Today I had the opportunity to witness many of my colleagues and classmates graduate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Since I’m a part-time student, I won’t graduate for another six months. For those who aren’t familiar, Harvard holds several different ceremonies. At the beginning of the day, they do school-wide commencement exercises. Then each different school splits off to do its own, individual ceremony.
These are my photographs from both the Harvard school-wide commencement (which was impossible to get a seat for, and thus, which resulted in a fairly short, lackluster photo set), and the Harvard Graduate School of Education commencement. Note that unlike with most of my photo sets, I tried to emphasize people I knew, since they might find the photos valuable later.
TV producer Shawn Ryan has mastered the art of the end-of-season montage. Last week’s season finale for The Chicago Code continued to demonstrate this, as The Parlours “I Dream of Chicago” played over the show’s final images.
A haunting, beautiful song that’s made even better when you know the backstory.
The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that’s not yet complete? Strunk and White—who must always be mentioned in articles such as this one—counsel against overusing the dash as well: “Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.” Who are we, we modern writers, to pass judgment—and with such shocking frequency—on these more simple forms of punctuation—the workmanlike comma, the stalwart colon, the taken-for-granted period? (One colleague—arguing strenuously that certain occasions call for the dash instead of other punctuation, for purposes of tone—told me he thinks of the parenthesis as a whisper, and the dash as a way of calling attention to a phrase. As for what I think of his observation—well, consider how I have chosen to offset it.)
The mere act of taking a photograph means the photographer holds the copyright for that picture. Sharing it on a social media site does nothing to limit or reduce that fundamental right, according to digital rights expert Mary Luria. “Unless (you) post the photo with a message that says, ‘please copy this and pass it along,’ the photographer holds the copyright,” said Luria, a partner in Davis & Gilbert in New York.
Misuse of content isn’t new, she points out — famous photos have been copied without credit for 150 years — but the Internet has made it easy and, in some circles, normal. “The culture of the Internet is this concept of sharing everything. That things belong to us, not to a person,” she said. “And they are surprised when someone says, ‘You’ve taken this, it’s mine.”
May 21st has come and gone, and I’m experiencing a mix of different emotions towards those believers who thought that the end would arrive this past Saturday. As a Christian, I admire their conviction and willingness to surrender all earthly things in the pursuit of something better. But as a regular human being, I’m horrified by their recklessness and general inability to conceive of alternative viewpoints.
This brief, unplanned discussion with my brother about the topic helps to sum up some of my viewpoints:
I’ve been reading a lot of stories about the rapture that never was. The NYTimes has a nice catch-all piece about those whose lives have been affected by years of false prophesying. New York magazine has a heartbreaking story about a marriage on the rocks due to the end times that never came. Many pieces also dealt with the aftermath, such as the LATimes, which wrote about a rapture-believer named Keith Bauer:
Keith Bauer, a 38-year-old tractor-trailer driver from Westminster, Md., took last week off from work, packed his wife, young son and a relative in their SUV and crossed the country. If it was his last week on Earth, he wanted to see parts of it he’d always heard about but missed, such as the Grand Canyon. With maxed-out credit cards and a growing mountain of bills, he said, the rapture would have been a relief.
Slate wrote about what happens to doomsday cults when the world doesn’t end. Answer: they slightly modify their beliefs to overcome the cognitive dissonance of having devoted their lives to spreading the word about one rapture end-date. And sure enough, rapture-proponent Harold Camping has since come out and said that his original prediction was off by six months, and that the rapture will in fact be happening on November 21, 2011.
Perhaps my favorite piece about the whole topic is this letter to Harold Camping’s followers, about what to do now that Judgment Day missed its mark. It addresses those who were wrong with grace, forgiveness, and encouragement:
When you want to believe something, and someone you respect tells you to believe something, and everyone around you also believes and wants to believe the same thing, those are extraordinarily powerful forces. I wish that you had not believed in the May 21st prediction, because I fear that it damaged the credibility of Christians in the eyes of some. But I see no reason now to belabor that point. Rather, I hope you have grace with yourselves.
Gabriel Sherman has a rather remarkable profile of Fox News head Roger Ailes in this month’s New York magazine. I’m not crazy about the use of anonymous quotes to basically slander Ailes co-workers, but it does bring up a good issue: more than anything else, Ailes would love to make an impact. Fox News has certainly done that, but in the way opposite of how Ailes intended, in the sense that it may have cost the Republicans the next election. There’s some tragic justice to that…
Sources confirmed Friday that the life of local marketing associate Rich Hammond has been plagued by a series of glaring errors in continuity, leading many to believe it was poorly thought out, with little regard for basic logic or consistency. Critics said the lax attention to detail and sloppy sequencing throughout Hammond’s life range from sudden, unexpected changes in dress and facial hair to total reversals in personality that seem to contradict his previously established thoughts and desires.
Back when I was in college, a good friend of mine was going through a difficult period of her life. She was depressed and unable to get motivated about basically anything. When she spoke with her father, he didn’t seem too concerned; he knew she was a hardy person, and she would survive this rough patch. But there is one thing he asked her that resonated with her, and with me:
“What happened to your dreams?”
Far more significant than temporary depression or the loss of motivation was the absence of dreams, of goals, of ambition. It is a lot less difficult to get through a trying time when you have a long-term end goal in mind, when your destination is in sight. Hope is easier.
For me, the past few years have been a story about falling into a deep pit, professionally and personally, and the journey that it has taken to climb my way out. I certainly had dreams and still have them, but maybe they have changed (dramatically) over time. Maybe they would no longer recognizable to a younger me. This makes me a little bit sad.
I’m grateful at what I’ve been able to accomplish a great deal with the generous resources I’ve been given. I’ve helped to grow two shows up from nothing, one of which is broadcast on one of the top public radio stations in the country. I’ve seen lots of movies, interviewed lots of heroes (save one), and written about things that I’m passionate about and gotten paid for it. All of these are things that I have enjoyed doing and been extraordinarily grateful for, but none of them are things I set out to do. As I look towards the horizon and see myself graduating from my Master’s program in six months, it is natural for me to reflect on my future, and the direction in which my life is headed.
One of Ira Glass’s quotes recently made its way around the internet (the quote was extracted from a video which is worth watching in its entirety):
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
The question I keep asking myself these days is: am I merely at the beginning of a long, fruitful career in being an online/media personality and broadcaster? Or am I already coming up to the end of it? Have I already completed most of my “character arc,” as it were?
One of my podcast inspirations, Shane Bettenhausen, once said (and I’m grossly paraphrasing here) that being an online entertainment journalist doesn’t cure cancer, doen’t solve world hunger, doesn’t change the world in any radical way. He said this on a podcast guest appearance, months after he had left 1Up.com in the wake of that company’s acquisition by UGO.
It was an eye-opener from me. Bettenhausen and his brethren had a podcast that was listened to by over 50,000 people per week. When they did panels at events like PAX, hundreds if not thousands of people would line up for hours just to hear them speak live. Yet Bettenhausen walked away from “the life” to go into video game development (it should be noted that “the life” probably does not pay that well for most people, so such a move is understandable on those grounds alone). I surmise that it was probably relaxing to stop being a public personality and resume life as a “normal” person.
Let’s look at the converse of the equation. I’ve been very gratified to receive e-mails from people for whom our show has had a profound impact. I’ve also been the target of much criticism and hate. That’s what I have not been able to get used to; not the fact that people don’t like my work (this comes with the territory). It is the nature, character, and tactics of the hatred that have greatly discouraged me. Sure, people might not like what Filmspotting has to say, but you don’t see disgruntled listeners launching repeated attacks on those guys through a variety of different platforms. And that’s not even getting into the general toxicity of the community. The manner and extent through which people have chosen to make their attacks has truly taken my breath away and caused me to re-think my online presence. Maybe if it has done that much, they have already won.
It’s the paradox of creating any form of long-term, periodical media: people who praise you only feel the need to do so a few times (as well they should…it would be weird if someone e-mailed in every single week with praise), while people who hate you will renew their attacks. On a long enough timeline, the hatred drowns out the love. It’s exhausting enough that I frequently have to ask myself, “Is this worth it to me?”
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One of the things I have found incredibly rewarding is my re-discovery of photography. I first studied photography at Amherst College under the tutelage of Justin Kimball, which is where I produced my first photo set. In the years since then, I let photography fall by the wayside, mostly because I was not able to produce images to the caliber that I desired, but also because I found carrying a DSLR everywhere to be a cumbersome proposition. Instead, I opted to take up iPhone photography, a legitimate art despite protestations to the contrary.
In February 2011, I acquired a new $120 lens and began playing around with depth-of-field more. Suddenly, I was producing images that I was actually pleased with, images that displayed actual technical proficiency. This led to the acquisition of a ton of new gear and several paying photography gigs. It’s been a fun ride, and one that I intend to continue for as long as I can.
I think one of the biggest tragedies is that there are so many beautiful people in the world (men and women) who don’t have a single decent photograph of themselves. My goal is to rectify this is frequently as I can. The moment when I hand or send someone a photograph of themselves and they see how nicely they can appear is a moment of pure joy for me. I hope to have many more of these moments in the years ahead.
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Those of you who follow my audioblogs may have noticed that I have significantly cut down on the audioblogging in recent days. Most of that is because I have been crazily busy for the past nine months with classes, work, and podcasting (it is only with the end of the semester that I finally even have enough time to write this blog post). But I think it is also because that I have tried to spend more time enjoying my conversations rather than documenting them. I have tried to do more living rather than creating.
The results have been mixed – but mostly good. There have indeed been many instances where I’ve been sad to have missed documenting something and sharing it with the world. But there have been equally many times where I’ve just been happy to be in the moment, away from the online beast that threatens to consume all of my time, attention, and sanity.
All I can say is that I am extraordinarily grateful for those people who have helped me to live, those people in my life with whom I have shared the triumphs and the heartache. You have made this year a better one than the last. You know who you are.
