Muchos gracias to Socar Myles for use of her photo, The Suck.

This blog entry is long overdue. Several weeks ago, on April 27, the world lost a cultural pioneer. Odds are that you’ve never heard of her, nor seen her photograph, but Emma “Pem” Farnsworth was a key figure in the shaping of modern world culture.

You see, she and her brother Cliff Gardner were the first human images ever transmitted over television. On October 19, 1929, in a small upstairs “studio” at the corner of Green and Sansome in San Francisco, her husband Philo Farnsworth sent an image of Pem and Cliff to a 3.5″ screen in the next room. And with that, the greatest modern influence next to the computer was born.

Despite revolutionizing the way people spend their leisure time, Philo Farnsworth never received much recognition for his invention. After his death in 1971, Pem made that her mission, writing an autobiography called “Distant Vision” and doing interviews to give her husband the credit he deserved.

Pem was 98 at the time of her death.

One has to wonder how she and Philo privately felt about how TV has evolved over its 76-year lifespan. Would they look upon today’s spate of public-humiliation “reality” shows with a touch of horror, or feel disgust over the way their invention converted politics into a soundbite-driven publicity mill? Even early on, when the broadcast window was limited to one hour a day, television was about entertainment, not information. One of the earliest BBC broadcasts was a dance routine by the swimsuit-clad Paramount Astoria Girls. From there, we went to Milton Berle in drag, “I Love Lucy”, “The Love Boat”, “Dallas”, “Knight Rider”, “USA Up All Night”, “Baywatch”, (skipping a few years) “Survivor”, “America’s Next Top Model”, “American Idol”, “Desperate Housewives”, until, finally, we arrived at the bottom of the entertainment gulch: “CSI: Miami”. (In the interest of full disclosure, it should be pointed out that as a youth I watched many of those shows religiously. I still hum the “A-Team” theme unconsciously.)

Mind you, not all was dreck and bilge water. We had some excellent journalism until Edward R. Murrow smoked too many cigarettes and Walter Cronkite wore out his sweaters. CNN gave us the ability to breathlessly watch no new developments at all–live!–24 hours a day from around the globe. “M*A*S*H” made people think as well as laugh. Um…I’m sure there were others that did not rely on bribing viewers with a glimpse of bare bum, but they escape me at the moment.

The point is that televion has done good things, but those moments are heavily outweighed by the hours of brain-sucking vacuum TV.

Does the consumer even shape the landscape of its viewing habits anymore, or have we become slaves to the electron gun, obediently watching whatever is put before us? How many times have you sat on the sofa flipping channels and complained to your mate (or pet), “There’s nothing on,” yet continued to flip channels anyway, finally settling on the least boring program you can find? Could this possibly be the future Philo and Pem envisioned, where instead of more enlightened beings expanding the horizons of our experience we are zombies stripped of the will to turn off the set?

In other words, are we the consumers, or the consumed?

The great irony of Pem Farnsworth’s death–her last great joke upon the planet–was that she died during TV Turn-off Week.

The hellburger
Originally uploaded by olivander.

Mr Efatima and I did the manly-man bonding thing by choking down a couple of these habanero burgers, billed by the pub’s owner as the world’s hottest. He may be right.

If you can get past the first few bites, it goes pretty easily, because by that point your brain’s ability to comprehend pain has burned out. I’m sure that if the heat hadn’t totally obliterated the flavor, this burger would have tasted wonderful.

Oh, and the evil bastards spiked the ketchup with chipoltes, so seeking relief by shoving a few ketchup-dipped fries in your mouth only exacerbates the heat.

The habanero burger (or hellburger, as we’ve come to call it) is also a gift that keeps on giving. Word of advice to anyone thinking about consuming one of these things: don’t do it the night before a long plane flight. You remember the scene in Alien, where John Hurt is flopping around a tabletop as the chestburster struggles to escape his body? Other than the alien invader being way down in my colon, that was me the entire flight home.

But hey, I got a free bumper sticker out of the deal. W00t!

Lost holiday
Originally uploaded by olivander.

About fifty years ago, a family took a vacation to Miami Beach, FL. They brought along their Brownie Hawkeye Flash camera and took lots of pictures of themselves having fun. They got home, finished up the roll with a couple shots of the dog, and put the camera up. Perhaps that’s the day that they bought a new camera. Maybe they set the camera down somewhere and forgot it and it became lost. Somehow, life interfered and the roll was never removed from the camera.

For fifty years.

Recently, I bought a lot of vintage cameras on eBay, and this family’s Brownie Hawkeye Flash was among them. I found the roll of film inside and decided–without much expectation–to develop it and see what was on it. Film left in cameras is notorious for not surviving. The camera inevitably gets opened, and the unsealed film is repeatedly exposed to light and high temperatures and humidity. On top of it, it had traveled with its camera through standard postal service, undoubtedly being subjected to x-rays at least once. I figured I would get, at best, a bunch of fog-covered frames with faint images of someone’s new car or kids playing in the back yard.

The results blew me away. Verichrome Pan was long heralded for its superior range of tone and fine grain. Evidently, it was made to last, too. The only alteration I made to the developing process was to push the developing time from Kodak’s recommended six minutes to eight, in the hopes that the increased time would boost the contrast enough to cut through the inevitable fog.

You can see for yourself that the pictures were almost perfect.

This lost holiday brings up many questions. Who was this family? What brought them to Florida? Why didn’t they ever get their pictures processed? Did they ever wonder what ever happened to them? Does the kid in the pictures remember that trip? What ever became of them?

I created a set for these photos on Flickr. I hope that someone, somewhere, will see them and say, “Hey, that’s Dad/my aunt/me!” If that happens to be you, please get in touch with me so I can return your photos.

My philosophy
Originally uploaded by olivander.

Ever have one of those days when you feel like your face is about to shed its skin like a snake, leaving one huge dessicated skin flake in the shape of a distorted visage of yourself crumbled on the floor?

Yeah, it’s like that today.

Some people put this in their mouth
Originally uploaded by olivander.

My first thought was, “That’s not a food item; that’s a medical condition.” It’s worth noting that the Spotted Dick is right beside the Tripe, and that the two cans are virtually indistinguishable.

Spotted Dick, as it turns out, is a pudding desert that is somewhat popular in the UK, though its name has occasionally caused embarrassment.

I’m still not gonna eat it.

Walking to work this morning
Originally uploaded by olivander.

After spending so much time in the dark, it’s nice to see light again.

Winter is hard. It’s even harder if you’re one of the thousands, maybe millions, of people who have SAD. (What a cute name for a form of depression, eh?)

For six months out of the year, we live like vampires: going to work when it’s dark, spending the daylight hours in windowless offices, then returning home in the dark. Weekends are the only time we see the sun, and we spend most of that time either asleep or crashed on the couch because we can’t motivate ourselves to do anything.

I get by with a set of 5500k daylight-replicating tubes in the light fixture at work, and a bunch of vitamins. Massive doses of B12. Sometimes I venture into the night with my camera and try to find some color. Sometimes I just shoot something that visually echoes my mood. Finding a way to make the darkness give something to you helps a lot.

Still, it’s nice to step outside in the morning and see the underbellies of the clouds aflame with the rising sun.

I’m not an activist, I’m a freedom fighter.
Originally uploaded by olivander.

I got that white peace ribbon during the Berkeley People’s Park protests years and years ago. Over the years, it has traveled with me, tied to a backpack or tote bag handle, on my jacket pocket, or flying from my car antenna. It’s become dingy and tattered with age, but its meaning is as important these days as ever.

Desolation
Originally uploaded by olivander.

I’ve felt very disconnected lately. Over the next couple of months, two of my friends are moving out of the country, two more are moving to the east coast, and another is moving to Atlanta. Sometimes I really hate living in the midwest. While it’s equidistant from everyplace, it’s also equally far away from everyplace. It’s a half-full/half-empty sort of deal. But with half of my friends gone, it’s just half-empty.