Travel Blog

From August 7 to August 10, I will be in Denver for a wedding. Unfortunately, it probably means I'll have plenty of time to think for the blog but no way to publish it. Sg I thought I'd keep these notes while gone and publish them all at once. Enjoy!

Darn Airport Security - Day One

Well, survived my first run-in with the TSA, with no lasting bruises. Actually, I have to admit that I've never had a problem with them. Sure, I've been stopped for the "random" searches many times (something about a goatee and metal briefcase), I've never had any real trouble. But I do need to remember to take off my watch before hitting the metal detectors.

The strange thing is that when I pulled my MP3 player from the carry on, it was completely blank. As you can guess, this is not how I left it; I had expected some Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. Now, since my Palm and Digital Camera weren't affected, it could be that the player is on the fritz. But still, fine before the checkpoint, blank after.

Which gets me thinking again to how fragile all this digital info really is. I mean, all our snapshots on the trip will be digital. My link to home, the cell phone, kindly remembers all my numbers digitally. This wonderfully rambling narrative isn't really "written" anywhere; it's all just magnetic states stored in silicon. So today it's the MP3's, what will it be tomorrow? Or to put it another way: I haven't actually touched a tax form in three years. Scary, no?

Now let's assume that Murphy and his followers are right - anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Given enough time, trouble finds us all. So do you have back-ups of everything? Does your doctor? Your business? The IRS? Just as you can expect to be involvep in a car accident or a minor fire once in your life, expect to lose digital data; we're all one checkpoint away from losing it all...

Photograph and Memories - Day 4

Well, Day 4 is here, and you can see how productive I was! It seems like the time to write was on the airplane; think of the frequent flyer miles I'd rack up if I were a novelist. Oh well...

So, at the rehersal dinner (and later the wedding reception), a photo-montage detailing the growth of both groom and bride played to light Christian pop. And during the ceremony, a bevy of cameras (traditional, video, and digital) sprang to life at each highpoint of the ceremony. This, naturally, got me thinking about photography and the nature of reminiscence.

As the critic/philosopher Walter Benjamin posits, a photograph can be seen as time travel, capturing forever the particulars of a place at a time. While the first decades of the medium saw it treated as a novel form of painting, the Twentieth Century saw it concenrate on the particularities the medium afforded. And if you look at everyday, amateur photograph, I believe you'd find "candid" shots dominating the developer's tanks. These attempts to not only capture but freeze our memories in place is so pervasive as to be invisible.

Yet this is not the only means of preserving memories. My example would be the memento, an object or heirloom to which one attaches personal memories. The advantage to this is that the memory is not tied to a particular time and place. For example, when I graduated from college my father presented me with a pocketwatch. This watch was passed down through four generations of sons; it has accompanied me to all subsequent memorable events: weddings, funerals, graduations. I already look forward to presenting it to my son, completing the circle and moving to the next generation. Although the watch doesn't actually "work," it keeps personal time through the Stevens' family.

Now, I don't mean to condemn photos over mementos; rather I encourage the cultivation of both forms. Photographs (digital or otherwise) are, by nature, public; they are easily duplicated, shared, dropped in a frame, and placed on the mantle. Mementos, in contrast, are private (stored in everything from sock drawers to safe deposit boxes). My belief is that by cultivating different forms of "memory," you build a richer tapestry of personal culture for your family and you.