A Valediction: The End of Blogging

(If you read that title and thought of John Donne, you’re probably either an English major or someone writing a paper for lit class. Either way, you’re in line for serious bonus points.)

The Burch Fellowship organization recently posted this link on its website, so I’m expecting we’ll have a lot of university traffic soon. For those of you coming to visit for the first time, welcome. Feel free to look around — since the oldest posts are farther back, you’d probably do best to click to the last page. You might also click on the links at right for an introduction to the project, some lovely video footage, and a few other tidbits.

As I’m completing my senior year at UNC-Chapel Hill, this is probably the last post you’ll see on this blog. For those of you who have kept up, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my adventures in England. For the rest — especially curious folks who have found themselves here by accident — I invite you to step in out of the English rain and prop up your feet a while. If you’re looking for a good read, you might find that here. If you’re looking for information on travel spots in England, you’ll definitely have some luck with the earlier posts. And if you’re interested in Black Dog legends, or anything connected to them, you’ve surely hit the mother lode: I spent my whole summer studying them. Feel free to email me with questions and comments.

Thank you all. It’s been quite an adventure — I can only hope that I’ll be starting a new blog to chronicle a similar journey sometime soon. For now, however, this pilgrim is home safe and sound, and ready to drink his fill of his homeland before setting off on adventures new.

A Startling Note on File Sizes

[A Side Project | How Much Is Too Much? | CHAPTER Markers | The Persistence of Memory - From Bytes to Gigabytes | On DVDs | A Film Reference, Conveniently Supplemented with a Link to YouTube | Some Distressing Figures | In the Far Future... | Dust to Dust]

When you make a habit of acquiring multimedia skills, it’s inevitable that someone will come along and draft you into engaging side projects. In the case of this afternoon (and well on into the evening), that group of someones was my family, and the project was making a DVD of my little sister’s recent performance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So I’ve spent much of the day transferring that footage over to the computer and messing around with it in Final Cut. I was wary of cutting out a chunk of time for a different project, but I hoped it would shed some light on the DVD-making process, which will be a concern in my own work not far down the road. Like all things well-edited, it took much more time than it should have, and turned out twice as well as I had hoped.

At several points today, I decided Final Cut (the express version, no less) might be too powerful for its own good. It has a delightful function that allows you to add little triangular markers to the movie timeline you’re using, and if you turn them into CHAPTER markings (the all caps are definitely necessary) and import them into a piece of DVD-making software, they’ll automatically translate into DVD chapters, which saves you a lot of trouble. I’ve been coming across fantastic little tidbits like this one as I plow dutifully through the forty bazillion-page instruction manual that comes with the program, and I was thrilled to learn this.

Except there’s a slight problem. CHAPTER markers aren’t the only kind of markers out there. There are also REGULAR markers, and several other kinds. I paid as much attention to these decisions as I pay to the color of M&Ms I come up with when I dig in the bag — none at all. Apparently the markers are all color-coded, but I didn’t know this. I breezily whisked through the project, dotting appropriate segments with so many markers in so many colors that it began to resemble a parade float after a heavy confetti job. When I exported the file, I wound up with convenient shortcuts to scenes 3, 5, and (somehow) 9.5 — a marker I had let fall in the middle of a scene, cutting a startled monologue clean in half. Needless to say, I started over, and used only green markers: the only true CHAPTER markers, you see.

This is a convenient segue to my next point about multimedia work: these files are huge, and they take time to transfer. I don’t use the word “huge” lightly. We’re not talking about a pile of dirty dishes, or even a buffalo. When I exported the Midsummer movie from a project file into a standalone movie file, the end result was a file 25 gigabytes in size.

For those of you who don’t work with many files this size — or even some of you who do — I’ll try to put this in some kind of perspective. (If a person who actually knows what they’re doing stumbles across this layman’s discussion and finds it severely lacking, feel free to chime in with something that actually makes sense.) But, to basics: A “byte” is the smallest unit of measurement in computer memory. The smallest files are usually several thousand bytes, or “kilobytes.” The journal I kept this summer, a word document with more than 100 pages of text, takes up 470 KB of space. That’s nothing. That’s pocket change on today’s hard drives.

When you get a thousand bytes of data, you have a megabyte. Now we’re talking. Most users won’t see anything beyond a couple of megabytes of data — a standard song file saved as an mp3 will cost you somewhere between 3 and 5, maybe 7 megabytes. These stack up if you collect a lot of them, but not all that quickly, and you can buy an external hard drive to carry the load of your music library and photo albums pretty easily.

If you’re like me, and you tend to collect the entire discographies of certain artists (I’m currently on a quest to get all Tom Waits’ commercial releases, which will probably take the rest of my life), you might have an encounter with the gigabyte, a value approximately equivalent to a million bytes. (That’s apparently not quite true, but it will do for now; if you want a real horror show, check out the Wikipedia article on the gigabyte, which is enough to make any humanities major thank God that A.P. credits have saved him from taking math classes ever again). Most college students probably have several gigs of music on their hard drives.

Now. The file I uploaded for the Midsummer show is 25 gigabytes. It took 30 minutes to convert it from a project file in Final Cut to a movie. That meant I had time to go down and eat dinner with my family before the little bar filled up with blue and the progress window disappeared. Naively, I thought this was a long time to have to let a computer do something. Not an hour later, I found myself putting the finishing touches on a DVD of the performance, and I set the routine for burning it. The computer told me it would be finished with the project in 5 hours and 27 minutes.

Now, call me crazy. I probably should have seen this coming, with all the files I’d already put together. But my brain refused to comprehend that something could take this long to make. DVDs are those little discs you rent from Blockbuster when you’re at home on a break from college. You put them in your machine, and your machine plays them. Movies aren’t work. They’re entertainment.

Tell that to my computer, which says there are still almost four hours of furious data crunching between me and the production of one DVD of my sister’s performance.

It reminds me, in a rather disheartening way, of that scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where an elaborate tower of pulleys, funnels, tubes, nozzles, eyedroppers and wheels churns through a minutes-long routine to make a single piece of gum that tastes like a five-course meal. (And as luck would have it, some poor soul looking for a copyright violation has posted it all on YouTube — here it is, courtesy of the generous Applebuster333. God, Gene Wilder’s bow tie gets me every time.) That’s essentially what’s going on with this project, though. A high-quality product, even if it’s slim enough to slide under the door, requires an untold amount of production and processing time before it jumps from the big screen onto your screen. Makes you want to treat that copy of John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth movie you fed to the neighbor’s dog with a little more respect. (Not really.)

Anyway, it’s been a night of startling technological revelations, especially when we go back to that first figure I mentioned about 900 pages ago. Let’s say there are 100 pages even in that Microsoft Word document I mentioned — as you’ll have completely forgotten by this point, it takes up 470 KB of space on my hard drive, which is just about all the data a Windows computer can handle anyway. (We’ll round it up to 500 KB, half a megabyte, for kicks.) I wrote for several hours every night for two months to get all that down.

What I’m trying to work my way around to is this: if you wrote at the same steady pace, a few hours a night, every night, it would take you more than 8000 years to achieve 25 gigabytes of text. 8333.33 years, to be exact — 8.3 millennia of constant typing. In that time, you would have written about 5 million pages, which actually doesn’t seem all that bad, considering it’s the average length of a typical American tax form. The United States would elect anywhere from one to two thousand new presidents. The sun would rise and set more than three million times. Mobile phones would have shrunk to molecular sizes. Radio pop would still be terrible, and so would airline food, although Delta will be flying to the Andromeda Galaxy by then. All jests aside, though, empires have risen and crumbled to dust in less time. Whole species have achieved dominance over the planet and then been snuffed out to make way for what’s coming next.

It’s a true sign of the times, I think, to consider things at this scale. We’ve come a long way from the typewriter, an even longer way from the Ticonderoga #2, which is still a writer’s most faithful friend in my eyes. But next time I stand in a computer store with my father and one of us says, “Man, we’ll never be able to use that much memory” (his words about our most recent purchase), I’ll know to think twice. The clock of human progress is a slow, quiet machine, but it will see us all into the dust before its steady march is done.

A Few Highlights

It is with great relief, and not a little bit of pride, that I give a highlight or two from the past few days’ work. I blew through a couple of tapes just today, which is enough to make anyone obliged to rest a moment on his laurels — ghost walks from the Isle of Man and York. My good friend Adam Wright was with me for the first one, and as I have him wandering in and out of a few shots, I plan to give him a cameo in the documentary. (I hope he’ll understand if I decide not to pay him for his brief, but nonetheless key, appearance.)

I’ve been able to devote a good deal of time to the interviews I collected along the way. Considering the wide array of possible mistakes a novice cameraman can make — a hair on the lens (or, perhaps, what’s left of a bug); forgetting to make sure the white balance is in order (thereby preventing people who wear white shirts from looking like fuzzy ghosts) — my interviews have all come out pretty well. So far, I’ve gone through an chat I had with a man who runs a garden complex with his wife at the base of Troller’s Gill, and a few talks with tour guides from different parts of England. I’ve already taken a glance at the interview I had with England’s reigning Black Dog expert in Northampton, and my talk with the owner of the Black Dog Inn in Uplyme. So far, at least, they all seem fairly clear, and undisturbed by traffic sounds, people shouting, the obtrusive honking of passing flocks of geese, and other noises one tends to encounter in the United Kingdom. Packing a boom microphone was my best idea yet; it functions directionally, and when aimed forward, it can pick up a street pianist’s rendition of Georgia on my Mind with heartbreaking clarity, while (mostly) filtering out the call-and-response hooting of two babies in strollers behind me. (See my notes on cameras, beasts and babies if you haven’t already).

That’s all for now. Tomorrow’s business as usual.

More Thoughts from the Editing Suite

[Progress Report | Flora and Fauna | Spotty Camera Work | That One Story about a Dead Bug, Which Died on My Lens in Troller's Gill, and Which I Mistook for a Chip or Flaw That Might Cost Serious Money to Fix]

Today was business as usual with the documentary. I loaded three more hours of footage onto the hard disk, mostly chronologically — the tape from Peel Town, and two tapes from York and the surrounding countryside. This means I’ve put a sizable dent in that stage of the project, which makes me happy.

Once I have a new reel, I usually watch it straight through and find all the clips I might use for the documentary. A useful clip might be something half an hour long, like some of my interviews. It might be just a few seconds — the shadow of a cloud rolling across a hill, a sheep that decides to come up and nuzzle the camera lens (you laugh, but it will be in the credits). It might be a truly epic pan across wild English countryside, or a brief shot — taken from a respectful distance — of one of the man-eating thistles I found on the Dales, which looked more than capable of shredding me if I looked at it the wrong way. Anyway, this is far too much detail. But hopefully it’ll give a sense of what kinds of things I’m looking for as I start putting the project together.

It’s difficult to point out any major revelations about film work I haven’t already shared, but I will say this: doing anything with a lens (and, thanks to whoever helped me assemble my kit, no lens cap) is nothing short of an adventure. I came back to my footage from the Isle of Man today only to find that a hair had somehow found its way onto the lens of the camera, and — being the novice I was at that time — I blithely went halfway across the island shooting film with somebody’s hair floating just left of center in every frame. (I say “somebody’s hair” because it’s curly, and it looks blond. How that might have gotten there, I cannot begin to guess.)

Luckily, there’s plenty one can do about this. For one thing, stray particles on a lens only appear when the lens is focused in a certain way. Zoom in beyond 20x or so (the lens on Black Magic will magnify things a whopping 99 times), and your little problem, be it a hair or a drop of rainwater, will phase out of being, as though by magic. So take a good look when the final production gets screened, but with any luck, we won’t be seeing much of that hair, curly and luminous though it is.

Of all the problems you can have with a lens, suicidal insects are probably the most bothersome, not to mention the most perplexing. Idiot that I am, I decided I would take a twilight trek through Troller’s Gill, a limestone gorge where a Black Dog with a particularly ferocious streak has been known to stretch its legs after the sun goes down. (I had been there before during the day, and the sight of the caves boring into the earth — left behind from the old lead mining days — were enough to ignite a spark of panic in me, even at three in the afternoon.) The place was crawling with midges after dark, all of them floating in big clouds right at head level. I couldn’t walk ten paces without becoming a temporary guest of these little evening celebrations, and it was pretty near impossible to get anything productive done. But I dutifully trooped down the path, setting up the tripod here and there and taking footage of the darkening hills. I finally withdrew from the place when the light got too low for practical filming; apparently the local midge government had somehow gotten wind of my presence, because I couldn’t go anywhere without a thousand-man escort hovering around my ears and face.

The next morning, I found a spot on Black Magic’s lens. That’s not quite true: it was actually during an interview that I discovered said spot, which rendered all the video I got for that segment completely useless, although it’s not really vital for the final production. It looked like a drop of water, and like any other spot, it would vanish after I zoomed in past a certain point. But it was really getting on my nerves, and when I checked the next day to find it hadn’t dried up and moved on the way I had expected, I got a little worried. I borrowed a soft cloth from my hosts and made a few exploratory rubs, and found that it had texture, which set off alarm bells in my head. It seemed likely that the lens had gotten chipped somehow. I didn’t know how or where this might have happened — I wasn’t even sure that lenses could chip, since I’d never encountered such a thing before. But I sat there on the corner of the bed, a hundred awful thoughts running through my mind (could it have brushed a tree branch or something?), and then I noticed that I’d managed to smear it. A few more minutes of careful polishing got rid of the spot, and I finally came to the conclusion that I had just rubbed away the final remains of a midge who had danced his last little bug bolero on the clear dance floor of my Leica lens.

So in short, the project’s rolling along fine. Compared to all that nonsense, looking at footage in the comfort of my air conditioned (and relatively bugless) computer room has been a piece of cake.

Sunlight, Apple™, and the Joys of Post-Production

[Here Comes the Sun | Final Cut | Reflections on My Time As a Yorkshire Pilgrim | The Process | Thank You, Steve | Strategy | More Black Magic]

Of all the natural phenomena I’ve had to readjust to this past week — has it only been a week? — anything having to do with the sun takes the cake. First of all, there’s its presence: the mere fact that I see it from time to time distinguishes this part of the world from the British Isles, as does its power to transform my little Honda Civic from charming automobile to furnace deathtrap. (I’m still getting used to the idea that I won’t be able to touch the steering wheel for about five minutes until the car cools off — quite a feat, considering this means I have to drive with only my fingertips.) There’s also the shortness of the days, as compared to what I experienced in the higher latitudes. I don’t really recall seeing much nighttime in Dublin; I was usually back at the apartment by the time it got full dark, and the sun was up when I woke, even on the earliest days. America actually honors that period of the day known as evening, which has been refreshing.

With the natural world out of the way, let’s turn to man-made wonders: namely, Final Cut Express, which I’m using to put together the documentary. I have some experience with the program from the Carolina Letters project we launched for the university. Most of that work was audio, although I did make a DVD for one of the lectures, and plan to do another of the same kind in the fall. So I’ve had a good time fiddling around with the various video options in the program, getting to know its odds and ends, and so far I’ve made some good progress.

My pilot project was my sixth tape, which has all my footage of the Yorkshire Dales. I wanted to go back to this one first because it was the first point on the trip in which the landscape really had me reeling — the hilliness of the Isle of Man and York’s ancient Roman walls had certainly caught my fancy, but in Yorkshire, I found myself actually slack-jawed at the landscape. I stayed in Thorpe, a “village” of six houses clustered around a triangle of grass that vaguely constituted a roundabout; I spent my days there hiking the nearby moors, taking perhaps too much footage of the sheep, and marveling at the endless swells of green hills that rose one from the other, like a still life of sea-green breakers.

Working with these shots has taken me back to what it felt like to be out on the road. It all feels so long ago, even though Dublin is less than a week behind me — my hometown in the U.S. has familiarity on its side, and the shock of return was enough to bring it all blasting back. After only days here, I feel as though I never left, and I have only these breathtaking images to remind me that not so very long ago, I was traipsing around on haunted grounds, wearing my battered hiking boots and probably the same shirt I’d had on since last Tuesday. Nostalgia doesn’t begin to describe it.

Here’s how the project goes: I hook the camera (loaded with the proper tape) up to the computer, and Final Cut “captures” all the footage from the tape and puts it into a program that allows me to cut it, shape it, and move it around. The software captures it at speed, so essentially, I press play on the camera’s VCR, “capture” on the computer, and go take a shower while the thing plugs away for an hour, moving the footage from one device to the other. Because Steve Jobs is a genius (Fortune has apparently named him one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs, but let’s face it — I like iPods, and chances are, you do too), the video is just as sharp and clear on the computer as it is on the camera, and I go about my merry business of cutting and pasting, snipping, rendering, and generally doing all that needs to be done to stitch something whole and compelling out of the scraps of information I spent this summer collecting. Luckily, the Final Cut interface — like most Apple products — is almost suspiciously intuitive. Although it will probably take more than a few weeks of fulling for me to fully grasp its potential as an editing suite, what knowledge I have for now will serve, and I’m looking forward both to making some good progress and also learning more about the system, and all the tricks I can pull with it.

I’ve been considering entry strategies for the project, because at this point, I have a great deal of footage to sort through and process, not merely computer-wise, but mentally. I plan to focus on the interviews, so I can take stock of the talking heads I’ve gotten; these opinions, after all, will be an integral part of the documentary’s narrative, and I want to give them the proper attention. Most of the B-roll I took will have voice-overs rather than audio, so I feel I can leave that floating for the time being while I take a closer look at the interviews. That’s not to say I don’t have some stunning B-roll, though, and I’d be happy to post some if it didn’t take up a bazillion megabytes of space per minute on the computer’s hard disk.

I brought Black Magic out of retirement for a brief tour of Atlanta today. Sarah, my younger sister, has just wrapped up a four-week acting camp at Georgia’s famous Shakespeare Tavern (you don’t have to live in Atlanta to appreciate the playhouse’s logo, which is just fantastic). She had Bottom’s part in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I thought it might be neat if I could tape it. Aside from the washout of red light that I wasn’t able to fix for a good bit of the time, and — one of my big pet peeves — the baby that materialized in my row during the second act, and would not stop making baby noises during big pauses, it went well. It was interesting to work with moving targets for a change; kept me on my toes, and my finger on the focus ring. The excitement of camera work hasn’t diminished a bit since I got started.

Bill Bryson: An Example

You could read that title in a lot of ways, actually. I’d definitely say he’s an example of good writing. But we’re concerned today with making an example, not following one.

Having spent the morning going through pictures for the documentary, I have to take a moment to gush about Photoshop. My father used to do web design for the paper, and I had an opportunity throughout most of my childhood to play around with the program, which is a piece of high-powered graphics editing software. (I think I squandered that opportunity by mostly using it to create an entire line of trading cards featuring the 1995 lineup of the Atlanta Braves that I planned to market one day. Somewhere along the way, I lost interest — probably because I was maybe ten years old — and they’re now stored on a Macintosh computer so old and dead that its hard drive should probably be put to work as a doorstop.) Anyway, what I’m trying to tell you in a roundabout way is that I haven’t touched Photoshop in years, and I’m in the throes of realizing it’s a pure masterpiece, even for someone who’s going to need it as little as I am for the project.

I thought about writing a few lines about all the neat filters and effects you can use in Photoshop, but that would take too long, and besides, we’re in the Internet, so we can do something a bit more fun. I’d like to take you — mostly because I still have 20 minutes till my laundry dries — through a brief example.

I’ve scanned a page from a book by one of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Country, which I bought for the plane ride home, and didn’t really need thanks to an exceptionally chatty seat companion. Anyway, with most of the scans I’ve used, I’ve gotten them out of books, which means they come out a.) completely facing the wrong direction, often at a diagonal; b.) close, sometimes alarmingly close, to large blocks of text that I won’t need to use; and c.) faded, as they’re photocopied images. See below; I’ve blacked out the text for copyright reasons.

Now, the picture we’re trying to grab is the one I’ve put in a red box. There are obvious issues — first of all, it’s facing the wrong way. It’s also flanked by both title and text, and if you look closely, you can see the ghost of the writing on the back. If we want to put this into a documentary, we’re going to have to make all of these things right. Some of them will disappear. Some of them will change position, or direction.

We start by grabbing the picture and turning it 90 degrees counterclockwise. With Photoshop, this takes all of three and a half seconds. And since we’re going to need just the image, we’ll bump it up in size, too — it’s saved at a high resolution, so this is even easier than the last step. And before you know it…

… we’ve got the thing right side up, which is a prerequisite to pretty much everything in life, from walking to graphic design. There’s still that problem of lettering in the background, and things could use a little cleaning up, but that’s a job for someone with more than 10 minutes to put to it. Nevertheless, we’ve gone from a picture that seems almost irretrievable to something very workable. After years of using Paint to cobble together images (that’s the only program I had for the map of England on the itinerary page), Photoshop is nothing short of a godsend.

Rain, and More Black Dogs

[Drought and Showers | The Rain Bringer | Georgia Heat | Black Dog Photo Shoot | Updates to Follow]

It almost seems Georgia — indeed, the entire South — has been in a drought for as long as I can remember. In the semester before I left for Europe, we would go a whole month with only a couple of days of rain, and the showers weren’t all that impressive even then. I have memories in my childhood of rolling thunder, lightning that seemed to tear the world into scraps and paste it back together again in the same moment. But those storms have all but dried up here.

Ireland and England were eye-openers. It doesn’t storm there; in seven months, I didn’t see a single bolt of lightning, didn’t hear even the most distant peal of thunder rolling over the Wicklow Mountains. When the rain fell, it would come steady and long, sometimes more than once a day. If you’ve ever wondered why all the postcards feature rolling hills and fields, green into eternity, look to the sky.

And yet, since coming home to a Georgia summer so hot it makes you sweat just to go get the mail, I haven’t been able to escape the rain. I drove across town with my sister to get groceries on Tuesday night, and we had to go through a thunderstorm so apocalyptic I thought we might not make it home. The rain played jungle drums on the hood of the car as we waited at stoplights, and with each blast of thunder, the radio signal would fizzle, as though in startled retreat. We had a milder shower last night.

It wasn’t until I look out the window at 2:30 this afternoon to find a hard rain falling that I began to question the weather. My family, especially my grandparents — farmers whose garden, thanks to the recent showers, has given up a bounty of tomatoes as red and slick-swollen as human hearts — are convinced that I brought the storms with me. My friends in Dublin tell me I left the sun behind. Those two things would be quite a feat even for a being empowered to direct the weather, so I’m not sure I can lay claim to having done any of this myself. But I will say it’s been wonderful to sit in my bedroom and listen to the thunder growling in the sky, and watch the thirsty earth drinking itself blind out in the backyard.

These are fickle showers, and sometimes they’ll slacken as soon as they start, leaving behind moments of quiet wonder: the hesitant peeping of crickets becomes audible, and the air heats up and swells until it’s something you have to face when you walk out the door, something you have to knock ahead of you and push aside as you bend to get the paper, like a balloon without enough helium to rise above eye level. It’s a strange thing to come back to a country where the air has struck a tenuous compromise between liquid and gas.

I spent the day uploading all the Black Dog pictures I collected on the road. I have articles and books from various people I met, and many of them have artists’ renderings of what a Black Dog might look like — a slim volume about Black Dogs in Latin American tradition was particularly helpful. I took the afternoon to rediscover the joys of using Photoshop, which makes any kind of photo work a breeze. I was able to scan in the photos and bring them up to a high enough standard and resolution to work in the documentary in a matter of hours. I still have a few more to go for tomorrow, and the rest of the time will be spent logging the few straggling hours of footage I have left. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into the real start of the project, but this preliminary work is very important, and it will make navigating the mountain of data I’ve gotten this summer a lot easier.

I’d love to put some of the pictures up, but as I’m sure most of the images are copyrighted, it would probably best to stick to text. But there will be plenty of that. Updates will keep rolling in as I make more headway on the project. More to come.

24 Hours on the Road and in the Sky

If ever there were a traveling scheme to make me happy to come home at last, these past few days have been just that. I sat thinking about all the legs of my journey back across the Atlantic, and realized that from Dublin to Atlanta, I was on the road for 24 hours, pretty much on the nose. A run-down:

5:40 a.m. : Struggle awake in the Dublin apartment where I’ve been staying. Stare in disbelief at the light outside, which has moved well past dawn already, because Ireland is on par, latitudinally speaking, with some parts of Russia. I dress and eat, and throw the last of my things into a suitcase and shopping bag. I don’t remember bringing this many T-shirts.
6:30 a.m. : On our way to the airport. The extending handle on my rolling suitcase has conveniently broken just the day before, which means I can either carry it — it weighs as much as a newborn Tyrannosaurus — or roll it along and grip it by the other handle, which involves shuffling along in a stooped position, like a caveman testing out a prototype for a rolling boulder. Suggestions that we get a cab are batted about, and discarded. We finally decide on the LUAS, a tram that runs next to the Liffey, and hop off at O’Connell Street.
7:10 a.m. : After a connecting bus, we hop off at the departures gate of the airport. Usually the place is quiet, and it takes less than half an hour to get a boarding pass and proceed through security. Today it’s a madhouse; for some reason, half the city has decided to turn out and fly on a Monday morning. We wait half an hour in the Q, and a dozen officials come by to check my passport and identification, at least three of them handing me a blue customs form to fill out. Non-American passengers are also given a tan questionnaire as long as my forearm with the words Homeland Security printed in imposing letters across the top. They are also forced to sing the national anthem (backward) and vault a gap in the floor where alligators writhe and snap. (They are not actually forced to do this, but from the intense expressions of the flight officials, it seems the possibility is just over the horizon.)
7:45 a.m. : We arrive at the desk, and the flight crew tells me they might be able to put me on a direct flight to Atlanta, instead of flying me through JFK. They give me a free breakfast voucher and tell us to make ourselves comfortable in the restaurant upstairs, and to come back in about half an hour.
8:20 a.m. : Because the attendant failed to scrawl a price allowance on the voucher, it doesn’t work, and we return to the counter empty-bellied. Amy and I have had a small disagreement on how much checked baggage I’m allowed on the trip. The shopping bag I’ve crammed with blue jeans and cargo khakis is too big for the overhead bins. We scramble at the last minute to convert it into something that will travel in the cargo hold without spilling or ripping to shreds, strewing my dirty boxers in a flapping line across the Atlantic Ocean. With the help of some packing tape and a plastic bag from the kitchen large enough to find employ in the new arrivals section of a local morgue, we manage to patch together something that resembles a Christmas present wrapped by a five-year-old. Proudly we convey it, along with the useless voucher, to the desk, where they inform me the Atlanta plans didn’t pan out, and the woman receives the voucher with a look of horror and apologizes. It has been an unforgettable part of the trip spent with someone whose importance in my life increases each day, and we hardly get a proper goodbye as the attendants whisk me through security so I can get to the flight on time.
9:00 a.m. : I go through immigration, and as the flight is about to board, one of the people from upstairs appears at the counter. She tells me that because I handled the voucher and failed Atlanta transfer so gracefully — I think she was exaggerating, they didn’t really take anything away, after all — they’re going to bump me up to business class for the six-hour flight to New York. I couldn’t be more surprised, or delighted. We get on the plane, and I’m treated to more complimentary food than I have ever encountered before on a single flight, and a seat that leans back, allowing me to pass out instantly, although I manage to wake up for the shrimp quesadillas they bring around in the middle of the flight. My companion is an older woman who tells me about her travels as a concert pianist. She becomes convinced somewhere along the way that I will leave everything I brought with me, including the small airline toiletries bag provided for business class fliers, and I patiently assure her that it’s one thing to misplace one’s wallet, and quite another to leave behind a jacket whose pockets are stuffed with seven paperback books, two Guinness pint glasses for friends, a crime thriller in hardcover, two DVDs, an apple, and as many of the plane’s free Dasani water bottles as I can carry.
1:30 p.m. : I arrive at JFK to find the place a madhouse. Every single day flight the day before was canceled due to bad weather in New York; I will find over the course of the next twelve hours that this has affected air traffic from here to Texas, because when an airport this busy catches cold, the entire country sneezes. I find a pay phone and wait in line behind a man who might have to cancel his honeymoon on a Carnival cruise line because of the flight debacle. I reach the pay phone after 45 minutes of waiting only to find that it isn’t authorized to dial the Atlanta area, where my parents are at work. It will be another hour and a half until I can check in for my flight, and get beyond the crush of people into the secured gate area.
3:29 p.m. : It’s the earliest I can get my boarding pass, and I sprint through the kiosk routine and go to the security line. They pull my jacket aside for inspection, and because they obviously have ties to dangerous guerrilla training camps, the handful of Dasani waters I pilfered from my business class flight all stay behind with a heavy-jowled man in uniform, who will probably drink them all before his shift is over. I kill time for my flight in the gate area, reading a few magazines, catching up with the news, and stopping to write a bit in an upstairs cafe. I find a bookstore and manage to thumb almost halfway through a paperback bestseller by the time I need to go board my plane, which is scheduled to leave at 9:20 p.m.
9:50 p.m. : But it doesn’t, and there’s a half hour delay before we get on. A flight to Columbus, OH was supposed to take off at 7, and people looking as tired as I feel slump in their chairs, staring blearily at the attendants working at the counter. They call the Atlanta flight, and part of the mad throng detaches to form a line at the gate. “What about Columbus?” calls a lone voice from the back of the crowd. Nobody answers.
10:30 p.m. : We’re taking off more than an hour late. The girl in the seat next to mine has been flying for more than thirty hours, having come from Barcelona, laid over in Frankfurt, and passed through one or two more airports for good measure on her way to JFK. She has several hours to spend at Hartsfield before her final connection to San Diego. Under such circumstances, I would be either unconscious with fatigue, or under enough mental strain that I would find myself trying to convince the pilot that I was the Queen of England, and capable of bestowing knighthood on any brave pilot with the means to charter a private flight home for me — to Atlanta, that is. (Perhaps I could say I was visiting Elton John, who lives in Buckhead.) I look over to tell the girl this in praise of her fortitude, and find she has fallen asleep. Moments later, I do the same.
12:20 a.m. : Inexplicable travel luck, or possibly plane engines adapted from extraterrestrial technology, brings us to the Atlanta airport ten minutes early, despite flight delays of more than an hour. I’m so road-weary I don’t notice the jet-way slam of the Georgia humidity, although I don’t fail to crack a smile at the sight of drug-sniffing beagles rolling around on their backs in the U.S. customs area. My baggage, which I sent ahead as soon as I got to JFK, has been corralled in a back room of the airport, which the guard opens. It’s a wasteland of waiting suitcases, stacked up on shelves five deep to the ceiling, and I hand over my claim ticket with an expression of despair. The guard calls over a tall, burly Israeli man and pats him on the shoulder: “This is Atlanta,” he explains. “Show us where this man’s bags are, Atlanta.” The man takes one sweeping glance at my ticket and walks straight to a corner, where both my suitcases sit, such efficiency that I nearly weep in gratitude, not even taking the time to wonder whether my savior was actually named Atlanta, or merely a personification of the city itself, possessed of the kind of familiarity one needs to navigate with poise and confidence a room packed to the rafters with look-alike travel bags.
12:40 a.m. : I notice that it would be five hours later in Dublin, 5:40 a.m., which means I’ve just spent an even 24 hours on the road. In the reflection of the sliding glass door, I mistake myself for a zombie conjured by movie magic. But none of this matters, because we are exiting the airport, and I am Quasimodo-dragging my suitcase up to the parking deck, and my father and I are in the car and on our way home.

When I started this post, I didn’t intend to write such a detailed itinerary of the trip. It probably made for tedious reading. Then again, try doing all this yourself, and you’ll see that I’ve given you the easy way out.

I spent my first day home relaxing, working off all the traveling stress. I started with a first attempt at cooking in some months, a batch of crepes (pretty good); listening to an entire Tom Waits concert posted on NPR’s All Songs Considered (very good – God bless those folks at the radio); spending time with my family (always good); driving miles through an apocalyptic thunderstorm to pick up fried chicken for dinner (absolutely terrifying, especially because European rain doesn’t come with any pyrotechnics); and wrapping up the evening in front of the television, something I haven’t done since January. It’s good to be home.

The software I’ll need for the documentary arrived right on schedule in the mail, and tomorrow, we’ll have some thoughts about my impressions of Final Cut’s express version, and a few remarks about the shape my work will be taking these next couple of weeks. To say I’m looking forward to it is a hopeless understatement.

Back in Dear, Dirty Dublin

It’s been a busy week in Dublin, and I wanted to take a minute out to put up a quick update.

The first thing warranting a mention is how bizarre it is to walk around for long periods of time without my gear. I’m used to walking down sidewalks with my senses on high alert, keeping a secure hand on my tripod to keep it from becoming a lethal crowd control weapon. On many occasions I’ve crossed a bridge just when the sun’s drifting out from behind a cloud (a rare sight on this side of the Atlantic, to see the sun at all), or seen a particularly colorful street performer, and I’ve reached for the zipper of my backpack, only to realize that the camera’s sitting back at the apartment, and my stint as amateur videographer has come to an end. It’s sad in a way, although a relief — at last I can settle backward into a rail car seat without worrying about squashing an expensive gadget, on loan no less, between the seat cushion and my spine.

I expected that it would take time to adjust to city life again, but even after spending a semester in this place, I wasn’t quite prepared for the mental shift I would need before I could navigate these teeming streets comfortably again. A day or so ago, I staked out a spot in a cafe by the Liffey River to log some footage. The place started off quiet enough, but as lunchtime saw the tables filling up with people, a buzz of conversation built up in the air, and someone put on some bad pop music on the house radio, and I couldn’t believe the noise. I packed everything up and moved down the quays a bit to another coffee spot, but eventually found myself in the same predicament.

I remember looking around at the people sitting at the tables next to mine. Most of them were in business casual dress, the women in serious black dresses and the men in ties, often with coats draped over the backs of their chairs. The cafe was right on the edge of a block of office buildings, and there were a few meetings going on; the rest of the diners were solitary, mopping up butter with croissants or sipping coffee and staring out at the flat grayness of a Dublin afternoon. The creeping sensation that I was in the middle of a great shifting of gears was inescapable. These were people who had been sitting in front of computer terminals and white boards for the last several hours — flow charts, spreadsheets, projections and proposals. This was their break, their chance to get out in the street and relax: but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was but a short respite, bracketed by more periods of intense industriousness. I had a dizzying image of the whole riverside, packed with these tidy coffee shops from one end to the other, all crammed with people killing time from noon to one. I felt the way a mouse must feel when he has scurried into the body of a grandfather clock: surrounded by an alien rhythm, dodging the sweep of clock hands and the grinding roll of gears. The pace of the country, I thought, had seeped far more deeply into my veins than I had realized.

I wound up putting everything away again and plunging into the street, searching for the little music shop along a back way I used to haunt when I studied here in the city. The sensations of the place were immediately comforting: the feel of strings pressed against frets; the smell of wooden guitar bodies, and the feel of a drumstick cradled between finger and knuckle; and the slick coolness of a splash symbol chilling the back of my tongue when I hit it. It brought me back to my senses gradually, and I was able to face the bustling streets with something approaching confidence. It has taken only a few days to settle back into the heartbeat of Dublin, but those moments of re-initiation were unexpectedly bumpy.

It’s good to be back in a city that feels familiar, and I’ve enjoyed strolling down its sidewalks and reacquainting myself with the way the buildings look under the sunlight, in the rain, in a softly drizzling mix of both. I’ve spent my time logging footage, slipping in and out of my favorite bookstores, and taking day trips out to spots in the Dublin area — at the nearby town of Bray, we climbed to the top of a mountain just in time to see a cloud surge up the opposite slope, and engulf us all in clinging fog for half an hour. It was incredible; pictures to come when they’re uploaded. We also made some time for opening day of The Dark Knight — I could write a whole post about that experience alone, but I don’t have the several hours I would need to really do it justice, so I’ll just say that I wouldn’t rule it out during the Academy Awards.

I hope to follow up a lead at the Museum of National History about storytelling. In the meantime, there’s plenty to do in Dublin: more logging footage, a trip to the library at Trinity College to search for Black Dog articles, and a chocolate festival in Temple Bar this weekend that sounds simply too good to pass up.

Not the Curtain, but the Final Act

[Staking out a Spot | Much Improved | Georgia on My Mind | Seven Months in Review | Inner Country | What Is Yet to Come | 100 Pages | All This Momentum]

Looking back, at least half of these summary bits could be album titles. Now if I just had an album.

Blogs are funny things. There’s a little counter that tracks how many people show up to look at what you’ve written. Yesterday there were five. Today’s count is at 31 visitors, and it’s not even noon over in America, where most of my friends and family are. Curious.

I had planned to knock out most of my tape logging today, and it wasn’t until I announced this fact to Amy last night over Skype that I realized I might need a bit more time. I told her of my plans, and she asked me how many tapes I had left to do. Twelve, I said, rather breezily. And then it began to dawn on me that each tape is an hour of footage. And for most tapes, there’s going to be a lot of pausing and rewinding while I scribble down notes in my little logging book. So unless I planned to put in what would pretty much amount to 24 solid hours of work, I was going to have to space out the labor a bit. (Remember when I mentioned not having enough footage? I’m now grateful to whatever restraining force stayed my hand and kept me from going hog-wild in the B-roll department, because now I’ve got larger questions about putting the documentary together on my plate, and it’s a comfort to know I won’t be trading sleep for tape logging when I get back home).

It wasn’t long before I staked out a spot at the back of a Costa — the U.K. equivalent of Starbucks, it would seem — where there were free electrical outlets. (Enough to power a small metropolis, actually, although I only needed one to charge my spare camera battery.) I got out the camera, brought back a cuppa mud from the counter, and started jotting down notes. All in all, I went through about two and a half hours of tape, which amounted to just about twice that amount of time in labor because I was working with the Yorkshire segments, most of which are an assembly of short clips of a few seconds, which means a lot of pausing and flipping back and forth.

Going back over the footage was, to put it shortly, an interesting exercise. Because it’s been several weeks since I’ve seen most of the shots, I was able to look at them with fresh eyes, with the result that I noticed several things I wouldn’t have seen before. The first of these is just how much I’ve improved as a cameraman. During the first ten minutes of the tape that I logged from my time in York, I found myself on the edge of my seat, murmuring to myself to keep the camera still, just for one second, that shot was almost perfect. (I didn’t realize until the girl at the table next to me started looking over that some of these requests were actually being verbalized, and I was quietly haranguing myself in the third person.)

Looking back through the footage also gave me an appreciation for just how amazing this trip has been. I became awed and excited all over again at shots of the Minster Cathedral in York; the comfortably cluttered stretch downtown they call the Shambles; and the sturdy permanence of the city walls, which remain in remarkably good repair, even though they were built by the Romans. Being mixed up in the day-to-day affairs of a place often has a way of dulling one’s appreciation of its beauty, and I found I was able to reclaim some of that delight as I watched the scenes I filmed last month, re-taking a journey that I’ll share with everyone at home when I get the documentary finished. I’m also pleasantly surprised to see that all the interviews I’ve taken, even under the most trying of circumstances, have turned out better than I could have expected. Especially the one I got during derby weekend in York, with drunken revelers passing by every five seconds and practically drowning out our conversation; you can hear every word he says, despite the dull roar in the background.

There’s one segment in particular that I have to mention. During my travels, I’ve done my best to record the music of street musicians wherever possible; although I plan on splicing in some commercial tunes for the documentary, I wanted to have as many local acts as I could get to strengthen the flavor of the place for the people watching. One of my favorite finds was a street pianist in York that I stumbled across while I was wandering around, completely lost, on one of my first afternoons. You don’t see many street pianists; a piano isn’t exactly something that fits in a case and slides neatly into the baggage compartment of a bus or rail car. But he was out there, with a worn but faithful-looking set of keys, some of which were coming unglued even as he was playing. (At one point I saw him rescue one of the black keys, a low F# I think, from the ground, and settle it back into place entirely with his left hand, while his right carried on a ragtime song as though nothing were going on. Amazing.)

The second song he played, which I captured in full, was a rendition of Georgia on My Mind — the Ray Charles version, of course — bluesy and full of soul. At the time, I was floored to hear it, and fairly certain the whole performance was getting drowned out by a pair of babies babbling to each other in nearby strollers (see my thoughts on cameras, beasts and babies for further discussion of this). But the quality of the boom mic I got from UNC saved the day once again, and I found myself listening to crisp, clear audio of the entire song. It was four and a half minutes long. I cried the entire time.

I can’t say for certain what triggered it. I’m still a little wiped out from the research I packed in this week, and I had also hit a jagged caffeine high from the coffee, probably because I can’t remember having had a cup since January, when I left America for Ireland. But something about that song, even from a pianist a thousand miles from the New World, jumped out of the rickety instrument — out of the speakers of the camera — and straight into my chest, and said, Come home, you idiot. It’s time for you to come home. And before I knew what had hit me, I had just lost it, and the people at nearby tables were starting to sip their coffee a little quicker and dart their eyes in my direction, as though I were growing another head, or mutating into a large and especially fearsome-looking bug. (It happens.) But the whole experience didn’t feel as mortifying as it probably should have; more than anything, I felt like something was sending me a message, and I was just happy to have received it.

(Against the black background, this player looks a little repulsive. But try it out anyway, I promise it won’t bite.)

Georgia on My Mind (sample)

By the time my plane touches down on the other side of the Atlantic, I will have been away from home for approximately seven months. Since the last time I spent more than a week or two in America, Fidel Castro has stepped down as the leader of Cuba. India has set a world record by sending 10 satellites into orbit in one go. Oil prices per barrel have climbed by almost $50, an unprecedented record; and Nelson Mandela’s birthday celebration has drawn almost 50,000 people to Hyde Park — a nearly unprecedented (but certainly deserved) record. It’s been a busy time for the world, and I feel hopelessly out of touch with things on the other side of the pond, from the elections to Exxon prices. I’m looking forward to having the chance to come back into an awareness of all these things when my time here in Europe is over.

And yet, I can’t deny that this trip has given me the chance to do plenty of exploring, both in this lovely country of England, and in a far different realm — the country of my inner self. After a hundred scrapes and sprees in the United Kingdom, involving everything from travel mishaps to the stifling awkwardness of being an American in England on the Fourth of July, I’ve discovered a resilience and fortitude I didn’t even know I possessed. I’ve learned a heap of things about folklore, not just as a form of study, but also as a lens through which the purpose of stories — their capacity to inspire and instruct, to amuse, to cause change — has gained greater clarity for me. I have had the rare opportunity to study tales as mirrors to reality, functions of humankind’s larger story: our quest to understand our world, and ourselves. I might have been following the footprints of the Black Dog, but no matter where I’ve gone, the footprints of man have always been somewhere nearby, running parallel.

It might seem strange to see these meditations here, when my journey is far from over. I still have another week in Dublin, during which I’ll still be logging footage and hopefully getting the odd interview with a folklore professor. There’s still another visit to the UCD Folklore Library in the works sometime this week. But this is my last day in England, and this particular point in time and space is perfectly suited to such thoughts — the half-sunny vista of a late Sunday afternoon, in which the inner landscape and the outer one meet in a mutual rise, affording sweeping views of what has come before, and what is yet to come. My flight from London to Dublin tomorrow will be but the first in a series of homecomings, and although I’ll be continuing the work I’ve done here in bringing this trip home to America as a documentary, it will be work of a different kind: almost a historian’s task, to rebuild a whole world out of the pieces and suggestions that remain.

Many people have commented on the length of my blog entries, and to a certain extent, it’s out of sync with my character. I’ve never been one to broadcast everything that happens on a daily basis via the Internet; I’ve made several good attempts at starting a journal, but always they wind up mouldering in a desk drawer or in the corner of my closet, to be unearthed years later, completely blank except for one or two ambitious entries (“June 22, 1999. I’ve decided to write an entry in this journal every day.” That kind of nonsense).

But the short answer to the question is this: I’ve written so much because I don’t want to forget anything. This has been my first attempt to document any part of my life this closely — in addition to these rather lengthy passages, I have almost 100 pages in a Word document of things I didn’t post here, either because they’re more personal, or because I didn’t have an Internet connection in this barbarian country. The thing was, once I started writing, I just couldn’t stop. I used it as a way to stave off anxiety about coming home when my stay in Ireland was up, and even though I’ve taken the odd break here and there for a day or weekend, I’ve continued, even at this rather startling pace, all through the summer. It isn’t because I don’t have enough to do as it is — the bit about logging tape should tell you that. It’s because I find that I can’t live without that last hour in the day which I devote to putting down my thoughts. It’s become an essential clarifier, a lens I have to polish daily, lest the whole perspective become obscured, or (worse yet) lost.

And there’s the added bonus of all this: that next time somebody asks me what I’ve been up to lately, I can wander over to my filing cabinet, and ask whether they want the short version, or to stay for dinner.

I also find that keeping a journal has played a major part in helping me find my voice as a writer. That whole endeavor can be a tricky business, especially when one’s first starting out. But I find that putting down my thoughts at the end of the day, even in a brief way, keeps all those senses honed that a writer holds most dear: keen skills of observation, the ability to handle mood and tone while keeping a story going, and an open connection between the eye, the heart, and the pen. Writers write, after all. And all this momentum just seems too good to waste.

With all that said, I think we’re finally at an end to this post. (Cheers go up from those still in attendance, which is nobody.) I usually save writing for the end of the day, but I wanted to get it all out of the way before dinner, so I can spent the evening walking around Exeter, reveling in the amazing spell of good weather and enjoying my last night in this beautiful country. I think I’ve said all I need to say at this point, and although there’s going to be more blogging to follow (there always is, it seems), this will do us for now, at least.