#86,”The Introduction of Motion Pictures” by Jonatham Lethem

March 28, 2010

The invention of film is a murky subject with many claimants from several countries.  For our purposes, we will discuss the American story of film which mostly begins with a photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, who filmed a running horse in a series of photos and later showed off his experiment to Thomas Edison who with the help of a clever assistant, W.K.L. Dickson, produced the “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze,” in 1894.

Edison was more P.T. Barnum than Albert Einstein and that’s no knock.  It probably took someone with a savvy for self-promotion and business acumen to marshall the various forces and make them profitable.  A couple things to note on the way to the formation of the cinema as the technology of the 20th century: Edison thought from the beginning of a way to marry sound to film and he first saw film as a peep show for the individual rather than as a shared experience in the darken room of strangers.

Thoughts:  Just as the American West was losing its frontier status in the early years of the 20th century, film came along to offer a whole imaginary realm for the American story to conquer.  Perhaps coincidence drove the film industry to the far shores of the American West where the sun-baked landscape offered great opportunities for year-round filming but there is more to that story than accident. 

America is an idea, cinema thrives on narrating ideas and California is the premiere land of mythology.  You put those things together and it is no surprise that Hollywood stamped its vision upon the world and still does so today through its ability to funnel huge sums of money into a simple stories that tap basic myths of reinvention carried on the shoulders of attractive people and disseminated through every possible medium in legal and illegal ways around the world.

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#50, “Two years before the Mast” by Kirsten Silva Gruez

February 3, 2010

Fancy pants Richard Dana spent two years at Harvard when his weakened eyesight (really?) made it difficult for him to study so he embarked a journey of self discovery by signing on to a voyage for a couple years.  As a sailor he learned how to furl sails and shed his privileged past.  But he was privileged and it was money that got him out of serving more than his allotted time on the ship. 

His journey took him to Mexican California where he was dubious about the morality and general worth of the residents, questioning their whiteness, believing them to be shiftless and slow, willing to take from the land what it offered them rather than to build it into something monumental.  Two Years before the Mast came out in 1840, eight years before the Gold Rush and yet he captures the sense of California as being the ends of the earth, the end-game of manifest destiny.

Thoughts:  As a native Californian, I’m always intrigued at what people from outside the State think and say about its people.  The stereotype of the flaky, vegan, cultish residents, obsessed with looks and self actualization does exist if not in quite the reductive sense of the stereotype.  Dana didn’t see those people as the “white” people attracted to the State came later, they weren’t the Californios that he saw and derided.  

Our Spanish heritage now more than a century and a half ago remains a strong subtext, found in the place names, the red tiles, the worship of the missions that are sprinkled along most of the California coast.  Is that because Anglo culture never formed its own identity because its people were too busy tending their own self creation to worry about the collective?

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