folding chair.  In his lap, he held an Oud.  Baba squatted and made his eyes match Anjum’s.  She knew what he wanted.

“Baba, I can’t,” she said.

“You can, Anjum. You must.”  Baba’s eyes pleaded.

She tightened her mouth.  “No,” she pronounced.  Baba took her shoulders and leaned in to kiss her forehead.  Then he spoke.

“I shield you from this if I can.  But you have a gift.  Anjum. Look. If you cannot look at all these people, look at this one man.  This one here.” He held her chin and turned it toward a man sitting near the center of the circle of people.  He was pale as tenting. His hands shook in his lap. His eyes bled sorrow. “This man, this morning, had a wife. He had a child.”

She looked at Baba. “I don’t know if it will come out anymore.”

Baba smiled.  “You can try, Anjum.”  He didn’t wait for her answer to lift her unto a table.  The old songs opened her chest as the old man started to play.

The New Guard and Uber

Tags

essay, new guard, old guard, Planet of the Apes, ride sharing services, travel essay, Uber, understanding social media, writing

Snapped this while waiting for the Uber driver to pick us up.

The other day, a commentator on NPR referred to current Twitter followers as the old guard. As he said this, I thought, What’s the new guard, then? Where does that leave those of us who barely twit? Sitting on a branch, wireless-less, with bird laryngitis, I guess. The truth; it’s impossible to keep up with the hyperactive mutations of social media. The age-old tenet that the young ‘uns will abandon a format as soon as their parents start to appreciate and use it (the aging face of Facebook is a case in point) doesn’t adequately explain how and why technology morphs so rapidly.

I’m only fifty-five, so I don’t think my cadre has lain down in the dust to breathe the last improbable gasps of a dead civilization just yet. However, even in the face of this mind-boggling web of newness, I don’t mind the idea of a new guard.

In searching for my own explanation of the new guard, I thought of this scene from the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. Astronaut George Taylor, (played by Charleton Heston), has landed on a planet he does not recognize.  While riding a horse down a beach with a scantily clad woman, he rides up on a beheaded Lady Liberty, discarded on the beach.  Tradition became meaningless upon the realization that the world he had known was now gone.  Taylor then decries the loss of his old traditions and boundaries, in a fit of histrionics worthy of the old guard. [Parenthetically, Charleton Heston won an Oscar for his performance in Ben-Hur. Go figure.]

The new generation of media-saavy twenty and thirty-somethings have a different take on our rules, our traditions, what we’ve preserved, what we’ve ruined.  Standing on the beach that is the actual, unvirtual world, boundaries may be viewed not as something to observe, but as something to be manipulated, a matrix of interdimensional possibilities.  I don’t think this is such a bad thing, having this innate belief in the elasticity of the world.

Take Uber, the ride sharing service that’s swept through America’s major cities.  Uber was an idea that grew out of this elasticized worldview. Here’s how it happened: Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick sat around after a conference thinking of new ventures. Kalanick and Camp, neither of whom had reached forty, had each started and sold their first tech companies and were ready for a new challenge  One of their conversations centered on the difficulty getting a taxi in San Francisco.  Uber was born out of this conversation.

Now, when I travel to a big city, I can use an app on my phone to summon a driver  and know exactly where the driver is in his or her journey to pick me up. The Uber app is the hub around which Uber revolves, which seems like a paradigm shift.  Most companies develop a business plan and then throw an app in parenthetically.  Kalanick and Camp speak new guard fluently, and understand that business is embedded into new technology,not the other way around.

Uber and similar services such as Lyft have faced their share of adversity.  Both companies have been sued by drivers over the designation that they are contractors rather than employees. In addition, Uber has been attacked by taxi companies and city regulators who would like to see them out of business. Realistically, the taxi companies and city planners would be better served to find a way to work with ride-sharing services. It’s kind of like putting one of those folding chairs back into the little sack it came in.  Be honest. You know you threw that sack away after the second time you used the chair.  Uber and services like it are not going back into the bag. It would be, like sacking the chair, giving birth backwards.

When you use Uber, a person picks you up in his or her own car, and takes you where you want to go.  Because the financial end is all on an app, no money changes hands unless the rider decides to tip the driver in cash. It feels like riding with a friend. And the friend is usually from the new guard, just finished college, or attending grad school, or driving to make a little money before the baby comes.  It’s quick, easy to use, and it’s cheaper than calling a yellow taxi.  Also, since the driver uses a personally owned vehicle, the cars are much cleaner than a typical taxi.

When we recently used Uber in Oakland, California, we encountered a lovely driver with curls that stood at attention all over her head.  She told us about getting the Holy Spirit in Waco Texas, the slight shame she felt when Baylor University released her for violating the drinking policy (those Baptists are serious, man), how much she loved Hawaii, and how we didn’t owe her a tip.  No, she insisted, the pleasure was all hers.  At one time, we were all as starchless and free as this young Uber driver.  She’s only one example of the lovely human beings we’ve encountered in our Uber travels.

Change, when it comes, always faces opposition. But I believe that each new guard, when it comes along, deserves a chance to create new paradigms, and replace traditions with ideas that work better for the current day. This emergent energy is what makes the world such an interesting place. Those of us in the old guard should sit in the back and enjoy the view.  Relax.  The Statue of Liberty’s still there in the harbor where it’s always been.  But thanks to the new guard, we don’t have to go to New York to visit.  We simply download the app.

PauserPrompt: The Personal Universe Deck

Tags

creative writing, fiction, grand canyon, Personal Universe Deck, writing, writing prompts

In my new Friday feature, I'm going to generate writing using types of prompts, and invite you to do the same.  This month, I'm 
using my Personal Universe Deck, or PUD, to prompt some new writing ideas.The Personal Universe Deck first originated with 
poet Michael McClure.  He describes how he created his Personal Universe Deck in this speech at Naropa University.  You'll find good descriptions for generating the PUD on this website, and on this one. This week, I shuffled my deck and pulled three cards containing the words turmeric, eggplant, sugar, wait, silence, and skip. 

Silence, Turmeric, Wait

Father and Daughter, a special bond

“Does this have turmeric?” she asked, sniffing the contents of the pita suspiciously. “Cause you know I don’t like that stuff.”

Lilly looked at her.  “You are six years old.  You live in Texas.  You’ve never had turmeric.  How did you even know turmeric existed?”

The girl eyed her mother with precocious disdain.  “I read about turmeric in my book on Asia.  I decided I don’t like it.”

Lilly sighed. Her father and brother, Will, suddenly got busy with their food.  Will stifled a giggle by coughing into his plate.

Lilly spoke. “The pita does not have any turmeric. I guarantee it.  We are at the base of the Grand Canyon.  This is the food the donkey brought down for you.  You won’t get anything else, so I suggest you eat.” She glared at her headstrong second child, willing the conversation to turn in her favor.  She pushed the sweaty veil of blonde hair out of her daughter’s eyes and implored, “Just try it for me, okay?”

The girl, Annie, widened her eyes and stuck her tongue out. Then she slowly moved her tongue toward the offending sandwich. Upon touching the contents, she cried, “Ew!  Definitely turmeric, Mom. Definitely. It’s going to be against my principles to eat it, Mom.”

“Upon what grounds did you base your decision to dislike turmeric?  What has turmeric ever done to you?” Lilly looked at her husband, Bob, and said, “Am I really having this conversation?”

He replied, “Keep your voice down.  People are looking at us.”

“Do you want to handle this, then?” She whispered furiously across the picnic table.

“No, just keep it down, okay?”

Lilly leaned into Annie’s ear. “This pita has chicken.  You like chicken.  It has mayonnaise, your favorite. It has grapes.”

Bob piped into the conversation then. “Yeah, Annie, I don’t like grapes, but I’m eating them, see?”

“Not helping,” Lilly said.

Nonplussed, Annie stated, “It has turmeric, too,”

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s yellow.  Turmeric is yellow.”

Bob spoke again. “That’s not turmeric, sweetheart, it’s called curry.”

Will, who’d been quietly wolfing his pita, picked his head up and said, “Curry?”

He started crying, the loud way, the way a sudden squall hits in the middle of summer, the way a kid cries during a vacation even though he is too old to cry in public any more.   Now, people were really looking.  His eyes were full of accusation.  “You know how much I hate curry! What is wrong with you two?”

Lilly said, “Now you know why I can’t remember our vacations.  My mind erases the trauma.”

By now, Will had reached across the table and pinched Annie on the arm, and both children were crying.  Bob and Lilly looked at one another for a moment, and then he started laughing.  Lilly did not see the humor, and told him so.

“Come on, now,” he said, “look on the bright side. We’re at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. We came all the way down here on freaking mules.  We have a six year old who reads books about Asia.  She knows what turmeric is, and she uses words like ‘principles’ in the right way.”

Annie walked around the table and crawled into Bob’s lap.  “I’m smart, aren’t I, Dad?”

“Smart is as smart does, Annie,” he said.  “I think you are going to be very hungry in a little while, and there’s nothing Mom and I can do to help you, so would you say that’s a smart decision?”

She patted his face. “But you’re forgetting about my principles, Dad.  And the candy bar in your pocket.”

I'd love it if you joined me in the Friday prompt.  Create your own PUD and write.  If you post the 
results on your blog, please feel free to post a link in the comments section here.