Antarctica XD

A camera, a tripod and a horizon - sounds like the perfect gig ... but at the bottom of the world? That's exactly what a photog known on-line as Xcylox did during a recent two months stint on the Antarctic plateau. There to shoot re-enactments for a British production about polar explorer Douglas Mawson, the Australian crew schlepped a High-Def XDCAM through the sastrugi and spindrift of the open tundra. (Beats stalking the milk and bread aisle when the first fat flake begins to fall.) This being 2007, no expedition is complete without a behind-the-scenes blog - in this case a picture-rich testimonial of the Sony's robust performance. While I haven't slogged my XD across any ice floes lately, I have slung it from Hollywood to Hurricanes to Hair-Net Conventions. But this ain't about me (PFFT!), it's about Xcylox and the gang. Who knows what their footage looked like, but if it's anything like the images on their site, I'm setting my Tivo NOW.

One Burly Journalist

Via News Blues, word of a VeeJay doing it his way. Stanley Roberts was but a KRON photog when the station suits bought into the VJ Principle - you know, the assertion by Michael Rosenblum that TV news outlets should abandon the two person news crew for multi-tasking solo-journalists. Like alot of us, big strapping Stanley was skeptical of the wholesale shift to new age one-man-bands, but - probably fond of his paycheck - stuck around for the ensuing VJ bootcamp. I for one, am rather glad he did. Why? Because Stanely Roberts has clearly found his groove. In doing so he's helped forge a new form of television reportage that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with bubbleheaded bleach blondes. Witness:

In February, Roberts pitched a series to his bosses, street level examples of citizens brazenly defying the law and logic called "People Behaving Badly". They bit, he hit the streets and less than year later his quirky body of work has captured the attention of viewers in San Francisco as well as YouTubers the globe over. Now, this ain't your father's franchise piece. A bit stilted and far from polished, "PBB" focuses on young Americans embroiled in Darwinism at large. 'Think MTV's "Jackass" meets Candid Camera.' is how the surly editor of News Blues so aptly put it - and who'd disagree with him? I won't - even if the uncoventional camera management at hand does nags a my inner cinematographer. But then again, perhaps that's the point.

Talented individuals have been turning news storis all by their lonesome ever since Al Gore's forefathers hammered out the very first test pattern. Rather un-humbly, I count myself a proud member of that solo breed. But it's a much-compressed POV that's kept me at odds with Rosenblum's VJ model. I wish not to trade in my heavy lens for a toy. Neither do I want to watch a newscast comprised solely of magic laptop backpack schmournalists. VJ's - especially seasoned photogs who write and think - can be potent force-multipliers and bring a singular verve to the drabbest of 'casts. Stanley Roberts appears to be just such an example - a hulking lenslinger with an eye for the absurd. "People Behaving Badly" may not be masterpiece theater but it's a (dutch-oven) blast to absorb - especially when compared to the over-teased, toothless dreck that so often passes for broadcast news these days...

Consider me a fan, Stanley.

Book Review: Ship of Ghosts

Spend any amount of time out to sea and you’ll wonder what it’s like to abandon ship. I sure did. In fact I spent a lot more time pondering the implications of a watery horizon than I ever did memorizing surface radar interface manuals. Perhaps that’s why they never offered me SEAL training. That, and I get winded after thirty seconds of treading water. Whatever the demerit, I did leave the Navy with a pronounced appreciation for sailors in peril (plus a bunch of old uniforms I’d never be able to fit into again). Over the years, I’ve maintained a vigilant watch, scanning local bookstore aisles for toppled stacks and sun-bleached survivors. When I ran across Ship of Ghosts the other week, witnesses heard my sonar pinging all the way over in the cookbook section. In the next paragraph, I’ll try to explain why.

A favorite of FDR’s, the cruiser USS Houston was the first flagship of the Allied Forces' Asiatic Fleet. But that very designation made it a doomed vessel, for in the months following Pearl Harbor, the far Pacific was nowhere an American sailor wanted to be. In hostile waters brimming with enemies, the Houston dodged bombs and detection along the Java Coast until a near suicide encounter with the Japanese fleet in the Sundra Strait broke the gleaming warship’s proud back, spilling its crew of old salts and former farm boys into the great briny blue. The lucky ones died quick. Those that managed to escape the wreckage, stay afloat and swim to nearby shore were rewarded for their bravery with years of unthinkable suffering working as slaves on the Burma-Thailand Death Railway - all while a war-weary nation focused on actions a world theater away.

Nautical author James D. Hornfischer does a yeoman’s job of following the Houston sailor’s improbable journey: from their robust crew of a president’s favorite ship to the battle-tested veterans of countless torpedo attacks to the emaciated skeletons of P.O.W. camp atrocity. For most sunken warship books, the unlucky sailors' plummet into The Drink is the end of the line. In Ship of Ghosts, it is only the beginning: the opening salvo in a gauntlet of torture and disease that the corn-fed young men of Roosevelt’s cruiser could hardly grasp as they traded the hellfire of battle for the comparative safety of shark-infested saltwater. A scant few of the Houston sailors ever made it back home. Those that did went about their lives with the trademark resolve of the Greatest Generation, their distant heroics and deprivation a figment of their imagination’s buried past. Few are still with us now, but both their plight and powers of endurance still awe followers of nautical lore - even a flunkie peacetime squid like myself.

Book Review: Manhunt

Where IS John Wilkes Booth? That was the question gripping the nation seconds after the dastardly actor publicly executed Abraham Lincoln. In fact, the .44-caliber ball had barely scrambled the Great Emancipator's brain before Booth staged a hasty and, as always, theatric escape. Dropping from Lincoln's box to the stage, the famed tragedian wheeled on the ankle he'd just broken, declared 'death to all tyrants', and hobbled away to a waiting horse. In his wake, the stunned patrons of Ford's Theater could only reel at this unrehearsed climax - for no American audience had ever before witnessed a Presidential hit. This was more than the deranged act of a famous thespian turned slavery sympathizer, this was assassination as performance art.

Of course, the events of April 14th, 1865 are well known to anyone whose eyes have glazed over in history class. What James L. Swanson does in his book Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, is follow the erudite actor on his speedy journey South - an unplanned trek into the wilderness in which the crippled and cosmopolitan actor was horribly miscast. Swanson paints a vivid picture of Booth and his accomplice ensconsed in the Pine thickets of Maryland as Union Troops thunder past. Later, we watch as the vain dramatist reads pilfered newspapers and recoils at his disastrous reviews. Instead of propelling him to Secessionist superstardom, his murderous deed earns him the hatred of a nation and forever cements Lincoln's status as beloved martyr and liberator.

With 'Manhunt', Swanson provides illuminating details to a story many of us think we know well, probing not only Booth's distorted psyche but also the motivations of those Southerners who chose to help him elude authorities. In the end of course, the asssassin's fellow rebels turn on him, tiring of his pompous demands and promptly locking him in an old tobacco barn. When the cavalry arrives soon after, the results are a farcical back-and-forth round of 19th century negotiations, followed by an impromptu arson and a fatal shot to the head. Defiant, delusional and debonair to the end, John Wilkes booth died like common rabble nonetheless, a grisly fate far removed from the Southern glory he so envisioned for himself. Read 'Manhunt' for the thrill ride, but also for the hundred and forty year old reminder that truth has always been stranger than fiction.

Book Review: Thunderstruck

Ocean travel, emerging media and a salacious murder - three favored themes that have kept me hooked on Thunderstruck since I first laid down cabbage for the hardback. 392 pages later, I'm still glad I did. Why? Because Erik Larson has a knack for exposing the underbelly of history's most seminal moments. He first nailed the formula with Isaac's Storm, then nearly did it again in The Devil in the White City (which I always contended needed a little more Devil and a little less White City). Apparently Larson got my memo, because Thunderstruck is a leaner, meaner weave of global achievement and gutter subterfuge.

The year is 1910 and Guglielmo Marconi's burgeoning wireless technology is anything but a bonafide success. Dogged by rivals, haunted by setbacks and mired in his own self-absorption, the Italian upstart seeks to rule the ether of the Edwardian Age. But despite possessing a technology that strikes many as nothing less than supernatural, Marconi just can't seem to wrangle the imagination of a most fickle public. Enter Dr. Hawley Crippen (and his cross-dressing lover), a most unlikely pair of fugitives whose encounter with a swaggering sea captain and a seemingly magic series of dials and antenna suddenly holds both sides of the Atlantic enthralled. In what could be described as a turn of the century slow speed pursuit, Crippen's capture crystallizes Marconi's strange new invention as a true tool of upheaval, one that could not only send dits and dots across the ocean, but could imprison a killer in thin air.

(3 of 4 Stars.)

Guests of the Ayatollah

So what do you do when a favorite journalist pens a hefty tome on you first political rememberance? You drop some coin for the hardback and savor every syllable. That's what I did with Guests of the Ayatollah, Mark Bowden's 637 page chronicle of the Iran Hostage Crisis. As he did in Killing Pablo and Black Hawk Down, Bowden weaves diverging timelines into rapid-fire situation reports, making the reader feel like a fellow operative on whatever dark exploits he examines. Here, Bowden has much to juggle: the clumsy yet effective takeover of a sleepy embassy by idealistic and often bumbling college students, the decaying mental state of the 66 American staffers caught in a surreal slumber party of deprivation and third world fervor, the seeming paralysis of President Carter to do anything about it, and the foolhardy courage of a young Delta Force - training for a daunting rescue mission that would end in confusion and spilled blood at a place called Desert One. Like the humiliating and protracted stalemate it describes, Guests of the Ayatollah bogs down somewhere in the middle. But all is forgiven at book's end, when the epic tale of America vs. Iran comes to a troubling close. It's the all too probable sequel that worries me.

In Awe of 'Rivethead'

I have a new hero and his name is Ben Hamper. Okay, so I’d never heard of the guy before a few days ago, when I picked up his memoir ’Rivethead’ in a Myrtle Beach bookstore. But 234 pages later, I’m thinking of building a statue to the diminutive author. Why the unseemly adoration? Simple, Hamper has accomplished exactly what I yearn to do: turn his years at (what often feels like) a dead-end job into an enlightening tome for the masses. Admittedly, he had it far rougher than your own whiny lenslinger. The son of a son of a son of a Flint, Michigan autoworker, Hamper reluctantly followed his own lack of ambition into the GM truck factory he grew up hating from afar. Once inside the belly of the beast, he picked up the rivet gun and tried to turn his brain off. But it didn’t work. Everywhere he looked, he saw the casualties of the assembly line: the burn-outs, the moronic management, the soul-sucking repetition of mass production. So he did what any born writer would do, he scribbled intensely between shifts and, when not too heavily intoxicated, punished his typewriter with his prose and pain.

From there Hamper’s path differs from mine, for he gained the attention of hometown heretic Michael Moore - who published his raucous columns in the 'Flint Voice'. This exposure brought him national attention, but he kept driving rivets home for an inflated wage until the constant lay-offs, the alcohol abuse and the suffocating stifle of assembly line existence drove him to the very edge of madness. That part I’d like to skip, but I can certainly identify with Hamper’s unhinged take on a profession that doesn’t make as much sense as perhaps it should. As a reader (and a wannabe author), I cannot help but admire his savage eloquence, his gonzo style and his blistering insistence on telling the truth. Every industry should have a ‘Rivethead’ - and perhaps, just perhaps, a ‘Lenslinger’ as well.

Is that too much to ask?

'Blood Done Sign My Name'

If anyone's wondered why I haven't penned anything too in-depth as of late, place the blame squarely on Timothy B. Tyson. For more than a week the native North Carolinian's masterwork, 'Blood Done Sign My Name' has captivated my imagination, ripped open my soul and made me laugh out loud at more than one Guilford County stoplight. That in itself is a testament to the author's skill, as his source material is far from humorous. When Tyson was but a boy, a white merchant in his adopted hometown of Oxford, N.C. gunned down a young black war veteran in the harsh daylight hours of May 11, 1970. A lackadaisical investigation followed, as did Klan Rallies and Civil Rights marches. Before it was over, several white-owned businesses burned to the ground at the hands of apoplectic African-Americans. Oxford survived the ensuing uproar and the townsfolk quickly went about the business of burying the details of their unpleasant past, (Sound familiar, Greensboro?)

But Tim Tyson didn't forget. Rather, the ugly truth of Henry Marrow's undignified demise forever altered the son of a preacher's 11 year old mind. For years it festered there until, like any good narrative, it became too much for the writer too keep to himself. So, cursed with a book he was born to write, Tyson did the only honorable thing ... he shone the light of truth on every crevice of a complicated tale. When those rays spilled over and illuminated the darker parts of his own family's history, he did not flinch. Instead, he examined the shortcomings of his own enlightened parents and told how even a liberal minister is guilty of the pacifying paternalism many White Southerners still regard as the foundation for proper race relations. Amid all this grisly deconstruction, Tyson does something else unexpected: he entertains, employing a born-raconteur style that this humble blogger can only dream of one day possessing.

Needless to say, I identify heavily with Timothy B. Tyson. Seven years my senior, this fellow outcast of the 'New South' witnessed his destiny in an Eastern North Carolina town barely a hundred miles from the one I begrudgingly grew up in. Though his childhood was far more dramatic (and tragic) than mine, I recognized many of the Southern-fried archetypes he describes: winking, bigoted authority figures that for the longest time made me ashamed to be a white guy from the sticks. Tyson, however, does my breed of thinker proud, by refusing to gloss over the many ways we all fall short of the glory. By doing so, he rights some of the wrongs of our forefathers while making even the most sanctimonious of us re-think opinions we didn't even know we had. Tyson's landmark work is haunting in another way as well. It makes me ashamed that I'm wasting this strange writing compulsion on something as patently vapid, as instantly disposable, as achingly empty as TV News.'Blood Done Sign My Name' is more than a painful chapter of my own region's past. It is a challenge for all would-be writers to dig deeper, until they find a subject matter that sufficiently hurts.

Challenge accepted...