Fuzzy edges

Crappy photo or just vintage?

My folks had a Polaroid Land camera. My grandparents did, too. It was this glorious bit of plastic and chemistry. You clicked the button, pulled the paper tab and waited and you were rewarded with an image.

True, it wasn’t a great image. The colors were off, tending towards yellow-brown. The edges were indistinct, lost in the fade and fog due to the cheap plastic lens that focused the picture.

But it was as close to instant as you could get. You didn’t have to wait weeks for the developer to see that look on Grandma’s face. A few plastic clicks and you had those memories captured in place, ready to be passed around the family reunion with the bucket of chicken and potato salad.

You can probably find one of those old cameras at a yard sale for a buck or two, but I’m not sure you can get old Polaroid film anymore. Not easily, I’d guess. And not inexpensively, either.

But I notice the images themselves are back in vogue. There’s an app for that nowadays. There are a handful  of those Smart Phone filters, for iPhone or Android, that will happily turn those crisp eight-megapixel images into something faded, crappy, yellow and blurred.

It’s a weird thing for me. I just traded up my phone, and it came with a better camera in the back.  I installed one of those filters last night and started snapping old-timey Polaroid shots.

But then, I was looking back at some of the pictures I took with my old phone and the 1.2 megapixel camera it came with. I  realized those pictures were  virtually indistinguishable from the new hi-def pictures from my new phone , once they’d been run through the filter.

Why do I even need the filter? It doesn’t make logical sense to spend more money to get a better product, then install an app to cripple it somehow. What’s next, a Rotary Dial attachment for when I want to make old-timey phone calls?

What is it about this crystal-clear, crisp edged point-in-time that makes us long for foggy lenses and faded color? Is it a misplaced sense of nostalgia, that faded things are somehow cooler? Or is it simply that our tools have gotten fast and powerful enough to easily duplicate that vintage feel?

I don’t know. I’ll keep the filter on my phone because I do like the effect, but I plan to use it sparingly.  I’ll opt for crystal clear more often than not.

Maybe  the best thing about nostalgia is that you can turn it off.  You can visit the past but you don’t have to stay there.

Sausage

Let’s say you own a plot of land. Your neighbor dies and his heirs sell to a local developer.

Now that guy’s bringing a plan forward to turn the land on the other side of your fence into something. Could be a factory or a church or a chicken farm. It doesn’t matter what because it’s going to change your life drastically.

Of course, this local developer knows the process. He knows what forms to fill out and where to sign and what boards he needs to meet with before he can get started. So, it’s no surprise that this guy is halfway to breaking ground before you realize what’s on his mind.

From your perspective, it looks a lot like he getting a special deal and you raise holy hell. A few other neighbors do, too. You write a few letters, meet with a few local officials yourself and do what you can to unravel all that he’s done.

And suddenly, people start to pay attention and what looked like a slam dunk for this guy starts looking much less likely.

Now, from your point of view, it looks like a conspiracy. He greased all the right palms and settled the deal before you knew what happened. The officials must be on his side. “What happened to the public process?” you cry.

The thing is, it looks a lot like a conspiracy from his point of view, too. He’s invested a lot of money and done a lot of work to get to this point. And now, when there’s no turning back, it all starts to look different. It was anything but easy getting to this point, he says, but his  sure thing ain’t so sure anymore. Maybe some people stop returning his calls.  The officials must be on your side, he thinks.

About the only thing both would agree on is that is that something fishy is afoot. And they’d both be right.

It’s the way government works, top to bottom. Nobody is rewarded for doing their work early. Nothing is settled until the last vote is cast and counted and things can change on a dime. I’d gather it was that way in Ancient Greece, with some last-minute Athenian wheeling and dealing. And I guarantee it was that way back in the late 1700s when our Founding Fathers made their deals.

Keep that in mind this week when there’s a debt deal nationally or a zoning deal next door. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just government.

Faulty disk

The very earliest memory I have is one of youthful vandalism.

I’m young, old enough to grip a rock in my wee fist. I can see a car driving past and I do what instinct tells me.  I remember rearing back and throwing the stone at the car.

I also remember my Mom’s reaction.  She jumped up, grabbed me, yelled and swatted my behind.

I asked her about it years later, and she doesn’t remember it at all. I gather it was just one example of my, shall we say, exuberance, at that young age. It was small potatoes for her.

But it was a big deal for me.  She recalls other things, like me trying to jump into some falls at Yellowstone National Park. I have no recollection of that whatsoever.

The rock incident occurred  a year or so later in life than my failed Yellowstone expedition and I figured that was because my brain, such as it is, had developed enough to start saving memories.

I asked my son his earliest memory a couple of years ago and he told me it was something impossible, from the first two months of his life. But he recalled it perfectly.

Here’s why:  He saw the tape. We bought a video camera soon after he was born and started running tape, recording burps and coos and assorted hijinks.

Here’s the thing: He recalls other bits of his life, when his own memories should override everything, more strongly than others because they were reinforced by video evidence. He recalls things from my perspective, from behind the camera, better than he does from his own.

So it’s no surprise: media shapes what we remember. And now, according to an article in this month’s  Science Magazine, the Internet not only shapes what we remember, but the actual mental  mechanism we use to remember. Folks taught  information kept on a computer that is due to be erased recall things better than those told the computer file will be preserved,  forever at their fingertips.

It’s a scary thing, especially in this age of Photoshop and partisan, Wiki-fiable and rewritable media. If our media-formed memories prove stronger than those formed by natural experience, we need to be pretty careful guardians of how those memories get written.