Saturday, February 24, 2024

Grandma's Story (How To)

 

Recently, several younger friends have asked me about how they could capture the stories their grandparents can tell, while they are still here. They’ve realized that behind every elderly face lies a story, probably several.

Journalistic techniques may be able to help you extract them. You might even consider hiring a journalism student, because people will tell strangers things they would never tell their families.

But if you go DIY, the process isn't all that complicated. 

First of all, a general observation. The best way to get someone to talk is not to ask them to talk. Instead ask them to take a walk. 

Once they walk, they'll talk.

Or offer a cup of tea. You can't drink tea without also talking.

But if you must set up a formal interview, for heaven's sake, don't ask for her whole life story at one sitting. Start small, just ask her questions that will prompt her memory. Such as...

"What flowers grew near your house?" 

"What was your favorite book?"

"What did your house smell like?"

"What was your pet's name?"

"What did you want for your birthday when you were small?"

"What was really scary back then?"

"Who took that photo?"

After those tidbits, maybe move on to the bigger things.

"Is there any dream you've had over and over?"

"How did you and Grandpa meet?"

"Where did you eat your first meal?"

"How did you get that scar?"

"Where did you go on your first date?"

You can go on and on if she is willing to cooperate. Over time, keep the questions open-ended and she'll volunteer to fill in the blanks. That's it. It is just that simple and just that difficult at the same time.

But for one who has lost their partner, there is also a critical question you might consider that goes like this. 

"After he died, and you went outside for the first time, what was different?"

***

In my own case, one of my grandmothers did leave a written account of her early life. They clearly were difficult times; she had to run away from home (a farm in Canada) to avoid abuse. But the tone of her story was not that of a victim, rather it was matter-of-fact, as if she were recalling a minor stomach ache.

She dictated her story to one of her daughters, my aunt, who typed it up and gave it to the rest of us. My other grandmother and both grandfathers left no written records that I am aware of.

There are a few old black-and-white photos, some public records, and some oral accounts that my sisters and I know about the three grandparents we met.

That's it. You don't know what you don't know.

(I first published an earlier version of this one three years ago in February 2021.)

HEADLINES:

  • The science of IVF: What to know about Alabama's 'extrauterine children' ruling (NPR)

  • Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, who wrote the opinion in last week's Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos have the same rights as living children, recently appeared on a show hosted by a self-anointed “prophet” and QAnon conspiracy theorist. Read more about Christian nationalist influencer Johnny Enlow. [HuffPost]

  • South Carolina GOP presidential primary: Nikki Haley’s battle with Donald Trump comes home (Yahoo)

  • Defense says cellphone data raises questions about start of Willis-Wade relationship (AJC)

  • Trump faces warning signs that his fundraising prowess may have limits in 2024 (AP)

  • Donald Trump urged Christians to support him in the 2024 presidential election, a contest he depicted in religious terms and likened to the great battles of World War Two. Speaking at a forum for Christian broadcasters in Nashville, he compared the stakes for the election to D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. (Reuters)

  • Informant who allegedly lied about the Bidens is rearrested (WP)

  • CBS faces uproar after seizing investigative journalist’s files (The Hill)

  • WAMU shuts down local news site DCist, will lay off reporters (WP)

  • Biden announces more than 500 sanctions on Russia after Navalny's death (NBC)

  • As Gaza Death Toll Mounts, Israel’s Isolation Grows (NYT)

  • Netanyahu unveils plan for Gaza’s future post-Hamas (CNN)

  • Former digital-media darling Vice to end website, lay off hundreds (WP)

  • Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began to develop their own accent (BBC)

  • New report: 60% of OpenAI model's responses contain plagiarism (Axios)

  • AI Is in the Midst of a Fever Dream and It’s Only Getting Worse (Gizmodo)

  • AI’s New Job? All-Purpose Hollywood Crewmember (Hollywood Reporter)

  • The AIs are officially out of control (Verge)

  • Removed Notre Dame Scaffolding Reveals Construction Crew Accidentally Built Mosque (The Onion)

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Friday, February 23, 2024

Everyone's Story Matters (How To)

 (This was originally published in February 2021.)

Chatting with my CIR co-founder Dan Noyes the other day about researching family history, he had some tips I can pass on, including tracing relatives through ancestry.com, the DNA-testing company. He says he's discovered previously unknown relatives that way.

Local newspapers have traditionally been the source for most family news from the pre-digital era. If your relatives owned a business, they may have advertised in the local papers. There is also the possibility they ended up in the criminal or civil justice records, and of course property records can be a major source of information.

Some of this data is online, but you are more likely to be successful if you visit the area personally.

People who've served in the military are traceable, and some professional organizations keep historical records. Colleges as well, as Dan says that there is a service that is now digitizing school yearbooks.

Obituaries are always helpful; I just reread my mother's yesterday, and it contained details I'd forgotten. For instance, that she arrived in Detroit precisely on her 8th birthday in 1923. and that she died precisely on her mother's birthday 79 years later at the age of 87.

There are immigration records at Ellis Island (we have my Scottish grandfather's name on a ledger there) or at Angel island, which is where many Asian-Americans entered the country.

If your family is religious, a church, synagogue or temple might be useful. And then there is the Mormon Church's odd tradition of collecting all of our vital records.

You can always search marriage and divorce records for personal details, though these are localized for the most part.

Best of all are journals and letters, along with photographs and old home movies. All of this material, when combined with personal interviews if you can do them, fill out the picture of a life.

It's conceivable that as more historical documents are digitized that merely entering relative's name in Google may yield richer results.

You can also investigate your own life using all the same tools. It might be worth the effort, especially if your name is of the less common variety. Google has gotten better and better at pinpointing which person you are among others with the same name.

All of this is in the spirit of capturing our lives for our ancestors and more generally for posterity. Every life matters. And that means that everyone's story does too.

HEADLINES:

  • Weaponizing San Francisco -A reactionary movement is manipulating urban crises for political gain. (Progressive)

  • Biden’s Promised ‘Devastating’ Response to Navalny Death Is Largely Symbolic (WSJ)

  • Poverty Has Soared in New York, With Children Bearing the Brunt (NYT)

  • Two Alabama clinics pause IVF services after court rules that embryos are children (NBC)

  • After siding with Alabama ruling that embryos are children, Haley defends IVF access (NPR)

  • Alabama IVF ruling a political gift for Democrats, headache for Republicans (BBC)

  • Biden Mulling Plan That Could Restrict Asylum Claims at the Border (NYT)

  • It Sure Looks Like Trump Can’t Pay the Bond in His Fraud Trial (New Republic)

  • Republican: Colleagues were warned informant’s Biden claims were not verified (The Hill)

  • How you can tell propaganda from journalism − let’s look at Tucker Carlson’s visit to Russia (The Conversation)

  • Fani Willis Didn’t Stand a Chance (The Cut)

  • Navalny's mother says authorities are blackmailing her to hold secret burial (Axios)

  • Yulia Navalnaya emerges as Russia’s newest opposition leader (AP)

  • Biden meets widow and daughter as Russia says Navalny died of ‘natural causes’ (WP)

  • Historic Odysseus moon mission marks a milestone in reaching the lunar surface (CNN)

  • Afghanistan: Archaeological sites 'bulldozed for looting' (BBC)

  • An online dump of Chinese hacking documents offers a rare window into pervasive state surveillance (AP)

  • Japanese stocks raced to a record peak, breaking levels last seen in 1989 during the halcyon days of the bubble economy, as cheap valuations and corporate reforms lure foreign money looking for alternatives to battered Chinese markets. (Reuters)

  • Google pauses Gemini AI image generator after it created inaccurate historical pictures (CNBC)

  • AI billionaire crowns ‘whole new industry’ amid ‘tipping point’ after his company passes Google for third most valuable in the world (Fortune)

  • Scientists say they can use AI to solve a key problem in the quest for near-limitless clean energy (CNN)

  • China’s Rush to Dominate A.I. Comes With a Twist: It Depends on U.S. Technology (NYT)

  • Google goes “open AI” with Gemma, a free, open-weights chatbot family (Ars Technica)

  • Reddit in AI content licensing deal with Google (Reuters)

  • Intel’s AI Reboot Is the Future of US Chipmaking (Wired)

  • A woman is marrying an AI hologram, ushering in a weird new era for human-robot relationships (Business Insider)

  • Rising Conservative Star Just Guy Wearing Nazi Armband And Crying (The Onion)

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Thursday, February 22, 2024

San Francisco is Just Fine

(winter harvest) 

One type of post I normally avoid is the “I told you so” variety. One reason is that it would probably have to be balanced with a “Maybe I was wrong” variety — not a favorable option.

But I couldn’t help but notice the Wall Street Journal headline this week: “Tech Leaders Fled San Francisco During the Pandemic. Now, They’re Coming Back.”

The subhead for that story added some detail: “Founders and investors who moved to Miami and elsewhere are returning to a boom in artificial intelligence and an abundance of tech talent.”

Well, I told you so. From time to time over the past few years, I’ve reported on my infrequent trips into the city. On those visits, San Francisco has seemed just fine to me.

That’s because I visit the neighborhoods, not downtown.

In neighborhoods like Potrero Hill, Bernal Heights, the Mission, Now Valley, the Inner Richmond and Sunset, the Marina, the Haight, the Fillmore, the Castro, North Beach and Chinatown, the local cafes and shops are doing a booming business, crowded with customers, both locals and tourists.

While it is true that there have been since Covid a large number of vacancies in the office towers downtown, and thousands of layoffs in the tech sector, San Francisco’s economy is and always has been about much more than technology.

In fact the latest figures indicate the tech sector accounts for just 18.7 percent of the city’s economy.

But that piece of the pie is extremely volatile, given to rapid expansion and contraction in its business cycles.

Another important factor in understanding this city is historical. San Francisco has always had an exaggerated pattern of boom and bust ever since the Gold Rush of 1849. Nothing much has changed in that sense over the past 175 years.

As for the homelessness, open drug use and car break-ins, these are real problems and similar to other large cities, but mainly prevalent in the Tenderloin, which has been a persistent slum since at least the 1880s.

Violent crime rates in San Francisco are extremely low, despite occasional national headlines to the contrary.

These are a few of the relevant local details that those in the east coast dominated national press corps never seem to be able to master. Thus, periodically those of us who know the city and its history well are subjected to their predictable diet of “San Francisco is in a doom loop” headlines followed inevitably by a wave of “San Francisco is booming again” headlines, as if these outsiders have discovered anything new or significant.

Neither set of headlines is completely wrong, nor are they completely right. One highly relevant and recent development is the practice of billionaires to interfere in our local elections, like that of the recall of former D.A. Chesa Boudin. 

But except for that, the bottom line is that as major cities go, San Francisco is just fine, thank you, like it always has been.

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Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Winter Harvest


 

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Remembering a Poet

(From February 2021.)

With the passing of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a significant guardian of San Francisco's post-war bloom has left us. For me, like so many others, his City Lights bookstore was on my list when I arrived in 1971 as one of the first places to visit.  I saw him there on several occasions in those days. He even rang me up once.

Over the years, I'd meet up with writers whose pieces I was editing at City Lights and we would migrate to one of the nearby cafes -- Vesuvio or Trieste -- to work over coffee. It made us feel cool. The spirit of the Beats from the 50s permeated everything we did as our version of an alternative culture made up of the hippies of the Haight and the radicals of Berkeley went seriously viral.

In 2001, I edited an interview of Ferlinghetti conducted by my friend, the journalist Ken Kelley. The poet was in a nostalgic, unhappy mood, as he watched gentrification drive high rents that made the lifestyles of poets, artists, freelance journalists and the rest of us so much more difficult than it had been in his younger years.

His spirit was generous -- he wanted us to have the experiences that had inspired him.

By 2015, I was at KQED when we interviewed him again, and he expressed his ongoing disappointment with how the city had seemingly abandoned its old spirit to become an elite playground for rich people.

But change is inevitable and the good old days were never quite as good as our memories suggest. There was a lot of poverty in San Francisco, especially among minorities back then and there still is, and I'm afraid that all of us who identified with the beatniks, hippies and radicals haven't collectively been able to change that in any lasting way.

None of that is to disparage the spirit of Ferlinghetti. He probably accomplished more than he realized by remaining a symbol of an alternative way to live life and also by simply living so long. Until Monday he was still among us, although most current residents of his city probably didn't know that. Now he is gone, everybody knows that. 

Death is funny that way. You don't know what you had missed until it is gone.

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Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Work for Art


“Art is kind of a reflection of society and an interaction with social values and experiences and whatever happens in the artist’s life. -- Enrique Chagoya

Chagoya was referring to the visual arts, where I had an unlikely involvement years ago -- as a dealer. It goes like this:

Hurricanes had followed me around for years. My friend Gus was a contractor on Sanibel-Captiva Islands off of Florida's Gulf Coast. We got to know each other because both of us had daughters who were home-schooling there at the time. 

After one big storm hit the islands, Gus drove around helping people do repairs and get their lives back in order. He did it in a neighborly kind of way, not for money or anything like that.

One man he helped was named Bob. He appreciated Gus's help so much he later become a client. Bob turned out to be Robert Rauschenberg, and over the next few years, as Gus built his seaside studio, the artist paid for his work not so much with cash but with original paintings.

To make a very long story short, Gus called me and asked if knew anyone who might like to buy them. Over the next few years I managed to sell three Rauschenberg paintings for Gus, two in the States and one in France. Gus kept at least one piece for himself, which is pictured here.

(This is an excerpt from a piece I published three years ago.)

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