Tech Dads

The old dad who fixed everything around the house with and adjustable and Philips head and a hammer, adjusting training wheels on bikes, the errant leaky faucet, the malfunctioning lamp that just wont stay lit, have been replaced by the tech dads of 2012. Tech dads around Christmas are not the men staying up late to put together the bike. The tech dad is hunched over his laptop solving tech problems for his kids much the way the old dads used to solve problems with a wrench.

Take Christmas day. I set up two notebooks complete with getting them online and punching in encryption codes and changing screen savers and passwords. Not a big deal really. The tech dad nightmare was my seven year olds Mp3 player. I get why Steven Jobs did such a great thing with the IPOD, because the old technology barely worked. Two hours to get the little bugger to talk with rhapsody and download music then I just started sliding over my own mp3 files from my laptop.

Then it was on to the remote control helicopter. No biggie really except extremely difficult to fly. Many crashes. Then onto setting up the digital camera so it would download. Not extremely difficult. The Uverse guy shows up and I have to transition all computers to the new provider. Rebooting and passwords and encryption keys. Setting up the phone to Tivo and control the television. Some tech issues to resolve between televisions.

The mp3 player craps out. The notebooks cant find the WIFI and my sons speakers need to be hooked up and his phone wont sync to the axillary jack on his receiver. Encryption keys and rebooting and the tape monitor circuit for the phone and recharge the mp3 player. All is well until the wife's laptop crashes.

Tech dad is on the job.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...I have one word...plastics!
Hemingways Attic...surviving as a writer

The Relevancy of It's A Wonderful Life

Watched It's a Wonderful Life in an old theatre in Chicago last night. Do it every year, but this year was different. The audience always participates which is something we digital creatures don't really get. But the participation this year had the resonance of our time. When Potter would appear on the screen everyone would hiss and boo. And when Clarence appeared everyone jingled their bells. But it was the scenes with George Bailey that were different this year. This year, people listened like their houses depended on it.

Take the scene after George's fathers death. George tells the board of the The Building and Loan to do what they want but they should keep it open so people don't have to crawl to Potter. And then Potter insults Georges father and this brings the heart if not the speech of the movie....iis it too much to ask for people to have a few walls and a roof over their head, well my father didn't think so, but to you people are a cattle... The audience was so silent you could hear a pin drop and at the end of his speech people stood up and cheered!

Then there were the scenes during The Great Depression. George struggles to keep The Building and Loan open and uses his own money. An eerie silence came into the theatre, people watching people from sixty years before struggling with the fear they were going to lose everything. When the Building and Loan didn't close and George mades his famous papa dollar and mama dollar proclamation, again, people cheered and clapped.

And then of course at the end when George is going to kill himself and is rescued by his friends. Frank Capras view of life comes through and George is toasted by his friends as the richest man in town, the people in the audience cried and sang along to Auld Lang Syne. And then we filed out and I watched people emerge with smiles on thier faces. Good Cheer and Christmas of course. But maybe hope...that  somewhere there still is  a place where we can be saved by the people who love us.

 http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Why Do We Watch Those Old Christmas Movies?

Bing and Fred dancing around on the screen with beautiful women in long gowns while other people sit around in tuxedos and laugh it up. Could anything be further from our world now? But of course around Christmas those old movies sneak out and suddenly we are watching Holiday Inn, White Christmas, It's A Wonderful Life, The Bishops Wife, Christmas in Connecticut. And those people from the forties come out in their black and white persona's and give us a glimpse of a time gone by. The question is why do we watch these old grainy films from sixty years ago?

Comfort. Continuity. Ritual. A curiosity about what people called happiness over half a century ago. Maybe it is all of these or maybe it is because in our own world we have no sense of time anymore and it seemed those people from the forties and fifties had all the time in the world. No cellphones. No texts. No Internet. They were squarely in the moment and even though they rushed around there seemed to be more symmetry to their lives. Even if it was all a fantasy.

And we cannot discount nostalgia. Very powerful emotion. A yearning for times that were simpler and in many ways better. A lot of these movies took place during World War II. Could the time have been any clearer? We were the good guys and everyone else was the bad guys. American culture was at it's zenith squarely in the American century. True there were no minorities but that is part of the American fantasy also, everyone just looks like us and acts like us.

And then there is the one thing about these movies that is probably the strongest reason we watch these black and white shadow plays. They go back to when we were children. These movies played out when we waited for Santa. They played when our uncles fell asleep in their chairs and snoozed the day away. They played when we came in from a snowball fight and drank hot chocolate. They played when we were young.

And that is what Christmas is all about really. The ghosts of the past come back once a year and dance around before we pack it all back up again. And so Bing and Fred and Cary Grant and Babara Stanwyck all come alive again and they are young again too. Just like we were.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Populism of It's A Wonderful Life

It's A Wonderful Life would fit right in with our times. The story of George Bailey is essentially a working mans story or rather a populist tale. George's quest to go to college is rooted in the fact that there will be a bigger world open to him once he has an education under his belt. Harry his brother goes and comes back the man moving into the bigger white collar world of his wife, but George stays behind in penny anne world of the Building and Loan to sweat it out in the small town of Bedford Falls.

The populism of the story is found in the ancillary characters of the town and George's family of his mother who runs the Bailey boarding home and his father the patriarch of old.  We are drawn to Ernie the cab driver, Bert the cop, Violet Biggs the harlot, Mary Hatch the small town girl who goes to college, but returns to the small town provincial world of Bedford Falls. Sam Wainright is the exception who comes from a rich family and moves in the bigger world of New York. Sam will bail George out but he is juxtaposed against George 's provincialness, his small town virtues that keep him in the town while others go on to find fortune and fame.

Henry Potter is the the arch type villain of the one percent. The man of the upper crust who is incurably corrupt, but holds all the power strings and is eternally trying to get the Building and Loan and bring down George. Again it is George's everyman qualities against the powerful banking interests of the privileged class with the final showdown when Potter accuses George of losing the eight thousand dollars. In the final scene of the movie George is rescued by the populace, Annie the housekeeper, Mr. MGower the druggist, Bert the cop, Ernie the cab driver, and finally Sam Wainright is given redemption by wiring him the money as Harry Bailey eschews the bigger world of a military ceremony to rush back and help his brother.

The movie resonates still because we respond to populist sensibilities. We inherently distrust the Potters of the world or the powers that be. We are now in an age where people rail against bonuses and the one percent getting all the wealth. This is why Its A Wonderful Life is still relevant. We are, after all, in the year 2010, a populace that still yearns for the small town life where good trumps evil and the rich guys lose in the end.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January