Category Archives: Nostalgia

Class reunions in the Facebook era

It’s a sunny August morning. I’m sitting in front of my computer in a t-shirt, shorts and Converse sneakers, listening to Rush.

You could easily assume the year is 1992. I did spend a lot of the summer of 1992 that way. But of course, no… it’s 2012. The music and attire may be (almost) the same, but the computer is not a Tandy 1000 EX with 640 KB of RAM. It’s a MacBook Air connected to a 23-inch LCD flat panel, with 4 GB (4,194,304 KB) of RAM.

So, the more things change, the more they stay the same. (Or, as Rush and the French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”) That saying will be put to the test tonight when I attend my 20-year high school class reunion.

The last time I will have seen many of these people is 10 years ago, at our last reunion. But a couple of significant things have happened in the past 10 years.

First, we are now 20 years out of high school. Which means that, for the first time, we are gathering having lived more of our lives after high school graduation than before it.

My biggest fear: I won’t recognize someone who recognizes me. There was a time in my life, even some years after graduation, when I could confidently name every single one of the 200-or-so people in my graduating class. But now I look at our class photo with only a vague recollection of a lot of now-nameless faces. Even among the people in the photo I do still remember and can name, will I recognize them with all of the changes 20 years have brought? Will I recognize them without teased perms and mullets?

Second, Facebook.

Like it or hate it (or both, as seems to be the case with most people), Facebook has had a profound impact on how we keep in touch with the people in our lives, especially those on the periphery of it. And few people occupy the periphery of our lives quite like those we spent 13 years with in public school and then haven’t seen since.

There are plenty of people with whom I was at best a passing acquaintance in high school, but who are now, by Facebook terms, my “friends.” Facebook keeps us in contact with a wide network of friends, family, coworkers and acquaintances past and present in ways that were never before imaginable. But for the most part these contacts are profoundly superficial. I might know that you went to the beach last weekend, or what you had for lunch, or that you have too much time on your hands to spend looking at cat photos, or that you and I have divergent political views. But when’s the last time we actually saw each other face to face? When did we go out for a beer or come over to each other’s houses for a barbecue or work together on an exciting new project? Facebook defines trivia, in the worst possible way.

Sadder though than the superficial connections Facebook creates with people I only ever had superficial connections with in the first place, are the superficial connections Facebook creates between me and the people with whom I was actually close friends in high school. Sure, many of them are now scattered across the country (or the world) and we couldn’t really hope for a more “real” connection than what Facebook offers. But a handful of my good friends from high school currently live in the same city as I do, and yet we only have those same trivial connections on Facebook. We could get together any time we want, not just when our entire class converges on our hometown to mark the frighteningly fast passage of time.

But we don’t.

Over the past few years I’ve been looking forward to this reunion with uncertainty. What kind of impact was Facebook going to have on it? Are reunions even necessary in the era of Facebook? Now that it’s (almost) here, I’m getting a better sense that, yes, reunions do still have an important place in our lives. Because while Facebook might keep us connected, it doesn’t really keep us in touch.

It does make planning the event a lot easier though.

My true path in life, finally diagrammed

It’s my birthday. What better time to reflect upon where I’ve been, and what I’ve become? Thankfully, Curiosity Counts (formerly a Maria Popova joint) has today linked to a flowchart, courtesy of Fast Company, that may explain it all.

A few of the details miss the mark: I taught myself BASIC, not Pascal (although I did try to make sense of Pascal while tinkering with my uncle’s IBM 5150 when I was 8), and I specialize in PHP, not Perl (distant cousins). But the lower left corner pretty much covers that, and also explains away the fact that I am married, for good measure.

Going back earlier in time, it even captures (and I’m being quite serious here) what might be the ultimate pivot point in my life: being massively obsessed with Atari but not getting into the next-generation game systems that followed it. It wasn’t for lack of interest; my parents simply refused to buy me an NES, and got me a Tandy computer (not a TRS-80, but close enough) instead. So thanks, Mom and Dad, for making a decision 25 years ago that set me on the path of lucrative uses of computers, instead of fantasy baseball and MMORPGs.

Here’s my version of the flowchart, with my path highlighted in yellow. Click the image below to see the full version, and be sure to check out the source, Taschen’s massive tome of infographics, while your at it.

Rod Hilton saves Star Wars

I linked to this on Twitter this morning, but it’s cool enough (and, dare I say, to the extent that Star Wars can be considered “important,” important enough) to link to here as well, just so it doesn’t vanish into the social networking ether.

Rod Hilton has devised an ingenious viewing order for the complete Star Wars saga. OK, actually not the complete saga, but what could come to be viewed as the definitive saga. He makes a compelling case for shuffling up the order a bit, and for removing The Phantom Menace entirely.

The ultimate sequence he devises is as follows:

  • Episode IV: A New Hope (or, more properly, Star Wars)
  • Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
  • Episode II: Attack of the Clones
  • Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
  • Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

I’ll leave it to Hilton to explain in detail how he arrived at this solution, along with its (mostly) pros and (few, minor) cons. The whole post is definitely worth reading and I look forward to watching the “complete” saga in this order soon.

Air (and Georges Méliès) fly us to the moon

Earlier this month, the French electronica/rock band Air released an album of soundtrack music to accompany the restored color (yes, color) release of the legendary 1902 Georges Méliès silent film, Le voyage dans la lune (A Voyage to the Moon).

Spoiler alert, I guess: This is the film that plays a central role in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant 2011 film Hugo. It is great to be able to see the film in its entirety, especially accompanied by Air’s brilliant soundtrack.

An excerpt is available on YouTube:

I purchased the album, which includes the full-length (15-minute) video, on iTunes, but it’s also available as a CD/DVD set from Amazon. I’m considering buying the CD/DVD set anyway, as the music is that good and the download version of the video contains some annoying compression artifacts (horizontal stripes that appear whenever something fast-moving appears, which I have to assume were a result of the process of compressing the video for download, and are not inherent to the version on the DVD).

I watched the full video last night, and found myself more profoundly moved than I would have expected from the film’s light and fantastical story. I’m not sure if it was because the hand-coloring brought the film to life in a way that black-and-white couldn’t, but there were two thoughts I just couldn’t shake as I watched it, which I don’t normally think about when I’m watching very old film footage:

1. Everyone involved with this film is dead.

This is not a profound revelation. But again, I think the color brings the film to life in a unique way. There’s nothing realistic about the color, so it’s not seeing people in color that makes it more vivid. I think it’s the simple fact that it’s in color, and the way it was colorized. That the creators of the film put in the incredible effort of hand-coloring each frame of the film. That they imbued it with their personality. And, beyond all of this, that it conveys a sense of frivolity and wonder that I don’t often associate with the early 1900s.

Grainy, black-and-white film of the era feels dark and dismal. Since that’s how we’re accustomed to seeing it, that time period, for me, exudes grit and grime, the ugliness of early, soot-choked industrial cities. This color, literally, casts these times in a new light, and brings out a joy and humor I would not have seen or felt otherwise.

2. We have learned so much about the universe in the last century.

It is obvious, I think, that Méliès was not attempting to create a realistic depiction of a journey to the moon, or of what people would find there. If Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of him in Hugo is accurate, his goal in filmmaking was to explore realms of fantasy, to bring dreams to life. And that’s just it: in 1902, the idea of traveling to the moon was pure fantasy. But just 67 years later, people actually walked on the moon for the first time. (And, 70 years later, possibly for the last.) The amount of scientific knowledge humanity gained during those intervening years is hard to comprehend, and as someone who was born after those final moon landings of 1972, it’s something that for me has always been and forever will be in the past. But for those who worked with Méliès on Le voyage dans la lune, it was still the distant future, one most if not all of them never even lived to see.

It is an amazing time to be alive. Not only to immerse ourselves in the technologies of now, but because we have unprecedented access to what it looked and felt like to be alive over 100 years ago, via the motion pictures of pioneers like Méliès. The restoration of the color version of Le voyage dans la lune is amazing, and it’s made even more wondrous by its pairing with some of the best music our era has to offer.

What do Star Wars, David Holsinger’s Easter Symphony, and an episode of The Office have in common?

A confession. As a kid, I didn’t like Star Wars. You’d think I was in the ideal target market for it. I was 9 when Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, and I saw both Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi in the theater. But for some reason it just didn’t appeal to me. I wasn’t into guns and swords, even if they were made out of lasers, and I found the plots impossible to follow.

As an adult I did eventually develop an appreciation for the original trilogy, however, and in particular I think The Empire Strikes Back is a genuinely great film. But overall, I still felt like they didn’t totally live up to the hype (especially Jedi with those godawful Ewoks).

And then the prequels happened. Lifelong fans of the series were as overjoyed before the prequels were released as they were infuriated after. Even as a kid who didn’t care at all about Star Wars, I remember getting swept up in eager musings on the playground as kids speculated about what the story before the story was all about. And then Lucas went and made the damn things.

The general consensus among Star Wars lovers was that the prequels sucked, and were nowhere near as good as the originals. But here’s the thing: as someone who didn’t religiously memorize every minute aspect of the original trilogy and embed it into the very fiber of my being from childhood, I didn’t really think the prequels were that much worse than the originals. They still had inscrutible plots, hackneyed dialogue, and lots of lasers and weird sound effects. I won’t quibble at all with the hardcore fans over George Lucas and his abominable, incessant tampering with the originals. But I will stand by my argument that the prequels are not that much worse than the originals because, really the originals weren’t that great to begin with.

Band geeks are like regular geeks

Anyone who was a band geek in the ’80s or ’90s (or, presumably, still today) will recognize the name David Holsinger. He’s one of the most famous and prolific living composers of music for band/symphonic winds/wind orchestra/whatever you want to call it. But outside of this arcane world he is largely unknown, as he rarely (if ever) writes for string orchestra, which is apparently where all of the “serious” composers dwell. Whatever the case, his technically demanding compositions are a staple among the more skilled high school and college wind ensembles, and he is revered by band geeks in much the way George Lucas is revered by regular geeks.

For years, Holsinger’s most highly regarded piece of music was called “The Death Tree,” which he composed in 1986 and originally envisioned as the second movement in his three-part Easter Symphony. The only problem was, much like Lucas and the legendary Star Wars prequels, he never wrote it. As with Star Wars, the untold story took on mythical status, and fans of his work built up impossible expectations for its excellence, should it ever come to exist.

My college band director was one such enthusiast, and while I was a student he commissioned Holsinger to finish The Easter Symphony. I was a junior, first chair clarinet at the time, and it was unbelievably exciting to be a part of something so awesome. David Holsinger traveled to work with us directly on the piece frequently during the year leading up to its premiere. I even got to pick him up at the airport on one of his visits, took him to Wendy’s (his choice) for lunch, and picked his brain on the hour-long drive to our small-town campus. He conducted the first public performance himself. In fact, if you can get your hands on a CD of that premiere, you can even hear my own indelible mark on the recording, as I utterly destroyed the final note of “The Death Tree” on an impossible-to-tune E-flat clarinet. (If you’re not familiar, the E-flat clarinet is to the regular B-flat clarinet as the piccolo is to the flute. And just as impossible to play in tune.)

I had never played (nor even heard) “The Death Tree” prior to our first rehearsals for The Easter Symphony. I was well familiar with Holsinger’s work, of course, but this particular piece had been too challenging for my high school band. So I approached “The Death Tree” with virgin ears, rather than with the cherished nostalgia some others had for it, much like how I came to like Star Wars as an adult. I liked it, but I hadn’t embraced the legend.

When the first partial scores for the first and third movements of The Easter Symphony began arriving in our rehearsal room in Minnesota, laser printed and mailed directly from the composer in Texas, there were various grumbles of disappointment. I enjoyed it all equally, but others complained that the new movements were nowhere near as good as “The Death Tree.” The legend had been built up out of all proportion, and it was simply impossible for David Holsinger (or anyone) to deliver a piece of music as mind-blowing as people were demanding. It’s not that The Easter Symphony wasn’t good. People’s expectations were unreasonable.

Just a cookie

On a recent episode of NBC’s comedy The Office, Robert California (James Spader), the intimidating new CEO of Dunder Mifflin’s parent company, is sitting in the conference room with the Dunder Mifflin employees, leading a brainstorming session to figure out ways to increase the company’s profitability. After a number of lackluster ideas from the usual suspects — Ryan (B.J. Novak) especially, in a classic moment of self-absorbed douchebaggery — the affable oaf Kevin (Brian Baumgartner) raises a complaint about the snack vending machine in the breakroom. The comment could be taken at face value, or it could, as Robert California takes it, be a metaphor for a profound insight into improving Dunder Mifflin’s core business.

Robert California ends up spending the entire day with Kevin, listening to and attempting to decipher Kevin’s cryptic food analogies, until, ultimately, he realizes that Kevin was really just talking about cookies the whole time. No deeper insight, no profound meaning. The Kevin he thought he was spending the day with never really existed.

Where was the failure here? In Kevin, for not living up to unreasonable expectations? Or in Robert California, for having unreasonable expectations in the first place?

I’m not saying that George Lucas and David Holsinger are like Kevin. But I am saying that maybe we’re all a bit too much like Robert California.

Answer: They’re all just cookies.