Our Photographs are Dying

It’s a morbid thought, but not an exaggeration.  Every day our most prized photographs are dying a slow death at the hands of dirt, dust, and time. And yet we use photographs to defy time. To capture our youth, hold it in our hands, hang it on walls, and show to others. With photos we speak to the dead. We take comfort knowing that even when we grow old, we will have photographs of our youth. We feel a need to say, “look! That was ME.” And yet, like the portrait of Dorian Grey, our photos will whither away just as we do.

I’ve taken on the duty of preserving our family’s photographs. My latest project has taken me deep into the private collection of my great grandfather, newsman Lee Sanger Ettelson (pictured above as a child and left as great-grandfather). I cherish the treasures I have uncovered, but continue to lament what is either omitted or lost.

In his professional memoirs, my great grandfather Lee Sanger Ettelson mentions having a bucket of photos of himself with various what-have-yous that he came across during his time as a right hand man of media mogul William Randolph Hearst. He whimsically wonders what happened to it, and shrugs off the loss. To me, as I sort through our family’s complex history, this hole in the photographic record is heartbreaking. He describes the location of the bucket in detail. It’s next to his desk in that old house on Vallejo street in San Francisco. I know exactly where he’s talking about, I could find it if it was only still there. Through the  library with the ladder and the Oxford Unabridged dictionary on a metal stand, past the sun room overlooking the bay from bridge to bridge with every landmark in between. Past the living room with the grand piano and the Chagalls on the walls and the China vases flanking the fireplace. If I only I got go back and get them. But the house is long cleared out, sold, remodeled and resold. Who knows where the bucket could be?

I think of my “bucket.” It’s a lipstick red 500gb hard drive named “Ruby.” My photos don’t die like other photos. They could be wiped out in a single moment, quicker than a flame burns paper. But they don’t die the same slow death those photos in the bucket must be dying in a trash heap somewhere.

I see no photos of his first wife, novelist and playwright Evelyn West (pictured below). She was the mother of his first-born son, my grandfather Ben Lee Ettelson.

There are plenty of photos of his third wife, Suzanne Huston Ettelson, a music critic and general matron of the arts. She’s the one who left me with the clues.

If Lee can hide an entire person, I wonder what else he can hide.

Not his Jewish ancestors. Somehow, he allows them to remain. Isaac and Lehman Sanger, brothers who made a fortune in the department store business. I’ve had a painting of Lehman for years, but I had never seen what Isaac looked like. He looks like Groucho Marx.

Then the Ettelsons, or Ettelsohns as we were once known. They were the publishers, the writers, and the scholars.

Looking at these two families helps me understand my grandfather. A writer by trade, just like his ancestor Baruch Ettelsohn, but also a shrewd operator, much like the Sanger brothers, whose business thrived for a over a century. But what is left other than these photographs of the dead? The Sanger Harris store is now Foley’s. Lee’s paper The Examiner is now The Chronicle. Evelyn’s novel is out of print. But the photos remain. Some photos come with captions and some don’t, but it’s up to us to find the true meaning of these images. We must find their secrets before they die.

Nexus Point

My grandmother’s family and my grandfather’s family were both from the same town of Soulwaki Poland

Nobody realized this until years later.

The Levitch and Beruvich clans.

My grandmother speaks of them fondly. She points to an old cousin standing in the back of a family photo on a wall of such photos in a room of such walls. “She must have been standing on something,” she says of her cousin in the photograph,” She was very short.”

The walls of photos were dizzingly confusing to me as a child. Who were all these faces watching me grow up? Now that I’m old enough to ask this question, my grandmother answers patiently, knowing it may be the last time anyone ever asks her. She draws an invisible family tree between the photographs, little branches stretching from frame to frame.

My grandmother evades my camera lens as I film the photos on the walls. All I catch are her gentle hands pointing from face to face, name to name.

It dawns on me how much more valuable these photos than any photo today. Photos have become a disposable, erasable commodity. The photos on the wall are lasting monuments. The subjects are immaculately dressed, and careful posed. The photograph were clearly taken at great expense to the subjects.

I take photos of the photos with the same device I now use to write these words. The casual nature with which I catalogue such artfully crafted images seems me almost vulgar considering how much time was put into taking them.

I wonder how many cameras were in Souwalki. I wonder if the photos of both families was taken with the same camera.

My mother’s family and my father’s family are from that same town as well.

Nobody realized this until years later.

Is destiny geographical?

Are soulmates somehow sown to borders before sworn as one before God?

Is there more to the term small-town sweetheart than we can possible know?

And what if you met your hometown honey hundreds of years and thousands of miles away from home?

What if it happened not once, twice, but three times?

Would it stand to reason that it could happen again?

Our cousin Josh speaks of the mother of his child. She’s from Poland he tells me.

I ask what town she was from. I should have known the answer.

“She’s from Soulwaki,” my cousin Josh tells me.

Namesake

Being a namesake is often a mixed blessing, for sharing a name with an ancestor can be a source of great pride or great embarrassment. In my case, bearing the name of my great grandfather Lee Sanger Ettelson, a renowned right hand of William Randolph Hearst, is a bit of both. On one hand, he is perhaps the most accomplished man in the history of our family. He was among the most powerful newsmen of his day, running Hearst rags in every major city in the country. Over the years he rubbed elbows with movie stars, impresarios, politicos, heads of state, and even royalty. He joined Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Astor on their honeymoon, helped Governor Pat Brown build his political dynasty, and served as the secret note-passer between Hearst and the infamous Marion Davies. His exploits have been catalogued in Time magazine, and books such as The Madhouse on Madison Avenue as well as the controversial biography Citizen Hearst (to which he also served as a significantly cited source).

Lee Sanger Ettelson moderates a political debate on ABC in Chicago

Lee as lampooned by his funny paper artists.

On the other hand, while my great grandfather was a very powerful man in his own right, he was, in the end just another yes-man for Hearst. As a consummate contrarian and independent contractor extraordinaire, I simply can’t abide sharing a name with anyone who would kiss the ass of a demented demagogue like William Randolph Hearst.Grandpapa Lee was also overly critical of those who loved him, and frankly a bit prejudiced. When my mother (his granddaughter) sent him heartfelt letters he would return her letters to her with editorial corrections instead of responding to them. And when she brought home my father, his immediate reaction to him was “too Jewish.” Fair enough I suppose, it’s a commonly held prejudice. Except in the case of my great grandfather, there was a fundamental contradiction in his criticism of my mother’s choice in a man: Lee Sanger Ettelson was Jewish. In fact, my father’s family and my mother’s family can both trace their Jewish back to the same town of Sulwaki, Poland.

Lee Sanger Ettelson at the New American building in New York

The two Lee Sanger Ettelsons—the assimilated professional, and the quasi-self loather—are reflected rather candidly in the two autobiographical tomes he penned in his later years. The first, Lee Ettelson Remembers discusses his professional life in considerable detail. It remains unpublished, but there is a copy catalogued in the Hearst library at his legendary estate, San Simeon (at which Lee often stayed as an honored guest). Personal details are conspicuously absent in this volume. For instance, there is no mention of his first wife and my biological great-grandmother, published novelist and award-winning playwright Evelyn West (author of Animal Fair). Of course, the most obvious omission is Lee’s Jewish heritage.

Although Lee’s Jewish identity is not documented in the historical oubliette of the San Simeon vaults, he later drafted a second volume which explored his family’s background in full. In 1969, Lee traced his ancestry back to Talmudic scholar and published writer Baruch Ettelsohn. Baruch Ettelsohn’s son Nachman was—like Lee—a newspaper editor and indeed edited his father’s own writings. When my mother and father were married, it was my Grandmother Miriam who realized that both the groom and bride’s family were from the same town in Poland. Sulvak. Sulvak, or Sulwaki as it is now known in Polish, has been under the yoke of everyone from the Tsars to Hitler to Stalin. The political instability of Eastern Europe has long caused border towns like Sulwaki to play fast and loose with their sovereignty. So thanks to the roving borders of the past few centuries, I can claim Polish, Lithuanian, and even Russian heritage—all from one spot on the map.

The only signs of Jewish culture I ever saw in my Great Grandpa Lee’s house were the original Marc Chagall paintings hanging on the wall. But I’m almost certain this was the doing of his third wife Suzanne, who he had met when she was the art, theater, and music critic for the San Francisco Examiner. She was a true matron of the arts, and the mastermind behind the Lee Ettelson Composer’s Fund which hands out a grand to a new composer each year. Unfortunately, Suzanne never started a Lee Ettelson Filmaker’s Fund, and the Chagalls were donated to Lee’s alma mater, the University of Chicago. So what did the namesake inherit? Great Grandaddy’s rusty old pocket knife and a name. But when my Bar Mitzvah came around, Grandmama Suzanne slipped me this cryptic note: It was a pile of documents which detailed just how Jewish her husband really was. There were magazine articles, news clippings, death certificates, and tattered memoirs. I was barely a teenager when she dropped these on me, and furrowed my brow at the time. She told me that I might be interested in my name some day. But that path back to Poland always seemed long and dark, and paved with pain. Now, I find that my name has put me on that path, back through time, across shifting borders, and between different identities. As I begin to wander a landscape of half-remembered stories and try to find my way back to Poland, Suzanne’s pile of papers have been infused with a new meaning: they are puzzle pieces, clues to a mystery that I don’t yet understand. Right now I find myself stuck in a voiceless vortex of geo-existential self-doubt, stalking through the cold austerity of my great grandfather’s edited history, the ramblings of his first wife’s unedited canon, and the concise clues Suzanne so carefully cataloged for me.

Lehman Sanger

Being a namesame is often a mixed blessing. I sometimes wonder what my Great Grandfather Lee Sanger Ettelson thought of the man he was named after, Lehman Sanger (pictured left). Lehman was a Jewish businessman, a former Confederate soldier who eventually went into the department store business. His exploits are well documented in the book Lone Stars of David by Hollace Ava Weiner. I wonder what he would think of how I use his name. Lee Sanger Ettelson was a newsman who always wanted to be a playwright. His great grand son, Lee Sanger Goldin is a playwright using blogs and videos to masquerade as a newsman. Suzanne used to criticize me for teaching myself how to play the piano. I’m sure Lee would chastise me for teaching myself how to be a reporter. Some things, you’ve just gotta teach to yourself I suppose. People have always tried to teach me how to be a Jew. It never works. I have to teach myself. I must follow the clues.

Forever and a Day

Spoiler Alert!

Darth Vader is Luke’s father, Bruce Willis is really a ghost, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt are the same guy, Norman Bates’ mother is dead, Kate Winslet makes it but Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t, it was all just a dream, it was Earth all along, Soylent Green is people, James Bond lives, King Kong dies, Rocky beats the Russian guy, the butler did it, and Rosebud is a sled.

-Author33

To Seek Out Strange New Worlds, and Blow them Up?

A vast sea of stars, lilting strings, the pound of timpani, and the rousing blast of horns. The words “Star Trek” breeze daringly into frame, and we know we are in the company of old friends. This is how a Star Trek movie starts out. This is not how Star Trek, the film that opened this past weekend starts out.

I know what you’re thinking, here we go with another Trekkie whining that the new movie actually appeals to regular people, and not just dorks like me. Yes, I have seen the clip from the Onion News Network that lampoons my kind, and found it endlessly amusing—indeed I watched it twice. But consider our perspective: imagine a new copy of the Bible is being realeased in book stores, and instead of starting out with “In the beginning…” it started out with “Check it, it used to be there weren’t but Jack and shit in the universe, and Jack had just left town.” Someone like me who thinks the Bible is about as overrated as Harry Potter would probably love it, but all those BILLIONS of people who love the Bible would be understandably upset.

Wait a minute? Are you comparing Stark Trek to the Bible.

Hell yes.

But Star Trek is some weird cult that only weirdos are into!

Hate to break it to you, but about two thousand years ago so was Christianity. And I guarantee that in another two thousand years Star Trek will probably be more popular, especially if last weekend’s opening gross is any indication.

Okay back to the movie. In some ways, J.J. Abrahams and company nailed it. This movie has all the charm, panache, and humor that the original series had, and none of the doldrums of say Star Trek I or Stark Trek III. It’s great to see Kirk in his prime, making out with green chicks and kicking ass. Chris Pine captures all the best of William Shatner’s iconic character and eliminates the awkward pauses. The guy who plays Dr. McCoy channels the late DeForrest Kelley so well that I’m starting to believe in reincarnation. The movie brilliantly integrates elements of the other films and episodes, and I’m glad they handled the Kobyashi Maru test so well. I watched Wrath of Khan late Friday night after the movie, and the prequel adds some wonderful  subtext to it’s sequential descendent and cinematic ancestor. I was watching WOK for the upteenth time, and yet it felt fresh and new. I never would of thought that possible.

The ship looks beautiful. The Enterprise has always been my favorite movie spaceship, even beating out the Millenium Falcon. It looks like a noble horse galloping through the cosmos, a flying saucer with a proud sleek neck, smooth hull and gallant nacelles. I’ve always wanted to live on her.

The uniforms were really cool. Like the cinematic Spider-Man costume, they are simply more detailed versions of the originals. It is as though they always looked like that, but the old cameras just couldn’t pick up all the details.

Okay, let’s address the plot of this film. In order to prevent condradicting the other series, the new Trek uses a time travel device to completely alter the entire space time contiuum of the Trek universe. In a way this is brilliant, because the fans can’t argue against anything that happens. But in reality, it’s a cheat. Generations of Trek writers have spent over four decades carefully working around each other to weave a complex tapestry of plot points that would make Tolkien dizzy with wonder.

Instead of honoring the Stark Trek tradition, the writers of the new film have cheated it, and in the opinion of many, have taken a gigantic shit on top of Star Trek’s beloved history. That’s a crying shame, because I really really really liked this movie, in spite of walking into the theater wanting to hate it. I was laughing and sitting on the edge of my seat the whole time, and yet it’s blasphemy of the highest order.

The sound design is inspired, but the score is fairly pedestrian. James Horner and Jerry Goldsmith provided such rousing music in the other Treks, and it’s a crying shame they couldn’t have hired Horner (Goldsmith passed away shortly after the last Trek film). There is a brilliant moment when the crew is being beamed aboard that we hear a subtle little echo of the original theme, and it filled my heart with joy—recalling a similar moment in the remake of the Thomas Crown Affair, when a few bars of Windmills of My Mind played. The final credit sequence made up for the disappointing opening, with a beautiful rendering of the original theme as planets swirled aroun the silver screen.

On to Spock. Yes, Zachary Quinto looks exactly like him, but he is so incredibly unlikeable that I could barely stand him being on screen. He looked more like a Vulcan Mind-Rapist than the Spock we all know and love. As this rebooted franchise continues, I see him as a serious liability. I’ve never seen Heroes so I have no personal bias towards or against him.

Furthermore, adding a romantic relationship between Uhura and Spock is disgusting, distracting, purile, immature, and unforgivable. It makes her character seem like a whore, and his seem like a joke. I’m sorry, but seeing Spock and Uhura making out on a transporter pad almost made me barf on my date.

Sadly, this was the only portion of the film that came anywhere near exploring the final frontier. The Star Trek series has always been an upbeat and optimistic prophecy for a future with a united humankind that has no use for money or war. Although far from dystopian, this new film is a fairly dark and dank view of the universe compared to its older brothers.

Star Trek has always served as sly venue for social commentary. The original series provided mature and subtle social commentary on the cold war and the civil rights movement in a time where such issues couldn’t be dealt with on television by “cloaking” them with the thin veneer of science fiction. In a time where idealogical struggles are coming to head in our country and abroad, we need this kind of commentary once more—and the new Star Trek fails us in that regard.

Lastly, Star Trek has always come with a geniune sense of awe and wonder. In the bright eyes of the Enterprise crew staring at the view screen into the unknown I saw hope for humankind and the galaxy. The new crew stared at the screen and saw lots of stuff to blow up. The mission of the Enterprise was to seek out new life and new civilizations. The new crew sought nothing of the kind.

That being said, my heart filled with joy in the epilogue of the new Trek film. For a few glorious moments, everything was back in its place. Kirk sat proudly in his chair, Sulu manned the helm, Checkov the phasers, Uhura was listening into the stars, Spock was searching them for answers, and Scotty was keep the engines warm. We were there, back on the bridge of the Enterprise we know and love. It was Star Trek alright, glorious glorious Star Trek. And as their beautiful steed blasted into the heavens, I felt what I always feel at the end of a good Star Trek episode…I wanted to follow them into the stars…

The Magic Senator Strikes Again

Just like his infamous “magic bullet” (click here for more info), Senator Arlen Specter has changed direction once again. For years he caucused with the GOP, but this year he was one of three Republican voted for the Democrats’ stimulus package. Now he’s decided to run as a Democrat in 2010, joining Joe Lieberman in my club of “kinda Jews and kinda Democrats who make me embarrassed to be both.” Specter claims that he finds his “political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans,” but this is clearly a bid to hold onto his political future in a state that went blue in the presidential elections last year. But Specter has a big bargaining chip that will get him a lot of Democratic support in 2010. If Al Franken is seated as the Junior Senator from Minnesota, Specter would give the Democrats their 60 vote filibuster free majority, an advantage that would allow them to push some serious policy through in the next few years. Obama sees this golden opportunity, and has welcomed Specter with open arms, and is apparently “thrilled” to have him on board. I hate to admit it, but so am I. Recessions make strange bedfellows I suppose…

Life after Dick

It’s always been easy to hate Dick Nixon. So easy, that it’s become almost second nature for many Americans. He’s that ugly kid that everyone picked on until he became ugly on the inside too. He was the kid who got cheated until he became a cheater too. That being said, getting picked on is no excuse for abusing one’s office. But for today, on the anniversary of his passing 15 years ago, let us laud his accomplishments, and save our derisions for the other 364 days of the year

To his credit, Richard Milhous Nixon signed into law more civil rights legislation than any else who has held his office before or since, he started the EPA, he and Henry Kissinger paved the way for the era glasnost and perestroika that the Reagan administration would eventually squander. And even though Tricky Dick’s sinister smile is often seen as the face of the Vietnam war, he was the one who eventually pulled us out. It took a lot of guts to be the first American President to lose a war. Sure, this pullout was after he escalated and widened the conflict. Was this abject slaughter, or simply giving it that good old American 110%? Say whatever you want about Dick Nixon, but he sure as hell knew how to try ’till you die, even if that meant lying through his teeth.

Richard Milhous Nixon

37th President of the United States of America

Winner, Loser, Champion, Abuser

January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994

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