MuseUnlimited

We recently decided to upgrade from standard definition digital cable to HD cable. I don’t watch much TV–maybe two or three shows per week–so I’ve resisted upgrading our service for awhile. When our old CRT started to die last year we upgraded to a 37″ widescreen TV, which has made DVD watching a real treat. The few TV shows that I watch are presented in letterbox on standard cable so we watched them with the picture on zoom to fill the entire screen. This looked okay, but I found myself wishing for a 16:9 picture free of pixelation. Then I noticed that HD was only $10.00 more per month, so we decided to make the plunge.

I’d like to preface this little narrative by saying that I’m a reasonably technically-inclined person. I’ve got a film degree and I used to work in film to video post production where we transferred the dailies from various film and television productions to video for editing. So connecting my HDTV to and HD cable box shouldn’t present that much of a problem. Sure.

The problems started almost immediately after connecting the new HD box to my system. The box had a sticker on top with instructions on authorizing it. I followed these instructions, but realized immediately that I had forgotten to connect the cablevision cable to the box. So I shut the box down immediately, connected the cable, and then followed the instructions again. Unfortunately my error did something to the HD box which it couldn’t recover from. This was going to require a phone call to Rogers. I’ll usually do everything I can to avoid phoning them because their cso it fillsustomer service is horrible. So I was surprised when I got someone on the phone in less than a minute. My happiness was short-lived, however, when I found out that I had reached technical service for people who had bought there HD boxes. Since I am a lowly renter my call was rerouted to another queue. Ten to fifteen minutes later I finally got another live body. She was able to solve the problem right away by sending a signal to the box. Within seconds I had TV.

But yet again my happiness was short-lived. I noticed that all the HD channels where being sent to my TV in 480p. A 480p digital signal looks good but it certainly wasn’t worth the additional monthly expense. I was confused because I had followed the setup procedure in which the box determines which signals your TV accepts, but here it was defaulting to the lowest resolution choice for everything. After some searching around online (by the way, Rogers, could you format your Web pages so they work properly in Firefox?) I discovered an on-screen menu that allows you to choose the box’s output resolution. I’m about an hour into my whole HD setup experience and I’ve finally got a decent picture and only because I read beyond the setup documentation that came with the box.

This was another one of those short-lived victory celebrations because although the picture was now quite nice, the sound was only in PCM stereo. My first thought was, maybe these channels are only broadcasting in stereo. But I noticed that a few channels where indeed advertising the fact that they were broadcasting in Dolby Digital 5.1. Again I started googling. Eventually I discovered that there should be a general settings menu on my HD Box. The Rogers Web page told me that all I had to do was press the display button on my Pace 551 HD box to access the general settings menu where I would find audio output settings. The display button didn’t work. I went to Pace’s Web site and checked out their documentation only to discover that it didn’t even cover the menus. I spent another hour searching online for the solution, but found nothing. Evidently no-one else had asked about this lack of general settingdeterminess menuissue in any of the online forums. Finally I broke down and phoned Rogers technical support and the voice-recognition menu system even put me through to the correct person on the first try. I explained my problem and he did a little searching through his help system and found the solution right away: press the “settings” button on your remote control twice. I found the “audio: digital out” setting and changed it from the default setting of “HDMI” to Dolby Digital (I was using HDMI for the picture but a coaxial digital cable for the sound, a common enough configuration).

So after about three hours or so I finally have a functioning HDTV system. Many people would never have gotten this far. Indeed, many would have just hooked up the box and happily accepted what they got. Some might even achieve the optimal settings this way. There are so many issues with my whole experience that I’m not even sure where to start. To begin with, I’d love an out-of-the-box experience similar to that of an Apple product, but considering that I was dealing with components from three different companies, that is probably impossible. That said, the Pace 551 HD box could be a lot easier to configure. In order to have a functioning system I needed to use an undocumented series of buttons to access a general settings menu. Why they changed the access procedure for this menu, I’ll never know, but why not publish the change on the Web? This would have saved Rogers at least one phone call from me, which I gather they’d like to do. In short, they have to put as many resources into creating a seamless user experience as they put into marketing their products.

I have been photographing my daughter Patia since she was a few minutes old. Nothing unusual about that in this age of ubiquitous cameras. (Though, the camera phone wasn’t yet a factor when she was born in 2002, the first year of their commercial deployment by Sharp.) But recently I have been thinking about working with her in a more structured fashion to create a series.

The thing is, for some reason it seems more difficult when the subject of your photographic project is your child. Whereas one of the main challenges with photographing strangers (or at least non-family members) is bridging the distance between you and your subject, the opposite is true for working seriously with family, especially children. I have always admired Sally Mann’s Immediate Family, but I’m sometimes disturbed by the distance she maintains between her and her children when photographing them. For example, I’m not sure if I could take a picture like Emmett’s Bloody Nose–in her shoes the parent would overpower the photographer in me.

That said, for me the problem of distance is not as much about taking the picture. I know where I want to draw the line between parent and photographer. It has more to do with editing. I have trouble stepping back and looking at the image from the point of view of someone who doesn’t know Patia and me. Actually it might be a bit more complicated than that. I suspect that it’s more that I don’t trust myself to get the necessary distance.

I suppose the problem of distance I’m describing is really just an example of the larger issue faced by any artist of finding the universal in the particular. I like a portrait that tells me something about the world through a well-chosen detail or two. There’s a compelling tension between the universal and the particular that makes a picture of a person into a great portrait. To make photographs with this tension, you need to get distance from your work. When your subject happens to be your child, attaining this distance is always difficult.

As I pursue my “Patia Series” (yes, it still needs a name) I’ll explore the issues that come up in an ongoing series of blog posts.

Time seems to stop for Patia as she pretends to be a mermaid riding on her seahorse, a yellow water noodle we bought during our trip to the local Canadian Tire. The crash of the waves provides the rhythm section to her singing (has she stopped singing for more than a few minutes at any time during this vacation?). While she plays the rest of the world melts away for her and, to a certain extent, it does for me too as I watch her from the beach.

But being pulled out of time makes me more aware of its passing. Patia has just turned six and she will be starting grade one in a matter of weeks. These are exciting times, but I’m also a bit sad because with increased literacy and numeracy she will lose her ability to be lost in the now. This perpetual now will be sliced into a series of thens; pasts and futures with their attendant regrets and fears.

I look past Patia and beyond Giant’s Tomb to the cumulous–or are they cumulonimbus?–clouds on the horizon. “Daddy, watch this!” she calls. It’s a new trick. Once again she has forgotten about her noodle which has already drifted away. It looks like a yellow smile against the dark surface of the water.

I wouldn’t be the first person to denigrate my cablevision/ internet/ cell phone provider, Rogers. When it comes to these services in Canada you’re pretty much stuck with two choices: a telco or a cable company. Sure you can get DSL from smaller companies. I used to get mine through a family-run company called Teksavvy. They are cheaper than Bell and their customer service–my original reason for switching to them–was second to none. But when I moved I wanted to get rid of my land line so DSL was out. And unfortunately these small network providers are forced to use our local telco’s infrastructure to provide this service and Bell Canada doesn’t hold back with its DSL wholesale clients.

There are alternatives, though. This post from Danny O’Brien points to some interesting work going on in my own backyard with respect to consumer-owned fibre. Not only would this allow me to do an end run around big cable and telco companies, it would also give me a faster connection upstream and down. The 7 Mbit/sec that I currently get downstream is fine, but the 512 Kbit/ sec I get upstream is pitiful. So where do I sign up? Well, aside from convincing my neighbours to invest thousands in a fibre drop, so far the most realistic option is to buy a condo with fibre already installed. When MM and I finally have enough money to buy a place we will likely go the condo route anyway.

My interests are manifold. A short survey of things that have recently vied for my attention will suffice to illustrate this point:

• Danny O’Brien on living on the edge of the network (after reading this I spent the rest of the morning ‘researching’ the cheapest and most sustainable way to set up my own home Web server). This is all compelling stuff for those afflicted with a bad case of DIY disease and people interested in alternative visions of Web 2.0.
• A review of Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland, A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith. I’m currently at the conceptual phase of a photography project that employs the central metaphor of a buried creek system as an organizing principle so I’ve been intrigued by how other photographers are creating what this review describes as a “metaphorical journey”.
• Colin Wilson’s coverage of missing the monoculture. This is fascinating stuff. Is there a “middle ground between monoculturalism and alienated uncommunicating tribes”?
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. Though I’m still a few hundred pages from the end, I can safely say this book is one of my top five all-time favorites. It’s about the golden age of comic books and swing jazz, the American Jewish experience in the 30s, 40s and 50s, the American immigrant experience during this period, being gay during this period, narrative, art, surrealism, the ability of art to change history, the uneasy relationship between big business and culture and many more things. My days currently revolve around finding my next opportunity to crack the covers of this book.
• Anything programming related like, say, Using PyObjC for Developing Cocoa Applications With Python, or Learning Lua or, or…

You see I have a history of devoting all of my energies to a particular interest only to have something else come along to take its place. At different times I have wanted to devote my life to writing, photography, film-making, web design, programming, marketing.

Tyranny of the specialist

Until recently I have seen this variety of interests as a failing, as an inability to commit to something. And why wouldn’t I? Specialization rules the day. The rapid industrialization that defined the early years of capitalism was made possible by the increasing specialization of the worker and this specialization has only increased in recent years. Indeed, in my day job I’m no mere bureaucrat; I’m a Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Analyst. My job is so specialized that there is a serious shortage of people to take over for the older generation of FOI professionals who are poised to retire in the next few years. But specialization is not limited to the economic sphere. Our culture is all about compartmentalization. Magazine racks are full of specialty magazines, our “airwaves” are dominated by specialty TV and radio stations. Music is more fragmented than ever and books are divided into a plethora of genres and sub-genres. And crossing the boundaries between genres requires superhuman strength. How many authors do you know who successfully work in two or more genres? How many musicians cross major musical genre boundaries? In this world someone who refuses to specialize is going to feel some anxiety.

I used to feel this anxiety–I’ll call it the anxiety of the generalist–most acutely at certain cocktail parties where I was either explicitly or implicitly expected to have a ready answer to the dreaded question, “So, what do you do?” Now I feel it online in the social media space. On Facebook I’m defined by what I read, what I listen too, and, more recently, what I buy. LinkedIn is worse: I gave up on it when I realized how difficult they made it to have more than one occupation. And then there are the online communities comprised of blogs, forums and other web sites devoted to an endless list of specialties from knitting to python programming. I occasionally see some computer geeks talking about photography and certain tech issues sometimes catch the attention of, say, landscape photographers. But by and large people live in online silos. Indeed, one of the great strengths of web is that it allows interests that were poorly served by old style media to flourish. In fact it even allows new sub-genres to surface. There are, for example, new sub-genres of pornography that could never even have been conceived even 15 years ago. Talk about “alienated uncommunicating tribes”.

These different online silos are dangerous to someone like me because it’s relatively easy to cross over from one silo to another. I categorize the subscriptions in my RSS aggregator to keep all my interests straight: photography, music, urban planning, design, programming and others. Some days I never manage to leave a category because I’m caught up in the raging debate of the day. But again, there’s the anxiety of the generalist at play. Growing up in a specialized world I’ve internalized the need to categorize. Why not remove the categories? Why not let disparate ideas bounce off of each other?

Collage

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon describes Rosa’s bedroom like this:

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa made. Her bedroom studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum and midden of her life. She did not “decorate it”; she infused it. (p. 247)

Rosa’s walls are covered in sketches, pictures, pages torn from magazines and words jotted on tiny scraps of paper late at night. For obvious reasons, collage has always fascinated me. But Chabon’s use of the word midden, a waste repository that archaeologists explore to better understand the lives of their subjects really caught my attention. In this case Rosa is her own archaeologist. Whether or not she will come to any definitive conclusions about herself is not the point. It is the habit of collecting and sifting through these disparate elements of her life that is important.

I have always enjoyed hybrids more than pure forms. I’m interested in where different spheres collide and/ or mesh. I love the period in Miles Davis’ music when he started experimenting with funk. I love Pynchon’s book, Gravity’s Rainbow for it’s mashing together of science fiction and historical war fiction among other genres. I love the combination of photography, sound and words in the slide shows from Magnum in Motion. In short I love the idea of throwing disparate things together to see what will happen.

In order to do this I need a place to capture my disparate interests. I need a midden. And since my family will object to my papering our walls with clippings of this and that, I have opted to create another in a long line of blogs (more on that later, maybe). It’s time to embrace variety rather than running away from it or feeling guilty about it. Welcome to my midden.