stumbling virtue

Americana

2009-10-27T18:15:57-04:00

Henry Ford's American suburb, transplanted into the depths of the Brazilian jungle.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Henry Ford seemed to know how to do everything better and faster. He built cars that got Americans moving faster than ever before, and he built them in a way that people could afford. Year after year, he was able to increase the number of cars he built while also reducing the number of workers needed to build them. Whatever he tried, worked. Ford was a man who knew he was right, and knew that his way of doing things was the best way, and he saw no reason why those ideas shouldn't apply everywhere to everyone. He was wrong.

In Fordlandia, Greg Grandin tells the story of Ford's misbegotten attempt to build a rubber plantation in Brazil in the late 1920s. This is one of those little pieces of history that can best be described as "rolling disaster," as in people making mistake after mistake at every turn. The choice of site was wrong; the Americans didn't get how to do business in Brazil; Ford didn't hire experts of any sort (botanists, people who knew how to run a plantation, people experienced with working in the Amazon). And of course, the rubber boom in Brazil had ended decades before; the British had realized that they could grow rubber trees on their plantations in Southeast Asia, where a pest that killed the trees in South America didn't exist.

An image that speaks volumes--a Ford stuck in the mud in Fordlandia.

The biggest mistake Ford made, though, was to try to run his Brazilian plantation the exact same way as a car-manufacturing Ford plant in Michigan. This made no sense in Brazil, where people didn't have the same consumerist motivation that Americans had developed. In America, people worked to earn enough money to buy things; making a good daily wage for a steady amount of time made sense because it allowed a person to buy a house, a car, a better house, a better car, more clothes, more toys. But workers in Brazil didn't have those kind of shopping and status dreams. In many parts of the Amazon, food was plentiful, so workers didn't have to struggle for food. The Americans who came to build the rubber plantation and town were dismayed at the initial high turnover of workers who came, worked for a few weeks, bought a few necessities, and then disappeared to go fish or plant crops. The idea of Ford's famous "$5 day" wage meant nothing to the Brazilians.

Along with trying to import the Ford way of doing business, Ford also hoped o import the Ford way of living. Ironically, this didn't mean the fast-moving American lifestyle that Ford had more or less created with his affordable cars, but rather an ideal late nineteenth century/turn of the twentieth century life that was long gone--a life of Main Streets, ice cream socials, and band concerts in the park, where people lived and died in the towns where they were born. This hope led to such follies as building American style houses that were outrageously unsuited for the Brazilian weather, and a ban on alcohol that infuriated pretty much everyone. The Brazilians who moved into the town (often as a job requirement, not because they wanted to) hated the lifestyle. They loathed Ford's demands for planting little picket fence enclosed gardens at their homes, and resented the constant health inspections of themselves, their families, and their houses. They hated the food Ford ordered served in the plantation mess hall (Ford was the worst kind of early twentieth century health nut, who insisted on menus made up of plain brown rice, whole wheat bread, and adventures in soy products); a switch from waiter service to a cafeteria style way of eating (Ford efficiency again) was considered demeaning and led to an epic riot whose violence far outstripped the event that tipped it off. Meanwhile, the Americans who Ford sent to run operations wilted in the heat and suffered enormously from the diseases of the jungle (malaria, yellow fever, etc.). Some went mad; two men who were sent to find a new source of rubber tree seeds went rogue, drinking and spending money wildly, and calling themselves rubber kings; the parallels throughout the venture have more than a passing similarity to Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (translated into "Apocalypse Now" for me).

Ford never saw any of this. He kept promising to visit Fordlandia, but couldn't seem to find the time, or really the inclination, to get there. After his death his family sold the land to the Brazilian government for a fraction of a fraction of what they had spent on the failing enterprise. Pieces of Fordlandia still stand, but it's nothing more than a ghost town.

I finished this book more than two weeks ago and haven't had a chance to write about it until now, so forgive the lack of detail. Or maybe you should be grateful for it, because I hope you are now intrigued enough to go out and read all of Grandin's excellent, well-written book. It is the story of the Fordlandia folly, but is also a fine minibiography of Henry Ford himself. The portrait of Ford is one of a man of good ideas who had a lack of self-awareness, and oddly, for someone who thought he was doing his best by people, seemed to have no human touch. Ford believed that the efficient factories he built were great for workers, but he didn't know when to stop. He didn't see that the efficiency he prized had its limit, and that doubling and tripling production was killing--spiritually and almost physically--his workers. He didn't get understand that people didn't all want to live the way he wanted them to live. It would have puzzled Ford, if he had stopped and listened. He thought that if he said "this is the best way to live, eat, work, decorate, shop," people would be grateful. But human nature doesn't work that way. Everyone gets sick of being bossed around after a while. Ford had theories that made sense in a cold, logical way, but when put into practice and extended to the nth degree, they didn't work. People are slippery and illogical and don't always choose what's best for them--sometimes for good reasons that can't be accounted for by logic. And though one might expect Ford to have been confounded by this, and frustrated by the failure of some of his ideals, he didn't seem to see it. He believed in what he believed, and that was it. While he may have had the imagination and vision to play a huge part in the technological revolutions of the twentieth century, Ford lacked the insight to see the consequences of his actions, and the will to see that what he believed might be wrong.

A fragment of Fordlandia today.

Sunflower Blossoms

2009-10-27T18:09:35-04:00

Oh, and I've also been busy acclimating to life with the charming Miss Sunflower. Yes, you're right, she is incredibly cute. You can tell even in a picture where I could only get her to stay still enough to get one eye.

There Will Be Blood

2009-10-27T18:06:36-04:00

It is just horrible how long it's been since I've written anything here. I've been busy with projects with tough deadlines, and yes, the latest theater project. So, what's that?

Well, now we're on "Titus Andronicus," and this has been by far the most difficult to edit. The style of the play is just very talky, with characters talking about things that happen offstage or explaining their actions (which often need explaining). If you cut too much, you risk making it incomprehensible, but if you don't, well, it gets tedious.

That's the heart of the problem--it's just not a great play. I kept trying to think if there was some theme that I could highlight and edit into sharper focus. But there's really nothing other than bloody revenge for revenge's sake.I think some people like it just for the simple glee of the blood and body parts. I find it a bit tiresome, though, and think most of the characters are pretty stupid. There really isn't a part for me in it, but we found one tiny bit that I could do. Then I found out, while researching the play, that that scene is almost always cut. I felt I couldn't in good conscious say I had made my best effort to edit it without cutting that part, so...for now I'm not actually in anything. We'll see if the director wants to put it back.

New Girl

2009-10-15T20:43:43-04:00

Today it's been one week since Sunflower arrived. Here she is:

The story in brief: I had been checking Petfinders for a while when I first saw the picture of Sunflower. The first thing that attracted me to her was her name; since my last dog was named Marigold, I felt there was the flower name connection that surely must mean something (I swear, I'm not suspicious and scorn things like "signs" or "karma"...most of the time). It turned out, though, that she had a giant hernia and the rescue group was raising money to have it removed. I sent in my contribution and waited. They put up a notice at the end of July that she had had the surgery, but no indication of when she'd be available for adoption. I wanted to wait for her, but continued to check the site and look at other dogs, just in case there was one that seemed extra right.

Sadly, there were so many dogs that needed homes. I wished I could take them all. But a number of the ones I looked at had restrictions from their rescue groups--they couldn't be adopted to a home outside a certain area, they needed a home with a yard, they wanted the dog to go to a home with other dogs. I also knew that I would have a problem if any group called my landlord, but decided I would just push through with either the truth (no matter what my landlord said, I had a legal right to have a dog in this apartment) or a good lie (give my parents address).

I kept hesitating, though, because I wanted to wait for Sunflower. Finally she was ready to be adopted. I put in an application for her, but then didn't hear anything. There was really only one other dog who caught my attention, but everyone told me I shouldn't take him because he had an existing medical problem and needed to be on medication. Their point was that someone in my always precarious financial condition shouldn't take on a dog that had potential to run up big vet bills quickly. Finally,though, I decided I'd at least inquire about him and find out how much his pills cost. But to my surprise, even though I'd only skipped two days of checking Petfinder, he was adopted. I wrote to the rescue group just to be sure, and yes, he was gone. Good for him, bad for me. I was angry at myself for listening to all the naysayers and letting him get away, despite how I really felt.

Then the next day, Sunflower's rescue group contacted me. All I had to do was talk to them and if we seemed like a good match, she was mine. She sounded great to me, so I put down a deposit on her adoption fee. The only problem was that my schedule, my dad's schedule (he had offered to drive me to Connecticut to pick her up), and her "foster mom's" schedule, we had to put off the pick up until early October--the 8th, to be precise.

Little is known about Sunflower's history. The rescue group said she seemed used to living in a home, but was found wandering the streets. No one knows how long she was out there, but they thought she was pretty traumatized by it--and her experience in the noisy town shelter as well. I suspect that when the hernia got really big, her previous people might have felt like they couldn't deal with the medical expense and dumped her.

The foster family and rescue group had warned me that Sunflower could be shy but once she got used to you she adored you. I prepared for her to be standoffish. When we walked in, though, she was ready to be picked up, petted, and give tons of kisses (if you can't deal with a dog licking your face, she's not the dog you want to be around; I'm okay with that, but have been washing my face a lot...). She loves riding in cars, so the ride back to New York was a lot of fun for her (and a great way for her to get used to me, I think). The foster family had said she didn't have a lot of experience walking on a leash, but she took to it like a pro.

Sunflower likes walking a lot--at a very fast pace. She does a lot of very interesting stretches, so she might have been a yoga instructor. She is a picky eater. She enjoys jumping on furniture and climbing steps. Whenever she sees a car by the curb with a door open, she tries to get in. She likes chewing on her toys; sometimes she rolls over on her back and holds her chew toy in her front paws and chews on it that way, which makes her look like a bear cub. In other words, she is ridiculously cute.

It's been hard to get pictures of her. The light in my apartment is terrible, so the flash on my camera phone (the only camera I have, sigh...) goes off whenever I try to take a picture of her inside. The lag on the shutter then gives enough time for her to blink from the flash, so most of the pictures I've tried to take have her with her eyes shut. I got the one above outside yesterday (apparently the last time we can expect to see the sun for a while), as well as the one below. The indoor picture below shows her sleeping on the trunk in my room that she likes to nap on.

So that's the Sunflower story so far--hopefully there will be more to come!

A Muse of Fire

2009-10-04T00:48:22-04:00

Agincourt

Sadly, the play closed last night (that is, a few hours ago). More sadly than usual because I had such a huge personal investment in this one. I worked so hard on the script and it felt like a struggle sometimes to try to get everyone to believe in what we were doing. But I think it all came out well in the end.

I am old enough now that I don't do a show hoping for fame and fortune (though a little fortune wouldn't be unwelcome). Instead, during curtain calls, I find myself looking out at the audience, checking each face, hoping desperately that someday I will see someone who is there just for me. But I am old enough now to know that it is foolish to think of such things.

Motion Pictures

2009-10-02T17:22:31-04:00

A study of a horse in motion, by Eadweard Muybridge's.

Did you ever find yourself lying in bed, late at night, thinking about some odd topic and wondering how you got there? Then you count back, trying to find the steps that linked one thought to another, strange leaps that don't seem naturally aligned but have some tie to each other, until you find where you started. Sometimes writing about history isn't so much about telling a linear story as it is about making connections.

In River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Rebecca Solnit tells the story of the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge (the tortured spelling of his name was his own invention, or re-invention, one might say). For Solnit, though, Muybridge's life and work is really just a jumping off point for meditations on the West and the inventions that propelled America into the age we think of as modern--a time of telephones, phonographs, electric lights, trains, cars, airplanes, and eventually computers and instant worldwide communication through the Internet.

The story of Eadweard Muybridge isn't a bad place to hang all these ideas. Born Edward James Muggeridge in England in 1830, he decided he was meant to seek his fortune in the New World. He made his way to San Francisco and after trying a few different jobs, and a few different spellings of his name, settled on photography and, eventually, Eadweard Muybridge. It took a number of years to get to that name, and in between, he sold his photographs under the name Helios.

One of Muybridge's Yosemite Valley photos.

It was a good time to be in the West and involved in photography. Landscape photography, particularly giant panoramas, were becoming popular, and Muybridge joined the other photographers who tramped out to different locations to try to capture the wild open spaces adored by easterners and Europeans who were already fascinated by the mythology of the West. At that time, photographers used a cumbersome wet plate process to take pictures and developed the photos on the spot, so a veritable entourage of equipment and assistants was required; it wasn't easy by any means. Muybridge achieved some success and showed a flair for the art; he was particularly interested in water, taking photos of rushing falls that came out as solid white on film, and using still pools to reflect and turn upside down lines of trees and rocks.

Moving to America and becoming a photographer was the first major event of Muybridge's life. The next was a stagecoach accident that happened when he was setting out on a trip to photograph Yosemite. Muybridge suffered severe head injuries, and spent the next few years wandering around America and Europe, trying to recover and seeking treatment (he also sued the stagecoach company and won a sum of money from them). The injuries seemed to have affected his personality, causing him to act more moodily, with more extreme moods. But he flourished as a photographer, capturing the attention of ex-California governor and railroad baron Leland Stanford, which led to the next big event of Muybridge's life--a commission from Stanford to photograph one of his prized racehorses in motion, in order to answer a long-argued question about whether while running a horse's four legs were ever all off the ground at once. After some experimentation, Muybridge devised a method of taking photos of the horse, Occident, while running, and found his calling in the field of motion studies (yes, the photos revealed that a horse does, indeed, have all four legs off the ground at once at some points while running).

Muybridge's career was nearly derailed by the next big event in his life--he found out his young wife was having an affair, and came to believe the son she had just borne was fathered by her lover, not Muybridge (this was never actually proven). The photographer immediately went in search of the man in question and shot him point blank. He was put on trial for murder (his legal expenses were footed by Stanford) and was acquitted by reason of justifiable homicide (the lawyers also hedged with an insanity defense, using his head injuries as an excuse for his actions).

Muybridge continued to develop his motion studies. He had a falling out with Stanford over publication of a book about horses in motion, because the author Stanford hired minimized Muybridge's role in the studies, didn't use any of his photographs, and omitted a forward Muybridge wrote. Alienated from his patron, Muybridge took to the lecture circuit, showing his photos on a device he invented, the zoopraxiscope, which rotated the spools of photos rapidly so they appeared to be in motion; it was, in essence, an early motion picture projector. He eventually got a grant to continue his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took many photos of nude humans in motion (including himself--for what it's worth, Muybridge never asked his models to do anything he wouldn't do). Eventually Muybridge moved to England, where he died.

This is all you really need to know about Muybridge, perhaps more than you need. Because, as I've said, it's not the man himself that interests Solnit in "River of Shadows," but his work and how it connects to other things. It's been a week since I finished the book and returned it, so it's hard for me to summarize even a few of Solnit's thoughts, ideas, and digressions. The book makes you think, though, and the main things I thought about as I read were about time and vision. With the latter, Solnit talks about the connection between train travel and motion pictures, that is that the sight of the world rapidly passing by through train windows prepared people for watching images rush by on a screen. I'd never thought about that, but it's wonderful to think about how so many things in the world that don't seem connected actually are.

The idea of how time was affected is more complex and far-reaching. Maybe the best way to say it is that up until about the 19th century, man had no control over time. But a number of things changed that--engines led to trains and steamboats and factories, which all altered time. Trains and steamboats not only compressed travel, but made it predictable. You could say "I am sailing on the 16th and arriving on the 24th," or "My train is arriving at 9:46 a.m.," and it would happen. Additionally, the trains and steamboats carried mail, making communication immediate; the telegraph added to this as well. Not only did distance lapse between family, friends, and lovers, but business now could be conducted more quickly. Meanwhile, photographs manipulated time in a different way--they froze it, creating almost a type of time travel in that it let people see others as they were, place as they were, and those that were gone still there in lifelike form; it's no coincidence that the spiritualists seized on photographs to help sell their scams of communicating with the dead. When Muybridge took photos of animals or people in motion, he made time pause so each action could be taken apart and studied; when he spun out the photos in sequence on his zoopraxiscope, he took control of time and motion, making the horse move slower than it really had, or faster. He showed what had happened in the past to an audience in the present. Time was no longer lost, and no longer controlled by nature. People traveled faster, they worked according to the factory clock, not the sun's clock; they stayed up later and had leisure time, aided by elecric light bulbs. They sent messages which arrived instantly, not in weeks or months. Just as dramatically as human lives had changed when people learned how to control fire, now lives were altered by time, captured, controlled, and manipulated. Railroads, photographs, Muybridge's horse photos, all connected.

"River of Shadows" contains many more interesting mini-essays about a variety of topics, ranging from the mystique of the old West to gender roles (why did Muybridge have women go through different actions than men in his photos). Solnit's writing is less that of a historian's style than that of a poet writing in a room lit by a candle on a rainy night; moody and contemplative rather than linear and even-handed. Sometimes the poetry of her prose got on my nerves, making me feel like, "okay, let's get on with it," but that flaw lies more with me than the author, I'm sure. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in photography, but more especially to those who want to look at history in a different way.

And now off I go, and when I am sitting in the train and it emerges from the tunnel to the elevated tracks and the east side skyline rises over the graffiti marked buildings of Queens, I'll think about the view from each window as an individual photograph, as a moment in a day, a month, a year, that may never be quite the same again, because no moment is the same as another, as photos from one fraction of a second to another show. Something can be frozen forever in a photo, but it cannot ever quite be repeated. Even looking at a photograph, when the picture now become officially a memento of the past, changes it because when we look at it now, from the present, we are changing it by what we know of what was once the future. Nothing can be the same.

Am I making any sense? I'm not. And that's fine today.