The Day We Freaked in Reno and Lake Tahoe

When Lea and I planed our excursion up the Pacific Coast of North America we also made plans to go to Yosemite National Park. We learned from our guide books that one not only should one but must reserve a tent campsite in the park given how many tourists come to the park even in April, which is when we planned to be there.

So, we made a four day reservation for a tent camping site in Yosemite and headed north. These four days determined our entire excursion in California and the Pacific Northwest. 

On our way away from the Pacific coast we decided to stop at Lava Beds National Monument which we could only reach by going through Oregon, We were only one of two campers in the campsite the two evenings we spent there. After awakening on the next morning we hiked one of the lava tubes that the national monument is famous for. In these tubes one hikes in total darkness.Despite this we only hit our heads twice, as I recall, as we felt our way along the walls of the lava tube from one cave to another. Thankfully we wore the hard hats which the rangers had provided to us in preparation for the hike.

After leaving Lava Beds we backtracked through Oregon and headed for Reno, Nevada. There we, much in need of a respite from tenting, stayed for four days in Circus Circus enjoying the hot tub, the television, and the cheap food that Reno, like Vegas, was then famous for. On one of our days in Reno we drove up to—and I mean drove up to--Lake Tahoe driving completely around the lake. It was, to say the least breathtaking. We had hoped to do some skiing but the temperature at the time we were there in April was in the 90s so skiing was inadvisable if not impossible.

Back in Reno we prepared to head to Yosemite. The we learned to our horror that the roads in from the Nevada side were closed during the winter months and April was considered a winter month. We panicked as we had to be in Yosemite the next day by, if memory serves, 6 pm or our campsite was first come first serve for others. Frantically we headed across the snowy Donner Pass to Sacramento then to Yosemite. We got there with a half hour to spare. We claimed our camp site noticing those waiting and hoping that those who made reservations, like us, would not show so they could claim an open tent site.

We, of course, did the usual things those who go to Yosemite do. We went to the lodge. We went to Hetch Hetchy whose beauty had been sadly destroyed to provide water for water hungry human animals in San Francisco. We took in the marvel that was El Capitan. We hiked along the river feeling its enveloping mist as we did. And we hiked up the 823 metres or 2700 feet of Yosemite Falls. 

As we hiked the Falls out of Yosemite Valley we had never seen so many people on the trail during our various journeys across the Canadian and US Wests. It was as if we were, and paradoxically so, at the mall since, as one ranger told us while we were at Glacier National Park in Montana, people will walk for miles in a mall—one of the temples of capitalist consumerism—but not in the great outdoors. In Yosemite, at least, they were hiking for the moment outdoors. By the time we reached the table where the falls fell and then fell again, however, most of those hiking the Yosemite Falls Trail had disappeared  hiking down the trail instead of hiking all the way up it. We were overjoyed to be away from the maddening halfway covenant crowd.

Truth be told, it was a difficult hike for Lea and me. This was in the days before I was treated for my asthma with Advair and Singulair and both of us, despite having hiked for months, had to stop a few times and catch our breath, resting for a half hour or so before beginning the hike up the mountain again. We were not the only ones having problems. We noticed a man in military fatigues who was in slow motion heavy breathing mode. There were other hikers, however, who made us feel deeply inadequate. Several young children, for example, seemed to have no problem hiking, nay running, up while a marathon runner in training passed us twice as we hiked up, once as he was on the way up the mountain and once as he was on the way down.

We finally reached the top and immediately went to where the falls fell off the mountain. We laid down on the pier at the top that stretched out to where the falls fell and watched the water fall. It was an amazing experience, an experience almost of free flight.

After we left Yosemite we went to nearby Kings Canyon National Park and Sequoia National Park.  The weather remained absolutely gorgeous.There was hardly anyone at either campsite. At the Kings Canyon campground one of the RV campers made biscuits/cookies for everyone in the campground bringing them to each tent or RV. We were so happy and they tasted so good. We met an Australian couple who were taking their one year vacation to travel across the US and Canada. We saw a couple travelling in an RV having trouble negotiating the roads in and out of the campground. We saw an RV break down and have to be towed out by a wrecker. The things one sees when camping!

 

The Day I Whirlpooled in Niagara Falls Ontario

 

I don’t remember precisely when it was anymore. It was, I am sure, sometime in the early mid-1990s. I was doing postgraduate work at university and borrowed a friend’s car—she called it the Beast—and drove down to Niagara Falls, Ontario to camp with my son Alan, who was still in his teens, and his mum, Rachel. 

Rachel, who had lived in India for a time, made us a very tasty meal of Indian—which region I don’t recall—for dinner that first night. I love Indian cuisine. The next day we did the usual things everyone does in Niagara Falls. We drove through the city taking in the touristy sites. We went to the Falls. We took a ride on the Maid of the Mist and got misty. We had a meal in a beautiful landscaped local park. We went to the Niagara River Whirlpool. 

At the Whirlpool we hiked down the trail and onto the rocky beach of this geological wonder and marvel where the water spins like a whirlpool. For some reason I decided that I wanted to feel what it was like to be whirlpooled by the river though it was probably illegal and certainly moronic. So I got into the river, grabbed on to the rocks and soil of its bottom and let my body move with that of the water. It was an amazing experience. Alain and Rachel eventually came in to the water as well though I don’t remember if they followed my idiotic example or not.

I paid for my stupidity later, however. For about a week my asthma acted up and my breathing was laboured. Was it the chemical bath? I did eventually recover living to tell the tale of the day I whirlpooled in the Niagara River near Niagara Falls, Ontario.

The Day I Was Surrounded by the Russian Navy

 

In 1997 I visited post-USSR Moscow for the first time. I was visiting relatives something that helped me cut through and around a lot of the red tape of getting a visa and getting official residency in the Russian capital.

I flew to Moscow via Aeroflot. I left JFK Aeroport in the morning and arrived in Moscow around 8 in the morning the next day. One of my relatives met me at Sheremetyevo Aeroport northeast of Moscow. I had packed lightly, carrying only two bags with me which I could put in the overhead and as a result got through customs and past the militsiya pretty quickly an with no problem. Tanya, my relative, and I left the aeroport, hoped a bus to a metro stop, and eventually made our way to her home near the Universitet metro station and near Leninsky Prospekt. I felt so good I didn’t need go to bed so me and my relative headed to a nearby park near the German Embassy.

I did finally go to bed, but at the normal time, and woke up feeling great the next morning. During my several months in Moscow I did the usual things. My bowels got messed up. I visited the museums. I went to the Kremlin. I went to Kolomenskoye, one of my favourite places in the city, lounging in the old orchard and watching the Moscow River flow. I went to Gorky Park via the embankment across from Luzhniki and did not have to pay as a result of going in the back way. I did the Mikhail Bulgakov tour visiting the Patriarch Ponds, Bulgakov’s model for Master’s house near the Arbat, the Sparrow or Lenin Hills, and the flat where Bulgakov lived which was covered with Master and Margarita graffiti from the bottom storey to the top. I visited the marvellous Mayakovsky Museum. I walked past the Lubyanka several times. I walked the French like boulevards of Moscow often making my way to Chistye Prudy to have a sit down, always making sure I went there by the street with Dunkin’ Donuts on it in just case I needed to use the wash room or water closet. I went to food and goods markets. I went to the USSR exhibition grounds. I saw the impotent’s dream. I went to Novodevichy and wondered about the cemetery finding Yesenstein’s, Oistrakh’s, and Bulgakov’s graves. I visited my relatives dacha east of Moscow near where the Soviet military stopped the German advance and picked fruit to put up for the fall. I went to hordes of churches which seemed to be on every block in the city. I visited the Choral Synagogue and went in after winding my way though those begging for alms out in front. And I went to bookstores, lots of bookstores.

There were some great English language bookstores in Moscow when I lived there. There was the famous one on Kuznetsky Most. There was Shakespeare and Company somewhere in, if memory serves, the south part of the capital. There was another one near Shakespeare and Company, if memory serves. There was one near the Arbat and the Master’s House. And there was one near the circle line in the south of the city. 

One Saturday in July I decided to go to the bookstore near the circle line. It was a beautiful day in Moscow, sunny and somewhere in the 70s, a lot like many other summer days in the capital. Generally the usually busy circle line was not that busy on Saturdays. What I did not realise until I got off the subway at a metro station I recall as having frescoes or icons of Soviet glory days. As I was walking through the station I was fascinated by the fact that you could clearly see the indebtedness of Soviet era heroic art to Orthodox Christian heroic art of earlier day.

After I exited the stations it very quickly became clear that it was Navy Day. Soon I was “surrounded by Russian sailors clearly having a good time on leave in Moscow. At first I was a bit scared. Booze, the military, out having fun, hey what could go wrong with that? Very quickly, however, my fears were allayed. The sailors were, and in retrospect not surprisingly so, in a very good mood. One of them asked me what I was up to and I told them I was heading to a nearby bookstore. They split from me almost immediately feeling, I suppose, that they could find a much better time elsewhere than with boring old me who could barely speak Russian in the first place.

The Day I Broke My Ribs in the Black Hills of South Dakota

 

After Lea and I left British Columbia we travelled to Rapid City, South Dakota. Lea had taken a short term gig with the Indian Health Service in Rapid which is why we went there to live for three months.

I had met Lea Danielsen in Salt Lake City. She, an Athens, Georgia girl whose father taught economics at the University of Georgia and who had converted to Southern redneckism which he now evangelised to high heaven, was doing a stint--I think it was a three month stint--with a health care corporation that placed doctors in positions around the US in Salt Lake. I was living an hour or so south of Salt Lake in Provo studying, researching, and teaching a class on social stratification at Brigham Young University.

I liked living in Provo—at 319 east and 100 north in Provo to be precise. I lived in a small studio apartment in the back of the two storey house. It was a short walk up to BYU, the Y, to the Sociology Department where I spent a lot of time. I also worked part-time and later full-time at Walt West Books on Columbia near the Desert Industries in Provo with the wonderful Walt West. It was one of the best used bookstores I have ever been in, and visited bookstores in Orem and Salt Lake.

For someone like me who was interested in American Christianity, American Protestantism, and Mormonism, the Y was a very stimulating intellectual environment. It was also a pleasant place to teach. One doesn’t go to BYU to party. One goes there to study. Several of the students I met and taught at the Y were as good as any of the best students at the University of Cambridge or the University of Toronto. One of the students I met—Cari Peterson (or was it Petersen?)—for example, knew Dutch, German, and Russian and she was only an undergraduate. She later went on to postgraduate work in German history at Indiana University in Bloomington. It was also a great place to learn about and research Mormonism, which was one of my favourite things to do at the time.

But back to meeting Lea, I met her when my friend Alan Avens, knowing my interest in American religions, “persuaded" me to go up to a Baha’i group meeting in Salt Lake. Lea was a Baha’i, a member of a fundamentalist, literalist, misogynist, and homophobic new religion that originated in Iran in the nineteenth century. I think Alan had met Lea earlier and thought that she and I would hit it off. And we did despite the fact that I was an atheist, something that would inevitably cause some friction between us as we travelled across the US and Canadian Wests.

Meeting Lea did for me what I suspect I did for her; we wanted to camp and hike but we didn’t want to do it alone. Soon she was visiting me in Provo and we were camping and hiking together. We, for example, spent a long weekend doing both at Arches National Park in Moab, Utah.

When Lea’s gig with the health corporation ended in Salt Lake and I decided to leave BYU, the more fundamentalist aspects of the university—the Y is this fascinating mix of fundamentalist religion and liberalism, religion and secular—didn’t sit well with me, we met up in Phoenix where Lea was doing a short stint in an Indian Health Service facility south of Phoenix. I had just written two editorials decrying the lack of free speech at the Y and thought it wise to get out of town. There we planned out what we were going to do next. We decided to drive from Utah to Grand Teton and Yellowstone and on to wider camping and hiking opportunities further north.

When we left Yellowstone we drove, after a several hour delay delay thanks to a 1 September parade in Gardiner, Montana, to Glacier National Park via US 89, a highway that winds its way through some of the most beautiful scenery in the US including the Grand Canyon, the Glen Canyon, Zion’s National Park, Provo Canyon, Cache Valley, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Grand Teton National Park, the Lewis and Clark National Forest, and finally Glacier. 

The delay in Gardiner proved to be a problem. Before we got there it turned dark, rainy, and foggy and I was stressed driving along a road that curved from left to right and back again and back again. I was doing all the driving because Lea couldn’t drive a shift and my Camaro was a stick. When we reached Glacier Lea and I had to set up our tent in the dark and in the rain with the limited help of a torch or flashlight. Both of us thanks to the stresses we were under—stresses so intense that my back and neck were throbbing with pain as I drove to Glacier—threatened, thanks to the anger we felt toward each other and the recriminations we tossed back and forth, to break off our camping and hiking sojourn at the top of our voices. By morning, however, we had calmed down and our journeys were back on. Familiarity does indeed breed contempt but it also breeds companionship and friendship, even if, in the long run, sometimes only limitedly so.

After Glacier we crossed into Canada after we were detained by a border agent at the crossing because I had mace that my mother gave me because she feared me driving across the US in my car and mace was persona non grata in Canada. We eventually went, as those of you who have been reading these memoirs know already, to Waterton Lakes National Park, Edmonton, Jasper National Park, Yoho National Park, Banff National Park, Kootenay National Park, and Cranbrook, British Columbia. Eventually we crossed back into the US and headed to Rapid City.

The health care corporation that Lea worked for and which gotten her the short term gig in the Indian Health Service Hospital in Rapid set us up initially at the historic Alex Johnson hotel in downtown Rapid City. From this base we hiked in the South Dakota Badlands, the only place we ever ran out of water during one of our many hikes, visited the famous Wall Drugs in Wall, went to Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial, went to look at the bison in Custer National Park, went to Deadwood, hiked one of the trails that circled around the Devil’s Tower National Monument in nearby Wyoming, where we saw four bald eagles and one human, got to experience the joys of hog heaven days in Sturgis, South Dakota and hiked the Black Hills. Additionally, I experienced the joys of getting into La Trobe University in greater Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and the University of Toronto, my dream school, for post-graduate studies

There are two hikes in particular that I remember Lea and I doing in the Black Hills. It was a beautiful November day in Rapid. It may have been somewhat overcast but the temperature was 10 degrees (mid-50s F). We thus decided on the spur of the moment, to head into the Black Hills to hike. Our first hike took us across and around boulders as we descended into a gorge. At the bottom of the decline I led the way across what looked like snow. It was actually ice. Upon stepping on it I almost immediately fell, got up, fell again, got up again, and fell again. When I got up for the third time I was in pain. Doctor Lea diagnosed my injury, broken ribs which there. Always ready, Lea wrapped a fabric bandage around my ribs and we, as we had to, hiked on. 

It was not the first time I had been injured while camping and hiking. Somewhere—was it in Canada or perhaps in the Redwoods parks north of the beautiful Arcata California?—my eye was scratched by a tree branch while Lea and I were out hiking. It was incredibly uncomfortable experience thanks to the fact that my eye—I think it was my right eye—would not stop watering or blinking. Thankfully, Doctor Lea made me an eye patch and put it on me. Within a few days I was back to “normal”, as “normal”, that is, as an always outsider like myself can get.

After finishing the hike Lea and I decided to hike up the highest peak in the Black Hills, Harney Peak (now Black Elk Peak) and its over 2200 metres or over 7000 feet. The hike was amazing. It was snowing those incredible large snowflakes. The sky bathed the green, brown, and black pines and the brown mountain in purple. There was only one other person on the trail—he was coming down as we were going up.The snow kept rising and rising. It was magical. We returned to Rapid happy if rather worn and me in pain.

The corporation that Lea worked for decided to transfer us into a new hotel later during our stay in Rapid City. In our new hotel we were given an apartment with three upstairs bedrooms, a downstairs kitchen, and a living room complete with television on which I watched the uncensored version of one of the best television shows I have ever seen, Tales of the City, on PBS. 

Eventually, Lea’s contract with the Rapid City Indian Health Service ended and we hit the road again. This time we were off to Winslow, Arizona. Lea flew and I drove down via Utah, where I spent a night in the Roberts Hotel, the same hotel I had stayed in when I arrived in Provo to look for a flat. On the way down to Winslow I listened to my Dallas Cowboys beat the Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl on the radio. 

Before I forget I should tell you, dear readers, that Lea and I did stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. We didn’t, however, see any flat-bed Ford or beautiful young lass slowing down to take a look at us. We were really happy, though, that Flagstaff was just an hour away.

The Night I Was Almost Scared to Death by Wild Pigs on Santa Catalina Island

Lea and I had been living in Winslow, Arizona for several months. The reason was simple. Lea was an MD, a medical doctor, and she would take periodic short terms gigs with the Indian Health Service in between our various camping and hiking sojourns. A few months of rest and increased income was a nice punctuation in between our long and primitive sojourns in various forays into the “wilderness”.

When Lea’s contract was up with the Indian Health Service hospital in Winslow, the base from which we took excursions into Flagstaff, Sedona, and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, we decided to head for California. Our plan was to drive up the west coast from San Diego to Vancouver, British Columbia. We drove down to the misnamed Montezuma Castle National Monument, headed across Arizona on 260 and 85A to the old mining town of Jericho and Prescott. Finally, we got on Interstate 10 and headed through the gates into golden California.

We had hoped to make it to Joshua tree National Park before nightfall but it grew dark and we were tired. We stopped for petrol in Desert Center where the attendant told us that we could pitch our tent for the night. The next day we drove to Joshua Tree and set up camp. After staying for a couple of days we left. It was more of a rock climbing park then we expected and we were not rock climbers or even interested in rock climbing. We drove through San Bernardino picking up some food, including several large bags of pistachios,  at a Walmart along the way. Next we drove down to Palm Springs. Eventually we ended up at Lake Perris State Recreational Area near Riverside where we pitched our tent for the night.

The next day we headed into Los Angeles. Our plan was to go to Santa Catalina for four days of tenting and hiking before we headed south to San Diego. We drove to Long Beach without a hitch—traffic was light by California standards and along the way we saw the ruins brought by the earthquake of 1989--and caught the ferry over to Santa Catalina. After arriving in Avalon, Catalina’s major city, we walked up the valley past the old Chicago Cubs spring practise baseball field and past the school and pitched our our tent in a nearby campground. We were one of only two campers there. The other was a graduate Social Anthropology student from one of the colleges of the University of London. When we checked in we were immediately warned about the wild pigs that came out at night and how “mean” they were.

We had no idea how scary Santa Catalina’s wild pigs were until we went to bed that first evening on the island. Around midnight we heard them scavenging around our tent. We were so afraid of them—they sounded fierce—that we didn’t get out of the tent until morning. Thankfully, I was still in my forties and my plumbing was consequently in good shape. Of course, there was also the empty bottle method that could be used in a pinch.

The first hike we did on Santa Catalina was up a 2000 plus mountain to the west of the campsite. We were told that on a clear day you could see Long Beach and Los Angeles from the top. We were not able to see either when we got to the top of the mountain but we could not have care in the least. The views of that part of the island were spectacular. 

Also at the top of the mountain was a road along which the electric golf cart vehicles for which Catalina is famous for sometimes ran. Autos were largely verboten on the island at the time. We turned east toward Avalon and within a few hours was back in Santa Catalina’s largest “city”. On the way down we passed the famous Santa Catalina casino. Ahead of us while still descending we saw the Catalina desalinisation plant. As soon as we got to Avalon’s city centre we stopped into a great and inexpensive Mexican restaurant where we ate on several occasions during our stay on the island and got some of their excellent burritos.

We hated to leave Catalina with its wonderful weather and incredible scenery but we had to. Lea made plans to attend a medical conference at the Hotel Del on Coronado Island in San Diego. So we got the ferry back to Long Beach, got into the Camaro, and drove south to San Diego.

 
 

The Day I Almost Got Attacked by an Elk

 

In the early hours of the evening Lea and I turned off the Trans-Canada Highway, crossed the Bow River, and entered Banff, which had only become a self-governing town in the early 1990s. We drove through the city centre noticing as we drove that it was “larger” and busier than many of the places we had recently been in our sojourns though the Canadian Rockies. 

After driving through the city centre we went to the campground—it must have been Tunnel Mountain Campground 1 near the Bow River Hoodoos--and picked out a spot to pitch our tent. It turned out to be easier than we thought it might be to find a nice camping spot acceptable to us both—we generally spent a lot of time picking out a camping spot we both liked generally for scenic reasons—because of all the touristy human traffic we saw in Banff town. Most of the tourists—many of whom were Japanese tourists ensconced in what looked like relatively sumptuous busses--in Banff were not, we quickly deduced, living in a tent in September like us.

After we set up camp we headed back to the city centre to the grocery we saw on the way in in order to get some food to eat for our planned four day stay in Banff National Park. The grocery store surprised us in several ways. It was bigger and had a lot more food, including fresh food, to offer than what we had recently been used to and it was “reasonable” in cost compared to what we had recently been used to.

Back at the campsite we started a fire, ate, and went to bed. The next morning we did what we always did; we planned out a daily hike. We had a wonderful book on the best hikes in the Canadian Rockies which had been helping us do this since we entered the Canadian Rockies at Jasper National Park and whose advice we almost always followed. It never let us down in all our journeys. The hike we chose took us through meadows, pine trees, and eventually to the famous Banff Springs Chateau, one of the chateaus built across Canada by the Canadian Pacific Railroad (but now and then owned by an American company, a fitting microcosm for Canada’s client state economic reality) to stimulate tourism—this one near the hot springs of Banff-- and a picture of which always seems to adorn almost every promo for Banff I have ever seen in my life. Like everyone else who comes to Banff, I suppose, we wanted to see the chateau too.

So we started our hike to the chateau. There was no humans on the trial when we began. There were critters, however. Lots of them. Everywhere. As we rounded a curve in the trail we came upon a rather large female elk and her baby calf grazing right next to the trail. We stopped dead in our tracks and contemplated what we should do next. We knew that we did not want to walk right up to the elk. That might prove hazardous to human health we surmised. We wondered whether we should turn back given the counsel we had received many times and what we knew about large animal and small human interactions. After several minutes of discussion we decided that we would take a large arc to our left around the elk so as not to disturb them. 

I went first. I took a wide half circle around the elk mother and her calf and stopped on the trail to wait for Lea. Then Lea started. I noticed almost immediately that the mother elk looked almost quizzically directly at me. Then she started to come at me at a brisk gallop. I had no idea what to do. For some reason I yelled “stop". The elk stopped, gave me another look, and came at me again. Figuring I had nothing to lose I yelled “stop" again. The elk mother stopped and returned to her calf. I had survived injury or death to live another camping and hiking day.

Lea, who had stopped walking her half moon arc when the elk came at me, resumed her half circle walk and met me on the trail. We laughed about what happened and about the absurdity of it all. As we walked on we came across a Banff resident who had grocery sacks in her arms after having hiked to the grocery. She was making her way back home. We told her about the elks on the trail. She immediately turned back.

Happy to have escaped possible injury Lea and I hiked on to the chateau. There we dined in a store behind the chateau surreptitiously on a sumptuous feast of free dried salmon for prospective customers something I still feel a bit guilty about today. Dried salmon—and it was really, really good dried salmon--never tasted better.

Shout out to Monty Python...

The Day Captain Kirk Almost Killed Me

After spending four days in Banff National Park and the Banff public campground Lea and I decided to cross over the mountains once again to British Columbia to Kootenay National Park in eastern British Columbia. So we headed north to Castle Mountain and hung a left on Highway 93 which ran along the Vermillion River between high mountain peaks and pine forests.

The weather was gorgeous and sunny. Along the way we saw a black bear, the first bear we had seen on our journey from Utah through Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia. We saw breathtaking mountains, breathtaking turquoise rivers, and breathtaking turquoise lakes, all of which were an illusion, nothing more than sunlight bouncing off the rocks below the depths. 

We couldn’t listen to the radio because not even the CBC signal could make its way around or over the mountain fortress surrounding us as we drove. We wouldn’t have listened to it anyway because everything around us was so spectacular. We must have had the radio on the CBC, however, because suddenly as we emerged from our impregnable mountain fortress the radio burst on. 

The first thing we heard—it was almost as if the voice of god had suddenly appeared out of the burning bush--was Captain Kirk, Canadian born William Shatner. Both Lea and I, though we were not Star Trek groupies or devotees—trekkers or trekkies—of course, knew who William Shatner was. I may have known at one time that he had had a musical career but if I did I had forgotten it long ago. It was Shatner’s musical career that was the subject of the CBC programme. He was singing the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on our suddenly working radio. It was punctuated by witty, parodic, and snarky commentary about the recording and Shatner’s musical career by a CBC host who was obviously having way too much fun. So soon were we. The song and the commentary had us in stitches immediately. We laughed so hard, in fact, that in retrospect I don’t know how I kept the Camaro on the road. 

Shatner singing the Beatles was only the beginning of the hilarity. Next up on the programme was Leonard Nimoy singing a song based on JRR Tolkien’s fantasy books, “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”. Lea and I’s laughter may not have been as deep, as hearty, or as dangerous as that for Shatner and “Lucy". The shock and surprise of the now old was gone. What wasn’t gone, however, was the memory of this crazy experience, an experience I will never forget, an experience that could have injured and killed us both. C’est la vie.
 
 

The Day We Ran Into a Pack of Bighorn Sheep in Kootenay National Park

 

Lea and I drove—well I drove my Camaro since Lea could not drive a stick shift and the Camaro had a stick shift—from Banff National Park in Alberta to nearby Kootenay National Park in British Columbia. I think we must have had visions of hot springs dancing in our heads since we learned that the village of Radium Hot Springs got its name from the hot springs in its midst that regularly reached temperatures of 39 degrees (around 100 degrees Fahrenheit). Radium was at the entrance to the park. We, of course, dreamed of that kind of heat since we had been dealing with just above freezing temperatures for months in the beautiful Canadian Rockies.

Driving into Radium Hot Springs in September was a trip both literally and figuratively. Immediately we noticed bighorn sheep wandering along the roads of the town like pedestrians on a Friday evening going shopping spree in town centres or around town squares. According to local folklore the bighorn sheep showed up in town about the same time every year during hunting seasons because hunting was illegal in Radium and the bighorn sheep seemed to know that.

After getting a campsite and pitching our tent in the mid-morning hours Lea and I headed immediately to the hot springs where we sat for an hour or so watching the 39 degree temperature of the springs meet the 4 degree air of Radium producing that wonderful mist so redolent of hot springs meeting the colder air of the Rockies in the process. 

While sitting in the springs Lea and I planned out our next hike. We left the warmth of the springs and hiked into the mountains above the springs. We soon learned that we were the only humans hiking in the mountains this late in the season. As we hiked we saw a bighorn sheep. She or he skittishly looked at us and appeared to be deciding whether he should come at us at full gallop or not.  Thankfully, he or she didn’t.

We hiked on and soon we found ourselves amongst a flock of bighorn sheep to our left. The encounter with the earlier bighorn sheep had been a bit disconcerting. We talked about being in a situation all alone deep in the mountains of British Columbia and what would happen if we were attacked by that sheep with no one, no one, around to help us. Initially the encounter with the pack was even scarier than that of the single bighorn sheep. What would we do, we contemplated again, if we were attacked and injured with no one around to help us? We needn’t have worried. The bighorn pack ignored us. Strength in numbers? Who gives a crap about a couple members of that horrid human species?

We emerged from our hike several hours later and went back to the hot springs for more warm comfort and cleansing. Later—I don’t remember how long it was, a day or two perhaps—Lea and I took down our tent, loaded the car, and headed back toward Cranbrook to see an old fort and the train museum.

The Night Our Tent Collapsed and How We Fled to British Columbia

 

It was the last night of our intended stay in Lake Louise. We planned, after four days of camping in Lake Louise to head south to Banff town making it our base of operations for more hiking amidst some of the most beautiful mountain country in the world.

The September weather had been wonderful during our stay in Lake Louise just as it had been in Jasper. The days were sunny and in the 2 to 7 degree range. The nights were, of course, colder generally staying in the upper negatives just below freezing. And then it happened.

I woke up sometime in the middle of the night with a sense that something was closing in around me. Eventually I pulled my arms and hands out of my warm sleeping bag to feel around so I could see, well feel, whether this sense of claustrophobia was a phantom or not. It wasn’t. I woke up Lea and told her of my sense of dread but she quickly retreated back to dreamland. We would not realise what was actually causing my claustrophobia until we woke up the next morning. 

In the morning we unzipped our tent and emerged from it to find that under the weight of wet snow that had fallen during the night the part of the tent I was sleeping under had collapsed. By that time the snow which had fallen after we retired to bed was mostly gone, melted in the renewed sunlight of a new day, and what was left was a wet and slushy mess and so was the tent. After much gnashing of teeth we decided to drive west to Vancouver.

 I don’t know how far we got as we headed to Vancouver but on the way west we saw an old hotel or motel on Highway 1 and stopped. We needed to clean up not only our muddy tent from the snow from the night before but thought it would be nice to do something that we hadn’t done for awhile: take a shower in order to clean ourselves up and sleep on nice comfortable beds in warm rooms for a change.

Whether it was the showers, the warmth, or a returned sense of adventure Lea and I decided to return to the Rockies the next day. After getting cleaned up we drove into nearby Golden, British Columbia. Golden was a lovely and "real" small town. The town had initially been built as a settlement at the confluence of the Columbia and Kicking Horse rivers in the Rocky Mountain Trench by the Canadian Pacific Railway which was building a line through the region in the late 19th century. Later it became a lumber camp and a lumber town as did so many smaller settlements in British Columbia during the era. At night the town really did look golden set as it was against a backdrop of magnificent mountains and magnificent colourful skies on all sides. 

At that time we were there Golden wasn’t as touristy and as expensive as it is today. We went to one of those inexpensive department stores that one could often find dotted in the city centres of small towns in the West where we prepared ourselves for our return to Rocky Mountain climes. I bought a pair of polypropylene long underwear, which, according to the camping guide sources we relied on, was some of the warmest and dryest long john’s one could buy in preparation for coldish camping and hiking in the mountains. 

After eating we returned to the hotel. The next day we decided to do some camping and hiking at Yoho National Park in British Columbia before heading back to Lake Louise and on to Banff. I am glad we did. When we got to Yoho we got a campsite, pitched our tent, and did some hiking. 

In the evening we learned that there was a tea house near our public campsite, the Twin Falls Tea House. We went there as night fell and found, to our delight, not only good tea and good food but great conversation. Hikers were there from all over including the United States and from various parts of Europe, most prominently from Germany. Over hot cocoa and tea we exchanged camping stories and gathered expert information on where and what to hike next.

The next day, of course, we hiked. We even hiked up to the twin falls that the tea house was named after. Then we returned to Alberta and headed south for Banff National Park.

The Day a Bison Nearly Set on Our Tent in Elk Island

 

Lea and I had been camping in Waterton Lakes National Park and Glacier National Park on the border between Alberta and Montana, Canada and the United States, for eight days. They turned out to be two of our favourite camping and hiking spots on our journeys through Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Alberta, British Columbia, South Dakota, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia (again). 

We decided, however, that it was finally time to head north. So we hopped in the Camaro and left Waterton. On the way north we passed through Cardston, the earliest LDS settlement in and capital of Mormon Alberta and hence Canada, High River, later one of the Alberta homes of the superb CBC show Heatland, Calgary, and Red Deer finally arriving in Edmonton in the early evening. We went straight to the West Edmonton Mall to see the waterslides, something my then friend Lea had a fancy for and wanted to see. Needless to say, they were impressive. When we learned that we could get free tickets to the waterslides if we stayed in the hotel attached to the West Edmonton Mall we decided to check into the hotel, a nice luxury after weeks and weeks of tenting in “primitive” conditions. We stayed at the hotel four days and not only did we get free tickets to the waterslides but also to the submarine, the second largest submarine fleet in Canada folklore has it, to the skating rink, and also a host of other attractions in the small city that was the mall, a mall which had its own police station and chapel. 

One of the first things we did when we checked into our room was to get into the hot tub for a bath, something that we had not really had to that degree anyway, for weeks. Sink baths and one minute showers (which all the “civilised Canadian national parks we visited had) are just not the same. We spent four days in the mall sliding on the water slides, riding in the submarine, and reading free copies of the Globe and Mail amongst other entertainments. I bought a sweatshirt (which I still have), got a haircut—my hair was too long for camping and tenting in “primitive” conditions, and we ate at some very good restaurants. We had a great time. I even got to visit one of my mentor’s in Mormon Studies at the University of Alberta and several nice nearby bookstores.

But Murphy’s Law was, as it almost always in, in operation though we didn’t know it at the time. The weather was wonderful during the four days we spent in the mall. It was sunny and only partly cloudy. When we went east to camp and tent in Elk Island National Park, however, the weather turned rainy and we “enjoyed” four days of rain in that park tramping around in our Sierra Designs rainwear. 

One of the most entertaining aspects of the park, as it always is in national parks, was the geology, the flora, and particularly the fauna. We saw, for example, a large moose enjoying a frolic in one of the ponds of the park. And we saw a lot of bison. One of these bison, a big bull bison, “liked” to be around us so much he walked and walked around our lonely tent in the campground, the only tent in the campground. At one point it appeared as though he was going to sit down on it crushing it, we were sure, in the process. We were, to say the least, a bit disconcerted by the absurdity of it all.

Fortunately the bison decided not to sit on our tent. It survived to live another day. So did we. We left Elk Island for Jasper National Park arriving there several hours later.

The Day I Nearly Died Laughing in Lake Louise

I no longer remember what day it was—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday?—but we—me and my then friend Lea Danielsen—decided to leave Jasper for Banff.  So we performed our usual campground ritual. We took the tent down, packed up the car, ate, and headed south down the Icefields Parkway.

The drive south was, as it had been when we drove west from Edmonton into Jasper National Park, spectacular. The sky was blue. The weather was sunny. The temperature was 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (or upper thirties and forties if you do archaic and illogical Fahrenheit), As we drove south we saw the monumental mountains of the Canadian Rockies with their spectacular green, brown, and black pine forests, mountains and forests made even more spectacular by the blue background of the sky which they were foregrounded against. We saw turquoise rivers, turquoise lakes, glaciers, and finally, as we neared Lake Louise, the famous Canadian larches of Monty Python fame. 

By early evening we had made it to the Columbia Icefields and its camp ground. So we reversed our camping and campground ritual. We unloaded the car, put up the tent, and ate. Before going to bed we visited the famous glacier that helps give the icefields its name. The glacier even then was melting in the face of climate change. Wooden markers with dates noted showed where the glacier had been years before and where it had retreated to in the early 1990s when we were there. 

We then returned to the campground from the icefields but we quickly learned that the glacier was not done with us for the evening. It was a cold evening, colder than we had been used to during our September sojourn in the beautiful Canadian Rockies of Jasper National Park, since, or so local folklore has it, the cold winds blew off of the nearby glaciers and directly into the campground and into our tent. 

The next day we drove to Lake Louise, where we stayed, if memory serves for four days. We set up our camp in the Lake Louise public campground. We woke up the next day and did our other camping ritual. We hiked. We hiked up a mountain trail that took off from the northwest edge of Lake Louise. About halfway up we stopped at the Lake Agnes tea house for some scones, soup, and tea. Replenished we once again headed up the mountain to see the famous and world renowned larches of the Canadian Rockies. When we reached the top meadow there were others there who had done the hike up before us and who now served as replacement trees for the many birds that landed on their shoulders and their arms looking, one presumes, for food.

After staying on top of the mountain for a while we, unlike the German hikers we met who went on to other mountain tops, hiked down the mountain. We descended to Lake Louise with its hordes of Japanese tourists hiking around the lake on mostly level ground and finally ended our hike at the parking lot of the also famous Lake Louise chateau where we had parked so we could do our hike. 

From there we drove over to the Lake Louise Village Centre. It was there that it happened, the event that almost made me die laughing. An older couple started their car and the horn immediately started blaring and wouldn’t stop. The male driver apparently flustered seemed to think that the horn problem could be solved by driving around the village of Lake Louise. From the parking lot you could hear the horn blaring north, south, east, and west and could follow its journey around the tiny village and eventually back to the parking lot where me, Lea, and a host of others listening and likewise following the car’s odyssey were almost dying of tear stained laughter. 

After the show we got in the car, went back to the campground, ate, and went to bed. The next day we took down the tent, packed the car, ate, and headed south to Banff for further adventures, none of them as joyous and hilarious as the car with the ever beeping horn making its way around Lake Louise, however. 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Hitchcock, The Birds, and the Happy Resolution

One of the fascinating things today about the brave new digital social media world is that a lot of those brought up and socialised into a world that thinks that it and its high tech, including its high tech films, are the best of all possible worlds and the best of all possible film worlds, are increasingly watching classic films these days. Though they have been socialised to dislike anything that seems studio bound, while at the same time, and paradoxically so, loving cgi, the new matte paining, while they have been brought up to hate black and white films not realising that black and white is sometimes an aesthetic choice and that some black and white films with their manipulations of light and shadow are works of art, while they have been brought up to prefer realism in their films, something that is ultimately not possible in books, films, or television given the reality that all of them are built on unrealistic manipulations of time and space, and while they have been brought up to dislike anything made in the past because it is technologically “primitive", they are increasingly watching the classic films of directors like Alfred Hitchcock on social media platforms like Patreon and YouTube because they have discovered that they can make monies by doing so. People will, you see, pay reactors to react to books, films, and television shows so they can watch how they react to them. Presumably, these voyeurs hope to see the reactor react positively to something they like, a fact that many reactors realise which is why they make sure to tailor their reactions so they can continue to make monies from their social media reactions. Commodity “aestheticism".

Alfred Hitchcock, of course, is one of the greatest directors of film of all time. He is one of the few masters of the cinematic craft and film art, as many of those watching his films on social media platforms for profit are learning. Hitchcock is not only the legendary master of suspense but he knows how to compose in black and white and colour, he knows how use music, he knows how to compose shots, he knows how to use delaying techniques for maximum tension, he knows, as did Shakespeare, mix tonal variations—comedy meets black comedy, meets drama, meets suspense, meets highbrow wit, meets even tragedy—all in order to manipulate those watching his films and to provide pleasure for those watching his films. One can, by the way, see just how good Hitchcock was at doing all of this even today thanks to the contemporary social media reactors we have been talking about, social media reactors who often describe how they were on the edge of their seats while watching a Hitchcock film. 

Not surprisingly, the Hitchcock film that seems to be the most viewed by YouTube reactors these days is his 1960 film Psycho. This is not surprising given that horror films—which Hitchcock did not make despite some reactors thinking he did--along with science fiction films and action adventure films, the new Westerns of modern Hollywood (see Die Hard), are among the most popular genres in contemporary comic book oriented Hollywoodland. Some reactors are, however, watching other Hitchcock classics as well including Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and The Birds (1963). A few viewers are even watching Notorious (1946), a kind of companion piece to North by Northwest and one of my favourite Hitchcock films, and Strangers on a Train (1951), both in glorious black and white. Very few, unfortunately, are watching Hitchcock’s British films, films such as the brilliant The 39 Steps (1935) and the brilliant The Lady Vanishes (1938), films that are as good as any films Hitchcock ever made,  

While the social media reactions to all of these Hitchcock films are interesting the social media reactions to The Birds are particularly interesting because they tell us something about the socialisation of social media reactors. The Birds is not your typical Hollywood film. Hollywood films are typically of the fairy tale variety with happy endings. They typically, in other words, have happy resolutions. The Birds, however, does not have a happy fairy tale resolution. Melanie (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch (the Australian Rod Taylor) may have found love by end of The Birds, by the end of the bird attacks that helped bring them together, but Hitchcock does not tell us the reason for the bird attacks on Bodega Bay north of San Francisco in the first place. Was it Melanie herself? Was it the caged love birds Melanie brought with her from San Francisco to the Brenner’s house in Bodega Bay for Mitch’s sisters birthday? Was it god looking down at the chaos caused by the attack of the birds on Bodega Bay, California and beyond and laughing at the absurdity of it all? Was it the end of the world predicted by Christians ever since the advent of that faith? Hitchcock doesn’t give us an answer or the answer. Nor does Hitchcock tell us how what we have just seen on the screen ended. Do Melanie, Mitch, Mitch’s mother, and Mitch’s sister escape the bird attacks after they drive off in their sports car at the end of the film? We don’t know. We can only speculate, surmise, hypothesise and most humans don’t like to do any of those three things.

In my experience those brought up on a steady diet of unrealistic fairy tales with happy endings and generally happy resolutions have difficulty, to use a contemporary phrase, wrapping their heads around works of art that don’t have happy endings where boy gets girl and life goes wonderfully on. I still recall, for instance, that when one of my relatives from Russia who was brought up in the Soviet Union of the 1970s on.a steady diet of happy resolutions came to visit me and we watched an episode of X-Files that didn’t have a happy resolution that she was flummoxed by the lack of a happy ending. She couldn’t understand why everything wasn’t tied up in happy social realist or disneyish bright ribbons and bows. Similarly, many reactors, most of them Americans I suspect, have the same reaction to The Birds. Why, the wonder, does the film not tie everything up in bright ribbons and bows?. Boo. Hiss. They can’t handle the truth that life often doesn’t have happy endings. And this is why, I suspect, those viewers who love Rear Window, who love Vertigo, who love North by Northwest, and who love Psycho, don’t equally love The Birds. 

I, on the other hand (and yes I do realise that value is in the socialised eyes of the beholder), think that The Birds is one of Hitchcock’s greatest works for exactly the same reason most reactors don’t like it: it doesn’t have a happy Hollywood ending. And that is why, I suppose, that I also prefer the art cinema, particularly the “foreign” art cinema, to Hollywood. The art cinema is, I would argue, more “real” than that of Hollywood. That, however, is not why most people watch movies. They may sing a mantra like chorus of we want realism in our films but they really go to see movies because they want to escape from the “real world”.  They go to see movies because they want the fairy tale. They go to see movies because they want the happy endings. They go to see movies because they want everything tied up in bright and happy ribbons and bows. They want, in other words, the bread and the circus. And who can blame them. Life, after all, is not a fairy tale. It does not often end happily. It is not often tied up in bright and happy ribbons and bows. Life is generally, as the Buddha said long ago, typified by suffering and the films Hollywood produces provide, as does religion, many with the serenity they need to get through it. They need their pie in the sky.

 

Dreaming My Life Away...

 

Every night for the last two or three years it has been the same thing: I go to bed. I dream. I wake up from my dreams before they are resolved. I have to urinate. Then, if I am lucky and can use yoga techniques to relax my mind and my body—a body racked by the pains of old age and old age infirmities-- I go back to sleep and dream again only to have the same thing happen again. The dream ends before it concludes and I am once again off to the water closet for the second or third time that night.

Usually I don’t remember my various mini dream movies. Most of them over the course of my life have typically been mundane and banal—a typical post-Star Wars Hollywood film--and most of them have been mundane and banal for the last two or three years too despite their lack of resolution. This morning I did remember my nighttime reverie and I wrote it down as it was one of the more vivid of my dreams and I wanted to make sure I did not forget it it so I could write it down and think about it some more.

In this dream I was in lovely house with at least two storeys. There were a lot of people in the house taking and moving about. I seemed to have been plopped down in the middle of a crowded party. Eventually I made my way upstairs to a room with very few people in it who were watching classic movies. A reflection of my general dislike about being around too many people particularly at mundane and banal parties and a reflection of my longstanding cinephilism?  Soon an announcement appeared on the television we happy few were watching that Michael Powell’s classic Peeping Tom—a film that deserves as much recognition as Alfred Hitchcock’s much better known Psycho—would be on next. I immediately headed downstairs and sought out two young French lasses. Did I assume they were cinephiles like myself because they were French and France—where I lived briefly and a country I have always been fond of—was well known for its cinephilism and film criticism in the 1950s and 1960s? I told them that the rarely seen and rarely shown Peeping Tom was going to be shown in a few minutes on the small screen upstairs. Initially, they berated me. Did they think I was trying to pick them up? Did they think I was ill? Did they not believe me? I left them immediately and climbed back up the stairs to watch the film. The two French lasses eventually followed which pleased me. Am I not as averse as I thought to watching small groups of others if they are also intelligent cinephiles? Then the dream ended.

As I thought about this dream I began to wonder if my endlessly repeating dream experience—dream ends before resolution—is a reflection of my age—I am not 69—and a reflection of my somewhat conscious concern about the end of my life.? I have long thought that I had resolved any issues concerning my mortality. Perhaps I haven’t managed to do this fully, however. One thing I do know is that I am weary and bored by the banal mundanity that is contemporary life in anti-intellectual America, a land where many right wing populists, many of them right wing know nothing theocrats, fascists, and xenophobes, seem to think that the stone age life was the best of all possible worlds in which humans had ever lived. As for me, I can’t imagine a much worse “utopia”, a utopia not that different from those when Christianity and Christian inquisitions ruled Europe, when Hitler and his inquisitors ruled Germany, and when Stalin and his inquisitors ruled the USSR, and I certainly don’t want to live in it now or at any time in the future or the past should the Doctor of Doctor Who really exist and can take me there. I would definitely want him to take me to almost anywhere else.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Why the Brave New Postmodern Digital Media World is Much Like the Brave Old Modern Media World

Since the 18th and 19th centuries mass capitalism has been the dominant economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic system in the world and particularly in the western world that gave it birth. On this fact both the major apologists and polemicists for and against mass capitalism, Adam Smith and Karl Marx respectively, agree. 

Mass capitalism is an economic system, a system of exchange, with its own theology, a theology propagated by the high priests of mainstream economic theory who postulate—though they don’t see it as postulation hence the use of the term theology here--that humans are rational and that human greed is ultimately good for all. It is an economic system that dominates western and increasingly global politics because modernity and its mass capitalism are bureaucratic and the higher in the bureaucracy one is the more monies one makes and the more power and authority one has. This allows those in the higher realms of the bureaucracy to use their power and authority, to leverage their status, in a multitude of political, cultural, geographical, and demographic ways. They lobby, for instance, the American government and have a greater ability to lobby successfully compared to those with middling power and authority and those with low levels of power and authority because in capitalist societies money, as the proverb goes, talks. It allows those with money, power, and authority to use these monies and this power and authority for cultural purposes. When they buy art they impact the “value” of the art they buy. When they contribute monies to symphony orchestras they impact the type of music that will be programmed. When they engage in risky behaviours that come back to haunt them the world has to listen because, as happened as recently as 2008, their “coughs” wreak havoc on the increasingly integrated global economy. Those with monies typically live longer, have less deaths in childbirth, and have less child deaths than those with moderate or limited monies who live in poverty.

The noted Swiss film maker Jean-Luc Godard, a director who has been categorised as part of the French nouvelle vague or New Wave by critics and historians, often used the “profession” of prostitution, as a metaphor for mass capitalism in his many films. In his 1980 film Suive qui peut (la vie), [English title Every Man for Himself], for example, Godard stages a scene—I hope I am remembering this right as I have not seen the film since it was released--in which a businessman, sitting at a desk choreographs a scene for his entertainment in which one of his cronies has sex, including anal sex, with a prostitute while another character in the film voyeuristically looks on. The message of this film, of course, is that workers are exploited by their bosses and their sycophantic flunkies in the lower upper levels and middle levels of capitalist bureaucracies, something that makes the English title of Godard’s film not quite accurate given the realities of power and authority imbalances within economic bureaucracies.

Godard, of course, is a polemicist who critiques capitalism in Suive qui peut (la vie). One does not, however, have to buy into Godard's normative polemics for the exploitation scene in the film to be descriptively accurate. Those in the highest and higher levels of capitalist bureaucracies do have more power and authority than those beneath them (pun intended). They do have labourers working underneath them (pun intended) who do their bidding, at least officially. They do make more money than those in the middle and lower levels of the bureaucracy. And the relationship between capitalist bosses and those beneath them (pun again intended) is one akin to that between a john and prostitute, one in which the john pays for a commodity, in this case sex, and one in which, arguably for some, he or she who is paying and playing is in an exploitative relationship with the worker who is doing the work, in this case the exploited sex work.

Though Suive qui peut (la vie) was made in those days of yore before the postmodern age with its digital media arose, very little has actually changed in the brave new postmodern digital world. The economy is still dominated by the few. These few oligarchs who run the few dominant corporations of the economy continue to, while not monopolise power and authority hold the lion’s share of it and as a consequence have a massive influence on the political culture of the West, which itself dominates the global economy. They continue to maintain this power and authority thanks to the greater social, economic, political, and cultural capital they have and which they are able to transfer to their heirs via primary and secondary socialisation. They continue to believe that they are the best and brightest and blessed by nature and/or god. They continue to benefit demographically from a system, particularly in the United States, in which economic, political, cultural, and demographic—health care, for instance--is inequitably and irrationally distributed (irrational because of all the unnecessary redundancies in the US health care system). Despite all the initial utopian rhetoric that the internet would bring “liberty" and “freedom" and “democracy” (all ultimately empty vessels into which are poured several cultural meanings) to humankind the internet, including its numerous porn sites, remain dominated by mega or uber capitalist bureaucratic corporations like Google, Amazon, Mega (formerly Facebook) and Apple, to note a few, and massive inequities. 

As I have noted previously on this blog, I have been engaged in ethnographic work for several years on the social media site YouTube which is owned by Google. Google, like many capitalist bureaucratic corporations of the modern era, is an economic giant whose earnings rival the gross national and gross domestic products of some nation-states around the world. It is a political giant lobbying governments in its interests. It is geographical giant in t that it is global. It is a demographic giant in that millions if not billions of consumers “buy” or “consume" its products, products that for some have no inherent value since it is, they argue, impossible to quantify the value of knowledge labour. And it is a cultural giant.

Despite the rhetoric of utopian digital media cheerleaders social media forms like YouTube are quite similar to other cultural and communication forms of the past. Like capitalist cultural communication corporations of the past social media forms are bureaucratic with remuneration, power, and authority inequitably distributed within them. Like capitalist communications bureaucracies of the past there are those who work for the communications corporation and those who run the corporation. YouTube, for example, like other social media corporations, takes a significant cut of the revenue generated by its “employees”—something many would argue is inherently exploitative--along with advertising monies it generates and plays, as did and does commercial television, over its videos unless one buys a VIP package from the corporation. Like capitalist media corporations of the past those who run the brave new digital communications corporations establish standards for the corporation and censor that which does not meet those corporate community standards. Like capitalist corporation communications forms of the past “employees” can be “fired. YouTube”employees”, for instance, who do not bring in enough revenues—reportedly 10,000 views over a period of time—are made redundant. Like the knowledge industries of the past the brave “new” social media are not interactive beyond the comments sections boxes below the videos in YouTube which may or may not be read by those who make the videos largely for monetary gain that voyeuristic consumers watch on social media sites like YouTube, comments, including the comments of most of those who do the reaction videos of films and television shows themselves, that are largely mundane and banal—lowest common denominator--and focused on a summary of the story and plot and whether the reactor and commentator liked what was being reacted or not. In other words, they, generally speaking, function in order to establish a community of the like-minded with their like-minded echo chambers and ostracisation of any who “deviate” from the constructed or fetishised norms. In this regard they function like most films and television shows of the past and like society and culture in general, they recapitulate socialisation for conformity and create and recreate, in the process, self-satisfied and self-righteous identity groups which are ethnocentric, hardly the cosmopolitanism some polemicists for the brave new digital media envisioned in their radiant brave new digital future narratives. Like capitalist corporate communications media of the past avant-garde artsiness and real critical criticism is barely present on social media, the content of which is mostly a vast wasteland of popcorn culture. Like the corporate media of the past Western media, and particularly American media and American English predominates. Social media, in other words, continues to mirror broader society and culture.

The more things change...

A Critical Ethnography of the Media: “Reading” What Isn’t There

 

There are, of course, a number of problems when it comes to the reaction videos of YouTube amateur reactors to to literature, films, books, and television programmes on that social media opiate, the newest of the lowest common denominator modern media form. Take for instance, the responses of most though not all social media reactors to the character of the mayor, the big bad of season three, in the masterful television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

For most of these amateur reactors whatever the mayor says can’t be trusted. In the age of Trump and others of his ilk before and after the coming or modernity he has to be gesticulating and behaving simply for his own advantage, they believe. The problem, of course, with this “argument” or “hypothesis" is that while the mayor is is clearly a parody and satire of the all-American family values guy and gal he truly believes what he utters just as, one presumes, so do at least some of his politically and ideologically correct brethren, particularly those of the sucker sort who have been adeptly pied pipered. He is serious when he warns of the ungodly dangers of uncleanliness (a good old time proverb many of the reactors don’t grasp in these radiant best of all possible world days). He is serious when he tells Angel and Buffy that their relationship is doomed just like that or Romeo and Juliet. And he is serious when he treats Faith like the daughter he hasn’t had in some time—he is over a hundred years old after all—or never had. A few reactors eventually get the Faith/mayor relationship--a doubling of that between Buffy and Giles (season three, in fact, is full of doublings including that in the aptly named “Doppelgangland”)--only after the intense confrontation between Angel and the mayor in the hospital in the last episode of the season, “Graduation Day”, as Buffy and Faith lie comatose in their hospital beds.

There are, of course, several reasons for the amateur Buffy reactor’s misreadings and misinterpretations of the mayor’s discourse and actions. The literalist kiddies (metaphor alert) of today can’t even see the literalism on the screen in front of their eyes and ears (literal and metaphorical). That is because there are things that don’t change. As PT once said, suckers are born every minute. Demagogues, of course, love that fact, that suckers—those who don’t know the difference between past and present spatially or temporally—are born every minute because it literally and metaphorically means they can more easily manipulate the masses for cultic politically and ideologically correct conformity. Now that would be a great allegory if it wasn’t for the fact that it is so literally true.

Another problem with the kiddies of the today, something that also connects them to past kiddies, is their inability to read or grasp tone. But then they don’t have experience with those adept at tonal shifts (and intellectual wit for that matter) like Shakespeare, Gogol, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Twain, and Hitchcock to help them since they have been fed on a steady diet of literalist and lowest common denominator cinematic crap that is characterised by low level wit, low level literal tonal shifts, low level literal parody, and they don’t really read much these days beyond their cell phones. Buffy, like Shakespeare, like Gogol, like Turgenev, like Bulgakov, like Twain, and like Hitchcock often comedy, tragedy, drama, satire, and parody all at the same time and while deciphering these changing tones may be a challenge for some of those brought up in this increasingly humanities free education world one would still expect that even the educated amateur should be able to discern the changes in tone and how tone works in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is not that difficult even for the socialised for conformity literally minded crowd.

Harmony, Shut Up: Musings on Hedgehogs, Foxes, Wolves, Sheep, and Human Moronicity

 

The social sciences—Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, and History—do, when founded on empiricism and interpretations grounded in political, economic, cultural, biological-demographic, and geographical facts--help those of us interested in real humanity understand real humanity, the real human condition, and the real factors that impact humanity. They, and particularly Cultural Anthropology, help us, for example, to understand how humans often construct their own “realities”. They, and particularly Cultural Anthropology, tell us something about the role ethnocentrism has played in human history and continues to play in human culture and society.  They, and particularly Cultural Anthropology and Sociology, tell us something about the social and cultural construction of “normality” and “deviance” and the role socialisation plays in replicating notions of “normal” and “abnormal” through soft power or the inability to think outside the socialised for conformity box and through hard power or coercion. They, and particularly Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and History (the academic discipline most prone to pull its own punches and provide, in the process the mythological, the mythhistorical, substructure for societies and cultures) tell us something about how humanity has changed over time and how human society and culture have varied across time and space.

The social sciences, of course, are not the only intellectual cultures that help us understand humanity and the human condition. Fiction, particularly classic fiction and particularly serious fiction, the fiction of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, of Lev Tolstoy, of Mikhail Bulgakov, of Nikolay Gogol, of Mark Twain, and of Alice Munro, to chose a few examples, have long helped many including me grasp the “nature”of  humanity and the “nature” of the human condition. Perhaps the work of fiction that has helped me most understand both is a short story by the noted science fiction writer C.M. Kornbluth titled “The Marching Morons”.

“The Marching Morons” is fascinating on a number of different levels. On the basic or literal level it is a tale about how the few intellectuals have to spend large chunks of their lives inventing devices and making them work in order to protect the masses, the marching morons, from themselves. On another level “The Marching Morons" is a clever inversion of Karl Marx’s conception of the working class, who Marx sees as the carrier of real humanity and real human society and culture and who will, thanks to the dialectic of time and with the help of intellectuals, restore humanity to its real nature by undermining breaking the cultural and ideological chains associated with the fetishisation of the commodities.

I don’t think I have ever read a piece of fiction or non-fiction that, as does Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons”, captures something essential about humanity across both time and space. When viewed in combination with Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox” it helps us understand something important about not only intellectual culture but mass culture. Berlin, of course, divided intellectual culture into two groups: the hedgehogs, those who try to find the essence of humanity, society, and culture in a single factor, and foxes, those who see multiple factors as providing the bases for humanity, society, and culture.  

The division between hedgehogs and foxes may be quite compelling when we focus on intellectual culture particularly in the West. Intellectual culture, however, is only a minute and perhaps shrinking part of human culture. Intellectuals, whether hedgehogs or foxes, are countercultures within a tiny broader counterculture. Broader society and culture is made up more by sheep than either hedgehogs or foxes as Kornbluth points up While the hedgehogs and foxes can and sometimes do think outside the cultural and ideological boxes they have been socialised for conformity into, the sheep rarely if ever think outside the box. They live largely contented lives fetishising the ideological commodities they have been socialised into as long as they can eat the bread and attend the circuses that help breed contentment or at least vaccinate the masses from thinking outside the box too often or too much.

The problem with Berlin’s division of intellectual culture into hedgehogs and foxes is that it is not broad enough. Those intellectuals, those apologists, those polemicists, those demagogues, who are courtiers, who are sycophants to those who have power because of their economic positions, their political positions, and their positions in the media, and who help the powers that be manipulate the socialised for conformity masses, the suckers as P.T. Barnum called them, are best described as wolves. 

Like intellectual culture in general, this culture of wolves, this culture of demagogues, is characterised by countercultures. There are, for example, demagogues on the left, demagogues who identify as liberals, demagogues who identify as conservative, and demagogues who are actually right wing populists. Those in the last counterculture, this culture of hired spin doctors who play sweat and sweat sour political and ideological flutes to the masses, differ in degree or quality from those in the other countercultures in that for them any means—lies, disinformation, scapegoating, slurs, inquisitions, uber hypocrisy, even murder (killing for the Lord)--can be used to achieve their theocratic ends because they believe that they and they alone are directly wired into god, history, nature, whatever. And yes I do realise that polemical (and to some extent analytical) intellectual Marxism shares this ethnocentric ideological and utopian trait.

With the triumph of mass modern society, mass capitalism, mass faux democracy—even Iceland is not a democracy in the real sense given bureaucratic realities though silent Friends communities may be—the masses have come to play a central role in producing and reproducing mass society, mass capitalism, and mass faux democracy given the extension of the franchise and the increasing role the mass media, including the mass brave new digital media, plays in pied piping the sometimes if not generally gullible masses. Paradoxically, even when the masses are not gullible they often get their cognitive wires crossed as when the right wing populist masses in the US, blame the federal government for all the ills of society, except when it comes to imperial warmaking, of course, rather than the economic elite who actually, thanks to their wealth, their bureaucratic positions, and the power and authority that comes from these, who really run most of the governments of the Western world. Both the Marxist Frankfurt School and Conservative Mass Society critics, of course, recognised these problems of mass society even if they did not always divine the cures for the mass society sickness. 

Will any of this ever change? I doubt it. The Frankfurt School and Foucault were actually right. Postmodern digital media have made it possible to spread bullshite, lies, delusions, and hallucinatory conspiracy theories faster and farther than was possible via the oral media of the traditional world and the modern media of the modern world. Education cannot stop it because schooling is not liberatory despite the liberal dogma that it is save only for a small minority. Delusion is probably even more prominent today than it was in the past. There are more masses than intellectuals and more conformist intellectuals than dissidents, those whose voices are always crying in a wilderness. The historically dissident Society of Friends, a group at the forefront of peace activism, indigenous rights, women’s rights, gay rights, for instance, even when its conformist wings are counted amount to only 400,000 worldwide. Even economic crises these days, thanks to socialism for the rich and powerful, thanks, in other words, to the use of taxpayers monies to bail out risk loving economic and financial vampiric corporations, have little impact on the systems that have been developed by those in power to maintain the dynamic status quo in mass capitalist societies like the US. 

Perhaps only an ecological catastrophe can bring about real change at this point. And ecological change is coming. In fact, it is already here in the form of pollution, climate change, health problems associated with both, and the declines in animal species, to name only a very few things associated with the human made apocalypse. While environmental catastrophe is unstoppable at this point what this entails for the human animal is uncertain. Perhaps the powers that be will leave this planet for another and the whole sick cycle will start anew. Regardless of what happens stay tuned for while the human drama, tragedy, comedy, black comedy, parody, and satire may not be all that suspenseful what is scarier, more horrific, more terrifying, more barbaric, more sickening, more distressing, and more full of blood and guts than the seemingly never ending plague that humanity brings in its wake. As always, candy and popcorn are always available in the lobby or in the kitchen.

The Mystery that is Amazon or, Lowest Common Denominator Capriciousness in the Brave New Digital Age

 

Trying to figure out the “logic” of Amazon is like trying to figure out why the Holocaust happened in a world supposedly presided over by a caring god. It is like trying to figure out why good things happen to bad people. It is like trying to figure out why the innocent die young. It is like trying to figure out why elites who sit on their arses spinning their world controlling webs wage wars that kill not them, generally speaking, but kill those who have little to do with why such wars are fought in the first place. You can’t understand any of this unless you assume that the capricious gods of myth are really real.

Take a recent experience I had with Skankizon. I have purchased a number of Alto Classic reissues from Amazon.com over the years. In fact, I recently purchased--since the beginning of the new year in fact-- Alto ALC 1485, Richter playing Prokofiev, and Alto ALC 1469, Simon conducting Grainger. I wanted to purchase two more: Alto ALC 1318, Oistrakh playing Prokofiev, and Alto ALC 1218, Ashkenazy playing Chopin. When I got to Skankizon checkout, however, Amazon claimed that it could not post these to my US street address. Uh, why? It could not be that the CDs weigh over 70 pounds or are more than 108 inches in size. They aren't. It could not be because the CDs are restricted because of hazmat regulations. They aren’t toxic though some might see them as such. It could not be that these CDs violate Amazon policies. Amazon offers them for sale so they can’t violate these policies. Moreover, Amazon has, as I mentioned earlier, sold several Alto discs to me over the years already including another Prokofiev played by Richter. It could not be that the item is restricted for sale by Alto. Why would Alto restrict Amazon sales of specific discs to upstate New York or restrict sales of items Amazon stocks to sell? It could not be because the item is restricted for export. Amazon.com has the item in its US warehouses and I live in the US. New York hasn’t seceded from the Confederate states yet as far as I know. It is not because Amazon.com does not export items. It does. Moreover, this item is not being exported unless New York is now, for Amazon, a foreign land.

Why will Amazon not sell these two Alto discs to me? Who knows? Though the actions of gods like Zeus are ultimately comprehensible those of Skankizon are not.

Postscript…I actually got a response, a real and not a bot one from the Amazonian heavens when I put this blog up on the Amazon's Facebook page. I was—formulaic, formulaic—told to mosey on over service and ask my questions there. The thing was I had done that already. Yesterday, in fact. And guess what I got there? Yup. Nothing. To be precise I was abandoned by one chat customer service operative for a future one who never, a la Godot, showed up. As I told the once correspondent on Amazon’s Facebook page who likewise left me an orphan, I will, in the future, get my Alto discs from Target in the USofA because unlike Amazon I haven’t experienced Mickey Mouse at Target…Yet. 

Postscript 2: I was, by the way, able to get the Alto Prokofiev Oistrakh disc I wanted from Target. Unlike US Amazon, US Target actually sells Alto discs they claim to have in stock to New York consumers. As I told Kramazon today, up yours. I will get my items from other sources even if they cost more first in the future.