The Tangled Web

   Before dawn I'd awaken to a faint and tinny pitch for National Speedway or Playland in Far Rockaway and slide the tiny plastic wheel to “Off”. Pulling the battery from its harness, I'd swab the acrid anodes lavishly with my tongue, convinced that this would breathe a bit of life into the dying nine-volt. The transistor radio tucked under my pillow, tuned to Cousin Brucie and lulling me to sleep with “Sweet Talkin' Guy” or “Mr Lonely” had doubtless come from the duty-free shop at the airport in St Thomas where men like my father lined up to buy primitive electronics and cases of booze. We'd visit for a week or so each Spring, loaded down with Noxzema, Sea & Ski and bags of cheap, colorful plastic gadgets Dad had picked up on Canal Street to distribute as baksheesh to the bell-hops and cabana-boys he'd encounter along the way. Assuming the Islanders were out of touch with current, mainland technology, these bags of swag might contain flashlight fountain-pens, watches with alarms and timers, compasses, egg-timers, coin-sorters and imitation Swiss Army knives. To complete the import-export circle, he'd load up on duty-free Mount Gay and Old Grandad as well as the latest in solid-state from Bell & Howell, Zenith, Kodak and Polaroid. Later, Dad would spend hours squinting at complex diagrams and unintelligible instructions, feeding bits of tape or film through Sprocket A and Loop B in an exercise of futility and frustration that often ended in a tangle and a tantrum. If operating these contraptions was supposed to get easier with the advent of the Super-8, the 8-track and the Land camera, this simplicity was lost on Dad, who finally backed away from flashy electronics around the time the answering machine became ubiquitous and steadfastly refused to accept a VCR, Walkman or Naugahyde-swaddled camcorder no matter how desperate we might have been for a Christmas gift. He never lost the mortifying urge to dole out colorful gizmos to the locals, long after such trinkets had been eclipsed by the mundanity of a pervasive, global advance.

    A few of my classmates in those early days had fathers at the forefront of technology, and whereas receiving as a party-favor a scrap of quilted textile destined for the Apollo spacesuit was interesting enough, having Mr Morita-San hand me a presentation-boxed, Sony radio-pen after a birthday party for his son was pretty spectacular. No one I knew had ever heard of such a thing beyond the wild imaginings of Dick Tracy, and most of us had our pens confiscated almost immediately as one classroom after another erupted in sudden bursts of muffled radio static during somber recitations of the Lord's Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance. In the early 1960's, when we were all poised atop the cusp of an unimaginable future, a mason jar of severed snake-tail rattles and a shoe-box full of Spanish moss and squirrel hides from a sojourn in the South could still sway the crowd at Show and Tell.

   With the advent of component stereos, digital watches and the Radar Range – spectacular in their excessive complexities and priced accordingly – the cascade of innovative technologies began in earnest just as we were heading off to Art School. With one foot planted in the dim and dusty world of Maroger medium, rabbit-skin glue and lead-white, those of us who still regarded Frank Stella and Mark Rothko with suspicion were totally unprepared for the future unfolding around us. In a matter of months we attended incomprehensible workshops on Holography, struggled to fathom the appearance of truncated dodecahedrons limned by lasers in the night sky and rushed to sign up for time on the first-of-its-kind color Xerox, which was so precious and expensive to use that it was monitored night and day by a testy adjunct. Now, of course, the virtual realities promised by Holography have been overtaken by the GameBoy, the laser is a toy used to blind drivers from the overpass and the color Xerox has fallen to the emergence of the twenty-five dollar printer from Costco.

   I recently came across and ad in SkyMall Magazine for a manual typewriter that, among other virtues, “recalls the thoughtful, well-written correspondence of yesteryear.” Without considering the availability of such anachronistic necessities as white-out or ribbons, the machine retails for nearly $200, despite the fact that the dump-shacks, thrift-stores and yard-sales are choked with Coronas and Olivettis any vendor would be happy to get a few bucks for. For a guy who could never grasp the complexities of the F-stop, the Fractal or anything whatsoever to do with the Cloud, the fact that people seem to want to surround themselves with vinyl records and manual typewriters is welcome news. Later this week I'll have to drag the flat-screen back out to the cottage for the summer tenants and begin the arduous, annual task of untangling the mare’s-nest of cables and wires devoted to affording wireless internet access and cable TV to a handful of guests who once upon a time were delighted to relax for a week on the rocky coast devoid of such technologies and now seem unable to relax without them. This process will involve endless hours on hold awaiting the cheerful aid of a voice from Bangalore, one or more trips to the Comcast office in Brunswick and the very real prospect of ending the day in a tangle and a tantrum.