This weekend turned out to be a lot of fun. Saturday morning I went out on my first group shoot with the San Diego DSLR Photography Group. SDDSLR is, as they put it, "an informal camera club of digital photographers." I first heard about them through a coworker, whose husband is our office's IT consultant, as well as the photographer for all of our company events. I happened to be poking around his photo site and noticed some galleries from previous shoots with the group. I asked him about it, and he invited me along.

I was a little nervous at first, since I am still quite an amateur and my gear is pretty limited. But the group was, as advertised, very welcoming and helpful, and I had a great time walking around Encinitas with a bunch of people doing what we love to do. Sure, I did have a little lens envy from time to time, but all in all it was a lot of fun.

Here are my favorites:

Texture and Color

End of Spring

Sunday morning after some nice Skype calls with family, Juliette, Jason, and I headed out to Santee Lakes to check out the splash park that Juliette had heard about. We had a nice picnic lunch by the lake, and then headed into the "sprayground."

Unlike the last time we visited a splash park, Jason was pretty timid about approaching the jets. I hadn't initially planned on getting all the way in, but I found that just hanging around the edge taking pictures wasn't going to cut it, so I handed the camera to Juliette and waded in.

He never quite got comfortable enough to completely jump in, even after other kids showed up and started playing. But, as you can see, he did eventually come in and have a good time:

The rest of this week's set:

Ever since I finished watching HBO's miniseries The Pacific a couple of weeks ago, I've been mulling over the reasons why I didn't like it as much as Band of Brothers. Not that I was surprised about that, mind you. After all, Band of Brothers is probably the best war series I've ever seen, and is one of my favorite shows of all time. Aside from which, in my previous experience, stories about the Pacific Theater of the war tended to be less appealing.

(It seems strange to use phrases like "favorite" or "less appealing" in reference to stories about real events, especially events that were, for many of their participants, life-altering and utterly horrifying. This is the vocabulary I have to discuss film and television, and I can't help but approach these particular works in the same way that I do any other sort of story, but it nevertheless feels inappropriate.)

As I was saying, I tend to be less attracted to stories about the Pacific war. That may be in part due to some latent ambivalence about that part of the war, having had some small view of the Japanese perspective of the war through my mother's mother. My grandmother, for example, is still haunted by the loss of her brother in the Battle of Okinawa. Maybe it makes me uncomfortable to see someone that could be my relative presented as the other. Maybe I'm uncomfortable because the picture is inaccurate. Or maybe because it might be true.

Yeah, maybe there's something there.

But I think the greater part of it has to do with the types of stories I like to experience, and the types of stories that are told about the Pacific war and the European war. Stories about the war in Europe often highlight the heroism of the soldiers, the camaraderie of the men, or the particular genius or ineptitude of the commanders and their strategies and tactics. Stories about the war in the Pacific, on the other hand, are often about the awful conditions, the terrible isolation of war, and the alien and brutal nature of the enemy. These patterns play out in the two series just as much as in other movies, and everything from the writing to the combat scenes to the choice of source materials bears it out.

Band of Brothers is, at its core, the story of a community. The series begins with the formation and training of Easy Company in 1942 and follows the group through D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, ending shortly after V-J Day in 1945. Things are difficult for them; some men are killed, while others are broken by the strain. Through it all, what comes through is the deep bond that's formed between the soldiers, and how they rely on each other to get through the war. Though the various episodes highlight particular soldiers or platoons, it always feels as though you are seeing different threads of the same narrative, and even now, nearly nine years after it first aired, I can easily call to mind the names of over a dozen of the men in Easy Company—Winters, Nixon, Speirs, Randallman, Guarniere, Foye, Webster, Lipton, Malarkey, Blithe, Heffron, Cobb—and looking over the list of characters on the IMDb page, I can place at least ten more from the names. The closing scene of the series is a montage of the men playing baseball together while the "main" character—Major Winters—tells a bit about what happened to each after the war.

By contrast, The Pacific is a story about individuals. Not all of the main characters are introduced at the beginning, and many of them never meet each other. They're all marines, but they're not all in the same unit, and over time some are rotated home while others come in as replacements. As the series opens, the men haven't yet joined up, and are largely separate from one another. As the series progresses, what becomes clear is that these men lived through a nightmare: unceasing rain, heat, and mud; disease and crushing fatigue; and a vicious, incomprehensible enemy. Nor do their comrades provide much support—indeed, one of the most interesting parts of the series is the weirdly antagonistic friendship that grows between Eugene "Sledgehammer" Sledge and his squadmate "Snafu" Shelton. The episodes flit back and forth between three central characters—Sledge, Sgt. John Basilone, and PFC Robert Leckie—whose stories are quite separate and rarely even touch. Aside from those three characters, I can only remember one or two others; the rest have faded into the mists of "supporting cast" in my mind.

I don't point out these differences as a complaint. The reason the stories are different is because the real life stories of the men involved were different. Each series draws most of its content from firsthand accounts, so if in one story we see friendships and heroism and in the other we see darkness and despair, most likely that's because that's what these soldiers went through. In many ways, it's probably even more important that we see the latter type of story, because we do no honor to our veterans by forgetting their tribulations. If I don't find one of the stories compelling, it's a failing in my own ability to appreciate it.

Having said that, The Pacific does have problems as a film, separate from my preference in subject matter. I think it all stems from the overwhelming success of Band of Brothers. Now, I believe that Hanks and Spielberg are honest when they say that there intention in making The Pacific was to get these stories out there and making sure they're not lost as the men who lived them die. But it's simply unavoidable that the creators of this series would look at the previous one's success and try to replicate it. And that's the problem: The Pacific is too self-conscious in its attempt to be successful. Rather than simply telling the story, it's as though the writers and directors felt that they had to constantly instruct the audience how to feel. They're constantly reaching for our emotions, which ends up feeling clumsy.

I keep coming back to this scene at the end of the second episode. Leckie and his platoon are finally relieved at Guadalcanal. Once they making it back to their ship, they head to the galley, where the cook's assistant tells them that there's no food, but he can get them a cup of coffee. He makes a passing remark about how tough they must have had it, to which one of the marines angrily responds by asking whether he'd ever even heard of Guadalcanal before. The cook's assistant gravely tells them that they've been all over the papers back home, that everyone knows about Guadalcanal, and that they're heroes.

I'm pretty sure that this scene was meant to bring home the marines' situation and to make us appreciate their heroism. For all I know, it may actually have happened. Either way, the cook's performance was so overly emotive, it ended up feeling clumsy. If I were going to feel that these men were heroes, I would have already felt that way from watching them in action. But as much as I respect and admire the real marines of WWII, after watching the first two episodes I mainly felt pity for the characters, not admiration.

Everything about The Pacific seemed to have that instructive quality about it, from the splintering charcoal pen in the opening credits to Tom Hanks' narration at the beginning of each episode, to the emotional swell of music when an important character was killed. Even the ending sequence, showing photos of the marines during and after the war alongside a bit of text explaining their lives, had that feel. And what it accomplished for me was to make me feel more detached from the story and characters, and a little irritated at feeling like someone was trying to manipulate me.

At the end of the day, though, I am glad that a series like The Pacific exists, because I do appreciate the desire to document and disseminate these stories while we can. And despite its flaws, The Pacific was still probably the best and most personally engaging dramatic treatment of the Pacific war that I've ever seen. True, it didn't live up to Band of Brothers, but I doubt there was really any way it could.

If you had asked me five years ago whether I would some day watch The Little Mermaid five times in a weekend, I'd probably have looked at you like you were an idiot. (I was a jerk, five years ago, I guess.) Of course, since Jason seems to have inherited our passion for movies, this has now come to pass. I'm not sure, exactly, but it's possible that I am now the world's expert on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and The Sword in the Stone. I'm at least on my way.

Anyway, the other day we were watching the end of Beauty and the Beast again, though this particular time was somewhat less tedious since we had skipped the first two-thirds of the movie. (Jason doesn't care much about continuity; he just likes particular scenes and doesn't care what order they come in.) We came to the scene after the climactic battle between the Beast and Gaston (OH NO! SPOILERS!) where the Beast has been mortally wounded and is dying in Belle's arms. In case you don't recall the exact scene, Belle begs the Beast not to die, the Beast tells her it's better this way, he slumps back and closes his eyes, and Belle collapses on top of him, weeping.

Just as the sad music came up, I heard Jason say, "Oh no! Booty night night." I looked over and he was pointing at the screen, saying "Night night!"

"She's not sleeping, buddy, she's sad," I replied.

"Sat," he repeated, nodding. "She sat."

Then it occurred to me: Jason sometimes gets Beauty ("Booty") and the Beast ("Beess") mixed up. Moreover, both characters were in a lying position with their eyes closed, so I couldn't be quite sure which one he was talking about. And it got me to wondering how much of the scene he understood. It seemed like he understood that something important was happening, and that it was bad—at least, the "Oh no" suggested that. But there was really no way that he could already understand a concept like death—he still struggles with the idea that Big Sur is too far from San Diego for us to see his grandparents every day. But if he was actually talking about the Beast's apparent death, how could I begin to explain that to him?

Before I could figure out a course of action, the movie ended and Jason wandered off to find something to pull off of a shelf.

I've since been able to determine that he probably did mean Belle, because now any time a character cries in a movie, whether it's Belle or Ariel or whoever, Jason will announce "Sat! Sat!" And, actually, that in itself is kind of remarkable to me, that he can extrapolate the concept to other people and other circumstances. But he's doing things like that all the time lately, which is why Juliette and I have been asking each other "Can you believe that?" a lot.

Last week, Juliette's brother came and visited us.

We had a good time going out to lunch on Friday at my favorite Mexican restaurant.

He's a good looking boy, don't you think?

As you can see, it runs in the family.

As you may have noticed, photography has become my latest obsession. I've been doing a ton of reading on photographic technique and composition, submitting photos to online communities for critique and publication (so far, none have been up to snuff), and taking a ton of pictures. The question that's come to my mind a lot, though, has been "How long will this last?"

I tend to be very single-minded in terms of what I'm passionate about. A year or two ago, all I wanted to do was play poker, and while I still enjoy it, both my interest and my skill have waned considerably since Jason was born. Before that, it was web design. Before that, movies. All of these things still have a place in my heart, but in terms of active pursuits, I've moved on.

Will I stick with photography? It's hard to say. Based on my track record with hobbies, it looks like I'll probably cool again some time in the next four or five years. On the other hand, although I've only recently taken it up again, I've had an interest in photography since I started high school, which is coming up on 17 years ago now. Too, as long as I have kids in the house, I'll probably have at least a little motivation to document their time with me.

The fact that my skill seems to be growing pretty rapidly (in my somewhat self-congratulatory opinion) helps, too. It's gratifying to be able to see the progress in my work over a very short time. On the other hand, it's also been frustrating since I can see how much more I have to learn. Some of the critiques I've gotten have been difficult to take, even though they were both spot-on and quite civilly delivered. I know: this is how you grow, you have to start somewhere, etc. And I do enjoy the process. But sometimes the gap between where I am and where I want to be seems insurmountable.

Usually around that point I have to remind myself to stop being so melodramatic and self-absorbed.

I think I had a point somewhere in there that I was swirling toward, but I seem to have lost the track. Anyway, here are my favorites from the trip home this past weekend:

Treacherous Footing

Overlooked

Garden Walk

Persistence

Contrast

And the rest of the set:

We drove up to the Monterey Peninsula for the holiday weekend in order to visit family. As with any long car trip (this one took about 9 hours, including stops), we tried to schedule things to maximize Jason's sleeping time. We also mentally prepared ourselves for his inevitable crankiness. But, as it turned out, the ride went pretty smoothly in both directions.

In fact, Jason was surprisingly playful on the drive up. He'd do something cute, then laugh and declare "Jay Jay funny!" My favorite was when he started playing "peek-a-boo" with us. It went pretty normally at first—he'd lift his blanket over his head and Juliette or I would gasp in mock confusion. "Where'd Jason go?" we'd ask incredulously. Then down the blanket would come, and we'd start in surprise. "There he is!" we'd shout, and Jason would laugh uproariously.

This time, though, the hilarity of it all became too much for Jason to keep it together, and he'd start giggling while he was still under the blanket. He started prompting us when it was time to play, too. "Wheh dih Jay Jay go?" we'd hear, followed by a conspiratorial titter, and, sure enough, when we looked back he was covered.

"Oh no!" we'd exclaim. "Is Jason gone?"

A muffled "Yeah!" would sound from under the blanket.

"Is he in the car?" we'd ask.

"No!" he'd laugh.

Finally, he couldn't keep it in anymore, and he'd burst out from under the blanket with a happy cry.

He kept that up for a good half hour, all the while giggling at how he'd pulled one over on his old mom and dad.

After how much I liked the first volume in this series, I can't believe it took me over a year to pick up the next one. I guess that's just a testament to how long my reading list has gotten.

I should note here that this review will contain some information that could be seen as spoilers if you haven't read the first collection.

The Books of the South is the second omnibus of Glen Cook's Black Company novels. The first two of the included stories—Shadow Games and Dreams of Steel—picks up just after the events of The White Rose. With the Company reduced to just a handful of men, the new Captain decides to turn south to try to return to the group's origin, the city of Khatovar. Along the way, they are swept up into a new battle between the once-pacifistic nation Taglios and its would-be conquerors, the Shadowmasters. Old enemies resurface, and a dark secret is hinted at in the Company's lost history.

Unlike the previous volume, though, this one does not collect a single narrative. Instead, the third novel (The Silver Spike) is a standalone novel that takes place in parallel with the events of Shadow Games. The plot here revolves around a group of small-time criminals who hatch a scheme to steal the titular spike—within which is imprisoned the soul of the Dominator—and sell it to the highest bidder. The Black Company itself isn't involved in the main action; rather, it's the White Rose and her companions—who split off from Croaker and his band at the end of the previous volume—who are left to deal with the problem.

As much as I liked The Chronicles of the Black Company, I expected to be able to jump right into this volume and pick up where I left off. I found, though, that this story was a slower burn. There's a more personal, less epic feel to most of the narrative—the Shadowmasters, for example, seem a pale shadow of the Dominator and Lady of the first arc. Still, I found that I was pretty hooked by the end of Dreams of Steel, which made the cliffhanger ending somewhat frustrating. I'm not sure I can say that this volume was as effective for me as the first, but in any case I'm still looking forward to the next one.

Started: 2010-05-12 | Finished: 2010-05-28

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Sunday night, Juliette and I stayed up way past our bedtimes to watch the series finale of Lost. As I think anyone would have predicted, reactions to that show have been sharply divided, with some people holding it aloft as the new canonically perfect final episode and others complaining that it retroactively ruined everything about the previous six years of their lives. (I'm exaggerating, of course, but probably less than you might think.) For my own part, I thought it had its flaws, and it did seem to reveal how much less of the show was pre-planned than I thought at the beginning, but it was so emotionally satisfying that I don't really care about the rest. Indeed, I found myself getting choked up far more often than I would have predicted.

What's interesting to me is how, in our post-show discussion, Juliette and I almost immediately started comparing it to other show closers. I, for example, couldn't help but recall how frustrated and disappointed the ending of Battlestar Galactica left me, while Juliette mentioned how the feeling of sadness she had reminded her of how we felt after the last episode of Six Feet Under.

Now, a lot of shows have left their marks on my psyche, but when I stop and think about it, it's kind of surprising to me how few of their endings made any lasting impressions. Friends, for example, was one of the biggest pop culture phenomena in the past twenty years. I've seen every episode more than once, and references and quotations still surface pretty regularly among my friends. Yet I almost never think about the last episode. Even Star Trek: The Next Generation, possibly the most influential show of my young life, doesn't stand out much for its ending.

Contrast that with a show like Six Feet Under, whose finale I still can't get out of my head, five years later. The entire run of the show was filled with moments that were shocking or moving, or otherwise memorable, but when I think of that show, the first thing that always comes to mind is that ending sequence.

I have a feeling that Lost is going to be somewhere in between for me. The last episode will almost certainly stay with me, especially the last few seconds, but there are other parts of the show that stand out just as much. Time will tell.

So, what are some of your most memorable series finales? What are the closing episodes that moved you or frustrated you the most? For the sake of the discussion, we'll define "finale" to mean episodes that were planned and written to be the end, rather than the ones that merely happened to come right before the show was cancelled. We'll also leave out the endings to miniseries; Band of Brothers, for example, would be out.

I look forward to hearing from you.

We've reached a somewhat inconvenient stage in the development of Jason's fine motor coordination. His skill at using spoons and forks to eat is progressing steadily, to the point where he enjoys using them and even refuses to eat sometimes if we don't provide him with utensils. He's still not all the way there, though. Sometimes he has trouble spearing or scooping up a piece of food, his usual solution for which is to take the food off of his plate and put it on the table. That gives him a better angle, but also means the mess is spread in a wider area.

Jason also still has problems keeping food on the utensil while he brings it to his mouth. He does a pretty good job for being 22 months old—I'd say he gets there about 60 to 70% of the time—but that still means a fair amount of food ends up on his chest and lap. And it's been many moons since he's let us put a bib on him, consequently we usually have to completely strip him down after meals.

The upside, though, is that since we usually finish dinner less than half an hour before he gets in the tub, he just runs around in his diaper while he plays and we clean up, and, man, if that isn't cute, I don't know what is.

The title of Ed Park’s debut novel, Personal Days, is one of those perfect, HR-generated paradoxes. On the one hand, personal days offer the opportunity for freedom, for escape from the humdrum routine of desk-job life. On the other hand, that freedom is contained within a neat, organized little box, usually requiring a form to be filled out and approved to be taken, and in most offices I’ve heard of, you get precious few of them. And, of course, when you do end up using them, it’s more often than not for errands anyway. It’s the kind of title that so perfectly encapsulates the mentality of certain types of jobs, anyone who’s spent even a moderate amount of time working in an office will, seeing it, either smirk or grimace.

Personal Days is the story of a group of co-workers at a faceless sort of “everycompany”—we’re never told the company’s name, or even its business—that is in the midst of a brutal round of layoffs. By the time the book begins, the company is already a shell of its former self, reduced to a handful of sarcastic, distracted, or fatalistic employees and their inept manager. We’re introduced to the characters and the banality of their situation through a series of vignettes, discussions about the differences between the two nearby Starbucks, for example, or a description of the lunchroom dynamics. Eventually, the company is purchased by a group of “Californians,” and the firings resume. The employees become by turns frantic or simply resigned to their fates, being laid off one by one with no apparent logic behind any of it—the Californians and the local management are left quite opaque, with only overheard snippets of conference calls and hastily scribbled notes retrieved from trash cans providing any clues to what’s going on. The real story, revealed in the last of three sections, is even more absurd than anyone guesses.

Park divides his story into three sections, each structured differently from the rest. The first section is a collection of fragments separated by bold-faced headers, while the second reads like a software EULA, complete with paragraph and subsection numbers. The third takes the form of an email from one of the peripheral characters of the first two sections to another who has recently been fired. I was immediately reminded of Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs, both from the idiosyncratic formatting and the presentation of office culture. Personal Days cuts harder, though, I think. Much of Coupland’s story is about his characters’ attempt to start their own company, while Park’s characters are never given that kind of agency. Everything about corporate life in Personal Days is dehumanizing, disjointed, and ultimately purposeless.

There’s a lot of humor in this book, and Park is spot-on and merciless as he skewers every aspect of cubicle life. I had a hard time laughing, though. The outlook is just too dark, and there’s never really any hope or redemption given. Even the glimpses we’re given of life after being laid off seem hopelessly mundane. And though we are given an outpouring of emotion and humanness in the stream-of-consciousness email that comprises the final section, it ultimately only serves to make the ending that much more poignant, as we come to realize that the email never reaches its destination.

As a satire and as a portrait of everyday life for so many of us, I have to say that Personal Days is pretty successful. It does feel gimmicky at times, but Park tells the story skillfully enough that I was able to see through the writing tricks well enough to draw me into what I found to be a compelling work narrative. I’m interested to see what he does next.

Started: 2010-05-04 | Finished: 2010-05-11

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