Real messaging from the Zone

Surreal New World

With all due respect to Rod Serling, host of that eery 1950s-ish TV series the Twilight Zone, consider the following imagined intro for a 2020 episode, delivered of course in Mr. Serling's unmistakable gravelly voice ...

'You are about to enter another dimension. It is the middleground of light and shadow, between science and superstition. You will encounter an enemy lurking there, a pathogen beyond that known to man, living between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. It is an enemy as daunting as travel to the boundary of space and as timeless as infinity. Conquering it will stretch the tensile strength of imagination and resources. You've just crossed into ... the Corona Zone.'

The Twilight Zone ran on CBS for five years keeping viewers gathered around B&W rabbit-eared TV sets perched on the edges of their seats.  Each story involved people crossing into the Zone to face unusual or extraordinary circumstances.  The storylines had a bad dream-like feel.  Might that define the surreal storyline of the world we suddenly plunged into?  Each episode ended with a surprise twist, usually with a morality message.  Could there be a take-away message for us now?

First, let's step back to examine Surrealism.  It is not a new concept, and its scope encompasses far more than Salvador Dali's wilted clocks in The Persistence of Memory.  Surrealism was a twentieth century movement expressed popularly through painting and literature, but photography too played an important role.  Artists used techniques like double exposure, camera rotation, lens distortions, montage, and solarization to create bizarre, compelling images.  Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of street photography and the decisive moment image, embraced Surrealism during one phase of his illustrious career, training his eyes to capture micro-seconds of the surreal he observed all around him.  Regardless of medium, all iconic artists of the movement employed a genius for turning something whether ordinary, ugly, or repulsive into compelling creations. 

© Henri Cartier-Bresson

What's for Dinner? © David Greenfield

Watchful Eyes in the Mens Room © David Greenfield

Now back to the question of whether today's surrealistic Corona-time could yield a compelling message.

There are certainly mixed messages out there. Here's but one example - pre-Corona I shunned environment choking-single use-plastic bags always making sure to do the responsible, right thing by carrying reusable bags to every grocery shopping excursion.  In Corona-time plastic has re-emerged as the safest go-to bagging option.  Markets provide a seemingly endless supply while my cache of reusables rests in an extreme socially distant corner waiting to be sequestered with the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain Waste Repository.  I'm inundated with leftover plastic that groceries no longer accept for recycling!

Plastic - soon headed to a landfill near you?

There are other mixed bag messages like the indisputable need for screens to maintain social connections and avoid isolation vs. the growing prospect of normalized societal isolation living one's life by screen alone.  But there is one Corona-time message that is unambiguous.  It's a take-away which should continue to percolate well after the curve has flattened and headed back to baseline - it's who our true heroes are!

Forget the adulation heaped on professional athletes for the entertainment they provide while receiving megabuck salaries.  Where would we be today without a frontline army of doctors, nurses, EMTs, ambulance drivers, grocery store workers, farmers & their hired hands, and bus & subway drivers?  These troops have been in the trenches 24/7 from Day One at great risk to themselves and their families.  And as parents struggle to create meaningful teaching experiences for their sheltered-at-home kids, how about a fresh appreciation for teachers.  By the way, this gallant workforce, The Essentials, is not comprised of One Percenters. They're largely people of color and members of our worker-bee immigrant community. They are the true heroes.  It is they who make America great!

And that is real messaging from the Corona-Zone to take to heart. 

World Turned Upside Down

 images © David Greenfield

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Hair

Give me 'down to there' hair,

shoulder length or longer.

Straight, curly, fuzzy,

snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty,

oily, greasy, fleecy,

shining, gleaming, streaming,

flaxen, waxen

I'm just a hairy guy

Is hairy-ness a new fad?
The answer is .... NO, all the salons and barber shops are closed, and everyone knows why that is!

To stem the corona virus spread our governmental leaders ordered a shutdown of non-essential businesses. So, add frequenting your favorite establishments, and seeing your favorite folks within them, to the list of taken for granted things we enjoyed in pre-corona time. All of that is now off the table. Keeping one's hair perfectly and regularly trimmed, coiffed, blow-dried, and colored (even if only your hairdresser knows), is but one more Covid-19 affected necessity you once knew. Maintaining the perfect 'do' may be deemed essential for you, but in the eyes of the government, an essential business for your persona remains non-essential for the public's health and welfare. So what does the future holds as weeks stretching into months of shutdown continue and the gray starts to show and controlling your locks goes beyond  a 'comb-over' remedy?

I don't know how this will play out, but I have a prediction. It's based on a reliable model which appeared in the venerable Farmers' Almanac concerning weather forecasting. In that august publication, which coincidentally also hits the newsstands each August, the year's long-range weather outlook was as follows - several months of gradually cooling temperatures followed by several months of gradually warming temps, then the gradual return of cooler weather. Regardless of which TV weatherperson you swear by, and his or her track record in forecasting, you can definitely bet your firstborn on the perspicacity of that Farmers' Almanac forecast. So how does this perspective relate to hair?

T

It's very simple. As the time for everyone's customary visit to their go-to stylist goes by the wayside, each 'do' will as expected become increasingly fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, and matty. I then predict spotting our neighbors, even from mandated social distancing, as having more and more bad hair days. If image is everything, mounting self-consciousness and maintaining good grooming frustration will lead to more desperate instances of amateurish home trims. These valiant attempts might be either self-inflicted or abetted by significant others. Manufacturers and retailers could view this as good economic news as demand for hats of all kinds skyrockets to join the ranks of toilet paper in popularity.

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair

Flow it, show it

long as God can grow it.

On a positive note, if you enjoy sporting facial hair, expert self-grooming is already a perfected skill ...

... at least for some folks.

In all seriousness, toss aside the lighthearted hirsute angst for a moment and let's circle back to the beginning of this post, i.e., all the salons and barber shops are closed! The closures put those favorite folks who have tended to our needs out of work, impacting not only their livelihoods, but their families' welfare and their futures. Granted, some will roll with the punches and creatively find ways to navigate the storm until inevitably it too will pass. But for many, the small operation shops they own will remain shuttered. Both owners and employees will suffer; their lives as they knew them will not return. 

How can we help - buying gift cards now to provide an infusion of cash to offset revenue loss, or paying for services now as if we had them as scheduled? Please share your thoughts in the Comment section at the bottom of the post to create a forum of ideas.

Thank you, stay safe, and continue to be well.

all images © David Greenfield

Visit my web site anytime to view other Galleries, Photo-essays, and read previous blog-posts, then kindly share on social media. Thank you.

WOTY

According to Wikipedia, the Word of the Year, sometimes abbreviated as WOTY or WotY, refers to any of various assessments as to the most important word or expression in the public sphere during a specific year.

So, what might the 2020 Word of the Year be?

During this Corona Time into which we've been sheltered-in-place, I pondered the possibilities, but first looked to last year's winner for insight.

In 2019, Merriam Webster named They as its Word of the Year. The dictionary defined the singular They as a pronoun referring to a person whose gender identity is non-binary.  The gender neutral pronoun They would be used in place of He or She.

So what would be appropriate for 2020, the year of pandemic - the global crisis that dominates the news cycle and sucks up all the oxygen on the planet?

Two rather non-imaginative choices quickly came to mind - Covid-19 and of course, Corona. I ruled out Corona right away since it conjured up a 'meh-tasting' light beer - light in carbs, and alcohol as well. 2020 has become No Ordinary Time (1). It requires a designated moniker that is surely not 'meh'. How about Quarantine or Respirator/Ventilator, or Swab, or as Nancy Pelosi has advised, Test, Test, Test? Perhaps Social Distancing should be the winning expression. What about something with scientific mystique, like the alpha-numeric N-95?  All these terms are tossed out daily and have become part of the vernacular.

Nope, these options are predictable and pedestrian.  I continued searching, looking for another angle.

Social Distancing

Social Distancing - big time

                             

Adjectives, that's it! I switched to consideration of this class of modifiers.  Wouldn't Unprecedented or Draconian make sense? No. So far none of the words or expressions merited the Word of the Year's winner podium or even stimulated welcome production of viral antibodies.  Then it hit me - ZOOM! Of course, it had to be ZOOM!

With social distancing colliding with the human need for personal connection, ZOOM's online platform is the new paradigm for connectivity.  ZOOM is all the buzz.  In just one day last week, the app was downloaded 275,000 times! (2) For the foreseeable future ZOOM-ing may be the new meeting up norm.

So how does one ZOOM? For anyone who has not already ZOOM-ed into a previously cancelled pre-Corona face-to-face meeting, here's one simple scenario.

Starting Scribble

Aside from all the joyful pop-up opportunities my wife and I have each week to be with our two local grandkids, Thursdays have been the traditional day we pick them up from school and spend the entire afternoon together. Covid-19 abruptly put the kibosh on that, but ZOOM still lets us engage in real time.  First we played Pictionary and then tried another enjoyable, creative game, Scribble. I start with a quick doodle-type stroke of the pen (see above), then its up to them to add their own scribble.  Here's an example of their piggybacking on my scribble and my finishing touch piggy back on their creation: 

Finished Scribble Creation

The joint scribbling exercise put smiles on our faces and we continue to explore more ZOOM ways to reach out and touch one another. But ZOOM-ing has longer legs.  ZOOM-ed connectivity also facilitates the critical ongoing work of repairing our broken world.  Whether your mission is political activism, providing for those who are hungry, welcoming the stranger, comforting the lonely, healing the environment, or focusing on any other worthy need, Corona time should not handcuff you and halt doing the right thing. I will continue longing for pre-Corona warm, meaningful, and necessary human interaction, but for now, "it is what it is" and ZOOM is my WOTY.  

PS: That said, if on occasion you still struggle, needing a morale boost or simply to chill from the burdens thrust upon you, remember what Jimmy Buffet and Alan Jackson crooned from Margaritaville, "it's always 5 o'clock somewhere". Of course, a few cold meh Corona Premiers may not suffice, but no worries, try this:  

   

                                             

 ****************************************************************

(1) Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of FDR during the war years   

(2) Wall Street Journal - March 21, 2020

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Is One Day Still Acceptable?

“Why post this blog now?”

The question was addressed to me a few years ago upon distribution of the blog post Unintended Journey on May 1, 2016 (1). It came as a complete surprise, and to my dismay. That posting delved into an emotionally searing experience I had while visiting Germany, a country I always believed I would never set foot in. The timing for release of the post was a day or two before Holocaust Remembrance Day, and was intentional. I considered the post’s message quite à propos for the day’s sacred imperative of remembrance. This year’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust is still months away, so why revisit this prior episode now?

For starters, let’s take a step back to get a 20/20 perspective of recent events, events now reverberating with history. On streets, in synagogues, homes, or stores, whether at night or in daylight, in small towns or cities, in the East or in the West, Jews are being viciously and often fatally assaulted. This pattern was unimaginable a decade ago. It’s more than sobering, it’s shocking. 

Is it prelude to the experience of other Jewish communities throughout diaspora history, those in Spain, Egypt, Poland, and Iraq? Is setting aside but a single day annually for remembrance still acceptable?

Not that long ago, German Jews were at the apex of their existence. As in the US today, they achieved admirable successes in science, the arts, academics, jurisprudence, and in government. Tragically, within a few short years the community’s upward bending golden arc was shattered. Nazis masterfully blamed Jews for Germany’s ills and as their troops goose-stepped across Europe, they orchestrated destruction of Jews throughout the continent. Jewish society plummeted  from its apex. 

Wehrmacht on the move

When the smoke cleared and details of the decimation entered public awareness, Never Forget became the rallying cry of Holocaust Remembrance and was seared into our consciousness.

Shoes collected from victims as they prepared for 'disinfection showers’ 

upon arriving at Auschwitz

Yet in 2018, seventy plus years later the Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found many adults already lacked basic knowledge of what happened. In fact, 41% of Americans and 66% of millennials did not know what Auschwitz is. 

A subsequent 2019 American Jewish Committee study found that a third of American Jews were hiding their Jewish identity out of concern over their safety. What is happening? Is setting aside but a single day annually for remembrance still acceptable?

Gaping archway of Birkenau, Auschwitz II

One and a half million people passed through the entrance, they left as ash through the chimneys

‘History is a way of knowing the past. Done right, it reveals the present and illuminates the future’ (2).

If one subscribes to this postulate, it’s not a stretch to conclude we are not doing it right. Pretending this time in history will be different is not a strategy. The resurgence of anti-Semitism could be a result, in part, of the vanishing legacy of the Holocaust. The recent spate of violent anti-Semitic acts demand a paradigm shift in action. 

Es Brent (It is burning) was the rallying song of partisans who brought the fight to the Nazis. The chilling lyrics describe a town on fire and admonishes brothers in arms to not merely stand and look, but to take up the tools to put out the fire. So, what tools do we have for deployment now?

Here’s what our community leaders have advocated:

1. Stepping up education of youth by parents and teachers for understanding that hateful acts will not be tolerated
2. Holding social media outlets accountable for what they publish
3. Lobbying elected officials and law enforcement agencies to improve safety and security at our institutions, and to vigorously prosecute crimes followed by handing out tougher sentencing 
4. Standing together with people of all backgrounds so it is understood an attack on one is an attack on all. Hatred that may start with the Jews never ends with the Jews.

‘Make no mistake: Anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem; anti-Semitism is an American problem and a global, human problem. Anti-Semitism is, at its core, an expression of a society’s need to have an ‘other’ to define its own identity and to blame for its troubles, whatever they may be, in any given period'. (3)

Everyone has a role to play if hate is to be beaten back to under the rocks from which it has slithered out. It remains to be seen which action each of us will take. 

Action will illuminate the future.

An umbrella day outside the Museum of Jewish Heritage in NYC.

The Auschwitz Exhibit is currently on display.

1. Unintended Journey 
2. M. Vogel - President, Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The institution teaches about and honors the diverse waves of immigrants who arrived at our shores and went on to help build America. 
3. Marc Baker (President CJP), Jeremy Burton (Executive Director JCRC), and Robert Trestan (Regional Director ADL). Op-Ed, Boston Globe - January 3, 2020

If this blog-post was meaningful for you, kindly send a link to your circle of family, friends, and colleagues and share on social media. You can also visit my web site anytime to view other Galleries, Photo-essays, and read previous blog-posts. Thank you.

                                                                         all images © David Greenfield

Slow dancing - Part II

La Tour Eiffel

Wind the film, dial in the exposure, focus, then click

That’s how you ‘slow dance with a film camera,’ …. and smell roses. It’s the point where I left off in my previous blog post.

“So what do you do in Paris at night?”

For some world travelers the question might conjure up all the raucous offerings of night time in Gay Paris - a front row seat at les Folies-Bergere, or catching a few kicks from the Can-Can madamoiselles at le Moulin Rouge, or some other hotspot for peut-être (perhaps) a je ne sais quois salacious pursuit. 

This query, however, was directed to Alfred Eisenstaedt, the beloved German-American photographer whose memorable images while on assignment graced the cover of Life almost one hundred times during the magazine’s heyday. Incredible! Eisie, as he was affectionately known, was a proponent of the recently introduced compact, versatile 

35 mm Leica camera. He mastered use of available light, even at night, shunning flash units attached to the bulky press cameras relied on by many of his contemporary photojournalist colleagues. 

Eisenstaedt’s answer to the query, So what do you do in Paris at night?, although a natural for him, wouldn’t satisfy anyone who was interested where in Gay Paris he hung his hat, or clothes, when the lights went down. 

Eisie responded with, f-2 at a thirtieth. 

St. Louis Children's Museum

If you take photos with a phone or select auto on your digital camera and are not conversant with manual camera settings, f-2 refers to the lens aperture, or opening diameter. This component, functioning like the iris of your eye, regulates light entering the camera. Eisenstaedt’s thirtieth refers to the camera’s blink, i.e., speed of the shutter’s opening and closing. The aperture/shutter speed combination determines exposure, the quantity of light hitting the camera’s digital sensor or film. Since there is no auto setting on the Leicas Eisenstaedt used nor my 1950 model Leica, I was taught to evaluate the day’s light, i.e., is it an f-4 at a one-hundredth or an f-11 at a five-hundredth type of day? Aperture and shutter speed dials were then rotated to the determined selections, i.e., the camera was programed if you speak digital-ese, prior to composing, focusing and finally clicking. 

Old Route 10, Grantham NH

Unlike image capture using today’s digital marvels, you had either 24 or 36 shots on the camera’s roll of film, not the virtually limitless number of shots available to the digital photographer. Clearly, instant gratification was not part of the equation. There were also developing and printing steps to complete before the image was seen. Even with the advent of the Polaroid and instant photography there was a minute or so delay before a small square print was slowly extruded from the camera’s innards. Imagine, instant then meant having to wait a whole minute! Clearly the film camera experience with its limits on the number of clicks, real processing costs, and delayed gratification in viewing, requires patience leading to a more deliberative process than the seemingly limitless, immediate, no cost point & shoot options commonplace today.  

Central Park, NY

                                  

As I continue the adventure of meandering on a film-camera déjàs vue all over again path, I find I am more selective with subject matter and spend more time composing before clicking. But when all goes according to plan, I am particularly buoyed with the results. 

Not everyone can dust off a favorite or nostalgic old film camera like I did and try shooting a roll, but everyone who points & shoots with a camera of any kind, can try to do the slow dance. Just imagine your device has only so many clicks before you’re out of ‘film’. Try it, you may savor the experience, and even note a pleasant floral essence in the air. 

Strasbourg, France

all images are Leica images © David Greenfield

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Feelin' Groovy

Mozeying Down the Line

In their 59th Street Bridge song, aka Feelin’ Groovy, Simon & Garfunkel implored each of us to slow down, you move too fast. Sounds good and refreshing, but given our penchant for always choosing the fast lane, I’m confident everyone will also agree with the following regarding pace …..

One saves time traveling only two hours 

instead of spending eight hours 

on the same journey. 

The theorem at play here is that speed and time accelerate in parallel although opposite directions, i.e., the faster you go, the shorter the time to get from Point A to Point B, or with due respect to Ben Franklin’s admonition, haste makes waste, the faster, and carefully you work, the quicker the task is completed. 

True, but what about the roses? Can you smell them at all while traveling or working feverishly at warp-speed, or must you move at moseying down the road speed  to savor the floral esters?

Pint Size Mozeying

So here’s my premise - experiences can be enhanced when time is expanded rather than collapsed. A required slowdown to smell the roses may be easy to accept, but hard to implement, especially in today’s instant messaging, tweety, I want to have it all and I want it now world!

Make no mistake, I’m not advocating a return to a time when composing and recording important thoughts required banging the keys of a Smith-Corona typewriter and reliance on white-out for typos, or to watching a rabbit ear antenna B&W TV with a twelve inch screen, but I do enjoy many moments back in the analog world. Two such pleasant experiences involve writing personal letters with a vintage fountain pen and, as you might imagine, periodically capturing images with an old film camera. 

For this posting, let’s consider pen and ink. 

Back in my twentieth century junior high school, we learned and practiced cursive writing, frequently using a fountain pen for in-class hand-in assignments. If your pen ran dry, you raised a hand to get permission to go to the communal ink well and fill ‘er up. Considering this practice, gifting a fountain pen, usually boxed with a matching mechanical pencil, was a go-to, if not pedestrian, gift for all the bar mitzvah boys of the era. Naturally when my rite of passage arrived I received my share. That said, I did receive a classic - a sleek black and gold Sheaffer pen. The unique innovation of this writing implement was the snorkel. When filling, rather than immersing the nib into a murky well and mucking it up with gobs of ink, you merely twisted the pen’s end cap and a tube emerged from under the tip to suck in the fluid. The nib remained pristine.

Nib and Snorkel

Of course longhand writing was to become an endangered species almost completely replaced by the keyboard. The key phrase here is ‘almost completely’. Not long ago I learned that when a friend’s signature was required, he reached for a pen handsomely perched on his desk and reserved exclusively for such occasions. It elevated the signing to an almost spiritual experience. The story tugged at me. I then recalled that somewhere in my attic I too had a special pen. Thus began a mission to find it, restore it to functionality, and most importantly use it when special words, words from the heart, as well as my signature were needed. 

Google searches are unquestionably completed much faster than mine but after a methodical expedition through decades of stowed memorabilia, I located the archived Sheaffer and blew off the dust. Clearly, it was in sad shape but still appeared salvageable, a task suited for the experts at Bromfield Pen - established 1948 in Boston. A week or two later the pen was returned to me with a new nib and pliant rubber ink bladder. Life had been breathed into my bar mitzvah pen. 

Today, whenever poignancy of a written word is the right way to go, albeit not the fastest, I fill ‘er up and savor every thoughtful writing moment regardless how long it takes to complete. Afterward, my signature is affixed, the paper folded into an envelope, then I ‘press send’, i.e., drop the missive into a snail-mail box. When I do, even without fresh flowers anywhere nearby, somehow floral esters waft into the air and I smell roses. Today, ‘sunshine in my pocket’ may be a more apt descriptor of that feeling than groovy, but call it what you will, it’s a feel good feeling.

Next time I’ll focus on slow dancing with a film camera.

Leica IIIg circa 1950

Visit my web site anytime to view other Galleries, Photo-essays, and read previous blog-posts, then kindly share on social media. Thank you.

images © David Greenfield