Where They Were Calling From

The well-received new novel Landline makes this seem like a good time to discuss the function of the phone on Family Ties. When I first started re-watching the show, the use of the phone to advance the plot jumped out at me; it rings in nearly every episode. But the one-sided-conversation as delivery system for exposition is hardly unique to old tech; cell phones accomplish the same thing now, even as they've allowed television and film to convey information in new ways, such as making text messages or social media visible.

What's different about the landline is what the shared status of the phone makes possible. People are waiting to make a call and threatening their little sisters if they hog the phone:

Or fighting over who should have answered the phone when it rang and rang earlier. (It's not clear to me if the Keatons have an answering machine). Then you get to reconcile when the phone rings again, this time fighting to see who can answer it first:

Which leads to make up kissing, courtesy of AT & T:

Who called? Who cares?

And of course it never seems to occur to anyone that the phone can be left unanswered - even if you're in the middle of, say, gluing a broken plate back together with two other people - which allows for physical comedy too:

And while we're on the subject of old tech, let me close with a little love for the newspaper. I've written before about my love for newsprint, so I'll just say that you can imagine my joy at images like this one, from the opening credits of season one:

The newspaper is also pretty ubiquitous on Family Ties, but it's more of a prop and less of a plot-advancer (with a few exceptions, like the episode where the calling hours for Aunt Trudy coincide with the family's yard sale because Alex forgot to pull the ad in time). 

I might write more at another time about other examples of great old tech - tape cassettes and rolls of film come to mind - but for now I'm going to take a break from that subject and from the show itself. I realized that not only do most of four seasons remain for me to watch, but also from the episode guides on Netflix it looks like I haven't even reached the halfway point for the series. So I'm going to gather more data and will probably write again when I'm done. In the meantime, I might write about The Grapes of Wrath, which I have finally started and which looks to be amazing, obviously a different kind of portrait of the U.S. from Family Ties but one that, from the 2014 vantage point, shares its compelling mix of the gone and enduring.  

We Won't All Be Welders

There's another story in The Seattle Times about the changing landscape of my former city: a 1912 apartment building downtown is slated to be demolished, an office tower erected in its place, its mostly middle and low-income inhabitants displaced into a city with increasingly exorbitant rents. Congrats to Sanjay Bhatt and news researcher Gene Balk for an interesting, if depressing, article, and for getting great quotations from one of the building's owners. This closes out the article:

           Stephanus, the building’s co-owner, said her business is owning places      for people to live. While what’s happening to Williamsburg Court is sad, she said, if people can’t afford downtown living, that’s for them to figure out.

          “If they find themselves in that position, there are a lot of jobs out there but they have to train themselves a little bit,” she said. “I’ve heard on TV they’re dying for people who can weld. I don’t see any of them going out to be welders.” 

My first reaction to this quotation, especially the last sentence, was anger. This feeling was tempered somewhat by reminding myself that this woman is in her 80s and is a landlord; those and possibly other factors make her less likely to have a sympathetic perspective.

But this idea that we all need to train ourselves for whatever the most lucrative hot new job is - it sidesteps questions like, Why can't the musicians and schoolteachers and others in her building get paid more for the jobs they already have? If we're all chasing the new, who will work at the old? It reminds me of when my favorite bowling and karaoke place closed six years ago. Who will live in Seattle after buildings like these are gone?

     

What Creates a Culture of Graffiti?

In a bathroom stall today at the university where I teach, I found myself looking a bit sadly at four blank walls. In grad school, the library bathrooms were filled with graffiti - women's voices proclaiming, counseling, dissing, and querying. There was always something to ponder, scoff at, lament, admire. I wasn't in the library bathroom today, so to be more scientific I suppose I'd better venture over there, but I'd be surprised if I encountered any ink.

Maybe it's because this school is primarily a commuter campus? Maybe the range of students, including many who have full time jobs and/or families, include fewer who are going to turn to a random wall for advice about art, school, health or love?

Except I don't think of stalls as random walls. I think of them as communities of sorts, early versions of Internet message boards or comment threads.

Maybe this perspective and my love of bathroom graffiti comes from my experience at the University of Chicago in the late 90s. There, it wasn't just the library bathrooms that were filled with musings; in the basement of Ida Noyes Hall, which housed the campus bar, movie theater, and rooms used for everything from Social Dance classes (fulfilling a PE credit!) to annual events like Blues and Ribs, I found one of my favorite scribbles: "For a good time call Avogadro's number 6022141..." (etc.). That probably epitomizes U of C's self-congratulatory nerdiness, but there were other good ones too, including paeans to Ira Glass. I wish I'd taken better notes, frankly.

Over time I added my own words to those walls. In the Reynolds Club (the student center), I wrote down lines from a Lucille Clifton children's book: "And Everett Anderson knew/his father loved him through and through/And whatever happens when we die/Love doesn't stop/And neither will I." Why? I don't remember, except for some reason I'd read that book and loved it. I saved the Derek Walcott line "The classics can console, but not enough" for, of course, the Classics building bathroom. And on the eve of the 2000 election, I photocopied a New York Times editorial that argued why people should not vote for Nader but instead, Gore. I highlighted what I considered important sentences and taped the editorial inside stalls around campus.

I'm not that young woman anymore; for one thing, I'd be far more aligned with those Nader voters I feared and loathed. For another, I get that there are other ways to express oneself and to connect with a community. There are other ways to be vocal and anonymous (while, um, being more sanitary), now.

But I'm interested in why some women's rooms are so quiet. And I still love when I find one that's not.  

Savoring the springboard

I didn't want to leave the 6th grade, and two years later, I didn't want to leave middle school. I couldn't imagine leaving high school because it meant that I was definitely leaving behind my best friend, who had died 6 months before. I had to go though - my town was too full of ghosts. Four years later, I was sad to leave college. Well, you get the picture - I like to stay.

I know I love a place when I turn off the lights in its empty rooms. I would do that in my dorm - pass by the lounge, its television screen dark, the old maroon couches listless, no one in sight - and I'd flip the switch before continuing on. Now, nights when I'm the last one on the third floor of the Humanities building, I'll turn out the lights in our (very little) lounge too. It feels less environmentally-conscious than simply, oddly protective.

Barring the unexpected (and aren't we always barring that?), I graduate again in 4 months. I need to concentrate on applying for jobs, and I know that in the right one I'd be happy to commit all over again to a new place and its old, quiet furniture. It's just the dive that's difficult. 

Ten Years Later: Seattle Shout-Outs, Metro Edition

On August 27, 2001, I flew from New York City to Seattle. I moved, sight unseen (site unseen!), to a duplex across the street from I-5, with 3 gals I'd never met, one of whom was also going to be in my AmeriCorps program. I'll barely celebrate my 10th anniversary in Seattle when it will be time to move again, this time for grad school.

These upcoming events - the anniversary and the move - as well as a friend's recent post about her one-year anniversary here - have put me in a contemplative mood. And the recent announcement that a 17 percent cut to Metro bus service will be averted has me in a thank-you-public-transit frame of mind. So, born of that mix:

To the other downtown-bound Metro riders at the corner of Eastlake and Lynn on the morning of September 11, 2001: I still think about you sometimes and am grateful for your combination of sobriety, sympathy, and dark humor, and the way, when the bus finally arrived, we all sat at the back, strangers compelled to stay together.

To the Metro driver whose sign read Ryerson Base but who stopped at the Ballard Bridge and picked me and a man up anyway, drove us downtown, and deposited us exactly where we wanted to go even though those places weren't bus stops: you are awesome.

To the driver who spontaneously let my friends and me turn your 44 into a party bus, complete with flashing interior lights, dancing in the aisles, and Right Said Fred accompaniment on the PA: you are even awesomer.

To every driver who saw me in their rear view mirror, running and running late, and stopped: your ordinary kindness makes the world a better place.

North Seattle vs. North Seattle

Last December, Dani Shapiro reviewed "Poser," Claire Dederer's memoir of regaining her life through yoga, for the New York Times's Sunday Book Review. I have not read the book but plan to if only to tease out for myself what is tongue-in-cheek and what is earnest. For instance, this paragraph (from Shapiro's review; italics mine):

“We were a generation of hollow-eyed women, chasing virtue,” she tells us. “We, the mothers of North Seattle, were consumed with trying to do everything right.” North Seattle — a first cousin of Park Slope, the Upper West Side, Berkeley and dozens of other such enclaves around the country — was a place where attachment parenting was all the rage. Kids weren’t weaned until they spoke in full sentences. Families all slept in the same bed; ate the same organic, locally produced food; and lived in an enriching environment safe from the dangers of plastic toys and disposable diapers.
Is Dederer making fun of the idea that all mothers in one section of a city could be monolithic? Or is she subscribing to that very idea? Furthermore, is Shapiro echoing Dederer when she lumps North Seattle in with other stereotyped areas - or is this her own take on the situation? The word "affluence" never appears in this paragraph. But it doesn't have to.

Homonyms are words that look and sound the same but have different meanings. The phenomenon I want a name for today is the sense of dislocation one feels when one encounters an unexpected homonym; North Seattle, in the quotation from the book and in the review, is that for me. The North Seattle I know does encompass the wide-stroller-wielding, latte-sipping women of Dederer's Green Lake. But it also includes the mom headed to the new DSHS offices at North Seattle Community College for food or work assistance and the women, some mothers themselves, caring for a gaggle of preschoolers, many of whom have mothers who must go to work, at Lake City library's story time.

Satirical or earnest, my hope for "Poser" is that it doesn't commit the sin of omission, of erasing those other mothers of North Seattle. I'll report back after I've read the book.

The Facebook Monopoly

Yesterday I was reading the Seattle P-I website when I noticed an article titled, "Has Facebook killed your urge to attend a school reunion?" (The headline did not capitalize all the letters, so neither do I :). At the end of the piece you could share your thoughts on the matter by voting. Choices include, "No way! I'm organizing a reunion right now on Facebook!" and "Yes, because I've already seen how weird my classmates became!" But among the six choices there was no option to say, "No, because I am not on Facebook."

And that is how I would have voted.

I was on Facebook, relatively briefly: once, in 2007 or 2008, for a few months, and again from July 2009 until May 31 of last year. I decided to leave - and not just to leave but to join others on the official Quit Facebook Day - because I didn't like the time I was wasting; I disagreed with how privacy decisions were handled; and I didn't like the vaguely stalker-ish impulses it could breed. But the biggest reason I left was that I didn't actually feel more connected with anyone other than very nice or funny acquaintances. The act of widely broadcasting my emotions - and reading other people's broadcasts - made me feel distant from actual friends and family. Even when people weren't trying to perform their relationships, the interface often gave them the look of performance. Very little was personal; I felt like a circumstantial audience member, not an intentionally selected recipient of information.

I do miss my friends' baby photos sometimes, but that's about it.

Lately though it feels like there are wider-reaching participatory repercussions to my decision to leave than just being the last to see the new kid's picture. It's not just that not being on Facebook is apparently inconceivable to some, as in the P-I article. For some businesses, organizations, or events, the only way to place an order, contact someone, or make your voice heard now is via Facebook. You can't even vote on a name for the Woodland Park Zoo's new reticulated python without going to Facebook.

I'm all for Facebook as a choice. But if you're operating in the public sphere, it seems short-sighted at best to limit in any way the number of people who can give you their money, time, or opinions.