I don’t know how your Friday was, but mine was weird. The US Embassy in Ankara was bombed, and I happened to be in an email exchange with a correspondent on the scene, an associate I met in my BBC days.
There was no internet access there at the scene of the bombing, and I did a quick point paper on the terror group the Turkish government is trying to finger for the attack. Then, an hour or so later, I heard the substance of my little note issuing from a live-on-the-scene report from the Turkish capital on Maryland Public Media.
Weird. I was drawn back to a surreal parallel to the story of the Great Ziggurat Temple of Ur. See, this is not the first time this has happened, that surreal feeling of having your words pop out of the television. You remember when Saddam parked a couple of Mig-21 Fishbed fighter jets next to a nondescript pile of rubble at an airfield in first (American) Gulf War?
On a hunch, I took the large format satellite image down to Mike McConnell in the J2 front office in the Pentagon, telling him that the bastard was trying to get us to destroy the oldest standing structure in human history? I looked in a copy of the unabridged dictionary for some fun facts on the Ziggurat, and as I walked back up to the BDA Cell, I heard Secretary Cheney on CNN decrying the barbarism of the Ba’athists in the very words I had just penned and handed to Mike. Very eerie.
So, I was thinking of images as I passed unclassified background material to Ankara yesterday. Here are some random ones from beyond the grave, as distant in some ways as the Great Ziggurat.
I will probably have time for that enterprise later this year. I am looking forward to it.
As part of that, I got the box of 1,007 Kodachrome slides I paid a West Coast company to digitize for me. They were in a big crate in the basement of the house in The Little Village by the Bay, next to the slide projector and the sliver-coated screen in the metal tube that snaps sideways and pulls down like a window shade atop the tripod legs.
The hardware went to Goodwill. The crate of slides went into the rental SUV, and from there into a distant position on the “I am going to get right on this, sometime” list.
I have been down this road before and it is a pain in the butt. I have tried to drag all my sorry analogue pictures into the present by scanning them. It is painful process- I wasted a weekend scanning the collected 1950s pictures of an author of a book I was editing. I don’t have enough weekends left to do stuff like that. I tried another approach to saving records. Dad had kept all his letters to and from his brother- I hired the local copying lady to scan them all into portable document format so I could share them with the cousins.
I soon learned to avoid the Step Above copying place out of fear of my personal safety. Due to the odd shapes, sizes, and front-and-back nature of the documents, I usually could hear muffled cursing when I approached the office.
(Home sweet Home, with Annook and station wagon, 1961)
So, this was a daunting prospect that I knew would never get done, year the scrawled handwriting on the slide trays indicated that the years of images contained therein ranged from 1959 to 1977. Since viewing them- remember those nights in a distant America? Setting up the projector with its harsh white light, getting the screen deployed, neighbors, the scent of Stroh’s Bohemian beer or whiskey from the guests and the wafting tendrils of cigarette smoke?
I was fairly confident that these little bits of Kodachrome film sandwiched in white cardboard squares had not been seen in forty years or more. I sighed as I drove the 850 miles back to Washington.
While looking for something else, I stumbled on a service that claimed they would digitize them for me for a low, low token cost. ScanCafe is the name of the outfit, if you are interested.
I certainly was, and the idea that I might lose these precious things was…well, hell, I wasn’t going to get to it any time soon so why not take the risk?
While I am working, the opportunity cost alone made the idea attractive. They advertised a slick process by which, in exchange for a credit card number, they emailed me a UPS shipping label and informed me that all I had to do was drop it at one of the Brown stores and they would take care of the rest.
The slides were returned to me last week. They will go in the garage down at the farm for the mice to nibble on, and the thousand images now reside on the hard drive to the lap-top and on the back up external drives. Some of them are quite striking.
(The Velveteen Rabbit? Vic in 1959.)
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com