Historical Record

To introduce the theme of encounters with unfamiliar technology, my earlier post “Hi, Tech!” began with a famous scene from “Nanook of the North” in which the titular Nanook bites down on a phonograph record. I knew that the most appropriate illustration for the post would be a photo of that moment, so I downloaded a copy of the film — it’s in the public domain, so online copies are plentiful — and began to search, one by one, for the frame that would work best as a still image.

Frustratingly, none of the actual frames from the film matched the iconic picture that I had in my mind. There was one frame where the record was positioned just right, but Nanook’s body was twisted in an awkward position that made it difficult to make out what he was doing. There was another where Nanook’s body was positioned perfectly, but the record was reflecting light directly into the camera and therefore looked like a featureless, glowing disc. Furthermore, every frame that I looked at had compositional problems: Nanook’s head was partially cut off, or his fur-lined hood was indistinguishable from his hair, or the white pelts that covered his upper legs blended with the white background, making him appear legless. To my dismay, the perfect moment that existed in my memory didn’t exist in the film.

The image that I ended up posting is a composite of elements from four different frames. It took me hours to put together, which felt ironic because the actual filming of “Nanook of the North” was done on the fly, unrehearsed, as the director Robert Flaherty stood in the cold and wind and pointed his camera. None of the fleeting moments that he captured was ever meant to be examined as closely as I examined those individual frames, cutting them apart pixel by pixel.

As I worked, I couldn’t help but reflect on the miraculous process that allowed these nearly 100-year-old images to land on my computer screen. Out there in the Arctic tundra, sunlight reflected by Nanook and his companions passed through the lens of Flaherty’s hand-cranked camera and chemically altered the light-sensitive coating on a strip of film, creating a negative. Each night, Flaherty developed and printed the negative onsite in a primitive darkroom. (He always made sure to show the Inuit participants what he had shot the day before, thus encouraging their continued collaboration.) Eventually, the negative was carried back to the United States, edited, and brought to a laboratory, where it was used to create prints that went out to cinemas for public exhibition.

Over the years, people struck duplicate negatives from existing prints and made new prints (which, unfortunately, were of successively lesser quality with each new generation). At some point in our own century, somebody digitized one of those prints, converting the patterns of light and dark into a series of ones and zeroes, and uploaded that information to a worldwide network of computers. From there, it was downloaded to the hard drive of an iMac in a house in Oakland. And now those ones and zeroes were displayed by my computer as patterns of light and dark on its screen, essentially duplicating the patterns of reflected sunlight that long ago had landed on the film in Flaherty’s camera.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. For millions of years, human life was evanescent — a series of infinitely small moments that happened and, just as quickly, vanished. When a person died, their disappearance was complete. Yet, uncannily, Nanook was here on my monitor, grinning at the camera as he watches a record spin on a phonograph and then puts it in his mouth. The pixels I was dragging around in Photoshop were ghosts of things that no longer existed.

I know what became of Nanook (whose real name, deemed by Flaherty to be unpronounceable by the moviegoing public, was Allakariallak). He died, most likely of tuberculosis, two years after the film was released. But since much of my retouching work involved the phonograph record, I found myself wondering about it. It’s not just an abstraction, a symbol of a record. It’s an actual, particular, physical object — something that existed, that had a past and a future.

Someone — we don’t know who, since the label is illegible — had once gone into a studio and sung into a large horn that conducted the sound waves to a needle, which carved a spiral groove into a waxlike coating on a metal disc. A metal “master record” made from that original was pressed into a shellac mixture and trimmed, creating a copy that someone — perhaps Flaherty himself — found and bought in a record store. That record, taken to the Arctic, appeared briefly in front of a camera, leading to its improbable immortality. And then what? It’s unlikely that the record still exists, a century later. It was no doubt listened to many times off-camera, providing entertainment to any number of people. Eventually its groove wore out, or it shattered, or landed in storage in somebody’s basement and was eventually disposed of. Its atoms, no doubt, have long been scattered through the universe. And yet, there it is, reflecting light, holding an unknown human voice, spinning on my computer screen.

When I drive on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge, I look at the countless rivets holding it together, and realize that each of those rivets was put there by a person with a rivet gun. For each, I wonder, who was the person in the early 1930s who hammered in that particular rivet? What did he have for breakfast that day? Did he have a family to go home to? Did he like his work, or would he rather have been an engineer, or a sailor? How long did he live, and how did he die? How can I express my gratitude to him for helping to build the structure that is supporting me right how, keeping me from falling into the bay? Every manufactured object we see embodies a human life (or many lives). The “Nanook of the North” phonograph record, which began with a voice in a studio and found its way into the mouth of an Inuit hunter, exists now only as an illusion, a collection of illuminated dots, but it still carries the spirits of the people who created it and interacted with it. How much more so for the things around us that we can still reach out and touch!

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Hi, Tech!

There’s a famous scene in Robert Flaherty’s silent documentary “Nanook of the North” in which Nanook, an Inuit hunter whose daily life the film depicts, visits a distant trading post. There, he watches in wonderment as a trader plays a record on a phonograph and explains (as the intertitle tells us) “how the white man ‘cans’ his voice.” The trader lifts the record off the turntable and hands it to Nanook, who examines it closely and then bites into it, perhaps to find out how the voice is stored inside.

The scene, as we now know, was staged. By 1922, the year the film was made, the Inuit were well acquainted with technology, and actually hunted with rifles rather than the old-fashioned harpoons they’re shown to use in the film. The real-life Nanook knew perfectly well what a phonograph record was. Presumably, he and Flaherty thought that American audiences would find the record-biting scene amusing. In spirit, it’s really no different from the scene in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” in which the crew of the Enterprise time-travels back to 1986, and chief engineer Scotty, encountering an early Macintosh computer, speaks into the mouse to give the computer instructions.

We instinctively find it funny when someone is mystified by technology that we take for granted. Debra and I laugh when our 20-something goddaughters don’t know where to put the stamp on an envelope, or have trouble reading an analog clock. The thing is, for our goddaughters, it’s not funny at all. These are actual things that they don’t know, and they’re encountering situations in which they’re expected to know them. Our laughter really isn’t helpful. I know this because I’ve often been in the same situation that these young women are in.

There was the time when an outdoor event was going on at Chabot College, where I was a faculty member. A colleague of mine who had been charged with photographing the event needed to step away for a few minutes, so she handed me her camera. “Would you mind taking pictures for a while?” she said.

The camera she handed me was a fancy SLR, with a long lens and numerous buttons and knobs. “I don’t know how to work this,” I told her.

“What do you mean?” She thought I was putting her on. “You teach Photoshop, don’t you?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I know how to take photos,” I said. I’m actually quite camera-phobic. If I had to take pictures, I always made do with an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera, and polished the photos in Photoshop. If I needed really high-quality photos for a client job, I hired a photographer.

“Never mind,” she said, shaking her head, and took the camera back. I don’t think she ever believed that I didn’t know how to use it; she thought I was just being an asshole.

There was also the time when, as an underemployed freelancer, I swallowed my pride and called a temp agency to see whether they could get me some work. The man I spoke to asked me the standard questions (what my availability was, how fast I could type, etc.), and then asked whether I had any special skills that might be of use in an office.

“I can do page layout,” I said.

“Great,” he said. “What do you use? Quark? Pagemaker?”

“WordPerfect,” I said.

WordPerfect?” he said. “That’s a word processor. I thought you said you did page layout.”

“I do,” I said. “I do page layout in WordPerfect.”

I was an early adopter of WordPerfect, became one of their beta testers, and eventually handled WordPerfect support on CompuServe. I was a WordPerfect expert — I could make it do anything, including page layout. I had no reason to spend hundreds of dollars on professional page-layout software when, as a beta tester, I got WordPerfect for free.

“If my pages look the same, and my clients can’t tell the difference by looking at them,” I asked the man, “why does it matter what software I use?”

“It matters,” he said, “because nobody is going to hire you to do page layout in WordPerfect!”

Like Nanook and Scotty, I’m not stupid. Given the opportunity (and the money to buy the expensive hardware or software), I could figure out how to use a camera or a page-layout program. It’s just that the need had never arisen before.

That’s why I tend to be sympathetic when people don’t know things that I expect them to know. Like the time when, on the first day of class, I was teaching my PC-using students to use the Macs that were in our classroom. I showed them how to use the buttonless mouse, where the Dock is, and what the Apple and application menus are for. I showed them the proper way to eject a drive and how to translate PC helper keys (control, alt) to Mac helper keys (command, option). About half an hour in, one shy student raised her hand.

“Hi!” I said, “You have a question?”

“Yes,” she said. “How do you turn it on?”

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Professionalism

Sometime in 1985, I got a call from a friend. “I just got one of those new Macintosh computers,” he said.

“I played with one for a couple of hours,” I said. “They’re fun.”

“Well, I was thinking,” he said. “You know how they come with those different typefaces? I thought I might offer typesetting services to people, and make some extra money that way. You have a background in publishing — do you think that would work?”

I chuckled, trying not to sound patronizing. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but nobody’s going to accept Macintosh output as camera-ready repro. Those bitmapped typefaces are clunky and amateurish, and the resolution is way too low. Besides, there’s a lot more to typesetting than just typing words on a line. There are subtleties of leading, tracking, and kerning that no computer can handle by itself. You need years of experience to be a good typesetter.”

“Oh, well,” he said unhappily. “The type looks fine to me, but I guess you know what you’re talking about.”

In my defense, I should note that in 1985, the Macintosh was still basically a toy. The introduction of laser printers and PostScript fonts was still a year away. Typefaces on the Mac were designed to be printed out on the Imagewriter, a dot-matrix printer. They looked better than previous dot-matrix output, but definitely could never be mistaken for the clean, elegant type that we were accustomed to seeing in books and magazines.

I was astonished, therefore, to begin seeing printed publications using Mac-generated type arriving in the mail, no more than a month or two after I told my friend what a silly idea that was. I had clearly been wrong in thinking that the years of experience and the critical eye that professional compositors brought to their craft was something that people valued.

Cut to ten years later, when my wife and I had a successful business producing educational and training videos for business and nonprofits. I’d sent a proposal and a demo reel to a prospective client who’d seemed pretty interested in hiring us. The client responded by sending us a sample video he’d received from another producer. “I still like your work,” he said, “but this guy is offering to do the job for less than half of what you’re charging. How is that possible?”

“Your guy isn’t using professional equipment,” I said after viewing the video. “He shot this with a consumer camcorder with a built-in camera mic. The image isn’t as sharp and clear as it ought to be, and the audio isn’t clean. He shot it in natural room light instead of using studio-quality lighting. He seems to have done it himself instead of using a crew. If you’re satisfied with that level of quality, then go with him. I certainly can’t match his price.”

Once again, I assumed that the marks of professionalism were important, and once again, I was wrong. The client accepted the other producer’s bid. And at that point, I began to wonder whether my priorities were wrong. The fuzzy, Mac-generated type had communicated the same information that traditionally set type would have. And the video shot with the consumer camcorder was every bit as educational as what I was shooting with my professional crew and equipment.

I started finding ways to integrate desktop technology into my production workflow, and the lapse in professional polish was apparently not noticed by my clients. Today, of course, the tremendously increased power of desktop computers and software, along with parallel advances in cameras and lighting, make the quality of digital video so remarkably high that it’s hard to remember a time when anyone had to be concerned about a trade-off. But I’ve continued to wonder what other indicators of professionalism are ready to fall by the wayside. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, TV, radio, and podcasts have generally been homemade, often with consumer-grade equipment, and audiences don’t seem to mind. Professionals of every stripe are allowing themselves to be seen onscreen in casual dress, with gray roots and grown-out hair, and the quality of their work clearly hasn’t suffered. Maybe it’s again time to put our emphasis on the inherent value of what people do, and to forget the attention to appearances.

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