Where would you Time Travel?

When it comes to thought-provoking discussion topics, one of the most intriguing has got to be: “If you could go back in time, where would you go?”  I asked a friend of mine this question recently and he said, “I’ve never thought about it.”  I find this mind-boggling, as I’ve spent days of my life contemplating just the rules of such an endeavor, never mind the actual answer to the question.  There are so many variables to consider:

• How long can I travel back in time?  An hour?  A day?  A year?

• Do I get to choose when to come back, or is the duration predetermined?

• Can I stay if I choose to?

• Am I going merely as an observer, or do I get to interact with my environment?

• Will my actions change history?

• If I do interact with my environment, will I know the language of the people I meet?  Will I arrive with the proper clothing and currency?  Will I have access to basic toiletries and lodging?

• Can I go back as myself and relive an event from my own life?  If so, do I go with my 53-year-old brain and understanding of the world, or do I go back to the person I was at that time?

• Once I arrive, am I bound to the travel restrictions of that time?  For instance, can I visit multiple places with the snap of a finger, or would I have to walk or ride in a bus, boat or carriage?

• Can I die, be harmed or put in prison while I’m away?

It can get complicated quickly, and each answer to the above questions will radically change the central answer to the central question.

When I asked a few of my Christian friends, they didn’t need to think twice: witness Jesus’s resurrection.  Fair enough.  Another friend of mine thought that seeing her grandparents as young adults would make for a good trip.  I like that one a lot.  Some of my music-centric friends thought about attending one of the seminal concerts by their favorite bands.  One friend thought about witnessing the JFK assassination and paying particular attention to the grassy knoll to see if there’s any truth to the conspiracy theories.

For me, I’ll make the following assumptions:  I will not interact with my environment in a meaningful way, but I can make small talk, order food at a restaurant, etc..  I can observe people, places and events, I can eat food, and I can be visible if I choose to be or an invisible observer when appropriate.  I am not subject to injury, death or imprisonment.  I can travel via the methods appropriate for the time period.  I can sleep in some other dimension, as opposed to living along in a dingy motel somewhere.  Money is no object.  I can not change history.  I can stay for up to a month.

Given these assumptions, I would consider time-traveling to Milwaukee on September 23, 1957 and staying for at least three weeks.  I have the following in mind:

I’ll first attend County Stadium to witness the Milwaukee Braves game on Monday night, September 23, and watch Hank Aaron hit a game-winning, league-clinching, two-run homer in the bottom of the 11th inning and celebrate with over 40,000 other fans in attendance.  A few weeks later, I will attend games 4 and 5 of the World Series and watch the Braves beat the Yankees, and I’ll stick around in Milwaukee to watch/listen/cheer/celebrate with my fellow fans on October 9th and 10th while the Braves beat the Yankees in the Bronx.  I could try to travel to New York to see the games, but I think it might actually be more fun in Milwaukee.

Since there’s a lot of time to kill in between these two events, I’ve got some ideas. I’d like to take a bus to Memphis, Tennessee, and on September 27th see The Biggest Show of Stars, including Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, The Drifters, The Everly Brothers, Frankie Lymon and Paul Anka.  Not too shabby.  And two days earlier, on September 25th, I can see Elvis Presley at the Eagle’s Nest, also in Memphis!  Even better, the weather in Memphis that week looks to be in the mid-70s to the low-80s, so I’d try to take a boat tour, eat some good southern food and get a flavor for the area.

If possible, I’d then like to quickly travel up to Green Bay for their 21-17 victory over the Bears at the inaugural game at New City Stadium (now Lambeau Field).  I’ll be there with 31,000 other fans, and future president Richard M. Nixon (and current - at the time - Vice President) will dedicate the stadium at half-time.

During the following week I’ll go back to Milwaukee and visit both sets of my grandparents.  I knew my maternal grandparents, Elmer and Louise, quite well as a young adult, but I’d love to see them again, hear them laugh, watch them cook a meal, play cards, sing in the choir, etc.  I’d even take a few bus rides with my grandfather at the helm as a city driver.  What a hoot that would be.  And then I can go just a short drive away to my paternal grandparents, Edwin and Mildred, who I didn’t know nearly as well in my lifetime, and get a fuller picture of who they were.

I would also kick around the land where I grew up in Menominee Falls and Brookfield.  None of the homes I lived in will be there yet, but I’d still like to see how things looked prior subdivisions being developed.

During my downtime, I’ll watch current movies in theaters.  It’s hard to know exactly what films will be played during this three-week period, but they might include Jailhouse Rock, Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd.  Maybe a few older films will be playing around town as well. And I’m sure there will be local concerts worth seeing. I’d also like to attend a Reform Judaism service somewhere in Milwaukee or northern suburbs and see what the services consisted of back then, and I’d like to visit Capitol Drive Lutheran Church where I’ll attend Sunday School a few decades later.

That sounds like a pretty good three-week time-travel vacation.  If the parameters were to change, so would my answer.  What if I can only go back for one hour?  What if I can change history?  What if I can snap my fingers and change locations?  What if I can interact with my environment with absolutely no worry about changing history? 

Oh, the possibilities are endless.  Sorta like this blog entry!

Where and when would you like to go?

Memories of At-Home Fatherhood

In Meg Wolitzer’s insightful and punctilious portrayal of at-home mothers in New York City, The Ten-Year Nap, she writes of an at-home father:

…his appearance at the school in the afternoon was confusing; it threw off theories about how the world worked.  You were initially pleased by him, but then after a short while you felt slightly annoyed.  He seemed like a loiterer here in the world that the women had formed for themselves.

I read this with a nod of recollection.  It’s now been 24 years since my wife and I made the decision to have me stay at home with our twin daughters while she continued her career in human resources.  As I wrote in my song, “Daddy’s at Home”: 

I remember the time
When I found this wife of mine
Was earning more than I ever would
And as her due date arrived
We needed to decide
Which one of us would stay home for good
I wasn't tied to the workday that took me from nine to five
But now I'm wishing I could just rest my eyes

This song highlights the joys of at-home fatherhood – many of my songs do – and I unequivocally stand by the decision to stay at home and raise the kids.  I wish I could do it all over again.  I loved being a dad to young children.

But there was also a flip side to the journey: being an at-home father was often isolating, particularly on the East Coast where people are less open and tougher nuts to crack in general, but even in the friendlier Midwest.  And while one could theorize about why this was the case, I think Wolitzer offers a plausible explanation: because women were dubious about this interloper, a man entering a world that had been reserved for them.  I wasn’t invited to join their walks, their coffee outings, their phone call chats – and really, I shouldn’t have been.  I see more clearly now than I did then just how presumptuous it was for me to think that I should have been treated as a colleague. 

When I first took my twins to preschool in Illinois, many of the moms viewed me as a novelty, and I was able to establish a rapport with some of the friendlier ones.  Looking back now, I’m grateful for the few mom friends I made, who occasionally took my phone calls to chat about which park district program we were signing up for or to just unload about the trivial trials that parenting includes.  During dark winter days, when parenting could feel like a life sentence, these phone calls were a lifeline for me.  

Over time, some of the relationships I established graduated to in-person gatherings.  I think that what I had going for me more than anything else was a nonthreatening quality, some sort of signal that read, “I am not going to make a move on you.”  In a way, I preferred these relationships to any I could have established with fellow fathers.  Too often, I found dads to be a bore.  If you weren’t talking to them about sports, finances and home improvement, the conversations dried up.  The women I became friends with were more interesting, unafraid to express regret and uncertainly.  They were more self-effacing and more empathetic.  More human.

As my kids grew older, I saw other fathers walking their kids to and from school.  Most were working in some capacity, either out of the home or on odd shifts, but there were a few of us full-time stay-at-home dads roaming about.  It became less of a thing.  Less novel.  More accepted.  A quarter of a century later, I like to think that I helped them along in some small way.

Mental Timelines

When you picture your life, do have a timeline in your head? I do, but I’ve learned that some people don’t. During my three-year stint teaching sixth-grade Sunday school, I devoted considerable time drawing timelines on the chalkboard, attempting to place historical events in their proper context.  I had always thought that mental timelines were a natural part of people’s imaginations.  To me, being able to picture a timeline is an essential element to my being: it helps me visualize my own history in particular, but I can also visualize years prior to my existence.  If you say 1960 to me, I don’t have loads of information at my fingertips, but I immediately visualize Kennedy vs. Nixon, Psycho, The Apartment, and my parents’ first date.  Fast forward to, say, 1974, and I can tell you much more:

My first-grade class with Mrs. Davis at Marcy School
Nixon’s resignation
The Godfather Part II
The Conversation
Henry Aaron’s record-breaking home run
The third Oakland A’s Word Series victory in a row (over which team?  The Reds?  The Mets?)
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis
Relayer by Yes
Late for the Sky by Jackson Browne
Get Your Wings by Aerosmith
It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll by The Rolling Stones
Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan
Crime of the Century by Supertramp

I was only six years old in 1974, and while my timeline is unbalanced toward pop culture, I’m happy to have some sense of what was happening at the time.

Back when I drew timelines for my students, I would first try to anchor things in the context of seminal events.  For example, I’d ask them to approximate when the Civil War took place and I’d get a myriad of responses, most of them way off the mark.  I’d get an answer like the 1950s, and I’d say, “Okay, so I was born in 1968, and my parents were both born in the 1930s.  Do you think the Civil War took place just fifteen years before I was born and during my parents’ childhoods?”  They’d answer no, and gradually we’d come up with a better guess, if not entirely accurate. 

Not everyone may share the mental timeline that I can recall, though I imagine that many people could develop their own with some guidance.  When my children were young I purchased a large roll of blank white paper that I laid out on the floor and – after drawing a long line – marked the years of their family members’ birthdays, the years when movies they love were released, when various wars occurred, when the Packers Super Bowl victories took place, etc.  I hope this had some impact on their own understanding of their place in the world. 

But while I’ve always known on an intellectual level that people are different – that we all have strengths and weaknesses – it’s one thing to know this and quite another thing to stop yourself, apply the lesson and really consider others’ experiences.  I may have a decent mental timeline, but someone like the actress Marilu Henner has a condition called hyperthymesia that allows her to remember life experiences to in fine detail and with great accuracy.  According to Wikipedia, only around 60 people worldwide are thought to have this gift.  I would LOVE to have this condition, but I imagine that Marilu had to learn early on that not everyone has her ability to recall whether it was Mother’s Day in 1971 or in 1972 that temperatures plummeted and her family’s outdoor party needed to be brought indoors.  She would know this, and she may have as a young person wondered how her fellow family members could be so daft.

I would be lost without my mental timeline, just as Marilu Henner would be lost without her amazing gift, but other people have their own strengths and may wonder how others live without them.

And all this comes back to the lesson we’ve all learned multiple times but perhaps need reminding of from time to time: not to judge people, but to try to understand them.  I’ve come to learn that the people who don’t say hi to me on the street when I pass them maybe aren’t being rude, but may be absolutely terrified of social interaction.  They could also just be rude, but it does no good to assume so. Six years ago I wrote a comparison of the movies St. Vincent and The Fisher King, and concluded that “it doesn’t hurt to assume the best in people, and it could even do a lot of good.  And as contrived as this message may be, this is exactly the default setting we should be employing in our lives.”

I personally need to be reminded of this adage all the time. Fortunately, when it comes to remembering dates, I don’t need the same guidance.

Organizing, Records and Discogs

When the pandemic started last March, much of the nation went into house-organizing mode, as people gathered never-worn clothes from bedroom closets and outgrown toys from playrooms, making room for other purchases that will one day need to be discarded.  The pandemic may have facilitated this organizing trend by forcing people to spend countless hours inside their homes, but I think a lot of it came down to control: giving us some semblance of power in a world that increasingly seemed to be careening towards a path of its own demise.  I think that’s what most organizing constitutes: a chance to regain control in an otherwise uncontrollable world.

While others were discarding, I was adding.  Just as the state of Illinois was shutting down last spring, I made regular trips to Home Depot to build three record racks for my growing collection of vinyl, and while the racks achieved their purpose of properly displaying my albums in all their glory, I soon wanted even more control.  I wanted them cataloged.

Enter Discogs.

Websites aimed to catalog aspects of our lives are nothing new.  Letterboxd tracks the movies we’ve seen (or haven’t seen yet), Goodreads does the same for books, Untappd for the beers you’ve sampled.  As someone who has made lists all his life, who when asked what my favorite movies are can immediately rattle off ten titles, I find these websites to be a Godsend, a way to transform scraps of paper or poorly organized spreadsheet files into fun, interactive activities that facilitate sharing content with others who relate to my obsessions.

There are plenty of options for music collector, but Discogs appears to be the site of choice for the folks I know.  It has its quirks and limitations, but after spending a week or so entering data, I’ve managed to inventory all of my records, CDs and concert DVDs nicely in the cloud and I’ve organized them even better on a spreadsheet that I can manipulate however I choose.

A few details.  If you’re a vinyl collector for whom its important to properly identify the specific pressing of each record you own – and there are reasons why this might be important – the endeavor of cataloging your collection is going to cost you loads of time.  For me, I was happy just to note that I owned a particular album and not that it was a particular reissue of a particular year.  This posed a problem, however, because Discogs attempts to estimate the monetary value of your collection – a nice feature – and to have this estimate somewhat accurate, it’s important for me to at least note that my 1974 Genesis release isn’t a first pressing, but a reissue.  And, truth be told, this is a pain to do on Discogs for several reasons:

1)     When searching for a basic record – say, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours – 538 versions of the album pop up, and even after filtering for country (U.S.) and format (vinyl) you’re left with over 90 options to choose from.  Which one do you choose without wanting to spend a great deal of time?  If you’re like me, knowing that I didn’t have a highly-valued first pressing – I chose the first reissue I could find.  But this leads to another problem…

2)     I want to be able to track my records based on the year they were released.  My mental timeline is part of what helps me navigate my world, and knowing that The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway came out in 1974 is one of those facts that anchors my historical timeline.  Unfortunately, if I want to properly recognize that I don’t own a valuable first pressing but rather an inexpensive reissue, it’s the year of the pressing that pops up when I chronologically order my collection, NOT the year the album was released.  I hate this.  Others hate it too, as a quick Google search confirmed, but while there are many likeminded people out there, there’s apparently only one solution to the problem:  download your collection, load it onto a spreadsheet, and physically change the dates to their original year of release.  That’s what I did.  Not ideal.

3)     Unless I’m missing something, I can’t set filtering defaults like searching only for vinyl releases in the U.S.  I have to tell Discogs to search only for “vinyl” and for “U.S. releases” every time search for a new record.  EVERY fricking time!  If I’m missing something, shame on me.  But this made entering data much more laborious.  And using the website is no better than the android app, as it takes a long time to even load the filtering page.  To date, there isn’t a Discogs app for PCs.  You have to go to the website if you want to make changes via your computer.  (I tried using “Disko for Discogs” which is supposed to be a way to use Discogs via an app, but this failed to even link up to my account).

These issues aside, Discogs is still a useful way to inventory of your collection, and if you own more recent CDs and albums, it’s easier still, as you can simply scan the barcode rather than typing in information (I entered my entire CD collection in less than a day).  Now that I’ve got everything entered and up to date, going forward when I purchase a new record, I’ll enter it separately onto Discogs and then onto the spreadsheet I’ve made to my preferred specifications.  Luckily for me, I only purchase 30 or 40 records a year, so this isn’t such a big deal.  If you’re a big collector with a lot of changes in inventory, this could be a major headache.   In addition to editing “year released” on my spreadsheet, I also manually edited the format of my items into basic categories (LPs, CDs and DVDs) and added a genre column (rock/pop, jazz, classical, spoken, humor).  This way I can sort my collection in any way I choose. (A question might be raised as to why I would feel compelled to sort my collection in multiple ways.  Again, it’s all about the illusion of control.)  The spreadsheet also serves as a way to enter albums that Disccogs can’t find – limited releases or self-released CDs that friends of mine have given to me over the years, for example. 

With everything entered, I’ve got upwards of 900 vinyl records and 500 CDs.  That’s a lot for sure, but each item is neatly arranged in the racks I built last spring, and as a result my mild obsession doesn’t seem like such a crazy endeavor.  When my records were stacked in boxes sprawled out on the basement floor, then I wondered if my collecting was getting out of hand.  Now if I ever feel this way, I need only look to a collecting friend of mine who’s amassed more than 5000 records.  Compared to him, my hobby seems downright sane.

Mank, Women and Context

After viewing the new David Fincher film Mank last weekend, I texted this to my buddy:

“The thing that bothered me was the drastic age differential between the men and the women.  I didn’t believe for one second that Mank was in his forties or even in his thirties in the flashbacks.  And his wife looked like she was about 22 years old, so when she talked about them having been married for 20 years, I almost chuckled.”

I may have almost chuckled, but it’s no laughing matter, as highlighted in the Andrea Towers article for The Wrap.  To take nothing away from the fine acting performances of Tuppence Middleton, Lily Collins or Amanda Seyfried, there is a legitimate complaint against Hollywood casting younger women in roles that would be more appropriately acted by older women.  Gary Oldman is thirty years older than Middleton, despite their characters having been the same age in real life.  Why not have Sara Mankowitz played by a 40-something actress?  It harkens back to 1950s Hollywood, when Audrey Hepburn was cast as a love interest alongside actors like Cary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart (ew!), what I imagine was the result of older male casting directors projecting their own desires.  Hollywood may have taken a few steps toward a more egalitarian industry, but it still has a long way to go.

Mank also inspired a discussion with my adult children, and we took opposite sides of the argument.  I argued that while I enjoyed Mank, it was the very helpful to have the context of having seen Citizen Kane and knowing some of the background of the players involved.  My son argued that if you need context to enjoy and understand a movie, then it’s not a good movie; that it fails in its essential role of being a stand-alone piece of art.  Yes, context may enhance a film’s enjoyment and understanding, but it shouldn’t be required.

But I wonder about this.  After all, could one really understand a Civil War drama like Glory without having some knowledge of American history and the role that slavery has played in shaping it?  Or more recently, I wonder how Once Upon a Time in Hollywood played to young people who knew nothing of the Manson murders.  They must have been moderately baffled when the film focused so long on Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, only to have it lead absolutely nowhere.  For me, knowing the real life tragedy had my stomach knotting up at the film’s climax.  For others, it must have seemed like a trifle, a comic thriller.  This perhaps strengthens my son’s argument, because context may have helped the film, but it wasn’t required.  But I have to believe that Tarantino made the film fully expecting his audience to be informed about the Manson murders.

Even non-historical movies benefit from some measure of context, and it’s why cross-dressing comedies like Tootsie or Some Like it Hot might not play as well today as they did at the time.  Or why today John Wayne’s character in The Searchers seems outrageously cruel, though at the time his treatment of an American Indian woman was treated as comedy.  Or circling back to women and how they’ve been portrayed in Hollywood, many comedies of yesterday fall flat today unless you have some acceptance of the more subservient role women played in decades past.

As for Mank, it gets off on its name-dropping moments, and I think without some knowledge of the past the film must be a rather laborious affair. Some of the name-drops are offered more as a wink to a knowing audience than as necessary ingredients to the film’s storytelling, but they tend to unnecessarily muddy the waters. This is in contract to, say, the way music references enhance character in High Fidelity rather than bogging the film down.  Mank falls short for this reason.  It’s a good film.  It is not a great film.