This Is Running for Your Life (26 page)

“I am
des-
per-ate,” he announced, watching me. “I am
desperate
 … for some intelligent conversation.” It was a great opener and he knew it. I smiled, setting down my pen, and inquired as to how I had qualified for the job.

“You have no computer,” he said, waving over my belongings. “You have a notebook, and a pen—longhand, that's the way to go.” I laughed by way of agreement. There suddenly seemed an awful lot to laugh about.

“Everybody has a story,” he said with a topic-changing rap of the table. “I'm an alcoholic. What's your story?”

I told him I'd bet there was more to it; he shrugged, then said that he used to be a writer too. Is that so? It is, he said, for a show called
Cheers
—maybe I knew it? I laughed—again—and said maybe I did. After some prodding he recounted the best joke he ever wrote, a slow burn for Sam Malone involving a gas station, nasty cologne, and a botched seduction. The punch line eluded me but I gave it up anyway. He was a Vietnam combat veteran, he mentioned in passing. He used to edit fiction for hire.

“Have you ever tried to write a novel?” he asked, spreading both hands out and dividing the space between them into three with his left one. “I show them what they're doing wrong, almost like a schoolteacher.”

I wanted to know what happened in California; he only grew maudlin about the money Ted Danson had shrugged off for one last season of
Cheers
—a decades-old refusal still at the forefront of all the things he couldn't understand. Patricia Richardson—same thing. And to think, she wasn't even that well known.

“Not much to look at. Nothing up here,” he said, cupping his hands over his chest. “She should have taken the twenty million and run.” He shook his head. Who wouldn't? He talked about Andy Ackerman and David Angell, the
Cheers
producer who was on American Airlines Flight 11: “We lost him.”

My companion went on quickly, with no time for follow-ups, tacking in a new direction when I asked for more detail. He was a gambler—twenty-one and Texas Hold'em, mostly, and followed a show called
Poker at Night
, where a woman—again, not much to look at—had just cleared close to a million dollars. He confused the show's name but remembered the exact number: $930,000. He'd never bet more than eighteen hundred.

From there it was back to comedy. “I'm not a racist,” he said, naming off his favorites—Woody Allen, the Marx Brothers—“but these are all Jews. They're the best at comedy: you just can't beat 'em.”

When a friend at the next table offered a sandwich from the ABC Store across the street, the man squeezed my arm as he stood to leave. I asked his name—still dazed by his absurdly improbable appearance and hoping he might hang around—but couldn't make out his reply. I asked again, and he frowned.

“I'm
fay
-mous!” he sang, shuffling past. “
Everybody
knows me.”

About an hour later, when I rose to leave, the man in the inside-out, oatmeal sweatshirt was too far gone to talk. He had sent his friend back to ABC for more vodka. The bridge game had broken up, small bills were exchanged, parties dispersed. I told him I wanted to say goodbye and thank him for the conversation. Would he give me his name? I don't know why but I was stuck on it.

“What would you want with me?” he asked miserably, propping his head in both hands. “I'm a piece of garbage.” I said it wasn't true and pushed a piece of paper with my e-mail on it in front of him. Again, I don't know why. He'd mentioned having an e-mail address but it was submerged in vodka by then. A young black man watching from two tables over gestured for me to come speak with him. He had heard the city was sending out homeless relief—was I it?

Who winds up in Hawaii? Statistically, it has one of the ten lowest rates of depression in the country. It was named America's happiest state for the third year in a row in 2011, according to something called the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. Statistically, alcohol hospital admissions are trending downward, while methamphetamine use has seen a 20 percent spike. Hawaii is in the top tier of drug users with “unmet treatment needs.” Its rate of patients admitted to the ER with secondary psychiatric problems has doubled in the last fifteen years. These are the numbers.

“You really want to talk to me?” The old man seemed wistful, as though I'd just fanned out Danson's millions. I said I did. What was his name? With his head hanging low, he began grappling blindly with his wallet. I stood puzzled, then pained, by his objective. At length he pulled out a pristine twenty-dollar bill and lifted it into the space between us. I said no—please. No, thank you. I squeezed his arm. And goodbye.

*   *   *

Just to the left of the picnic shelter is the Waikiki strip, ever streaming with tourists carrying ABC bags on their way to their next meal, or purchase, or rest in between those two things. To the right is the beach, where a family of three, a toddler and her parents, were camped for the day. All afternoon a ritual played out: The little girl let out an icy scream each time her father returned her to the ocean, sometimes permitting submersion, sometimes not. Always she reserved the right—between burying her face in his neck and turning to contemplate the waves—to reconsider. You didn't need to hear her cries to know them:
Don't let go of me, Daddy! Daddy—don't let go!
You heard him too:
Button, have I ever?

Beyond the family is shoreline, then a stone breaker. Beyond that are dozens of surfers, small and silhouetted, like penguins riding on personal floes. They wait and wait and intermittently rise up. Finding their footing, they stand like
inukshuks
on the horizon, under a perfect ceiling of cloud. One at a time they crouch and twist with the waves, more than human, bypassing the human altogether. Beyond the surfers are the sailboats, beyond them the warships, and beyond those the thin, levitating line between sea and sky.

 

Pixelation Nation

Photography, Memory, and the Public Image

History is embedded in every inauguration-night image of President Obama, but for me only one says it all. Three years later, the original of this particular image was hard enough to turn up that I briefly wondered if I had imagined it. Cropped for clarity, it would look much the same as what you're envisioning now: Barack and Michelle Obama, the first black president of the United States in the arms of his black wife, smiling and slow dancing as they are serenaded by Beyoncé—the world's foremost pop star, who also happens to be black—on a proscenium that seemed to have lowered from the sky for the occasion. It's a campaign manager's dream, the very picture of hope and change. At last!

It's the uncropped version, though, that vexed me. Granted, the margin of context in the Obama photo I'm talking about has more in common with, say, a moment-killing pan from Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift kissing in
A Place in the Sun
to the nearby grip wiping mayo off his shirtfront than it does the sinister element hidden behind Vanessa Redgrave in that
Blow-Up
shot, or Hitchcock's camera showing us a knife rising behind a soapy, unsuspecting Janet Leigh. And yet, the scene beyond that proscenium seems like a pretty essential clue; without it you get a nicer picture but only half the story.

But then as trained aesthetic consumers we prefer our defining public images well composed and to the point. For instance, were it not similarly cropped for clarity, the most notorious image of the torture perpetrated at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison between 2003 and 2004—of local community leader Ali Shalal Qaissi balancing on a wooden box with his arms outstretched, his fingers wired for electrocution, his head hooded and body draped in black cloth—might have made an even more horrifying impression. Edited out of the shot that inspired its own Banksy stencil and landed on the cover of
The Economist
below the words “Resign, Rumsfeld” is the schlubby outline of
some guy
. Standing in profile, maybe three feet in the foreground and off to the right of the hooded, electrified prisoner,
some guy
is a brush-cut brunet in belted khakis and an olive-green golf shirt. The wedding ring on
some guy
's left hand is poised just above his gently thickened middle, and he's peering down into a digital viewfinder of his own, as though he's just taken a snap of his four-year-old twins posing with Pluto on the Magic Kingdom promenade and wants to make sure everybody's eyes are open.

On the morning after the January 20, 2009, inauguration, I was most struck by an image of the presidential waltz taken from deep in the crowd: Barack and Michelle embrace like lacquered wedding toppers in the middle distance; between our photographer and the first couple stand a phosphorescent crop of cameras, phones, and camera phones, all raised high in a kind of holy gesture of affirmation. The aliens might assume the cameras are part of a blessing ritual, glowing amulets bestowing good luck. That assumption would be close but ultimately too kind. The aliens would probably figure that out when they discovered the same ritual surrounding the fatal beating of a Chicago kid in junior high, or the gang rape of a Vancouver schoolgirl. Or when they got a load of
some guy
scanning his camera's screen while a torture victim teeters nearby.

If cameras were originally used, as Susan Sontag memorably put it, to collect the world, the atomic device known as the digital camera has more of a self-reinforcing quality, sucking a fluid moment in at one end and spritzing its owner with
eau de permanence
out the other. Whether the images are moving or frozen hardly matters anymore. That only a thumb-toggle divides the two introduces a kind of interchangeability; each one can become the other at your command. Especially when they are held out blindly in big crowds, the screens that have replaced the traditional viewfinder appear to function as a kind of second subjectivity, a third eye to cope with a world that is less often collected with any kind of discretion than amassed in daily reality dumps. So that to raise a camera is mostly to remind yourself:
Right now I'm here; I'm here right now.

I suppose it goes without saying that, even as I shook my head over the inauguration-night photo's landscape of pale, Promethean torches, their same periwinkle shadows painted my face. Sitting at my laptop, I wondered what difference it made, when technology offers such persuasive surrogates for seeing the world, whether you experienced that night with the help of a three- or a thirteen-inch screen. After all, that was kind of the point of communication and broadcast technologies—bringing us together, eliminating obstacles of access, equalizing an experience or event. But images like that of the new president and first lady make me wonder at the thoroughness of the job. What difference does it make that I wasn't able to actually witness this historic event when it appears the majority of the people who were there couldn't quite bring themselves to show up.

Is that unfair? Very well then it's unfair. But even if we are to agree that inserting a camera between yourself and your immediate surroundings, or raising that surrogate eye, does not in any way affect the experience of those surroundings—does not swaddle you up in a sense of impartiality, or shift the burden of action—the question remains,
What's the deal with that?
What's the deal, especially at public events inevitably recorded by professional equipment and pinged instantly around the world, with the compulsion to add your funky G3 shooter to the mix? Are trophy pics even possible in a world where all is photographed?

In the digital age, everything survives in an equal perpetuity, so that to experience the world through images is less and less to be rewarded by pleasure or insight and more and more to be afflicted with a kind of hysterical reality blindness. Some claim digital celibacy—we'll call them
liars
—while others end their days with the numbed insensibility of a triage nurse on Flickr's teeming front lines. Even the most cheerful digital creators and consumers are sometimes overcome by the odds of a race between infinite content and their two little eyeballs.

But then getting eyes onto every image is no longer the point. Or at least, a post-Soviet case of inflation has caused any given image's valuation to plummet. Those of us compelled to slog through every one of a friend's seven hundred wedding photos, or each album of a weekend away, need not worry so much about hurt feelings. A complete lack of audience will hardly inhibit a steady upload stream, any more than it stops us from living our lives. For every personal photo disseminated through some form of media, dozens more are the result of pure reflex and languish until giga-space is needed for more like them. The act of shooting, not necessarily its smeared result, is now in many ways the point of photography, which has become more medium than message. I can only imagine that the bulk of the cell-phone videos shot on inauguration night now rest in unvisited digital tombs.

*   *   *

At the 2011 SXSW music, film, and interactive festival in Austin, Texas, the Q&A session that followed the world premiere of a documentary about a crappy year in the life of talk show host Conan O'Brien was lit in part by the audience's hoisted iPhones. The energy of a room changes when this staggered, Lite-Brite wall goes up; we move from audience members to viewers, a seemingly minor but when you think about it kind of massive shift. It is as though—as we so often feel with celebrities and indeed as celebrities often feel themselves—there would be little point to an event that was not photographed. Instead of helping to create a moment, we insert a remove from it; instead of feasting our eyes, we make a formal claim on what they see.

After ninety minutes of listening to Conan O'Brien bellyache about the hardships of high-stakes showbiz, I didn't feel bad for him until he stepped out onto the stage of the Paramount, and a theaterful of journalists and partisan moviegoers lifted their phones in a kind of inverted salute. Tiny images of Conan and his director filled the theater like backward mirror shards; on a screen hovering next to me, he looked much farther away than the Gumby-legged figure a few rows off. Another MPEG to fatten up the old blog, I guess. Another thing that happened, if we still agree to the barest terms. It is considered more accurate and more interesting to say “another thing that happened
to me
.”