1/2/02, 7:00 pm. Katie/Katelyn/Kaitlyn (I still don’t know how they spell it) has been out of surgery for about four hours. She survived the surgery and it didn’t last as long as they expected. She’s breathing on her own, and they were able to take the oxygen level down from 100% to 41%, which is good news. Her color is good, which is good news. The bad news is she has more fluid on the lungs than she should have.
More on Katie…
Brad called me last night. I was about 3/4 asleep, but he woke me up pretty fast. Katie (her real name is Katelyn, but I’m not sure how she spells it so I cheat) had tests yesterday. There wasn’t anything good that came of them. She’s sick, with a virus. Illness and surgery aren’t a good combination. That’s just common sense. There’s more hardening around her heart than they expected, which will make the surgery harder. And there’s a growth around her heart, so they’ll have to go in again in six months to a year. And (I’m getting sick of that word) the part of her heart that needs to function for anesthesia to work normally doesn’t. I’m getting this third-hand, so I don’t know if that makes any sense or not.
The odds are stacked way too heavily against her.
Brad was pretty down about it. A lot of people are. I am too.
“Maybe the surgery isn’t supposed to happen tomorrow,” I said at some point. Hey, I don’t know.
Brad asked if stuff like this makes me question my faith. Absolutely it does. Then I got philosophical. What else was there to do? Besides pray, that is. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind.
From the dawn of civilization to today, more than twelve billion people have lived. Twelve billion people! And God knows all of their names. Not only that, He knows everything about those people, down to how many hairs are/were on their head. God knows when they lived, and He knows why. And He can run all the possible scenarios in His head. Someday I can ask God, “What if I’d lived in Israel during the time of Jesus? Would I have followed Him?” and God will know the answer!
It’s pretty easy to determine when we’ll die. The instant we’re worth more to God dead than alive, it’s over. We’re gone.
Brad and I can imagine scenarios where Katelyn is worth a whole lot more to God alive than dead. What if she went in and beat all those odds, then 15 years from now, stood in front of a group of people and told her story?
God knows the answer to that what-if. He knows who would be there, and who would react in what way. God also knows what would happen if He miraculously healed her, instead of letting her go into surgery. And God knows exactly how much pain and grief He would save her by pulling her out of the game and taking her home at any given point.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to get over that bit about God knowing more than 12 billion names. I do well to remember five. Not five billion. Five. So I need to trust Him.
I told Brad about a surgery I never had. I was in second grade. I had a bad case of tonsilitis. Not as bad as my sister had about the same time, but bad enough I was missing school. The day before I was scheduled to go into surgery, my doctor checked me up one last time. He looked in my throat, and where he’d previously seen walnuts, he saw two normal tonsils. “They look good to me,” he said. “Let’s just leave them there and see what happens.”
What happened was nothing. It’s 20 years later, and I’ve still got ’em. I missed a few days of school since then, but never on account of a sore throat.
Miracle? Who knows? And why was God doing me any favors? Who knows? Am I worth that much more with my tonsils intact? Only God knows. He knew that 20 years later, I’d need some reason to trust Him. For all I know, that’s the only reason.
God can do for Katelyn’s heart what He did for my tonsils. Or He can do something else.
Please excuse me while I go talk to Him.
Happy New Year!
The way the ‘Net oughta be. I finally broke down and bought a VCR yesterday. It’s hard to do video work without one, and you want to give people drafts on VHS. When it comes to consumer video, there are two companies I trust: Hitachi and Hitachi. So I went looking for a Hitachi VCR. Their low-end model, a no-frills stereo 4-head model, ran $70 at Circuit City. I ordered it online, along with 5 tapes. Total cost: 80 bucks. For “delivery,” you’ve got two options: delivery, or local pickup. I did local pickup at the store five miles from where I live. You avoid the extended warranty pitch and trying to convince someone in the store to help you, and you just walk into the store, hand the paperwork to customer service, sign for it, then go pick it up. Suddenly consumer electronics shopping is like Chinese or pizza take-out. I love it.
The VCR’s not much to look at and the $149 models are more rugged-looking and have more metal in them, but this model is made in Korea so it ought to be OK, and the playback’s great on my 17-year-old Commodore 1702 (relabeled JVC) composite monitor. For what I’ll be asking it to do, it’s fine. In my stash of Amiga cables I found an RCA y-adapter that mixes two audio outputs, which I used to connect to the monitor’s mono input.
Desktop Linux. Here are my current recommendations for people trying to replace Windows with Linux.
Web browser: Galeon. Very lightweight. Fabulous tabbed interface. I hate browsing in Windows now.
Minimalist browser: Dillo. Well under a meg in size, and if it’ll render a site, it’ll render it faster than anything else you’ll find.
FTP client: GFTP. Graphical FTP client, saves hosts and username/password combinations for you.
PDF viewer: XPDF. Smaller and faster than Acrobat Reader, though that’s available for Linux too.
Mail client/PIM: Evolution. What Outlook should have been.
Lightweight mail client: Sylpheed. Super-fast and small, reasonably featured.
File manager: Nautilus. Gorgeous and easy to use, though slow on old PCs. Since I use the command line 90% of the time, it’s fine.
Graphics viewer: GTK-See. A convincing clone of ACDSee. Easy-to-use graphics viewer with a great interface.
News reader: Pan. Automatically threads subject headers for you, and it’ll automatically decode and display uuencoded picture attachments as part of the body. Invaluable for browsing the graphics newsgroups.
File compression/decompression: I use the command-line tools. If you want something like WinZip, there’s a program out there called LnxZip. It’s available in RPM or source form; I couldn’t find a Debian package for it.
Desktop publishing: Yes, desktop publishing on Linux! Scribus isn’t as powerful as QuarkXPress, but it gives a powerful enough subset of what QuarkXPress 3.x offered that I think I would be able to duplicate everything I did in my magazine design class way back when, in 1996. It’s more than powerful enough already to serve a small business’ DTP needs. Keep a close eye on this one. I’ll be using it to meet my professional DTP needs at work, because I’m already convinced I can do more with it than with Microsoft Publisher, and more quickly.
Window manager: IceWM. Fast, lightweight, integrates nicely with GNOME, Windows-like interface.
Office suite: Tough call. KOffice is absolutely good enough for casual use. StarOffice 6/OpenOffice looks to be good enough for professional use when released next year. WordPerfect Office 2000 is more than adequate for professional use if you’re looking for a commercial package.
Does God have to heal?
Strong religious content again. I make no apologies. People who are offended by this kind of stuff are probably long gone anyway.
My friend and co-worker Charles Sebold helped inspire this one. Charlie’s page is worth a read. He writes with considerably more brevity than I do, but if you like the kind of content I produce, you’ll probably like Charlie too.
Charlie pointed out an alternative reading of Genesis 3:16 on Saturday that dovetails nicely with the interview I conducted Sunday night. Genesis 3:16 is a verse that feminists hate, mostly because they read it incorrectly. True, it’s been misapplied over the years. Here’s how it reads:
Then God said to the woman, “You will bear children with intense pain and suffering. And though your desire will be for your husband (or: And though you will desire to control your husband), he will be your master.”
Some men wrongly use this verse to lord over women. Charlie raised an interesting question. Keep in mind that when Jesus spoke, He used parables that people would understand. Doesn’t it stand to reason that He learned the technique from God the Father? Also keep in mind that we, God’s people, are referred to as the Bride of Christ. And keep in mind that Adam and Eve sinned because they wanted to be like God. Pure power trip.
So let’s paraphrase it in light of that:
Then God said to the woman, “You will bear children with intense pain and suffering. And though humanity will desire to control Me, I will be your master.”
Eve undoubtedly already knew the desire to control Adam. Undoubtedly if she desired to control God, she also desired to control Him. I’m sure she got the metaphor instantly. I’m sure Adam got it too–he understood control.
We still have control issues today. It tends to fall into one of two extremes. One extreme denies that God is in control, whether it’s by choice or ineptitude, and believes that God won’t reach down and help us. An awful lot of mainline denominations fall into that trap, wittingly or unwittingly. Many fundamentalists hit the other extreme, teaching that if we say or believe the right things, God is obligated to perform a miracle. St. Louis Rams superstar Isaac Bruce falls into that category. During the Rams’ Super Bowl season, Bruce totaled his car. He threw his hands off the wheel, cried out, “God, save me!” and believed God was obligated to save him. Bruce walked away from the accident. When asked why the same thing didn’t happen to Payne Stewart when his plane went down, Bruce said Stewart didn’t say the words. Now, while it’s very admirable that Bruce’s gut reaction was to say “God, save me!” instead of one or a series of four-letter words your mama didn’t teach you, it’s wrong for Bruce to believe that God is obligated to do anything, and it’s wrong for Bruce to judge people whose lives God chooses not to preserve.
What Isaac Bruce forgets is that God’s priority is to get as many people into heaven as possible. Yes, God loves us and cares about us and cares about what happens to us. He cares when I lose my keys and how many stoplights I have to sit through on my way home late on Friday nights. But if for some bizarre reason me sitting through 10 lights for five minutes apiece could help someone else get to heaven, it’s gonna take me an hour to get home. Every time.
So, when my work is done, I’m finished, no matter what age I am or what condition I’m in. The reason for that is really simple. Those of you who are married will understand this. Being alive and on this Earth is like being engaged. When you’re engaged, you can spend a fair bit of time together, but not as much as when you’re married. Your desire to spend more time with one another, and to do things you can’t do when you’re not married, are what drive you to get married. And whether you’re willing to admit it or not, you long for that day. Some people lie to themselves and try to tell themselves there’s something better than that day, and their lifestyle reflects it, but in reality by living that way, they’re in their own way longing for that day.
God has that same longing for us. He longs for us to cross over and be in Heaven, where He can spend more time with us, and higher-quality time with us. God looks forward to our deathbed like we look forward to a wedding day.
So, yes, God wants to heal us, because He doesn’t like watching us suffer. But that’s secondary. God wants us to want Him to heal the people we love. Somewhere I read a very interesting study titled, “Why God Needs a Human.” Interestingly, Jesus’ hands were tied when He went back to His hometown, because in His hometown, the people had no faith in Him. He tried to perform miracles there, but they weren’t as spectacular nor as numerous as anywhere else. So our unbelief in what God can or will do does seem to hinder His work.
So yes, we are supposed to want God to perform miracles on the people we love. Intensely. And when He does, the results are often spectacular. My friend Emily totaled her car a few months ago. She didn’t walk away from the accident like Isaac Bruce did. So some might say Emily didn’t have as much faith as Isaac Bruce did. To that I say, well, you don’t know Emily, and I don’t know Isaac Bruce, and it’s not my place to say anything about anyone else’s faith. But Emily should not be alive today. She says the only thing she remembers about her accident is an angel coming and getting her. And Emily was found laying in the road, where there was danger of her being run over. I would argue she was there for good reason–the dangerous place is also the place you’re most likely to be found quickly. And the same angel who could take her out of the car can just as easily be there to protect her. Potentially there was more than one.
When Emily tells that story, people get goosebumps. When Emily talks about her comeback, people get inspired. I didn’t know Emily very well before her accident–we met about a month before it happened–but at the very least, this incident in her life gave her another tool in her arsenal. And thanks to that, God may get another engagement or three He wouldn’t have had otherwise.
God knows–and only God knows–when it makes sense to heal. Our job is to be concerned on behalf of our brothers and sisters. But in those cases when God decides it’s time to call someone home, it’s not up to us to question the timing.
—
That’s much easier said than done. I wrote that bit about 4 pm on Sunday, in preparation for an interview for my documentary. Well, it’s not my documentary. I deliberately separated myself from the story, so I’d go in knowing just the very basics–a young couple from our church, named John and Karin, had twins in early September. Tommy, the boy, is completely healthy. Katie, the girl, has a heart condition. You can instantly tell when you see Katie that all’s not well with her. Don’t get me wrong–she looks fine. But when Katie and Tommy are in the room, you can’t hear Tommy breathing unless you listen for it. You can hear Katie. They’re short, desperate breaths. Tommy breathes about 60 times a minute, Karin said. Katie breathes 100 times.
I had John and Karin tell me the story, more or less from the beginning. Twins, a boy and a girl. Wonderful. Then Karin notices a yellow sticky-note where they were keeping Katie. The nurse wouldn’t give a straight answer. Heart murmur. That’s OK though. A lot of babies have what looks like a heart murmur and it goes away. Katie’s didn’t go away. Enlarged heart. OK, so you wait for the baby to reach 11 pounds, then you do surgery. Katie wasn’t growing.
I saw Katie and Tommy’s baptism, through the camera eye. I filmed the entire service. One of the church members wanted John and Karin to tell their story on video. John and Karin were very open to the idea. I agreed to the project, assuming certain resources would be available to me. It took about 45 minutes one Tuesday afternoon for all those resources to come together. OK, God’s pretty clearly behind this one–all the doors are wide open and the sun’s shining in and I do believe I left my sunglasses in the car. Alright alright, Dave can take a hint or twelve.
Pastor broke down while he was baptizing Katie. I caught the whole episode on tape. You can tell a lot about a Pastor from the way he handles infant baptisms. I’ve seen Pastor baptize dozens and dozens of babies. One has cried. Exactly one. Pastor has cried once, and that was with Katie. He loves her like his own daughter. So do a lot of people in the congregation.
Well, come late November, Katie had a growth spurt. Here she is now, the end of December, 10 pounds. That’s not much for four months, I know–I was born 10 pounds. But 10 pounds is close enough. Her surgery is Wednesday. It’s going to be a 10-hour ordeal. There’s little question that the surgery will make her a normal baby. The question mark is whether she’ll survive the surgery. Many don’t.
John and Karin sat down and talked with me for about 30 minutes, telling me their story. Everyone involved in the project knew what they wanted John and Karin to say–they knew John and Karin and they’d heard them talk. What they didn’t know was how to coax them into saying the good stuff. After a couple of conversations with people who knew them, I knew, mostly instinctively, what questions to ask to bring the story out. Four years of journalism school proved useful after all.
So I rolled the camera, played with the lights to get John and Karin to look good, and started asking questions. They answered the questions I meant to ask, rather than the questions I actually asked. Easiest interview I’ve ever done, far and away. After 20 minutes, Karin had to leave with Katie–she was uncomfortable in the lights. Karin apologized. I told her not to. At that point, John said there were three things he wanted to say. I told him I had plenty of tape. So he poured his heart out. Some of it I can’t use. But some of it was among the best stuff to come out of the interview.
The gist of it: They know God has a plan. They don’t know what it is, they don’t understand everything. But they trust Him. They trust Him more than I do.
By that time, Pastor was there, along with some of John and Karin’s friends. They wanted to pray for the whole family and annoint Katie with oil, as James 5:16 says to do. I caught that on tape too, along with some of the chemistry of the group. Pastor wanted me to emphasize the importance of small groups with the video, so I wanted to capture the essence of the group. The group was an awful lot like mine. That’s good. John and Karin said without the small group’s support and concern, they wouldn’t be what they are right now. I know. Without my small group, I wouldn’t be either. And I thought I had the coolest small group in the world, but this group is just as good. Same love, different people, that’s all.
There must have been 15 people in that room who’d have given their hearts to Katie if it would help. Katie didn’t understand what was going on. She looked over at her dad and her brother, then up at her mom and stopped crying. A room full of people confessed their sins to one another, as James 5:16 says to do. That’s awkward, but none of that stuff will leave the room. I’ll destroy the audio portion of the tape if it turned out–I was having problems with the microphones at that point. A room full of people prayed with intensity. And pastor pulled out a vial of oil, annointed Katie, and prayed for strength for her. John and Karin were holding their twins, sitting in front of an altar, Pastor standing right behind them. It was a beautiful picture–John and Karin sitting there. Pastor’s got their back. And God’s right behind all of them. Meanwhile, they were all surrounded by a tight circle of friends, hands outstretched.
By the time it was over, I think everyone except Tommy and Katie was crying.
I took tape home last night, but I didn’t take any equipment. Right now I don’t need to be editing video. I need to be praying that Katie makes it through Wednesday and sees Thursday. And the next Thursday. And let’s see… There are 52 Thursdays in a year, so about 4,000 Thursdays after that.
The tape can wait.
Dave gets a movie rental card
Faced with producing a documentary film, and faced with the increasing prospect of doing it on my own without help from people who know what they’re doing, I went on an excursion last night. Well, first I called up a friend to see if she was doing anything. She wasn’t home, so I decided to do something useful with my Saturday night: research.
I drove to Hollywood Video, filled out a membership form and handed over my driver’s license and a credit card. I came home with two installments of Ken Burns’ acclaimed Baseball series. I wanted to see how Burns did documentaries, particularly how he handled stills and mixed stills with old movies. So I grabbed the 1910s-1920s installment and the 1930s-1940s installment. Then I drove over to Wal-Mart and picked up a couple of frozen pizzas. Then I came home to watch and learn.
Burns usually shoots still pictures the way a cameraman would shoot a scene, either shooting the less-important part of the scene and then panning over to the important part, or shooting a panoramic view of the whole picture, then zooming in on the important subject. When faced with a good, well-composed and well-cropped closeup, he just lets it sit alone. On television, there’s no such thing as a still–the image will jump a little–so you can get away with that more than you might think. He added a little more life with sound effects and voiceovers. For example, when showing a picture of a sportswriter, he added a voiceover and the quiet sound of a manual typewriter. That’s an interesting trick I’ll have to remember–when you can’t engage the eyes with much, engage one of the other senses.
And what about transitions, the whiz-bang stuff that Premiere gives you so much of? If Burns ever used a transition, it was very subtle. Where I looked for transitions, I found only hard scene changes.
But for all his critical acclaim, I was disappointed with the 1910s-1920s installment. Babe Ruth Babe Ruth Babe Ruth Babe Ruth. I had to check the tape to make sure this was Baseball, and not a biography of Babe Ruth. Yes, Babe Ruth was (unfortunately) the most important player of that era. But Babe Ruth wasn’t baseball. He was a fat drunk who hit a lot of home runs mostly because he had a ballpark with a nice short porch in right field for left-handed hitters to hit into. And he mostly played right field, so he didn’t have to run around a lot. Yes, in his early days Ruth was a tremendous athelete. But he didn’t take care of himself, and had he played anywhere else, he would have been far less remarkable.
What did Ken Burns have to say about the 1929 World Series? Author Studs Terkel came on and talked about how his buddy had tickets to Game 1 of the series and wanted him to go. He didn’t go. Lefty Grove was expected to pitch. Instead, Howard Ehmke (who? Exactly.) pitched instead. There’s a story behind that, but heaven forbid Ken Burns spend 30 seconds telling that story when he can use that 30 seconds to show a package of Babe Ruth-brand underwear instead.
Screw it. I’ll tell the story. About mid-season, A’s owner/manager Connie Mack went to Howard Ehmke and told him he was letting him go. Ehmke was a veteran pitcher, but he was well past his prime, and Mack rarely pitched him–six of the other pitchers on his staff went on to win 11 or more games that year. Mack was a notorious cheapskate and was known to sometimes only take two pitchers with him on road trips, so far be it from him to keep Ehmke around and on the payroll when he didn’t need him. At that point, the A’s were World Series bound, with or without Ehmke, and the whole league knew it. (No wonder Burns didn’t talk much about the 1929 season–the only noteworthy thing Babe Ruth did that year was remarry.) But Howard Ehmke had never pitched in a World Series, so he pleaded with Mack to let him stick around just long enough to pitch in a World Series game. Now Connie Mack may have been a cheapskate, but he wasn’t a soulless bastard like so many baseball owners of that day and later days. He had compassion on his veteran pitcher and said OK. Now I don’t remember whose idea it was, but they even talked about him starting one of the games. Mack asked him which game he’d like to start. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Ehmke answered, “The first one, sir.”
Absurdity. The best pitcher in the game that year (and for most years to come) was one Robert Moses “Lefty” Grove. You play the first game to win, so you go find your best pitcher to go win it for you. So the whole world expected Lefty Grove would pitch Game 1. So the Cubs, expecting left-handed fireballer Grove, loaded up their lineup with right-handed power hitters. At the last possible moment, Mack announced his starting pitcher would be soft-throwing right-hander Howard Ehmke. Ehmke pitched the whole game. He won, too, striking out 13–a series record.
The 1929 World Series was one of the most dramatic series ever, with the A’s staging a gutsy come-from-behind victory in Game 4, scoring 10 runs in the 7th inning to overcome an 8-0 deficit. Lefty Grove came in to pitch the 8th and 9th and preserve the victory, notching his second save of the series.
But since Babe Ruth sat at home while all this was going on, I guess nobody wants to know about it. They don’t want to know about any of the colorful guys on either team either. Jimmie Foxx was the greatest right-handed home run hitter in the game before Mark McGwire came along. A converted catcher, Foxx would play seven positions at some point in his career. Whereas Ruth began his career as a pitcher for the Red Sox, Foxx wrapped his up as a pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies. Like Ruth, he was always smiling. And he was one of the nicest guys to ever play the game.
The rest of the Philadelphia clubhouse wasn’t as nice as Foxx. Left fielder Al Simmons was a vicious hitter–arguably there were two things on that team meaner than Simmons’ bat, and those were Foxx’s bat and Simmons’ temper. It was a good thing the A’s didn’t lose much in those days, because after every loss, Simmons, hotheaded catcher Mickey Cochrane, and hotheaded pitcher Lefty Grove would redecorate the locker room. Connie Mack knew better than to go near the place until after they’d left.
As for Hack Wilson, the Cubs’ star center fielder, well, I’ve heard stories about him. It would have been nice to hear some new ones.
Hopefully we’ll find out a little bit about all these guys in the 1930s-40s installment. After the Yankee Dynasty of the late 1920s ended, the A’s Dynasty replaced it, and Ruth was retired by 1935–his last great season was 1932–so there isn’t much excuse to talk about him.
So while I was able to learn a fair bit about how a movie can come together and look good from discrete elements that are varied and sometimes damaged, I’m less impressed with Burns’ storytelling. To hear Burns tell it, you’d think the only teams that played baseball in that era were the Yankees, Red Sox, Yankees, A’s, Yankees, New York Giants, Yankees, the Chicago Cubs, Yankees, the St. Louis Cardinals, Yankees, and the Negro League teams, who rightly or wrongly got more screen time than the non-Yankees MLB teams.
More on video editing
Last night I found myself watching some old documentaries my Dad had on VHS (mostly episodes of old Discovery channel series, circa 1990), as much to watch how they used footage from varying sources and how they handled voiceovers as for the information they were presenting–although the subject matter was something I find interesting. It’s much easier to deal with poor quality old footage today than it was then–what I’d try to do is digitize it into Premiere, then export it to a Photoshop filmstrip, then export that into PhotoDeluxe and use its automatic cleanup, then take it back into Photoshop and then back to Premiere. The result wouldn’t be perfect but in five minutes you could have a film clip that looks a lot better.
I’m not sure I can ever watch TV for enjoyment ever again–I find myself analyzing it, trying to figure out how I’d do something comparable, or better. Then again, aside from baseball games, I haven’t watched TV for enjoyment with any regularity since 1992 when Quantum Leap went off the air, so I don’t think my new hobby changes anything.
My next video project is a documentary. I won’t be spending much time behind the camera; I’m putting my journalist hat back on and doing the interviews. I don’t know yet if I’ll be the one assembling and arranging the clips. The challenges here are really different from my music video projects, but I don’t see it as being very different from my old magazine projects in college. The biggest difference is that now I can add audio to help tell the story, and the pictures can move. But it’s still a matter of gathering the story, then gathering elements that help tell the story.
This is a big change for me though. In Journalism 105–the second journalism class I ever took–they exposed us to the basics of all the major forms of journalism: newspaper, magazine, advertising, radio, and television. I learned how to write a basic, straight news story in high school, so newspaper writing was easy. Magazine writing appealed to me a bit more because you could get more creative. Radio was a nice challenge, because you had very limited space to tell the story since it would be read aloud. Advertising was the most different unit but I didn’t struggle with it too much, at least not in that class. The only unit I disliked was the TV unit, because I didn’t like storyboarding. I think I know what changed though. When I learned TV writing, we were still in the linear era. Non-linear editing systems existed, but they weren’t widespread, so that wasn’t what they taught us.
Fast-forward six years. A couple of media professionals in St. Louis taught me how to use Apple’s Final Cut Pro. I was competent in an afternoon. To me, it looked almost like desktop publishing software, the biggest difference being that final output was playback, rather than a printed page. Suddenly TV made sense, and I caught myself thinking I’d like to go back to journalism school and get a broadcast degree. Sanity quickly returned.
Video resources online. I’m going to let the cat out of the bag. The biggest obstacle to learning video editing is a lack of footage to work with. Sure, if you’ve got a DVD-ROM drive, you can rip video from DVD and use it, but then you can’t legally use the result for anything unless you go get the appropriate permissions. You want to get permissions before you start on a project, but you don’t want to wait around for permission before you start getting your hands dirty. The answer is to mess around with some public domain video. Then you can do anything you want.
The lowdown: Anything produced in the United States before 1922 is now public domain. This includes video, photos, and music–although a specific recording can be protected by separate copyright. As a general rule, it’ll be 2067 before you see widespread public domain music recordings. Anything produced by the U.S. Government, whether in 1776 or five minutes ago, is public domain. And a large number of works produced since 1922 have fallen into the public domain for one reason or another–the most noteworthy example being the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” If you’ve ever wondered why 800 of your 922 cable channels, seemingly including ESPN, C-SPAN and the Cartoon Network, are showing that movie at any given moment in December, that’s why–any TV station can play that movie without paying anyone a dime.
Public domain video or stills can also be useful if you’re in the middle of a project and need to illustrate a point and none of your sources (whether your own video or other video you’ve obtained permission to use) illustrate it adequately.
Finding public domain stuff is a little harder. So here’s a core dump of all the resources I’ve found in the last couple of days:
http://www.pdinfo.com — public domain music
Links page from above, includes other media
The Internet Archive’s Movie Collection, over 950 downloadable PD movies, mostly short informational or promotional pieces.
Rick Prelinger’s journal, related to the above collection.
Kino International, a distributor of old movies on VHS and DVD, some of which is in the public domain.
Retrofilm.com, a distibutor of public domain material on professional-grade media such as miniDV–they don’t sell material on VHS or DVD. Their catalog is surprisingly large and recent, including a 1980 made-for-TV movie about Jonestown that I remember seeing at least twice.
Tips for handling files from The Internet Archive Collection on various platforms
The Public Domain: How to find and use copyright-free writings, music, art and more, a 300-page book on the subject.
Tools. There’s a non-linear editing project for Linux called Broadcast 2000 that got rave reviews, but unfortunately, DMCA-related litigation caused development of the program to be halted (presumably because of fear of lawsuits, either due to liability or due to people possibly using the program to violate the DMCA) and the developer no longer offers it for download. I did find the source code on Tucows, and recent versions of SuSE and Mandrake are supposed to have it. Since the program was GPL, you can still legally download it and do whatever you want with it. GIMP was abandoned by its original authors early in its development cycle and subsequently picked up by others, so maybe Broadcast 2000 still has a future.
I found some Broadcast 2000 tips here.
Regardless of what tools you use for editing, be sure to get Virtual Dub–do a search on Google. You can use it to crop your video clips and convert between formats. I’ve had good results using the Indeo 5.1 codec at a high quality setting. Slice the video you want to use into the segments you want, leaving yourself a few frames on either side just in case you need to stretch the sequence out or decide you want to use transitions.
I’m back again.
More video. One of my Christmas gifts was The Pretenders: The Singles. The Pretenders are one of the most underrated bands of the past 20 years, and while they get plenty of radio play, it’s limited to just a few songs from their extensive catalog. But I already had that disc, so I went to exchange it yesterday. I had trouble finding anything that really struck my fancy. I walked over to the (very small) “Inspirtational” section, which basically held anything vaguely religious that wouldn’t fit in the New Age section. I found a bunch of stuff I’d have no interest in, such as Petra (I don’t like that style of music regardless of subject matter) and Newsboys (an ex-girlfriend of mine thought they were great any time I can avoid being like her, I jump at the opportunity) but I did unearth two things that sounded interesting: Sonic Flood’s self-titled 1999 effort and Listen by Michelle Tumes. Both were used copies, and I guess that kind of stuff doesn’t sell too well at that shop (downtown Columbia, near the University of Missouri) because they were extremely eager to do an even-up two-for-one exchange despite the marked prices. So they were happy and I was happy.
I was even happier after I gave the discs a listen.
Michelle Tumes has a haunting, atmospheric sound about her, and she has either a gorgeous voice, a great producer, or both. Allmusic.com compares her to Enya, and musically I think that’s a fair comparison, but I’d place her voice somewhere between a Jewel and a Loreena McKennitt. She’d be good to listen to late at night when you want to calm down.
Sonic Flood, on the other hand, is someone to listen to when you want to get fired up. Think contemporary power pop with a little edge to it. To draw a secular parallel, the energy and guitar tone in their version of “I Want to Know You” reminds me of Third Eye Blind’s “Never Let You Down.” I could live without the spoken word interludes, as they’re not particularly profound and the second one is completely incoherent, but the musical bits are delightful.
To get a little more practice with video sequencing, I grabbed their version of “I Want to Know You” and started assembling video, using leftover clips I didn’t use in my last project. I had a bunch of clips that just–in my mind at least–seemed to fit perfectly. I grabbed a bunch of high-energy stuff that seemed compelling for the last project, but the high-energy stuff just didn’t fit a song like “Mary Did You Know,” which is a contemplative song. On the other hand, “I Want to Know You” is a celebratory gem.
This is just a mental exercise; I don’t expect to do anything with it. Legally, the Fair Use doctrine should allow in-home experiments like this. Should I decide I want to do something with it, I’ll probably look into having someone re-record the song (I can already hear someone with local connections doing a phenomenal job with it), juggle the clips to fit the re-recording, then secure permissions to the video clips I used.
Merry and Blessed Christmas to All…
I made it through three services last night. I ran camera at one service, which is usually a struggle because Pastor likes to run a marathon while he speaks–and last night as he was prowling about, he forgot where a step was, so he actually fell off the raised platform he speaks from. He disappeared from view, so I’m zipping around with the camera in a panic–where’d he go?–and then he popped back up, laughing.
I need to start taking a video camera to high school basketball games so I can practice keeping up with Pastor.
Brad, my partner in crime, was on lights.
The Video was smack-dab in the middle of the message. Pastor talked about journeys, spiritual and otherwise, then he wondered aloud whether Mary and Joseph knew what they were in for. Brad took the lights down, and Mary and Joseph popped up on stage, holding a doll, in front of a fake fire. My idea of using a real fire in our new building got the axe really quickly, just like all my best ideas. Instead, Brad rigged a fake fire, where he buried a bulb in a pile of logs, and somehow he made it look real. Mary and Joseph wondered aloud what all the prophecies in the book of Isaiah regarding the Messiah meant. After a couple of minutes, Joseph left, leaving just Mary and the baby onstage. Our vocalist snuck up on stage, and I hit play on the camera (it’s the only miniDV device we have at the moment), and The Video–the popular song “Mary Did You Know?” set to pictures from The Visual Bible: Matthew, plus a few classic paintings by people like Rembrandt–played. And play it did, without a hitch, except for one spot where the audio clipped because it got louder than the camera could handle. Normalize, schmormalize. Next time I will. At the first service, Larry was singing when it clipped, so no one heard. At the other two services, his timing was a little different. Pastor heard it. I heard it. I don’t know if anyone else did. But every project has a flaw somewhere. Next time, I’ll run the music through a sound editor and normalize it myself.
Larry had asked when in the service he’d be singing. “The middle of the sermon,” I said. He looked at me like I was joking. Obviously he hasn’t worked with us enough.
Then, when the song and video ended, Pastor popped back up–at the back of the church, out of camera range. “The question isn’t ‘Mary, did you know?’ anymore, but it’s, ‘Do you know?'” Then he walked around, pointing to members of the congregation, asking if they know.
Good stuff. A few people cried through the video. There were people there to answer their questions. We survived. We sat around a little while after the 11:00 service, talking about it all. This was my first Christmas Eve service at my home church in more than 10 years, and the first one I’d had any involvement in. I don’t know if this is going to become an annual thing or not. If it does, I’m glad it’s once a year.
Blast from the past. At the 11:00 service, a former parish pastor-turned author who’s a member of our congregation gave the children’s message. “I snuck one of the presents from under our tree here tonight, tee hee hee,” he said with a sly look on his face. “It says right here on top: To Tim, with love. I wonder what it is…”
And that made me remember. My dad always knew everything he was getting. I never figured out how.
Until this year, that is. I was at a Christmas party, and the hosts’ son got to open one present at the party. So he was picking up packages, shaking them, trying to decide which one to place his bet on. I asked him if he’d like me to take some packages to the hospital for an x-ray…
And then I realized why Dad always knew what he was getting. Dad put himself through Med school working as… an x-ray technician! And then, once he got out of Med school, he worked as a radiologist–reading x-rays!
Which made me wonder… Would he? Well, Dad was just like me. Or the other way around, more likely, seeing as he came around first and all. So I guess the first question to ask is, would I?
Yes.
So would my Dad?
You bet your last wooden nickel.
Another blast from the past. Next year, when I’m more bold, I’m gonna read the classic “Mary and Joe, Chicago Style” by Mike Royko. I’d link to it but unfortunately I can’t find it online anywhere anymore. The Trib seems to have taken down its Royko tribute. Nuts.
And justice for none.
I don’t understand this. Let me get this straight: You pack your sneakers with military-grade explosives and a fuse, walk onto a plane, try to light up, assault two flight attendants when they try to figure out what you’re doing, and you only face a maximum of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine?
That makes no sense to me. The plane alone is worth a few million. (I’ll have to ask my buddy Sean, who happens to work in Boeing’s billing department, how much a new airliner will set you back.) Then, of course, there’s the little problem of the people on the plane. There were something like 180 passengers, plus a crew of 12? So why isn’t he facing 192 counts of attempted murder, plus two assault charges, plus whatever the appropriate charge is for endangering a few million dollars’ worth of property belonging to someone else?
We’ve come a long way from the days when stealing horses was a capital offense, haven’t we?
Since this sorry excuse for a human being was (fortunately) dumb enough to get caught and didn’t actually kill anybody, the death penalty is a little harsh, and expensive, since we don’t use cheap methods such as those that involve gallows and ropes or a single bullet anymore. I’m thinking enough consecutive life sentences to ensure he really does die in prison would be good. It saves making a martyr out of this luser and saves some money–money that can be used to foil the next one like him.
Twenty years and a quarter-mil won’t do any good. He’ll get back out, and then he’ll just be torqued off enough to try something else and do it right this time. The money’s too low too. A quarter-mil may be a lot to you and me, but there’s just too much risk that the organization that got him the C4 can also get him the quarter-mil. Any risk of that is too much risk.
Since justice isn’t going to be served, maybe some of the 192 can pursue some kind of a civil case against him, or some organization they can link him to. And then there’s the possibility that maybe 20 years is longer than this guy’s life expectancy once he gets into the penal system…
But one shouldn’t have to count on such things.
Attending my first (and maybe only) baby shower
9:00 PM, Saturday night. With five friends in a dark parking lot. Our cars were parked in a row, in a dark corner of a parking lot, at the bottom of a hill. We hoped we’d be difficult to see. We ducked behind the fronts of our cars, peering out over the hoods through the windshield and out the back window. Through it we could see the blue Christmas lights of the house and the faint shadows of the gifts we’d quietly placed on the front porch. We hustled back to our hiding spots, leaving one of us, Sean, behind. Among our group were Sean, Wayne, and Yours Truly. We’re all still in pretty good shape, but Sean’s the fastest runner. We would need his speed tonight. The plan was simple: Ring the bell, then run like there’s no tomorrow and get out of sight while the rest of us watched.
We watched as Sean crept up the steps. There was a light on in the living room but no sign of stirring inside. Sean rang the bell, then lept over the gifts, swooped down the steps, and hightailed it across the driveway to the side of the house. We saw the door open and saw a burly, bald-headed 6’5″ frame fill the open door. It was Jon, no question. We snickered as he looked around. Then he looked down. We saw him look around again and scratch his head. Someone giggled. “Hello?” Jon shouted. Someone else giggled. I didn’t worry so much about that. We were a good 250, 300 feet away. Maybe further. Surely he wouldn’t hear…
“I hear you!” Jon shouted. I could tell he was looking in the direction of our cars. Funny, they seemed well-hidden when I drove up.
I stood up. We were found out. I walked around my car, through the parking lot, up towards Jon’s house. A few others followed. Sean emerged from his hiding place. Jon was standing there in his pajamas, grinning like a kid in a toy store with $1,000 to spend.
“You guys didn’t have to do this,” he said.
“We wanted to,” someone said.
“You guys are the best,” Jon said. “Bethany’s in the shower.”
A plot started to emerge. Jon’s as much of a conniver as we are. We’d hustle out of there, drive to the community center and watch the last few minutes of the Blues game. Jon would call one of us on a cell phone when Bethany was out of the shower. He’d give us a secret code. I suggested a phrase like “These pretzels are making me thirsty,” or “I’m selling these fine jackets.” He suggested, “Sorry, wrong number.” I lost. So we piled into a couple of cars, drove off to watch the game, and waited.
The reason for our mission was simple. Jon and Bethany are expecting. January was to be the month to get ready. But Jon and Bethany’s baby (they won’t let the doctor say whether it’s a boy or a girl) is getting impatient. It’s been 32 weeks and the baby’s ready to rumble. And that’s a problem. Jon and Bethany aren’t ready. They don’t have all the stuff they need, and Jon’s the first from his family to have offspring and Bethany’s the first from hers, so it’s not like there are any relatives ready to jump in with emergency hand-me-downs either. They’re the intrepid pioneers. The baby shower was going to be in January. Now we’re praying the baby waits until January. We found out about this late last week, so on Friday, we started planning an emergency shower. We ran out Saturday afternoon, fought the Christmas crowds, and bought some stuff. We went separately but kept running into each other. That was good–they had a registry, but we were able to compare notes and make sure none of us bought overlapping stuff. One bottle warmer is a good thing. Three bottle warmers are too much of a good thing.
We sat there at the community center, waiting in anticipation for the call. The Blues won 2-0. The phone never rang, but the pager went off. Jon paged us instead of calling. Recognizing the number, we piled back into our cars. We were on a mission. We zoomed back to the parking lot, parked, and took our strategic positions. We saw a figure standing through the living room window as Sean walked up to the driveway. He quickly ducked for cover. The shadow disappeared. Sean crept out from his makeshift hiding place, tiptoed up the stairs and onto the porch, rang the bell, and bolted. We waited. And waited. And waited. We knew darn well they were home, because we’d just seen someone walking around in there. Besides, their Dodge Intrepid was parked in front of the house.
Sean ducked out from his hiding spot. Still no one had answered. So he slowly crept back up the stairs, knowing full well that his cover could blow at any instant. He rang the bell again and took off like a cat. Nothing. Finally the door opened. A shadow emerged. A couple of giggles came out. A couple of shhh!s followed. I noticed this was a burly, 6-foot-five shadow. Now, Bethany’s tall and all, but she’s no six-foot-five, and I think the last word I would use to describe her would be “burly.” It was Jon.
The burly shadow beckoned. We stayed down. A second shadow emerged, ever so slowly. The burly shadow beckoned again. We came out from our hiding spots.
“I kept yelling, ‘Jon, Jon, someone’s at the door!” Bethany said, laughing.
“I was hiding in the garage, listening to the doorbell ring, saying, ‘Come on, woman, get the door!'” Jon said, laughing harder.
“It’s 9:30 at night, my hair’s wet and someone’s at the door and I don’t know who it is. No way I’m answering it,” she said.
So we gathered the gifts up from the porch and handed them to them. Jon asked us to come in for a few minutes. We said no, it’s late, it’s past Bethany’s normal bedtime now. They insisted. So we came in and gathered in their kitchen. Jon whipped out the digital camera. “These pictures won’t go outside the family or the group,” he promised. He snapped a couple of shots. Someone suggested Jon sit down with Bethany and I take camera duty. It took me a minute to figure out the camera. They started opening gifts. I shot 34 pictures. “I still don’t know what this is for,” Bethany said about some of the things. One of the members of our group who has a niece and a nephew explained some of it. The three guy visitors, Sean, Wayne, and I, just nodded like we knew something. We were, after all, The Three Wise Men Bearing Gifts. Or something. Or something bearing gifts, that is.
We were in and out of there in 30 minutes. “Fastest baby shower on record,” someone said. “That’s they way they should be,” someone else said. I’ve never heard a girl say anything good about going to a baby shower. Maybe that’s because there are no guys around to liven things up with smart-aleck and clueless commentary. Or maybe that’s because they run on too long. Regardless of which is the cause, we’ve found the cure.
“We’ll have to do this again,” someone said. Then we piled into our cars and drove off into the night.