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.  

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.  

Cleaning Up and Reaching Out

In the process of trying to decide what I want to do with this blog, I recently brought it into the late 20th century by adding tags (!) and just now I went through my blog list to remove abandoned ones, correct changed addresses, and add new ones. For example, I stopped identifying as a Unitarian Universalist about two and a half years ago, so goodbye to the UU World Blog. And I started reading more critiques of higher ed, U.S. culture, and inequality - if you're interested in those subjects too, I highly recommend Tressie McMillan Cottom's blog.

Also, I saw an old friend yesterday. He wants me to join Twitter. I'm not going to at this point, but if you're there, you should consider following him. He posts smart and funny things.

Doing something new I should know about? Lemme know so I can promote you too :)

All the News...

Tomorrow is the last day that a paper copy of the New York Times will arrive at my house.

I give that sentence its very own paragraph to underscore what a profound change this will be for me (and, well, to add some theatricality to the whole thing). For the last ten years, my father has given me a subscription as a gift - a long time to give any gift to anyone, let alone such an expensive gift, let alone to your, er, adult child. So. I completely understand that this had to end; in the past year, as he's moved from a job at the NYT itself to a copy editor position at a small paper in Rhode Island, I've reminded him several times that he no longer has to foot this bill.

But this is a man who has been a journalist his whole adult life, who has news paper ingrained in him the way some people have the union ethos or lighthouse keeping (OK, maybe that last one is a stretch). When he's on a trip, he buys the local newspaper, even if it's the Wretched City Urinal, even if the headline writing kills him, even if he finds the thing loaded with, insult of insults, "non-stories." It's as much a testament to his traditional view of how one ideally gets the news as to his love for me that he held out on cancellation for so long.

And it's an ideal that he passed on to me. If I were a typical early-30-something, I would have preferred to access my news digitally all along. But I'm an outlier. I do read websites, I have listened to podcasts, I pay some bills electronically, I write - gasp! - a blog. But I'm also that person on the bus who's filling out her rent check while trying to keep the Arts and Business sections from sliding off her lap to the floor.

It would be one thing if I were just embracing my inner grandma. But I find that looking at a screen for too long or listening to the radio without having an activity to do irritates me. And when there's technology that I don't understand, I'm just as liable to abandon it as I am to try to adapt to it. (My friend calls this falling into an Amish black hole...which is maybe name enough for this phenomenon. She is the funniest). Case in point: my laptop "died" three years ago. Why do I put died in quotes? Because I never actually brought the thing in to get diagnosed. For all I know the light is dead and the motherboard is fine.

So I'm nervous about staying as informed through the radio and Internet, but instead of, oh I don't know, swiping the neighbors' copy from their driveway on my way to work, I'm going to try to change my habits. I've already been checking the Seattle Times and other news websites almost daily for (ahem) a few months - I can add one more (though only to the tune of 20 articles a month for now). And when I move to a college town for grad school soon, I'm going to look into delivery rates for the local paper.

I don't have to completely reject being my father's daughter.

Good Old 1995

My parents have been mailing me boxes of my stuff from high school and college on and off for almost a year now; they moved back to Connecticut in June 2010 and, though they now have a huge basement, still (understandably) would like me to take possession of that which is mine. So. Boxes.

I have unearthed some treasures: articles from Parade magazine on the "cyberspace" fight to save "My So-Called Life" from cancellation; a beloved cassette tape, "TV Hits Vol. II" from the Meadowbrook Pops Orchestra, featuring classic '80s shows (who doesn't want to listen to the theme song from "Murder, She Wrote" on demand?); and my first pair of glasses (huge frames!) But the overwhelming majority of space is filled with letters.

I attended the University of Virginia's Young Writers Workshop in Charlottesville in the summers of 1994 and 1995, and, in those early-email days, it was natural to write to new friends through the trusty U.S. Postal Service. I was 14 and 15 and prolific, and so were my friends from Pittsburgh; St. Petersburg, FL; Brookline, MA; Ridgewood, NJ; and beyond. We may have only spent 3 weeks together in the same space, but some of us wrote to one another for years.

I love those letters now, both for their often-quirky, handmade, collaged envelopes and for the high school obsessions detailed within, but it also makes me sad to read them. A lot hadn't happened yet in 1995, including the deaths of two close friends and three of my grandparents. I'm no longer in as frequent or meaningful of contact with any of those people: college, significant others, jobs and new friends intervened. And in many cases we've just grown apart.

I'm not sure what you call it when you keep lots of things, pages and pages, that you can't bear to look at for very long, but that's what I'm doing. I'm an archivist, and I want to be able to remember Bug and Chris and Emily and Dave and everyone else, as they were.

I've Lost that Lovin' Listening

Sometime in the last 2 years I have stopped needing music. I still crave specific songs occasionally, and when I'm borrowing a car and driving around, I do tend to scan the channels. But 98% of the time now when I want sound, I turn on NPR.

Combine this change with my past accumulation of obsolescent technology and a recent move, and you have...the great CD give away! See something you like? Contact me and I will send it to you (or, for Seattleites, bring it by the next time we hang). See something you gave me? Please don't take it personally that your musical offering did not make the cut and the soundtrack to "Follow that Bird" did. See something that I borrowed from you and forgot about? Sorry! Let me know.

In no order and spanning levels of time, space, fame, and quality:
Broken Social Scene, Bee Hives
The Turn-Ons, East
Drexel, Catch em while they're still alive
Rajini, Speak Truth '07
Beth Orton, Trailer Park and Daybreaker
Adam Sandler, What the hell happened to me?
The Gene Harris/Scott Hamilton Quintet, At Last
St. Germain, Tourist
Coldplay, Parachutes
Ridin' High (?)
Jay Jay Johanson, Antenna
Better than Ezra, Best Of
Henry Hanks, untitled?
Japanese HeepHop (?)
Bob Dylan, Greatest Hits Volume II
Mask Phantoms, The Spang Nut God Banner
Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy
Danny Massure, What it Is
The Get Up Kids, Something to Write Home About
The Magnetic Fields, The Charm of the Highway Strip
Ms. Led, Afternoon in Central Park
Carole King, Tapestry
The Smashing Pumpkins, Tarantula
OK Go, Oh No
James Taylor, Greatest Hits
Nate Newcomer, Edgewater Alienation (featuring bonus "Freddie Got Fingered" DVD! Actually if you want this you can have it independently too).
Sarah McLachlan, Mirrorball
Band of Horses, Everything All the Time
M. Ward, Transfiguration of Vincent
MIA, Diplo Piracy Funds Terrorism 1611
Death Cab for Cutie, Transatlanticism and You Can Play These Songs With Chords
Morcheba, Sampler
Goo Goo Dolls, Before It's Too Late
The Beatles, White Album
Eagle-Eye Cherry, Feels so Right
Whit Press Presents: City to City, Seattle Reads New York
Buttersprites, Buttersprites
Reef Encounter, untitled?
Cowboy Junkies, Black Eyed Man
Can You Read this Boston?
Lou-Lou, Bad Puppy
Martin Sexton, Wonder Bar
My So-Called Life soundtrack (I know, I know, but it doesn't actually have the featured Buffalo Tom song...it has a different one)
Brown Bird and Justin Kennedy, untitled?
Cornershop, Handcream for a Generation
Marc Bolan and T. Rex, 20th Century Boy
Femi Kuti, Sampler
Moby, Play
Dateless, Demo
Kevin Barker, Currituck County

When The Cover Song is The First One You Hear

A few years ago, my brother made me a mix CD of people performing covers - Billy Corgan singing "Landslide," K.D. Lang singing "Joker," etc. My favorite was Toots and the Maytals doing "Country Roads." West Jamaica!

Another song I loved off of this album was Social Distortion's version of "Ring of Fire." I'd never heard Johnny Cash sing it, and when I did, out of a jukebox at a bar, I thought it was too slow and, well, kind of boring. The fact that I had made it to my mid-twenties without becoming familiar with Johnny Cash was seen by some friends as blasphemous in and of itself. But to not like "Ring of Fire"?

I know I'm not alone. My mother knew the Fifth Dimension's version of "Wedding Bell Blues" before she knew that Laura Nyro had done it first.

We all have first loves. But sometimes your first love isn't technically first.