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.

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.

Flammable

My roommate was aghast.

Her boyfriend was standing over the kitchen sink, a lighter in one hand and a fistful of non-dairy creamer in the other. He sprinkled the one on top of the open flame from the other and was rewarded with a flash of flame.

She gasped.

“I had no idea that stuff, those chemicals, were in my non-dairy creamer.” She swore off the stuff then and there.  If it burned that easily, imagine what it did to your stomach lining?

Of course, I knew that the increased surface area from the powder made it flammable. It would have worked if he’d used flour or talcum powder or sawdust. It’s the reason why grain silos have been known to explode.

But she didn’t know that. Her boyfriend didn’t either. He just knew a cool trick that would impress people.

It’s kind of the way it is right now with science, news, politics, philosophy and economics. Everybody knows a few good tricks, enough to do the social equivalent of lighting a small fire over the kitchen sink.

But few of us know the underlying facts, theories and science behind those tricks — and therefore what those tricks really mean.

I doubt most people could really explain the science behind allergies or the economic principles that drive the stock market. It’s the age of specialization and everybody knows a lot about our specific areas of expertise, but there is no way we’d be able to know all that there is to know today.

So we rely on experts, or people who claim expertise. The problem is, they are often just regular people who know the cool tricks, and not what’s behind them.

The downside is that it’s easy for people to push concepts or ideas that are not supported by facts. They may not even know the facts themselves, but who’s going to challenge them? Their opponents are mostly just as factually ignorant.

So they spin their versions, myths based on what they fear is happening instead of what is supported by fact, and make a knee-jerk reactions every few years at the ballot box, or daily in the grocery aisle or doctor’s office.