I have been working on a multimedia history-based creative project, and it's a new way, I think, of channeling my feelings of not being understood. I so often feel that if people could see how my life has been, where I was, and what I experienced, my choices and viewpoint would make so much more sense to them.
\ This is something that I used to do with fiction, and it's a wonderfully flexible thing to be able to make up people and circumstances. If one writes histoorical fiction or speculative fiction or weird fiction, it's not even necessary to stay in one's own time and place. Alternative History has become a whole genre with lots of sebgenres within it.
But I am currently working on a project about a minor celebrity in the Big Band Era, someone who lives in a real house in a real city and who reads real newspapers about actual, factual history. This is a constant challenge, as I'm continuously surprised about how little I know about both American and world history as it affected everyday people. And I used to be a bit muddled about ration cards and the points system for food, but people of the time could not afford to be muddled about such details. A small moment of confusion might make for a bad dinner for the family, or no dinner at all. So I try to really understand how it really was for people of different races and classes and ages at a time period that goes from about twenty years to about five years before I was born.
And I'm woking with a disappearing history. Every day a building is knocked down, a library removes some old book from the shelves, a museum takes away an exhibit that no one ever visits and they put in a snack bar and a gift shop to support the remaining exhibits. So if we want to get in touch with the past, we need to work a little harder.
I'm too young to remember the Korean War or President Kennedy's inauguration, and yet the history of my youth is vanishing. I know time is change and the old must make way for rthe new, but when every reference point disappears, how do I try to help people understand where I came from and why I relate to the world as I do? Generations before me were used to places and institutions being more permanent; you worked at a factory and your kids got job there when they were out of school, or you could point to an old brick building which is now filled with offices for the city, but which used to be your own primary school. It's all what Alvin Toffler, who wrote Future Shock, said would happen.
For example, this is the only photo I can find anywhere of the radio station where my father worked for several years.
I could go into many, many boring details about how different the building looks from the days when Dad worked there. Raymond was a two-line road in those days, not a divided highway with a median strip so the building used to be much further back from the roadway, with a big rectangular parking lot in front. And that panel over the glass doors in front had red letters, each at least three feet high, which said W - G- E-E. And now not only are the letters not there, but I think the old wreck of a building has been razed. At least I have this photo to show that there onces was something there. The manager's office was to the left, the studio with a large glass viewing window, was right in front of you as you walked in, and the advertising sales staff worked in the office to the right. If you went past that there was a small studio to the right where radio commercials for local businesses were recorded in front of a cluster of floor mikes huddles in the corner.
Younger people may feel more secure because their friends' phones hold pictures of videos of their shared experiences, and their parents have uploaded their graduation parties on Facebook. But maybe cloud storage will someday be so expensive that people's histories will be deleted with the click of a key. I don't know. But I do know that creating a portait of a character whose more active years were in the 1930s to the 1950s does something to help me cope with a past which feels like it's blowing up behind me as though I was a character in an action movie running toward the camera.
Standard Blog Post Disclaimer: If you feel that my viewpoint is askew, that my facts are doubtful, and/or that I don't know enough to be writing about whatever my chosen topic is, then that's what you think It is not necessary to tell me that, or imply it in comments. I'm not a spokesperson, a jornalist, a public official, or an influencer. Even if I'm off the mark, I doubt that anything too terrible is going to happen.
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