An entire retail world at my fingertips - but is it worth the cost?

As I walked through a Best Buy this weekend, I was amazed to see how many artists were still represented in their CD department.

Remember those? The five-inch shiny disks we used to buy music on before people under 30 (and some over) started going to the digital convenience of iTunes? Yeah, I thought they were gone, too, but they aren’t. I can remember the last CD I purchased (a Nine Inch Nails album in 2007) like it was yesterday. It was unlike buying something on iTunes, which is convenience itself. I had to drive to the store, walk through said store, use my eyes to find the disc, walk it up to the register, and purchase it. Once I was in the car, I had to unwrap it and manually insert it in the disc player. How exhausting!

While I love the fact that iTunes offers rare and strange things that I would never, ever see on a Best Buy shelf, I wonder if the shift between online and offline retailing is something that truly benefits us. I’m no economist, but it would seem that offline retailing would be more beneficial in the long term, because it requires employees, people to maintain the physical infrastructure, contracts with the people who make the merchandise, people who ship the merchandise – a long chain of economic ties. Online retail, however, requires far less of these – no employees to speak of (or at least not nearly as many as an actual store) fewer shipping needs (as items are likely shipped from a warehouse directly to the customer) no physical infrastructure to build or maintain, greatly-reduced local tax base and so on.

It’s become apparent that technology has changed how we live our lives in ways that unimaginable even several years ago. Who would have thought, for example, that digital camera technology would become so dominant as to render all of the Pro-Ex and Ritz locations an endangered species (taking with them all of the film manufacturing jobs)? Who would have thought that we’d see shrinking CD selections at stores like Best Buy? Who would have thought we'd see formerly-vital video rental locations like Blockbuster Video shuttering stores because it can't compete with RedBox and Netflix? Who would have thought that the U.S. Postal Service, an organization that was formerly seen as a lifetime job, would be posting billions of dollars in losses and shuttering facilities because people don't write letters anymore? Who would have thought that’d we’d see entire large chains like Circuit City fall under the combined weight of Best Buy’s market dominance and the Internet?

If it seems like the so-called economic recovery isn’t apparent, I think part of it has to do with entire industries as we knew them not even a decade ago no longer existing in a meaningful form. Circuit City alone took more than 30,000 jobs with it when is collapsed earlier this year. And if you take away those jobs, there are going to be people spending less money, right? How does this benefit us?

While the Internet has all but turned the retail world on its head, I don’t think it’s something that benefits us long term, much in the way that I don’t think that shipping off many of our entry level manufacturing jobs overseas has done us any favors. No one can stop the inexorable march of technology, but I can’t help but think that there’s a price to be paid in terms of human employment, be it here or elsewhere in the country. Remember, behind every shuttered Ritz Camera and Circuit City facade lingers memories of employees with families to feed that contributed to the local tax base. Can we really say that Amazon or eBay (both of which I happen to love, full disclosure) have that same benefit?

Here’s a glimpse of things to come. When my dad was looking at a dual VCR/DVD player at Best Buy, he asked me to run to Target to price compare. When I came back with the answers, he asked me an interesting question. “Where else could we go to look for these?” We sat there in silence. No easy answer came to mind - at least anything in the physical world that we could drive to. Perhaps this is the future of commerce – sending money to people unseen in places unknown, and then wondering why local retail seems to be withering on the vine.

There is a cost to have this convenience we’ve all come to expect, and whether or not we realize it, it’s something we’re all paying, be it as a customer with few local options or someone who worked in an industry that no longer exists.

My Heart Will Go On-Board the Titanic

From the moment I saw the first pages of the December 1986 issue of National Geographic, the RMS Titanic had me hooked. I talked about the disaster to anyone in my first-grade class who would listen. I read, and re-read, the article to the point of memorization. My biggest Christmas gift next year was a book about the expeditions to find the wreck written by Robert Ballard, the man who was featured in the National Geographic articles. I made Lego Titanics. I was able to draw the ship from memory by age eight, and would tell anyone who would listen that the fourth funnel was actually a fake. I read every singles scrap of information on both the ship and the sinking. For some reason, it spoke to me, even at a young age. It felt, to put it simply, mine.

One of my most prized possessions is an original copy of a 1912 book, “The Sinking of the Titanic and Other Great Sea Disasters,” published mere months after the disaster. I found it when I was 12 in an antique store, and gladly paid the $10 price that guy wanted for it. It shot up in value in 1997, when James Cameron’s “Titanic” created another legion of fans.

While I appreciated the interest, part of me felt jealous in the sharing. Where had you people been, I imagined asking, when I was making sand Titanics on the beach in Door County in 1989? Still, the movie did a lot to bring awareness to the event, even if no one named Rose or Jack had sex in the cargo hold in an act of rebellion against a cruel fiancé. One of the offshoots of the interest created in the movie was the traveling exhibitions that were made available for public viewing across the nation. I attended my second one tonight (the first being in 1999) at the Science Museum of Minnesota. I'm glad I was able to go (it was a birthday present), because any time you can stand next to the salvaged D-Deck gangway door from your icon and look through original window glass, it's a good time. It was a well-produced and informative display, but again, I found my old jealousies coming to a head. As I was standing next to a silhouetted outline of a lifeboat on the floor, I suppressed the urge to grab the person standing next to me and scream, with froth coming out of my mouth, “How many men were used to test these in Southampton before they were put on board? How many?” (The answer: 70). I wanted to bomb the crowd with the trivia that is lodged in my brain, to prove that I was somehow more Titanic than they were.

Still, I thought there were many moving artifacts presented in tasteful displays. What moved me the most was a simple pair of black woolen socks that belonged to someone who had died. They were found in his suitcase, along with a pair of pants and a vest, and brought to the surface years later. They moved me because they were so simple and humble. The man had taken them off to pack them, and died before ever getting a chance to wear them again. It’s tragic, in an infinitesimal way. The Titanic is a rare tragedy. If someone had a traveling exhibition on the Hindenburg, maybe a tenth of the people would show up. If someone had a traveling exhibit on the worst air disaster in history (two 747s colliding at Tenerife, Spain, which killed more than 580 people in 1977) it would be just me, and only if I wasn’t busy that day. No, Titanic is special – special because the people on board had so much time to decide whether or not to attempt to change their fate – to fight against an order of “women and children first;” to fight against an English class system whose raw survival percentages (63 percent of first-class passengers survived; 25 percent of those in third-class did) indicated just who was on top of the pile in life. The sinking is also unique because it took more than two-and-a-half hours for all of this human drama to play out, with all of the emotion and dreadful majesty that the spectacle encompassed.

The sinking wasn't even the only one of its kind in that era. The Empress of Ireland, another White Star liner, sank with more than 1,400 people aboard in May 1914 off the coast of Canada. She took nearly 1,000 of those people to the bottom with her - but most of those people were poor immigrants, and that ship sank in less than 20 minutes, making any sort of memorable dramatic narrative far less memorable than the agonizingly slow death of Titanic. With World War I less than six months away, these deaths would seem paltry in comparison to the millions lost on both sides during a four-year slog through the trench warfare meat grinder.

Towards the end of the exhibit, I saw a placard that explained how the artifacts were preserved, and how “even as you read this,” items still on the sea floor were rotting away due to the passage of time. These items, it said, needed to be preserved because (paraphrasing here) of their historical significance due to the era they represent. I take issue with this claim. It’s one thing to take items from the Titanic simply because you can make a whole hell of a lot of money doing so, but it’s quite another to claim that you are doing it in the name of preserving some era that people really don’t care about anyway. Items from this era are regularly cleaned out of Grandma’s house and given to Goodwill (if they are lucky), or thrown away out right. The only reason that these particular artifacts are worth preserving is because they were on the Titanic, pure and simple. To claim anything else is disingenuous.

I think Robert Ballard had the right idea in wanting to leave the site alone after he found it, to not take anything except photographs. Since 1986, the wreck has become something of a tourist attraction. Countless relic recovery expeditions have been launched to the site, and a couple even got married in a submersible on the wreck in 2001. Any dignity this site once had has been stripped by the same sort of greed and lust that drove men to build the biggest ship in the world in the first place. In its day, Titanic was the latest product of a culture whose sense of cleverness had swelled to the point where they had the nerve to create something and say, in the words of an anonymous deckhand, that “God himself could not sink this ship.” If anything, it reminds me that the same sort of smug satisfaction that we’ve somehow mastered fate through technology is just as alive and well as it was before April 14, 1912, when 50,000 tons of steel and iron began to rot away on the Atlantic seafloor as an unseen reminder of the costs of hubris.Perhaps an exhibition like the one I toured tonight is simply a reminder that time heals all wounds. I can’t imagine that it would have been a big hit had it been done in 1925, when the people who’d been on it and those who’d read about it in the papers were still alive, but now that they are all dead and gone, a new generation is curious and emotionally detached enough from the original event to find interest in it. It makes me wonder if, 90 years from now, my great-great-great grandson will be touring a 9/11 exhibition and yawning in boredom as his father explains that the steel column in front of him came from Tower Two. One irony with Titanic is that sea travelers were safer in the wake of the disaster. Ships of the time, where were getting bigger and bigger as creators designed new ways to build them, only had to carry a small amount of lifeboats. Remember, Titanic had the legal number of boats that was required – it just happened to be enough for 40 percent of the people on board. Also, radios of the time could be turned off, making a distress call pointless if no one was around to hear it. Both of these things changed in the wake of the sinking of Titanic.

The final irony? Had Titanic stayed afloat, she would have only been “the biggest ship in the world” for another month and 10 days. In May 1913, the Hamburg American Line launched the SS Imperator, which was 30 feet longer and 1,600 tons heavier than Titanic. In all likelihood, she would have ended up being sold for scrap, as her sister ship RMS Olympic was in 1934. She would have been forgotten by all except a handful of ship buffs, like yours truly, who also remember the RMS Britannic, the RMS Empress of Ireland, the SS Normandie, and many others who met their end at the end of a scrapper’s torch.

So, as I walked out of the exhibit with my replica third-class coffee mug and a photo of my family and I superimposed against the grand staircase, I felt a bit guilty, like I was an accomplice to being a disaster voyeur. On the other hand, it’s perhaps appropriate to quote a t-shirt which was popular as a form of late-90s backlash to Cameron’s blockbuster movie: “The ship sank. Get over it.”

The haves, have-nots, and state dinners that make me lose my appetite

Usually, the haves and the have-nots are a little more subtle than this, but the evidence on how both are being treated are slapped all across the front page of today’s issue of the Star Tribune.
The bottom story, “Charities trimming turkey dinners,” is about how local charities have cut back on Thanksgiving dinners for poor people in the wake of the current economic state. According to the article, ICA Food Shelf gave 900 turkeys away last year. This year, the number dropped to 430 because of a lack of funds. Next to this article, in a green sidebar on the right side of the paper, a small snippet speaks volumes: “Nearly 1 in 7 parents with grown children say they had a “boomerang kid” move back him in the past year, said a Pew Research Center study. One in seven. That’s a quarter of a grade school classroom living with their parents.
Up higher on this page, in the same column, is a teaser called “A Festive Feast for the Obamas,” which outlines a “lavish outdoor feast” for their first state dinner. Close to 320 people attended the event, which is given more coverage on page A3. When I say “coverage,” I don’t mean, “article.” This is a full-page spread about the menu (created by guest chef Marcus Samuelsson), the entertainment (provided by Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, among others) and the gown Michelle wore (a champagne-colored number by Naeem Khan). The lead paragraph in the story drips with palpable awe and enthusiasm: “Each table for 10 was draped in green apple-colored cloths and napkins, offset by the sparkle of gold-colored flatware and china, including the service and dinner plates from the Eisenhower, Clinton, and George W. Bush settings. Floral arrangements of hydrangeas, roses and sweet peas in plum, purple and fuchsia were meant to evoke India’s state bird.”
This isn’t journalism. This is public relations fluff, and I am ashamed that news services spent the time and money to cobble this pageantry together. This smacks of the trappings of royalty, which, if memory serves, is one of the main reasons we split from the British in the first place. I’m also ashamed at the very fact that such luxury exists when so many are suffering. If George W. Bush had done this, in the midst of a recession, I could foresee calls from various corners saying that he is out of touch with Main Street and the common man (bear in mind, I am no fan of W.). But with the Obamas? It’s all apple-colored cloths and napkins, apparently.
This honeymoon crap needs to stop. The man has been in office for a year now. I for one would like to see an end to this type of fluff coverage. I understand – I get that Barack loves to play golf and basketball. I get that Michelle has an organic garden. I get that the kids love living in the White House. I get it. It’s been pounded into my brain over and over again by PR machinery that rivals the treads of an M-1 battle tank.
I get it – and I’m tired of it. It makes me angry that someone in Obama’s position could be so tone deaf in how this appears to people like me – taxpayers who can barely afford a meal at McDonald’s. I think the right thing to do in this situation would have been to take the money used to buy all of the glitz at that state dinner and donate it to the same food shelves that are trying to feed the have-nots, who don’t have the type of political connections to eat a “mostly vegetarian” meal off the White House finery. I think it would have been appropriate, given the current situation, to have a more restrained meal, perhaps even taking the time to recognize those who are going hungry or relying more on their local food shelves now than ever.
During the Civil War, Lincoln was outraged to find that his wife, Mary Todd, had been remodeling the White House without telling him.
“It would stink in the land,” he said, to ask Congress for more money “when the poor soldiers could not have blankets,” and paid the costs himself rather than approve any more bills for “flub dubs for that damned old house.” (“Did Lincoln own slaves? And other frequently asked questions about Abraham Lincoln” by Gerald J. Prokopiwicz).
It seems that Obama is unwilling even to give up the excesses of a state dinner. Is this the departure from “politics as usual” we were promised? If so, I’m disappointed.

Hanging up.

My finger wavers over the power button, moving closer and closer to turn the device off, but in the end, my cell phone always wins. It never turns off.

I was listening to an interesting NPR commentary this morning from a woman (I didn’t catch her name) saying that she had spent more than $7,000 on a cell phone over the past decade and had never once used it for the sorts of emergency calls (stuck in a ditch, stranded at the airport, etc.) for which they are apparently most useful. The commentary ended with her saying that she was going cold turkey, and shutting the phone off. I wish I had her courage.

I don’t like the thought of being reachable at all times. The simple answer I get to this statement is usually something along the lines of “Well, why don’t you just turn the phone off?” My reply is equally simple: because of voicemail. Even if I shut the phone off, someone could leave a message – a message that I, being the completist that I am, would feel compelled to answer. So, along those lines of thought, shutting the phone off saves me nothing but the ring of the phone. Its obligation is still there. Waiting.

Cell phones have changed us, as this commentary stated. We’ve become ruder, we have shorter attention spans and, perhaps most egregious of all, are more self-centered. I think cell phones are perhaps a prototypical antecedent for why Facebook and Twitter exist. It is communication not for a purpose, but for simple communication’s sake. I don’t really need to tell anyone that I am having a sandwich for lunch, but with modern technology, I can, and, according to media professionals whom I seek to emulate, should. Remember – it’s not what you say, it’s how much you can say it, and in how many platforms.

I don’t want people to be able to reach me at any given time. I don’t want my work to be able to reach me whenever they want. Granted, neither of these things happens very often, let along at odd hours of the night, but they could, and that’s what bothers me. The potential for interruption has become an interruption in itself.

In the end, I think we were all lied to. Cell phones haven’t improved our lives; they’ve simply changed them, in my opinion for the worst. We all buy into the advertising, showing photogenic people talking to their photogenic friends in their photogenic calling circles, and the implication is made that we too could be one of those people – wanted, needed, and reachable for all sorts of fun and excitement. My reality does not jibe with this. If anything, the silence that my cell phone’s lack of activity during its first few days of operation reminded me that nothing had changed, that I was not one of these people – but before, it wasn’t an issue, because there wasn’t a phone not ringing to prove it.

I wish I had this woman’s courage. I wish I had the ability to just chuck this stupid thing in the water where it belongs, and have enough faith in myself and in those who know me that I could still hear something important in a timely manner without this electronic ball and chain. I wish I had the courage to hang up, and really start living in the moment, without the distraction of what might happen when the phone rings, and brings me an electronic stimulus that never fails to make me drop what I am doing in the hopes of some greater reward.

"Old Dogs" has me barking mad

How does John Travolta keep getting work?
For the past week, I’ve been assaulted with previews of his latest movie, “Old Dogs,” which seems to be a variation of “Wild Hogs,” his 2007 comedic outing, only without motorcycles. Let’s hear the plot of this sure-fire Oscar winner: “Two friends and business partners find their lives turned upside down when strange circumstances lead to them being placed in the care of 7-year-old twins.” I can almost imagine the pitch at whatever board meeting green-lit this cinematic turd: “It’s Robin Williams! AND John Travolta! WITH TWINS!”
Everything about this movie, judging from the preview, smacks of bland inoffensiveness. Let’s face it: Robin Williams isn’t Robin Williams without being coked to the gills, and Travolta isn’t Travolta without disco music or witty Quentin Tarantino dialogue. These two have made so many insulting movies during the past decade (Travolta: “Swordfish,” “Wild Hogs,” “Battlefield Earth;” Williams: “Bicentennial Man,” “License to Wed,” “A.I.”) that they gone totally beyond the pale of what passes for acceptable Hollywood conduct. Have our standards fallen so low that these two has-beens can keep cranking out clunker after clunker and still find work?
Oh, I can hear the screams already. “Robin Williams is funny!” Yes, Robin Williams CAN be funny. I admit that. I loved “Death to Smootchy.” But he’s guilty of at least this much: it seems he will do any movie, no matter how terrible, for a paycheck. He’s become a comedic Robert DeNiro, turning in performance after performance of the same shtick. He’s almost become a parody of himself. Travolta is much the same. “Pulp Fiction” brought him back into the mainstream as a legitimate star, and ever since, he’s proven that the comeback he earned with that performance was a fluke. Come to think of it, these two belong together: Mork from Ork and Vinnie Barbarino, lighting up the silver screen. That’s right, folks – the 1970s never ended.
Watching the preview for “Old Dogs” is so painful that the only humorous item I find in it is that the movie itself will probably do OK in the box office, given that there is a relative scarcity of movies that both adults and kids can see and not be completely bored to death. If anything, it’s evidence that movies marketed to appeal to more than one age group have a higher failure rate than those aimed at a specific audience. I wonder what this film’s investors were thinking. If I were them, I would have sunk my money into a safer bet, like a direct-to-DVD “National Lampoon” movie loaded with innuendo. It’s a sure-fire moneymaker.
As a new parent, I have accepted the fact that I will more than likely have to sit through at least one variation of “Old Dogs” in my parenting lifetime. You’ll be able to recognize me pretty quickly: I’ll be the guy in the front row with duct tape over my mouth and steam coming out of my ears, boiling over at the fact that I can pay nearly $10 per ticket and this is the best that Hollywood can give me.

When someone great is gone

As my wife’s relatives sat around a dining room table and discussed what to include in her grandfather’s obituary, I looked down to see a copy of the days newspaper open to that particular page. It was a mixture of tiny text and smaller photos of happy-looking people, gazing out to the world with all of the wonder and delight their faces could muster. It was, I thought, the end result of the discussion the relatives were having at that particular moment.
It had been a good day up until I got the message. The sun was out, the winds were warm, and I faced the prospect of a birthday party that night for all of the family members who were having birthdays in November. I knew that Julian, my wife’s grandfather, would not be there that night, but from what we’d heard, the knee surgery he’d undergone earlier in the week had proceeded smoothly. After getting home from church and laying my daughter down for a nap, I happened to look at my phone. I saw there was a message.
“Hi, Joe, this is Kitty (my wife’s aunt). I’m sure you’ve already heard, but Julian passed away this morning…”
The November birthday party was still on, she assured me, because we’d all need to convene and figure out what we’d do regarding the funeral arrangements. I saved the message, and put the phone down. The silence in the house was startling. My wife, whom I presumed did not know about her grandfather passing away, was at dance rehearsals. I called her several times, and finally told her the bad news.
I never realized this before, but every single obituary on a typical newspaper page is a product of the same resonating bad news. It starts at a main source, and spreads like a ripple in the family waters, reaching ever-distant shores, inspiring the same reactions of sadness and disbelief. It’s also a reminder of our own precious mortality, which never seems as vital or fleeting as it does when someone who was always there before now isn’t.
I wasn’t terribly close to Julian, but I knew him well enough to say that he had a long and fruitful life. In fact, many of the people on the obituary page seemed to have had that much in common. As a writer, it raises a serious question: how do you summarize someone’s life, with all of its joys, slings and arrows, in a single paragraph? It seems an impossible task – yet it is done hundreds of thousands of times every day.
I will never look at the obituary page the same way again.

“The worst is all the lovely weather,
I'm stunned, it's not raining.
The coffee isn't even bitter,
Because, what's the difference?
There's all the work that needs to be done,
It's late, for revision.
There's all the time and all the planning,
And songs, to be finished.”

-LCD Soundsystem, “Someone Great”