You're Only Dead Once

By Elliott Joseph

Copyright Elliott Joseph

February 2011

To life!

Hey, wait a minute. This blog is supposed to be entertaining. What am I doing writing about death? Well maybe what has an absolute end can help provide meaning to what comes before.

Ernst Becker opens his Pulitzer Prize winning book, "The Denial of Death," with a quote from Samuel Johnson, "The prospect of death wonderfully concentrates the mind." As the realization came to me of its eventuality, whenever that may occur, I began to prepare information for those who will have the responsibility of taking care of matters after I am gone.

What started this for me? Besides my own natural thoughts, I was faced with all those tragedies and disasters in the news, floods, tornados, storms, shootings, war, disease, the ever presence of obituaries.

But what sealed it for me was deleting the names in my address book of those friends and family members who have passed away. What a terribly sad and painful thing to do! Everyone dies, but how to accept it? If I could retain the names of the dead, perhaps their ghosts would comfort me.

There is so much being written about death these days. The media, the literature, the films, the theater. It's hard to escape it.

Live forever? Jonathan Swift cautions us about that, as you may recall from that part of Gulliver's Travels about the Struldbrugs.

"Happy notion where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal...their minds free and disengaged from the continual apprehension of death." What advantages I would acquire if I lived forever, I thought.

"The question," Swift writes, "was not whether a man would choose to be always in the prime of youth, attended with prosperity and health, but how he would have a perpetual life under all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it.

"Loss of teeth and hair, no distinctions of taste, eating and drinking without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue. In talking they forget the common appalation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations."

And so Emerson writes, "As the bird trims how to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, obey the voice of eve obeyed at prime; 'Lowly faithful, banishing fear, right onward drive unharmed; port, well worth the cruise, is near, and every wave is charmed.'"

And John Donne. "Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so."

For some, I guess, like Donne, "One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more, death, thou shall die."

Every creature, from the beasts of the jungle to the tiniest insect, does everything it can to avoid death, and yet there are men and women and boys and girls who come to welcome it, though in truth, others embrace it tranquilly, if not eagerly.

Death?

To life!

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You're Only Dead Once

Ten Thousand Words?

By Elliott Joseph

Copyright 2011 Elliott Joseph

January 2011

On Christmas Day The New York Times published The Year in Pictures 2010. To say they were remarkable, eloquent and breathtaking would not be an exaggeration. On the same day the San Francisco Chronicle published an article reporting that Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, the last lab in the world processing Kodachrome color film, will discontinue its service at the end of the year.

Also reported was "The Last Kodachrome Photograph Show." The photographer Pat Willard, who will have four Kodachrome photographs in the show, refuses to use Ektachrome film and will revert to black and white.

My wife Roz Joseph, also a professional photographer, has refused to go digital and has given up taking pictures, leaving some thousands of color slides and prints in her collection.

With page after page of color photographs in the paper, especially in the Sunday Magazine, it is shocking that the Times has announced it is dramatically reducing (believe it?) the publishing of photographs starting the first of 2011, in an effort to bring back some of the ten thousand words that even one picture represents.

Words will continue to appear in the paper for those intrepid readers who wish to go beyond the captivating images brought to bear by a host of talented shutterbugs.

So what's going on? It is the development of the digital camera that may be behind the return of the printed word. Rapid technological advance of the camera from the days of the old Graphlex encumbered by its outlandish flash, has transformed photography to today's convenient digital devices which not only do away with film, but which, with alarming alacrity, backed by the extraordinary manipulations afforded by Photo Shop, produce frightfully gorgeous results, such as raising a model's awkward eyebrow and putting a sports car on the top of Mount Everest.

I am a victim as well as a beneficiary of this ease of producing good color renditions heretofore requiring the most careful attention to format and subject, and without the need of utilizing painstaking studio work aided by brilliantly creative lighting.

In a recent three week trip to Portugal, one of the world's most photogenic countries, I shot, without any particularly professional ability, over 700 not bad photographs with a pocket sized digital camera I bought for less than two hundred and fifty dollars. Gone were the heavy, expensive Nikons and their array of lenses with there countless boxes of transparency film, to shoot dozens of guesswork slides that I could show to no one without a projector and a dinosaur of a screen, while they dozed off in boredom. Furthermore, each of those friends and relatives, with their digital cameras could now produce rather excellent pictures, making my own unnecessary.

I must say I have taken some pretty good pictures myself in the past, have gotten some awards, and have been the subject of photographs by some excellent pros, such as the one shown here by the renowned travel photographer Carl Purcell, who had led the safari trip to Kenya that my wife and I took twenty-five years ago. Because of his talented eye he was able to make a snapshot look thought out, and it proved good enough to be published in newspapers across the United States and abroad, demonstrating that you don't need a digital camera to do a great job.

In my early career in advertising I learned to respect the agency's art directors and photographers whose now ancient equipment could produce outstanding work. Who read my words of copy that I labored over?

So it's actually the quality of the photography these days that is behind The New York Times possible thoughts about questioning the proverbial statement that a picture is worth ten thousand words. And the word may be spreading. Amazon is back to selling books. With Kindle, your average consumer is reading more, and turning from the thrall of the image.

Sports, travel, advertising, arts and leisure, Sunday styles, even The Week in Review, have been dependent on the photograph to grab the attention that only a glaring headline used to produce.

If the Times ever does cut back its photography, will you miss the ease of all those amazing pictures to tell you their story? Will it try to make you want to know more with the word?

"Taking photographs," writes Susan Sontag in On Photography, "has set up a chronic voyeuristic reaction to the world which levels the meaning of all events."

Will I lose my former love of the photograph? Is it too seductive, too easy to relate to? Has it become too time consuming to think? Too difficult to ignore? Will I miss the words?

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Alameda Sand Sculpture

By Elliott Joseph

Photography By Roz Joseph

Copyright 2010 Elliott Joseph

December 2010

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read."

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that marked them and the heart that fed,

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing besides remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Who can explain the compelling anti-Ozymandias passion to create beautiful sculptures and castles of sand, only to see them washed away within hours by a relentlessly approaching tide? This curious and highly vulnerable art form can be seen on countless bathing beaches around the world each summer, yet nowhere is it more poignantly and expertly practiced than at the Robert Crown Memorial State Beach in Alameda, California where each June several hundred serious men, women and children compete in the Annual Sand Sculpture and Castle Contest.

They come well prepared to this broad expanse, with its handsome view of the San Francisco skyline. They bring home-made tools, shovels, containers for carrying and spraying water, a sketch of their planned sculpture, warm clothes for protection against the wind, and enough food and drink to sustain them during the feverish work session to meet the deadline and beat the water before it erases their painstakingly constructed achievements from the memory of mankind.

The sculpture must be made of sand, with trimming of wood, rocks and shells found that day on the beach. That's the only rule before they go to work, singly or in groups, on the small plot of beach assigned to them at the low tide morning registration hour. By mid-day their sculpture will have to be completed so that the judging, and the all-important picture-taking, can take place before the inevitable.

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Fading Fast

Painted Wall Signs Are Disappearing

But Is Restoration The Answer?

By Elliott Joseph

Photographs By Roz Joseph

Reprinted From Online Preservation

Copyright Elliott Joseph

November 2010

In the heart of Chinatown in Oakland, California, there is an old advertising sign that looks just like new. In fact, it is. The "MJB Coffee Why?"sign, prominently displayed on the side of a century-old building was first painted in 1906, but was redone 15 years ago.

The owners of the building were able to get a grant from the MJB Coffee Company, through the Oakland Museum, to repaint the sign in its original colors. The sign was one of dozens that had been painted on walls throughout California for the company, which wanted to pique people's curiosity about their java.

Across the bay in San Francisco, on a building that housed the Victoria Theater, another old advertising wall sign was revitalized 25 years ago. The 1920 "Albers Flapjack Flour" sign had deteriorated so much that painters had to find photographs of the original wall from the Carnation Company, which owned Albers. Although the black-and-white photographs showed the miner's facial expression and other details on the ad, painters had to guess the mural's colors.

These renewed signs are among the exceptions, however. Thousands of others in cities, towns, and rural areas across America are not as fortunate. They are doomed, either by destruction of the buildings that are their canvasses, a covering coat of paint, or weather and time.

For instance, San Francisco's "Get Kist for a Nickel" sign, whose provocative message promoted the soft drink for more than 40 years, is gone. In the otherwise beautifully preserved town of Nevada City, California, the landmark "Rose Fashion Shoppe" wall sign can barely be read. Exposed to the elements for almost a century, it is simply fading away.

Created for commercial purposes on brick, concrete and other canvasses, old painted wall signs may have lost their power of persuasion, but they have taken on a value of their own as American artifacts.

One of the companies that painted walls was the California firm of Foster and Kleiser. Before it was purchased by another company in 1953, when the service was discontinued, the company had painted walls in hundreds of cities in the Western states. The service was called the "Special Paint" department, says Joseph Blackstock, director of research at the Patrick Media Group, Inc., the company's current owners.

"The term 'Special Paint' was probably more accurate in the years following World War II," Blackstock says, "because we painted on other surfaces as well as on regular walls. We might paint designs on water towers or reservoirs or indeed do murals in commercial establishments."

Almost all outdoor advertising companies offered a wall-painting service in the early years. The paint was usually brightly colored, and signs were painted once a year, sometimes twice or more. Affectionately known as "wall dogs," the painters had to work with many kinds of surfaces.

"Some of the surfaces were so bad," Blackstock says, "they would wear out good brushes in a day or two. Another factor was the weather. In Seattle and Portland, much of the painting had to be done in the rain. In Tucson and Phoenix, it was often in temperatures of over 100 degrees."

The cost of painted advertisements was surprisingly low. In 1929, they ranged from $15 to $50 per month for a three year contract in heavily trafficked areas, with exceptionally busy locations going for $100 per month. Ten years later, the company sold advertisements for as little as $9 per month and as much as $250. More than a few new products got their start on wall ads: Coca-Cola, Signal Oil, and Canada Dry were prime examples.

In addition to using walls in cities, enterprising tobacco companies sent their representatives to rural areas to convince farmers to allow the sides of their barns to become advertisements. One of the most successful companies to do this was Mail Pouch Tobacco: "Treat Yourself to the Best" started to appear on barns everywhere.

"In the early days, the farmer was offered his choice of being paid subscriptions, says Mary Ruth Whorton of the Helme Tobacco Company, which now owns the Mail Pouch brand. Whorton tells the story of a British celebrity arriving in New York who was asked what he thought America was most famous for. Without a moment's hesitation, he replied, "Good looking women and Mail Pouch Tobacco signs."

At first, local sign painters were given the rural jobs. Later, by the 1930s, the firm of William and Ed Burner were handling all the contracts -- as many as 17,000 barns, walls and billboards. The 1965 Highway Beautification Act forced Mail Pouch to paint over many of its ads, since signs within 660 feet of interstate and federally aided highways are now prohibited. In former days, it took about three years to cover all the territories.

Currently, Helme employs one part-time person to paint signs in Ohio, West Virginia, Western Pennsylvania and Western Maryland. They are repainted every five to six years, and new locations are rarely added.

Painting walls is a tradition as old as Pompeii. In old wall signs a time is conveyed that can never return, when milk was delivered at the door, when flappers danced the Charleston and a penny bought a salted pretzel or a jaw-challenging gumball. Is restoring them an option? Some say that those who attempt to restore these ads change them in the process. They look too new, too crisp, too fresh, and too out of place, as if we expected to take their original message seriously. There is something to be said for keeping those that remain in a state of arrested decay.

"I loved those old wall signs," Blackstock says, "and was greatly disappointed when our company discontinued them."

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Six Days in The City

By Elliott Joseph

Reprinted from California Living

San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

Copyright 2010 Elliott Joseph

From a diary found under a bench in Washington Square

MONDAY

11:10 a.m.

Up after nine and a half hours. Feeling good. Better wash T-shirt. Hair coming along.

Noon

Breakfast at Jim and Dora's. Saw Kim and Charles. Fog burning off.

1:00 p.m.

Almost succeeded in controlling left nostril after twenty-five minutes of concentration in Washington Square.

2:00 p.m.

Observed some suits. Wasted lives.

3:00 p.m.

Read "Walden." Really dig Thoreau. Wind coming up.

5:00 p.m.

Hunza's for a shake.

7:00 p.m.

Gold Spike for dinner. No wine.

9:00 p.m.

Cold tonight. Double espresso at Trieste. Rapped about war and photography.

Midnight.

Felt stiff neck coming on. Practiced concentrating on the left nostril again. To bed at two.

TUESDAY

11:25 a.m.

Up after nine and a half. Neck OK.

Noon

Bumped into Maggie at Jim and Dora's. Said she's going to buy some belts and set up a blanket at Embarcadero Plaza. Asked me if I want to go into partnersip. Baba says, "All life is an effort to attain freedom from self-created entanglement."

1:00 p.m.

Held breath for three minutes in Washington Square.

2:00 p.m.

Hitched to Golden Gate Park. Got a ride all the way in a new Ford pick-up. Golden Gate Park was designed by one man. Why does man foul the nest?

5:00 p.m.

Took three hitches to get to North Beach. Bumped into Red Ed. Said he was going to Oregon. "I love a broad margin to my life." Sky bluer than blue. Bought some groceries.

7:00 p.m.

Beef stew at the U.S. Saw this groovy chick. Great teeth. Libra. Would you believe, a lawyer!

9:00 p.m.

Walked. Glad I didn't sell my black turtle neck sweater.

Midnight

Smoked. Resolved never to shave the beard for anyone. Thought I was getting a headache, but it passed.

WEDNESDAY

Noon

Ten hours. At this rate, I'll live to be a hundred.

12:30 p.m.

Breakfast at Jim and Dora's. Should take coffee black.

1:15 p.m.

Tried the right nostril at Washington Square Got a dog's mess on my left leg. Surprised I didn't get mad.

2:30 p.m.

Walked to Bank of America building. All bombing is insane. Peace has to start with each of us. Sorry I sold my camera.

4:30 p.m.

Watched the commuters running. To eat their meals? Play tennis? Make love?

6:00 p.m.

Napped.

7:00 p.m.

Liver and onions at Little Joe's. The way he sweats!

9:00 p.m.

Peeked into three pornos. Do our bodies think?

10:00 p.m

Picked up this girl. Sally. Works for an advertising agency as a secretary. Has an M.A. in English, but didn't tell them so she could get the job. Inglorious man.

Midnight.

Three times.

THURSDAY

9:30 a.m.

Phil, Mark and a guy named Bob crashed pad. Hitching all night. Mark going back to get his degree. Went back to sleep.

Noon

Called Sally. Crab meat salad at Mama's. Sally paid. Wondered whatever happened to Ruth Moore.

1:30 p.m.

Left nostril exercise at Washington Square.

2:00 p.m.

Wondered what I'll be like at thirty. Not all that far to go. Felt the warm sun under my skin. Bob made me laugh this morning. Said he'd come to San Francisco to make it.

3:30 p.m.

Walked to Cala Foods. No opening yet. Checker cum laude. The dears don't know what they're missing.

6:00 p.m.

Letter from mom. Herb got a raise. Her hints used to be more subtle.

7:00 p.m.

Everybody to the U.S. Had to wait twenty minutes for a table. Maggie there. Said she's got the belts. Told her I'm not cut out for business. Now how would I know that?

9:30 p.m.

Browsed through Tower Records. Shot pool at the Sport.

Midnight.

Alone again.

FRIDAY

11:00 a.m.

Registered at Opportunity Personnel. Why is filling out an application so degrading? Should be called a supplication.

1:00 p.m.

Changed back into jeans.

2:00 p.m.

Dim Sum at Hang Ah. Wondered who is going to rent all that office space going up.

3:00 p.m.

Cable cars filling up. Must be the weekend again.

4:00 p.m.

Fell asleep on a bench at Washington Square. Hit by a frisbee.

6:00 p.m.

Walked to Henry Africa's. Didn't go in.

7:30 p.m.

Ham steak at the U.S. Mixed with the tourists on Grant. Called Sally. Out.

9:00 p.m.

Saw Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Couldn't believe it!

Midnight.

Irish at Buena Vista. Not one face made me happy. To bed at 1:30.

SATURDAY

Hitched to Tam. Thick white fog bank off the coast. City absolutely the most beautiful sight. Raced a dog. Hitched to Stinson Beach. Alive at last. Should go back to Mendocino one of these days.

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The Russians of California

By Elliott Joseph

Reprinted from The Voice of America

Copyright 2010 Elliott Joseph

September 2010

The other night I had smoked fish, pelmeni and shashlik for dinner. My wife recently made borsch, piroshki and beef Stroganoff. A few weeks ago we spent the day at Russian Gulch State Park. Last week we toured the Russian River. One of our favorite magazines has published a new recipe for Kulebiaka. I sometimes go to Irinka for a glass of tea, or browse in the Ananie bookstore. On the bus I saw a man reading a newspaper called The Russian Daily Life. I live on Russian Hill.

Where am I? Moscow? Kiev? Saint Petersburg?

Not at all. I am in San Francisco, California, and it seems that a day can hardly go by that I don't see or hear or touch or taste something Russian. Russians are all over the world, of course. Through the many years of their great history they have traveled, they have traded, they have hunted, they have planted and settled. Some have remained, some have returned to their motherland. Some have settled in other countries and then moved on to other lands.

But a certain number of Russians have come to California. Here, too, some stayed and some left. And the process still goes on as Russians continue to come and go from all over the world. It was natural, even inevitable for the first Russians to have come to California. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the west coast of what is now America was the next step for Russians who had made the trip to the Aleutian Islands and Alaska. At that time the Spanish and Mexican governments in control of California felt threatened by what they regarded as Russian expansion. To prevent this, the Spanish increased their own colonization of California, and enacted restrictive legislation against the Russians, who were engaged in fur and whale oil trade, agriculture, shipbuilding, cattle raising, fishing and forestry.

The Russians formed a colony at the Russian River, north of San Francisco, called Slavensk, now known as Fort Ross. Meanwhile, the Spanish established missions up and down California to provide a sort of barrier against the Russians. The northernmost of these was the Mission San Francisco Solano, founded in 1823 at Sonoma, butting up against the Russian settlement.

Not all of the Spanish were hostile to the Russians, and there are many stories of friendship and mutual assistance. There is even a famous, if unfortunately tragic, love story. Nicolas Petrovich Rezanoff, a Russian government attache, and a celebrated sixteen year old beauty, Conception Arrilaga, daughter of the Spanish governor of the territory, managed to secure official approval of their betrothal. But Rezanoff, journeying across Siberia, to make a report to his government before the wedding, developed a fever and died. It was 35 years before Conception learned her Russian lover had not abandoned her of his own free will. In the meantime, she had taken church vows, and was to remain faithful to Rezanoff all her life.

Because their people were beset with physical and economic hardships and the mounting hostility of the Spanish, the Russian authorities ordered withdrawal of the Russian colony from California, selling all Russian properties in Decembeer 1841 to Johann August Sutter, a Swiss then living on the Sacramento River.

Today, there are about 50,000 Russians in California, most of whom live in the San Francisco Bay Area. They arrived in periodic waves starting around 1900, except for 50 families who came as early as 1869. Some were Molokani or "milk drinkers," pacifists who drank no alcohol. Others were "Spirit Wrestlers," sometimes called Doukhobours. Some were Subotniks. Many came by way of Turkey, Iran and Siberia. Many came after the revolution of 1917-1919. In the 1930s many came from Manchuria. The last big group to come to California were displaced persons from parts of Eastern Europe, just after World War II.

And what about today's Russians of California? What are they like? How do they differ from other Americans? Seeing how strongly their influence is felt, I became fascinated with the subject. I had to learn more, because in doing so I would learn more about California, San Francisco and myself.. And as I did, I felt I wanted to tell you about it.

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