Today is the first Mother’s Day since my mom passed away in February at age 97-3/4. In her honor, I am publishing this eulogy I delivered at her memorial. Missing her!

I want to tell you a little about our mom, whose life mirrored our nation’s history for the last century.

She was born Jeanette Dorothy Tulman on May 4, 1914. Think about that for a minute. She was born before the start of World War One, when Woodrow Wilson was president, the first of 17 presidents during her lifetime.

Jeanette was born at home at 107 Bristol Street, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood of immigrants. Her family rented, then owned and lived in the three apartments at 107 for generations, the occupants changing a bit from time to time, as these relatives moved out and those cousins moved in. At one point my great-uncle Julius Littinsky had his medical office on the ground floor. Other members of the extended family lived nearby. My great-uncle Israel Brower had a pharmacy a block away, on the corner of Bristol Street and Pitkin Avenue.

Jeanette’s family was the Fiddler on the Roof generation. They had fled oppression in their Russian-Jewish shtetl and had emigrated to Brooklyn seven years before she turned up. Her father William Tulman, for whom I was named, was a printer. Her mother, Sylvia Brower Tulman, was the oldest of six in her own family and had helped raise her younger siblings when her own mother had died very young. Sylvia, or Sluvie as the family called her, was six months pregnant on the boat my grandparents took across the Atlantic to New York, and Jeanette’s older brother Lou had nearly been born in steerage. Or so they teased him.

Education was very important to Jeanette’s family. Right off the boat, they learned English and went to school. Some became professionals: a doctor, a dentist, a couple of pharmacists, teachers. Jeanette graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School just after turning 16. What did her immigrant parents do with this young girl, in those scary early days of the Depression under Herbert Hoover? They sent her to college, to a three-year program at Maxwell Teacher Training Institute that got her a credential but no degree.

Around that time, this wonderful photograph of her [shown above] was taken, probably about age 20. Our cousin Boo wrote to us about Mom in those early days:

“So I think of your mother … and I remember my glamorous cousin who lived upstairs from us on Bristol Street. I remember an artist who painted her when she was in high school [a painting that is still in the family]. I remember when I was a ten-year-old being so impressed because your mother returned an engagement ring to some guy before your Dad.”

Painting of Mom as a teenager

At 23, when FDR was in office, Jeanette married an art teacher—our dad, Harry Zarchy, whose family had also fled persecution in Eastern Europe. In 64 years together, they set a fine example in their respect for education; eternal, unconditional parental love; and, eventually, gracious aging. A few years after my sister Sue was born, they moved out of Brownsville to their first home on East 21^st Street in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Eventually these descendants of the Fiddler on the Roof generation joined the middle class fleeing to the suburbs after World War II during the Eisenhower years. Our folks bought an amazing three-story, five-bedroom house in Freeport, Long Island, where Sue and I grew up and came of age. And where we laughed a lot.

When I was in junior high, Mom decided to go back to work. Her teaching credential had expired, so she took a job at Doubleday Publishing while completing her degree at Hofstra University. One of her job responsibilities was writing blurbs, descriptive paragraphs that appeared on the dust jackets of new books. We laughed at the word “blurb,” which sounded funny to our ears, like a frog sound.

After several years at Doubleday, around the time JFK was inaugurated, Jeanette, now in her mid-40’s and armed with a degree and a new teaching credential, embarked on a long career as an educator, teaching Kindergarten for 19 years in Brentwood and Lynbrook, Long Island. She loved helping these littlest school kids transform from babies to students, and often came home with hilarious stories of their antics. One time she told us that her student Hector had reported:

“My daddy comes home at night and says to my mommy, ‘Where da beer, dear?’ And my mommy says, ‘Here da beer, dear!’

“’Where da beer, dear?’

“’Here da beer, dear!’”

We chuckled for decades over that one, repeating it over and over to each other. Probably not what Hector’s parents would want his teacher to remember them by!

Jeanette retired in 1978 when Jimmy Carter was president, six years after Harry retired. Because I’ve lived in Northern California since graduate school, when my sister Sue and her family decided to move to Arizona, our folks were at a crossroads, facing a momentous decision. With both their kids out west, would Jeanette and Harry follow their lead, or would they choose to emulate most Jewish New Yorkers and retire to Florida, that muggy, damp, humid somewhat mildewed state that’s so far away they’ll never get to see their grandchildren?

Fortunately, they made the right choice. The inexorable family migration that had started in Eastern Europe and paused for 70 years—first in New York City, then the suburbs—now continued westward to the Sun Belt. The physical proximity this provided—with some of us living in the same community, and some a short flight away—has made all the difference in keeping this family close and together. And to that I say, Bravo!

In their decades in Arizona, Jeanette and Harry made new friends, outlived most of them, then joined a synagogue social group to meet new people … and she outlived many of them. After Pop died ten years ago, while W was in office, my dear wife Susan hooked Mom up with the Scottsdale senior center. Mom joined a grief and loss group and, in her 90s, made a bevy of new friends and created a new social life for herself.

I think I first realized our mom was special in ways beyond just being our mom, one day when I was about 14. We had a family friend named Shirley Fischel, who taught English in the junior high I attended. One day at the beginning of the year, I passed Shirley walking down the hall with my English teacher. Shirley gave me a big smile as I greeted my teacher.

“Oh, you have Billy in your class?” she asked my teacher. “He comes from a wonderful family!”

Now, our dad was a fascinating and talented guy, a Renaissance man who taught art in the New York City schools for 30 years while he wrote and illustrated 36 books on crafts and hobbies and the outdoors. He was an accomplished musician and photographer who could do or make or fix or discuss anything, with expertise and authority.

I assumed that Shirley would tell my teacher about Pop’s many skills and achievements, that he could tune up a car, draw a complex electronic circuit, or lecture about da Vinci’s sculpture. But what Shirley wanted to convey about my family instead were traits of character. Specifically, that Mom possessed a unique and laudable blend of sweetness, intelligence, and conscientiousness that was especially admirable because she had successfully passed it on to her children.

What were Mom’s accomplishments? If you google Harry Zarchy, you’ll find links to his many publications, even now, over 40 years since his last book was published. If you google Jeanette Zarchy, you’ll discover that she has barely penetrated the digital age, except for references to a book called Sewing: A Mother and Daughter Activity Book, by Jeanette Zarchy. But Pop actually wrote it, back in a different era when his publisher thought a woman’s byline would sell more sewing books.

Mom’s accomplishments are intangible and can’t be spotted on Google. Her resume is impressive … and long lasting: two children, five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, loving spouses, cousins, nieces, and nephews. And friends, many friends. Her sharp mind and the twinkle in her eye have always attracted others. As she got older … and older … living on her own and able to take care of herself until just recently, she amazed and inspired those around her.

After Mom’s passing, my sister Sue and I received a note from our cousin Pearl, who said:

“I will remember Jeanette in many ways. Her love for the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books is one way; eating chocolate ice cream is another; watching hummingbirds is another. Some music reminds me of her, as well.”

I also received an email from our friend John, who’s about my age, and who had met Mom on many occasions over the years. He said,

“I know that you probably now have heard many stories of how she touched peoples’ lives, but the news made me recall what I thought was the last time your Mom and I were together.  I think it was Susie’s 60^th birthday (when Mom was a mere stripling of 94). 

“I sat down with her and we talked for quite a while.  I don’t recall all the details, but I remember that I was in awe of her memory and vivacity.  She remembered the last time we met, recalled details of previous conversations, wanted to know how our lives were proceeding, and talked about her life in Arizona.  I on the other hand had to rely on her memory to recall the last time we met.  But most importantly it made me feel good to see how much she—and all of you—have thought of us as part of your larger family.  We will miss her very much.”

Mom and Pop

Of course, I already miss her terribly. I won’t miss her telling me I should lose weight—even when she’s right—as others in the family won’t miss being told they’re “too thin” (this from the pot calling the kettle black). But I will miss her telling me I am a great writer, even if, as my mommy, she had little credibility.

And I’ll miss her love of baseball and the Diamondbacks, which flourished in the years since Pop died. He was never a spectator and disliked the passivity of just watching something. Mom told me a few years ago: “I used to love going to watch the Dodgers at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn when I was a young woman. Then I met your father.” When I realized Mom had started reading the sports page, I knew she’d gone off the deep end.

Most of all, I will always appreciate Mom’s acceptance of our ups and downs and the momentous life changes in our family. And I am grateful that we had her for so long, from Woodrow Wilson all the way up to the Obama years.

I want to thank all of you who loved her—friends and family alike, especially everyone who invited her out, gave her rides, brought her food, called her, befriended her, listened to her, shared some of your lives with her, or appreciated and enjoyed who she was. Thanks especially to her in-home aide Julia Castillo, who helped Mom through her final weeks on this planet, and to Karen Jeselun, who helped us to find Julia and to convince our very stubborn Mom that she really did need some help—at age 97-3/4!! And a huge thank you to my wonderful sister Sue, whose Herculean efforts over the past year made it possible for Mom to live out her days in her own beloved home.

Mom as an elegant nonagenarian

Finally, I want to leave you with a verse from an old cowboy song. Pop taught it to me when I was a kid starting to learn a few chords on the guitar. My guitar skills never advanced too far and I’m certainly not going to sing it, but here are the words:

From this valley they say you are going.

We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile,

For they say you are taking the sunshine

That has brightened our pathway a while.

Sometimes I think that verse is about Mom, but her passing has NOT taken away the sunshine. Her bright eyes and sweet smile surround us and continue to brighten our pathway, her spirit an integral part of our being, our DNA, our legacy. And we bask in the light and joy of her well-spent life.

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1. Sweet Home

My dad, in a portrait by my late aunt Evelyn Zarchy Miller

Today is the 100th anniversary of my father’s birth in New York City—the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants—and just over ten years since he passed away. In his honor, I am publishing this eulogy I delivered at his memorial. I still think about him and miss him every day! There’s more about him in my story “Dog Years.”

My daddy was the strongest man in the world. My daddy was the smartest man in the world. My daddy could build or fix anything, and he was an expert on everything. That’s how I thought of him when I was growing up, and most of it turned out to be true.

My dad, Harry Zarchy, was a Renaissance man, a teacher in the New York City schools for 36 years, a skilled musician, a hobbyist and craftsman who excelled in fields as diverse as jewelry making, watch repair, clock making, furniture building, ham radio, photography, drawing, and countless others. And he was an author, the creator of over 30 books on crafts and hobbies and the outdoors for kids and teenagers, mostly with his own photographs and drawings. Between 1941 and 1973, in 32 years, he published 36 books.

Listen to some of the titles:

Let’s Make Something, Let’s Make More Things, Let’s Make a Lot of Things, Here’s Your Hobby, Creative Hobbies, Let’s Go Camping, Let’s Go Boating, Let’s Fish, Wheel of Time, What Does A Scientist Do?, Jewelry Making & Enameling, Model Railroading, Stamp Collector’s Guide, Ceramics, and the last one, the Betty Crocker Modern Woman’s Fix It Yourself Handbook of Home Repair, and many others. His books sold well in the education market, especially to schools and libraries, and they stayed in print for a long time.

He was a great teacher, both in and out of the classroom, and he could study and master any subject. Pop played violin, banjo, cello and guitar when he was growing up. When we moved to Long Island, he met Joe Muro, our neighbor over the back fence. Joe played string bass, the huge upright bass fiddle, in various jazz  combos. When he found out Pop had played cello decades before, he taught Pop the bass. In typical fashion, Pop mastered the instrument, then bought an old bass with a big hole in the side, repaired the hole, refinished it, and, with Joe’s help, started working as a freelance bass player. Eventually he was elected Vice President of the Long Island Musicians’ Society.

Similarly, he attended adult education courses in golf, taught by a friend of his, mastered the game, and soon was teaching the classes himself, despite being a relative rookie.

When an encyclopedia hired him to write an article about archery, he researched and learned all about it. Soon he was making bows out of multiple wood layers bonded together, and arrows from dowels, feathers, and points, and we were shooting at a target in the back yard. He got interested in amateur radio, so we had a two-way ham rig in our basement, and an antenna in the attic. He wrote a book on model railroading, so we had the coolest HO gauge train setup that anyone had ever seen, complete with mountains, tunnels, villages, switches, and signals.

He was a unique personality who didn’t follow the crowd and delighted in being an individual. He liked to wear brown shoes to weddings, which drove Mom crazy, and he had crepe soles years before they became popular. He bought one of the first Volkswagens imported into this country in the early 1950s, and loved it when neighbors came by to marvel over it and its daring design.

“Where’s the engine, Harry?”

“In the rear.”

“Where do you put water in?”

“You don’t, it’s air-cooled.”

This was the first of a series of foreign cars he had, at a time when everyone else was driving huge American boats. He was a horse trader. He also had a Hillman Minx, a Sunbeam Talbot, another Hillman, a Fiat, and others, and another Volkswagen in which he installed a Porsche engine. On more than one occasion, he left home in the morning with one car, and returned that night with another. But never more than one at a time.

Pop at school, probably at James Madison High School in Brooklyn in the 1950s

Years before the women’s movement, he taught me, by example, a deep-seated respect for women. He never disparaged women or made lewd remarks. He believed strongly that women could and should have access to the same jobs and opportunities as men, just as he showed us that men could and should share in housecleaning, cooking, and gardening.

After retirement, Pop got a computer so he could write a mystery novel. Well, not just one computer. In typical fashion, he constantly traded them in and traded up. He had a Macintosh, then an IBM, an Amiga, another Mac, another Amiga, another IBM, another Mac, and on and on. I lost count at twelve computers.

Pop also had a great sense of humor and he delighted in telling and retelling some of the silliest jokes you’ve ever heard. He always called me “Will-yam” even when he greeted me on my last visit to see him at the nursing home. When we got together, he loved to catch me up on the latest details of his new tools, computers, books, or projects. On more then one occasion, his enthusiasm boiled over, and he looked at me with a twinkle in his eye, turned sideways, stuck a thumb in his belt, and said, “And… can you tell I’m about to lose some weight?”

He loved recounting an incident from his teaching years: One day he noticed that some students walking by his room seemed to be laughing at him. When he questioned them, one asked, “Mr. Zarchy, is it true what Mr. Coleman said about you changing your name?”

Jerry Coleman was Pop’s good buddy, and quite a jokester, so Pop asked them warily what Jerry had said.

“Well,” said the student, “Mr. Coleman said your name was originally Archibald Zarchibald, but you shortened it to Harry Zarchy.”

On my last visit with him, I told him I had just interviewed Bill Clinton and was about to go meet Gerald Ford. “They named a theatre after him,” he replied.

“You mean Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln was shot?” I laughed. He grinned, happy that I’d gotten the joke.

It wasn’t always easy growing up as the son of a Renaissance man. Occasionally he was gruff with me, if I didn’t live up to his expectations or his standards or his amazing  energy level. Pop played semipro soccer for a short time in his youth, and I felt I could never be the athlete or outdoorsman he was. He was a musical snob, and sometimes we clashed about that. He loved only classical music and jazz written before 1945. Rock and roll was based on jungle rhythms, he told me, and therefore it wasn’t music at all. “All the experts agree,” he would say.

But I never doubted his love for me for a second, and our relationship smoothed out as I grew out of my adolescence. Also, I started dating in high school, and I became more diligent about cutting the grass and doing other chores on time, so that I could be sure about borrowing the car.

Pop never questioned my choice of career as a cameraman. In recent years, I have grown aware of how much of him is in me, as I have started writing and teaching too. But when I was younger, I had to find something to do with my life that was outside of his experience, because he did know so much about so many things. He always asked me about my work, and one time he told me he hoped I would get to shoot a big movie some day.

Well, that day has still not come, but I did get to shoot an episode of a big TV show recently. I told him a lot about it on my last visit here to see him a couple of weeks ago, but unfortunately, he didn’t get to see it. After the show aired Wednesday night, I got an email from a friend who was enthusiastic about the program and knew of Pop’s passing. He ended it this way:

“Bill, I know it must have been a bittersweet experience for you to watch the show tonight after having just lost your father, but I kept thinking about how he would have kvelled at your success. Who really knows? Maybe he did… at least I would like to think so.”

For you kids out there, who only knew Poppy as an old man, you should know that he was a sweet, gentle, vibrant, brilliant, man, a great man, respected and admired by everyone he knew. His passing makes us all very sad, but it is not a tragedy. We are lucky to have had him so long. He had a long and fulfilling life, a fascinating and multifaceted career, and a great family. He and Nanny were married 64 years, and they delighted in their children, five grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren, and in the wonderful spouses their progeny have brought into the family.

He used to tell me that, when he was a kid, his family would get together to play music, sing and dance together, and have fun. The best way to celebrate his life is for us to do the same thing. Music, singing, fun. That way his memory and his legacy will live on in all of us for the rest of our lives.

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In my mind, I’m Danny McCoy, deftly easing my washboard abs into my 69 Camaro ragtop, trolling confidently up and down the Strip, the wind ruffling my hair as I head for a liaison with my all-grown-up childhood pal Mary Connell, or a dalliance with Delinda Deline, the boss’s daughter.

In RL (gamer parlance for Real Life), I’m a middle-aged guy with grey hair, a little too full of sushi and sake, ambling and people-watching from Luxor to New York, New York, trying to take a few interesting photos on the Strip before collapsing into bed after a long day walking the floor at NAB.

Obviously I’ve watched too many episodes of “Las Vegas!” Like the Josh Duhamel character in the Camaro in that now-defunct series, I use a lot of cameras. Unlike him, I’m a freelance DP, not a casino surveillance and security expert.

I’m often asked about how some camera or other looked at the annual NAB Show in Lost Wages. My answer is usually the same: “It looked great.”

The truth is, nearly everything looks great at NAB. The manufacturers show off their cameras in shooting galleries in their booths. Every camera they make is lined up and pointed at a colorful, flatly lit set, populated by a strange race of young people with gleaming teeth, perfect bodies, and flawless skin. Back in the day, the models were all women in some form of flimsy beach attire. Now the galleries hold attractive folks of both genders, dressed more for an indoor checkers match than a sensual, seaside romp.

It’s often difficult to tell which cameras are new at this year’s show and which have been around for a couple of years (an eternity in the current frenetic life cycle of digital cinema equipment). Few manufacturers print brochures anymore. If I let them swipe my badge, they’ll send me information on their products, but I can already get that stuff on the Web. Sometimes a prototype camera will only be shown under glass, which usually means it doesn’t work at all.

The shooting gallery sets are colorful and bright, inspiring confidence and homeyness with their warm cheer and saturated, primary colors. But this tells me little about how the camera will look if subjected to the demands of a gritty night shoot, contrasty concert lighting, a medical procedure, or a jetlagged operator. To get an idea, we resort to the inevitable geekfest of comparing specs, and we’re forced to babble about compression algorithms, workflow paths, signal-to-noise ratios, and exposure latitude.

It can be difficult to see the subtleties that distinguish one camera from another. Placing a manufacturer’s latest, simple $8000 camera next to their own, top-of-the-line $60,000 camera yields a surprisingly small amount of obvious, observable difference in image quality. This is especially true when the only viewing device is a built-in electronic viewfinder or small, attached monitor. The largest monitors you see in shooting galleries are often 17” LCDs on racks above the cameras. Sometimes the differences in systems are more about features and controls, sometimes about lenses, accessories and flexibility.

Camera design has moved lightyears away from the traditional professional form factor, where the camera sits on your right shoulder and is steered by your right hand. Cameras seem to be getting bigger, with all the large 4K sensors dictating short, squat, boxy body designs. These boxes spawn awkward rigs for handheld shots that attach camera body, EVF or monitor, recording device(s), power supply, handgrips, and follow focus controls on a pipe or breadboard-type frame.

Self-portrait of the author walking the floor: NOT Danny McCoy

Cameras are also getting smaller, with several ridiculously minuscule camera systems expanding their reach.

They’re all at NAB, either with a primary-color meat puppet shooting gallery or an impressive demo they shot elsewhere. Or both.

All this against the background of a town that exploits appearance and excess, reveres beauty and trashiness, winks at gambling and sin, and boasts its own pyramid, volcano, Eiffel Tower, roller coaster, and Manhattan skyscrapers. Vegas even has its own, half-sized Statue of Liberty.

For a recent postage stamp design, the U. S. Postal Service used “a close-up of Vegas Liberty’s face, because it looks good,” reported the New York Times.

“An up-close visit on Friday confirmed this. Compared with the original, it appears, in fact, a lot less weather-beaten, much pout-ier, and, if such a description were ever appropriate for a national monument, far more sultry, and, frankly, sexy.”

So, in this town where appearance is everything—where even the Statue of Liberty is sexy—about that new XLNC666 that Flemtech showed in their booth at NAB: how did it look?

It looked great.

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1. NAB 2011: Back to Vegas
2. NAB 2011: Digital Cinema Camera Shootout
3. NAB 2012 Preview

Sony's new FS700 affordable, 4K, slo-mo camera

I’m winging to Las Vegas for a couple of days to attend the NAB Show, the annual technical meeting and equipment show of the National Association of Broadcasters.

In particular, I’m interested to see these digital cinema cameras, many with 4K sensors—some recently released, some newly announced this week:

• Sony NEX-FS700, which boasts super-slow motion and a 4K Super 35mm sensor for under $10,000
• Sony F65, the newest high-end flagship of the Cine Alta line, which I saw at a recent preview at Videofax in San Francisco. It features an 8K sensor oversampling to a 4K image capture.
• Canon EOS 5D Mark III, the latest update to Canon’s hot DSLR line, which tries to remedy some of the problems inherent in the Mark II’s video capture capabilities.
• Canon’s EOS 1DC, with 4K resolution in a DSLR body
• Canon EOS C300, which uses Canon EF lenses and a Super 35mm CMOS processor, released a few months ago
• Canon EOS C300 PL, model which takes PL-mount lenses, announced a few months ago for spring release
• Canon’s EF mount EOS C500 and the PL-mount C500 PL, their newest entries in the high-end camera market
• Newest developments from Arri for their market-leading Alexa camera. Will they release a 4K model this year?
• A new $3000, 2.5K Cinema Camera from Blackmagic, heretofore known as a manufacturer of accessories
• The new thumbsized, 3-D, 1080p digital cinema camera developed by the Cameron/Pace Group and used by director James Cameron on his recent dive to the Marianas Trench, the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean
• JVC’s GY-HMQ10, their new entry into the 4K market, relatively affordable for about $5000
• Panasonic’s new 4K 4:4:4 Varicam “concept” camera
• New micro-P2 storage cards from Panasonic, about the size of SD cards
• Whatever new surprises are in store from Red Digital Cinema

I’m especially intrigued by this excellent summary in nofilmschool.com, which compares the newest digital cameras by resolution and price. And as always, I’ll also be looking at new camera accessories and lighting gear at the show. Watch for more reports coming up soon!

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1. NAB 2011: Show Preview
2. NAB 2011: Digital Cinema Camera Shootout
3. NAB 2011: Back to Vegas

Chuck and Willie at AT&T Park

Rock musician Chuck Prophet has released a new video, Part I of his musical tour of San Francisco.

The video features scenes of Chuck playing cuts from his new Temple Beautiful album and chatting about songs inspired by various iconic settings in the City by the Bay.

“When it comes to heroes, forget about it—Willie Mays, the Say Hey Kid,” he says, standing in front of the slugger’s statue at AT&T Park (for the song “Willie Mays Is Up at Bat”).

“If ever Cain and Abel went into business together, it would probably be something like the O’Farrell Theater,”  in front of the Mitchell Brothers’ porn paradise (for “The Left Hand and the Right Hand”). Other locations include the Geary Street site of both Jim Jones’ People’s Temple and former Punk club The Temple (“Temple Beautiful”), Harvey Milk Plaza at Castro and Market (“White Night, Big City”), and various downtown corners (“Who Shot John”).

Chuck at the O'Farrell Theater

I shot much of the footage, along with Richard Gunderman and first-time director-producer Darrell Flowers, usually using two Canon 5D Mark II cameras for interviews and musical performance.

Rookie director Flowers, an old pal and a seasoned professional lighting director and gaffer, plans to release Part 2 of the Temple Beautiful tour in the near future.

Original video on YouTube

Chuck’s new Temple Beautiful album on iTunes

Producer/Director
Darrell Flowers

Editor
Cody Flowers

Finishing
Luke Shock

Post Production Supervisor
Chris Valente

Cameras
Bill Zarchy
Richard Gunderman
Darrell Flowers

Additional Footage
Thaddeus Homan

Location Sound
Conrad B. Slater
David Lezynski

Sound Mixing
Marc Pittman

Grips
Jimmy Stuart
Jani Vournas

Make Up
Laura Tesone
Nancy Marsalis

Editing & Finishing Courtesy of
Remedy Editoral, LLC, San Francisco

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1. Brazil: My First iPhone Video
2. Living in Oblivion: On Creating, then Destroying Your Original Video Media

In the past two years, I’ve been to Brazil on two work trips, vacationed in Baja, visited my son in Chile, and now I’m in Mexico City for nearly a week, shooting a medical video. Everywhere we’re surrounded by wonderful faces, fascinating street scenes, huge swaths of color, unique art, and both traditional and innovative design. A visual smorgasbord, for sure. Also, amazingly, we have a whole weekend off.

Here’s a sample of the color around us. Photos from Coyoacán and Palenco Districts, Frida Kahlo’s House/Museum, and the Museo de Arte Moderna.

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I’m very excited about the publication of the third volume in our new e-Book series!

No Definite Plans: Eleven Stories of Laughter, Love, Travel, is now available on Amazon’s Kindle Store and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Book Store for $.99. This new offering is by Townsend 11 (my writing collective), edited by Larry Habegger. I contributed a story (“Chartres: Ecstasy at the Altar,” about my family’s odd visit to a venerable landmark), as well as one of the two cover photos.

In this third book, No Definite Plans: Eleven Stories of Laughter, Love, Travel, you can learn how to hold it while rafting the Amazon, have an animated dream, witness a unique spectacle in a French cathedral, visit a women’s only sanctum in Morocco, and head for home in the Midwest. You will contemplate an emperor’s curiosity, discover the unexpected aftermath of adventure, and confront the inevitability of aging. And, in our first fiction offerings, you’ll meet unforgettable characters in China and India and ponder the generation gap in modern language.

Our debut volume, No Fixed Destination: Eleven Stories of Life, Love, Travel, will take you down the Nile, behind the curtains of the airline industry, and through the chill of the Ethiopian rainy season. You’ll read about finding summer love and the price that comes with it, passing yourself off as your mother, trying to train a chicken, racing a motorcycle on the world’s most demanding endurance course in China’s Taklamakan Desert, and much more.

In our second book, No Set Boundaries: Eleven Stories of Life, Travel, Misadventure, you can witness a Catalan ritual in Barcelona, shop the Italian way, freeze on an English beach, deal with prejudice in Ethiopia, backpack down a frightening road in Cambodia, rest in a California garden, and glide along on a French canal. You’ll learn about a bent zucchini that’s not a vegetable, try to help lost travelers, break a leg on a mountain trail, and dash through an ancient city in India.

Townsend 11 is a collective of eleven writers (including one who’s been living in Barcelona for several years) who meet monthly in a converted brick warehouse on Townsend Street in San Francisco.

We are committed to sharing stories that enlighten, entertain, and inspire. Our work is an eclectic mix that has been widely published in major magazines, newspapers, and books, and has earned numerous awards. Now, in this age of e-books, we have launched a series of works to engage you.

BUY OUR BOOKS: All available for $.99 at most e-Book stores.

No Kindle? You don’t have to own an e-reader like a Kindle, iPad, Nook or other tablet to enjoy our e-books. You can probably read them on a device you already own.

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1. Townsend 11 Publishes Volume 2: No Set Boundaries
2. Townsend 11: Volume 1 Now in More Stores, Volume 2 Due Out Soon
3. My Writing Group Has Published a Book of Stories—No Fixed Destination, by Townsend 11, Vol. 1 of Our New Series

May 2001

The director introduced me. “This is Bill. He’ll follow you wherever you go.”

The host nodded at me. No rehearsal, no fixed plan, just stay with him, shoot whatever he says, and always try to show where we were. I slung the Sony F900 HD camera onto my shoulder, and we rolled tape.

He stood in a pool of light in front of a black wall, smiled, and spoke to the camera:

Hi. I’m Steve Jobs, and I’m here at Tyson’s Corner Mall in Virginia, right outside Washington, DC. I’m standing in front of this wood barricade we’ve built in front of our first retail store, that’s gonna open in six days.

Now, nobody’s seen inside here yet, and I’d like to take you inside for a little private tour. So come on in.

He opened a door in the black wall, and I followed him into the first Apple Store, a week before its opening, gleaming like a bright new jewel with iMacs, PowerMacs, Titanium PowerBooks, iBooks, and no one but the two of us. A huge photo of John and Yoko was visible at the far end. Steve beamed a welcome to the audience.

“Now, this is our store. The store’s divided into four parts.”

Then, pointing broadly to his left, “The first quarter of the store has our home section, with great home and education products…”

He stopped and glared at me. “You’re supposed to pan over when I point there,” he said.

Great. There we were, barely a minute into the tour, and I’d already pissed him off.

I had discussed what to do about pointing with the director, Bill Couturie, and we had agreed that I would stay on Steve. Later in the day, after Steve left, we would shoot cutaway shots of the home area and the pro section and all the other places he pointed.

It was a long, awkward moment.

Then Bill C came out of the back room where he and the Apple people were monitoring my camera and the audio.

“I asked him to stay on you, Steve. We’ll shoot cutaways later.”

“He should pan over when I point.”

So we started again and I followed his points each time, then came back to him. He related easily to the camera and took us around the store with great pride. He had wanted to do it all off the cuff, without a Teleprompter, in one long take without a break, like a live performance. We came close to doing that, as he led us from one section to another. We did shoot cutaway shots of each area of the store later, and some were used in various edits of this piece.

Continuing his tour of the store at Tyson’s Corner, Steve showed off the children’s areas, the racks and racks of Mac software and accessories, and the Genius Bar, a place to bring a computer problem or a problem computer. Sales and knowledgeable service in one place. Genius.

I had worked for Apple for years on a variety of film and video projects, starting in the early 80s, with talk show host Dick Cavett promoting Apple II and Apple III products. On one setup we had Dick walking around a huge bluescreen set, where he was composited onto a VisiCalc spreadsheet. A later film had Cavett pitching the brand-new Macintosh, which sported “Lisa technology,” referring to the point-and-click interface pioneered in that Mac precursor. Cavett needed coaching from our Apple client on the correct pronunciations of MacPaint (mac-PAINT, not MAC-paint, or mick-PAINT) and MacWrite (mac-WRITE). Nobody knew from Mac-anything, and we all had to learn.

Dick Cavett on the set, with the author, left, and director Steve Michelson, 1983

In 1987, during the period of Steve Jobs’ exile from Apple, I shot the Knowledge Navigator video with director Randy Field. This prescient view of future technologies spawned a generation of “vision videos” through the 90s. Apple and many other high-tech companies produced grand visions, sometimes shooting 35mm film with union actors and mock-ups of wished-for devices and software interfaces in narrative, scripted films. A few years later I shot two half-hour films for Microsoft, a comedy and a murder mystery, one with a budget approaching a million dollars. The six-minute Knowledge Navigator video was widely distributed by Apple and then-CEO John Sculley.

I had been around Steve Jobs a bit, though I’m sure he didn’t know who I was. I’d filmed him briefly at Apple a couple of times, but most of the crew was either out of the room or behind a curtain while we rolled. I’d also waited all day for him to show up at the old CKS Studio across the street from Apple a couple of times, eventually wrapping and going home, having shot nothing at all. Some days, running two multi-billion-dollar companies (Apple and Pixar, where he was also CEO) was more important than whatever promo message we’d been preparing.

I’d also been around him the day before shooting the tour at the Apple Store, when I scouted the location with Bill C and the lighting crew for our film. Our immediate reaction when we saw the store was that it was overlit. The overhead fluorescent lighting wasn’t green or depressing in color, but the high-intensity tubes specified by the store’s lighting designer seemed very bright, with the white floors and walls. Worse, the computers were displayed on white tables and islands, and the intense overhead lights, to my eye, made the displays look dark. I was afraid they’d look muddy on video.

So we had experimented with removing the cover of one of the fluorescent fixtures and adding a layer of Opal Tough Frost, a light, white diffusion material we commonly used to soften lights. We wondered if anyone would notice the change when the Apple people showed up a bit later.

Steve noticed immediately and asked what had happened. Bill C explained it was an experiment, to soften and reduce the overhead lighting slightly, so the screens could pop out better when we shot the tour the next day. Steve was interested in the idea and asked if there were different stages of softening available, and we introduced him to the world of diffusions and helped him select with a Rosco swatch book. He asked what metric was used to quantify the light, and I lent him my Minolta incident light meter and explained how to read the scale.

“So, it’s logarithmic,” he confirmed, grasping it quickly.

In the end, I think he had my lighting crew install Hampshire frost over the light fixtures, the very lightest diffusion available at that time, practically transparent. But when Apple rolled out the first few stores, the lighting looked just as bright as it had started out.

Apple was still just a computer company then, but they were already showing an awareness that the computer would soon be the hub of the digital lifestyle now so deeply engrained in our culture. Though the iPod was still just a twinkle in Steve’s eye, the new Apple Stores sold digital video cameras and other-branded MP3 players. iTunes was already widely available, but only as a handy jukebox program for music you ripped from your CDs or downloaded from Napster.

My cousin worked at Apple at the time, and my uncle, a venture capitalist, wasn’t sure if the stores were a good idea. There were many doubters in the business community. Business Week even ran a commentary that week titled “Sorry, Steve. Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work.”

But I was already an Apple fanboy. I loved their stuff, and I knew it could be difficult to see the new Macs, except in a few specialty stores, and software and accessories were not widely available. It all made sense to me. And now ten years later, Apple stores are by far the most profitable retail real estate in the country, generating $5625 in sales per square foot each year. This compares with Tiffany second at $2974, Coach third at $1820, Game Stop fifth at $1009, Best Buy tenth at $831.

The week after the shoot at Tyson’s Corner, I was shooting the grand opening of the new Apple Store at the Galleria in Glendale, California, another upscale mall. The Mac faithful came out in force. Hundreds of people were lined up hours before the place opened at 10 am, and thousands waited on line all day to pass through and ogle the new store and all the product.

In the next couple of years, I shot a slew of projects with Bill C, which Steve showed during his keynotes at Macworld Expo in San Francisco just after New Year’s each year, or at Apple product roll-out events in Cupertino. We interviewed Jonathan Ive (Apple’s Vice President for Industrial Design) a number of times. We also interviewed U2’s Bono (in Dublin), Aaron Sorkin (in his office at Warner Bros.), Annie Leibovitz (in her New York studio), Francis Ford Coppola (at his winery in California), Seal (in his LA home studio), Wynton Marsalis, Alanis Morrissette, Elijah Wood, Tony Hawk, Sheryl Crow, Drew Carey, Moby, and Steve Harwell from Smashmouth. Dr. Dre stood us up three times.

U2's Bono, center, with engineer Jim Rolin, left, and the author (in a Jimi Hendrix tie-dye T-shirt) after our interview in Dublin, Ireland

We showed them the iPod; asked them about iPhoto, Garage Band, and the iTunes Music Store; and revealed the new swing-arm iMac to them, by pulling a black drape off the computer on camera.

When we showed the guys from the band Bare Naked Ladies the swing-arm iMac, though, they thought it was funny and bobbed its head up and down as they made up words for it. Apparently Steve hated that, because the week before Christmas, the Apple folks had us fly down to LA for an elaborate, substitute Sunday interview setup in a recording studio there, hoping we could persuade Seal to drop by and talk on camera for a few minutes, on his way through town between vacations in Canada and Mexico.

“Steve would want us to do this,” said an exec from Apple, and eventually that evening Seal did come by and gave us some great reactions as we pulled the drape from the iMac. He loved it.

The old hands at Apple, the ones on the original Macintosh development team, referred to Steve’s legendary charisma and powers of persuasion as the Reality Distortion Field. His powerful genius attracted many creative artists and persuaded them to become a part of Apple’s legend and legacy. Annie Leibovitz told us he had called her himself to ask if we could film her, and Francis Coppola seemed genuinely surprised that Steve hadn’t come to Sonoma County with us for the interview.

I rarely saw Steve Jobs again, but his legend loomed ever larger, registering huge successes with each new product release. He led the charge into the digital lifestyle as Apple evolved into the multifaceted consumer electronics, music, movies, books and software giant it is today, the world’s most valuable company.

The Other Costs of Technology

I gaze about at my Apple orchard, present and past, and warmly recall the bounty of Apples I’ve consumed over the past 25 years: MacPlus, Quadra, Duo, PowerBook, PowerMac, Macbook Pro, and all the iStuff: iBook, iMac, iPod, iPad, iPhone, iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, iChat, iWeb, iCal, and iWork.

I love my orchard, I love all my iStuff.

But I’m aware that all this great stuff comes to us at a price. Much of it is produced in China at Foxconn, under horrible working conditions with little corporate responsibility. I was very moved recently (as was Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak) by Mike Daisey’s dramatic monologue, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. His show recently opened in New York. I recommend it heartily to anyone else concerned about the human cost of the high-tech revolution.

No related posts.

Townsend 11 has published Volume 2 of our new e-book series—No Set Boundaries: Eleven Stories of Life, Travel, Misadventure.

For several years now, I’ve belonged to this collective of eleven writers (including one who lives in Barcelona). We meet monthly in a converted brick warehouse on Townsend Street in San Francisco.

We are committed to sharing stories that enlighten, entertain, and inspire. Our work is an eclectic mix that has been widely published in major magazines, newspapers, and books, and has earned numerous awards. Now, in this age of e-books, we’ve launched a series of works to engage you.

In our second book, No Set Boundaries: Eleven Stories of Life, Travel, Misadventure, you can witness a Catalan ritual in Barcelona, shop the Italian way, freeze on an English beach, deal with prejudice in Ethiopia, backpack down a frightening road in Cambodia, rest in a California garden, and glide along on a French canal. You’ll learn about a bent zucchini that’s not a vegetable, try to help lost travelers, break a leg on a mountain trail, and dash through an ancient city in India.

Our debut volume, No Fixed Destination: Eleven Stories of Life, Love, Travel (published in July), will take you down the Nile, behind the curtains of the airline industry, and through the chill of the Ethiopian rainy season. You’ll read about finding summer love and the price that comes with it, passing yourself off as your mother, trying to train a chicken, racing a motorcycle on the world’s most demanding endurance course in China’s Taklamakan Desert, and much more.

Our third volume, No Definite Plans: Eleven Stories of Laughter, Love, Travel, will be published later this fall.

Townsend 11′s authors are: Jennifer Baljko, Carol Beddo, Jacqueline Collins, John Dalton, Larry Habegger, Dana Hill, Barbara Robertson, Bonnie Smetts, Jacqueline Yau, Bill Zarchy, and Y.J. Zhu.

• BUY Our Books
• Read more ABOUT Our Books
• Read EXCERPTS from Our Books
• Read Larry Habegger’s INTROS to Our Books

Related posts:

1. OUR NEW BOOK—No Definite Plans: Eleven Tales of Laughter, Love, Travel—Volume 3 from Townsend 11
2. Townsend 11: Volume 1 Now in More Stores, Volume 2 Due Out Soon
3. My Writing Group Has Published a Book of Stories—No Fixed Destination, by Townsend 11, Vol. 1 of Our New Series

The amazing little GoPro HDHero cameras can record full 1080p HD video, as well as timelapse and single shots. They’re tiny and easy to rig anywhere, as in the setup below where we used them on a corporate shoot, mounting six on laptops for a video chat, instead of the built-in iSight cameras.

The GoPro mounted on a laptop, using its flat-base mount, Velcro, and blue tape to protect the lid of the computer.

The GoPro provides a higher-quality alternative to the built-in webcam. The wire taped to the side is for a lavalier microphone piggybacked onto the camera.

But camera movement is where the GoPros shine. The HDHero comes with helmet mount, auto mount, body mount, or wrist mount, with both waterproof and non-waterproof housings. I recently bought the HDHero camera, helmet rigging, suction cup for autos, tiny clip-on LCD monitor, extra batteries and clip-on battery pack.

In Timelapse mode on the GoPros, you can only control the interval between shots (2, 5, 10, 30, or 60 seconds). Everything else is automatic—shutter, aperture, video gains, etc. The cameras have a fixed, wide-angle lens. No zoom.

Mush rigs the GoPro with a suction cup mount on the roof of our van in São Paulo.

Shooting timelapse results in folders with thousands of jpegs. A new folder is created each time you start shooting a timelapse sequence. But when you render your image sequences later (I used Quicktime 7 Pro’s File —> Open Image Sequence command), you can control the frame-per-second rate, creating different length clips of the same event, with different speeds of movement. The moving GoPros clips in “Traffic Study” were all rendered at 30 fps, and also at either 10 or 12 fps. Sometimes I used the slower speeds in the final edit, sometimes the faster ones.

Adjusting the GoPro on the roof of the Sprinter van. Then we drove around with the camera running in timelapse mode for most of the next two days.

The blurriness which adds so much energy and motion to these timelapse sequences resulted from the GoPro’s shutter staying open long enough to smear the motion, for one or more of these reasons:

• The camera itself moved past fixed objects very quickly
• Objects on screen moved very quickly
• There was not much light, the aperture was wide open, and the shutter dragged (stayed open a long time) to provide an adequate exposure

We shot most of the static-camera sequences with my Canon 5D and the Canon’s TC-80N3 Timer/Remote Control, variously adjusting the interval between frames from 1/2 to 2 seconds, and varying the shutter-open time from ¼ second to one full second. These clips were rendered at 10 and 30 fps.

Some of the colors and effects are amazing. Editing in iMovie definitely added some down-resing and compression artifacts, but you can’t beat the ease of use (and cheapness of the software!).

Traffic Study

Cinematography: Bill Zarchy, Mush Emmons
Editing: Bill Zarchy
Cameras: Canon 5D Mark II, GoPro HDHero
Edited in iMovie
Music: Villa-Lobos, Prelude #1
Shot in São Paulo, Brazil, in August 2011

Related posts:

1. Brazil: Smooth as Silk
2. Back to Brazil
3. Brazil: Visiting the Rental House

All in all, I was in the air about 22 hours, and on the ground for about 48. I did have a couple of hours to prowl around through the heart of Paris on our arrival day with my camera and director Dan Smith.

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1. Paris When It Sizzles

I chuckled when I came upon this sign recently in my travels.

As I thought it over later, however, I wondered if the sign was granting permission or issuing a warning. Guess I’ll never know for sure.

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Busy week. Lotsa time in the air:

Last Monday—Fly SFO to Washington/Dulles
Tuesday—One-day shoot near Dulles airport
Wednesday—Fly Dulles to SFO
Thursday—Breathe, pant
Friday—Scheme, pack
Saturday—Depart SFO to Paris
Sunday—Arrive Paris
Monday—One-day shoot in Paris
Tuesday—Fly Paris to SFO
Today—Breathe, pant, blog

Mastering jetlag is the only way I can get through periods like these. It’s an imperfect science at best, but from long experience with many buttburner flights and some bookish research, I am finally prepared to set down:

Uncle Billy’s Rules for Conquering Jetlag

1. Jetlag is caused by the disruption to your sleep cycle from major, swift time zone shifts. From the moment you get on the plane, change your watch to your destination’s time zone and start immediately to acclimate your body to the new time.

• If you’re leaving late in the day and arriving early the next day, try hard to sleep on the flight. Avoid caffeine and curl up with a good book or movie and try to drop off. Take a pill to help you get sleepy, if that’s your taste, like Melatonin or Ambien. You might drink a glass of wine or two to enhance drowsiness, but be careful here. Don’t get sloshed. Alcoholic beverages are dehydrating.
• When you arrive the next morning, try hard to stay up until a normal bedtime. Find your hotel, shower, change clothes, head out to walk around and explore your surroundings. Do not go to sleep in the afternoon, as your already confused body will not let you sleep that night.
• On the other hand, if you’re flying and arriving by daylight hours, stay awake as much as you can. My flight yesterday was scheduled to leave Paris at 1:40 pm and arrive in San Francisco at 3:45 pm the same day. I was tired when we boarded, and I did nap a few times for a few minutes during the 11-hour flight. But I also drank coffee, walked the length of the 747 a few times to keep my joints lubricated, read a bit, took Ibuprofen to combat the pain of the seat in front of me jammed into my knees, went to the back of the plane to stretch and stand, watched 2-1/2 movies on my iPad, ate the two provided meals plus a sandwich I brought aboard, took pictures out the windows while over Hudson’s Bay in northern Canada, listened to my son’s podcasts, and did whatever I could to stay conscious.
• Nearly everyone else on the flight slept. Air France dimmed the lights and kept the cabin stuffy, which increased drowsification, but it’s in their interests to keep all 300 of us subdued while locked up in their tin can. When the passengers who slept the whole time got to their hotels that evening, they cursed that darned, unavoidable jetlag, began their trips with sleepless nights and sleepy days, and rued the discomforts of travel. I went home, unpacked, drank coffee to last through the evening, put away my gear, dumped the garbage, made some calls, sent some texts, played with the dog, totaled my petty cash, answered some emails, imported and inspected all my photos, scarfed a burrito, watched “City of God,” took an Ambien, and went to bed around midnight. I slept well, awoke around 7:30, and felt fine and energetic all day.

2. Stay hydrated. Airplane air is as dry as the Gobi desert. Increase your fluid intake (except for alcohol). Water is best.

• Try this test: Press your forefinger into the pad of your thumb so the skin turns white, then remove the finger. Does the thumb pad stay white or does it plump out and turn red quickly? If it takes longer than two seconds to regain color, you have slow CRT (capillary refill time) and are probably dehydrated. I kid you not.
• Another test: if your pee does not run clear, you could be dehydrated, though there are other factors (like food intake, medication, and vitamin supplements) that can influence urine color. Google “pee runs clear” if you’re dying to read more on this fascinating subtopic.
• Drink water before your flight, and bring water on board. In most places, airport security won’t let you through with liquids, but you can buy your own bottle in the gate area shops before you board. On some airlines, the flight attendants are attentive about bringing water around at regular intervals, but on other flights, they’ll just leave drinks out in the galley between meals, while they gab in the back of the plane.
• Continue to drink water after you land, and avoid salty foods, which are dehydrating. If you’re on a trip where you’re flying often, drink constantly. On a long trip a while back, we flew SFO-Auckland-Wellington-Sydney-Tokyo-Taipei-Singapore-Johannesburg-Nairobi-Kampala (Uganda) in a two-week period. After our arrival in Africa, the director, a good friend of mine, started acting uncharacteristically short-tempered and cranky. I knew he generally consumed minuscule amounts of liquids and only peed on Wednesdays. Our client liaison, a registered nurse, suspected dehydration, and shut down our shoot till the director drank a bottle of water. She kept her eye on him the rest of the trip.

3. Make sure your body is as comfortable and your mind as occupied as possible for your flight.

• Fight for a good seat, especially if you need to sleep on an overnight flight. If you’re a big guy like me, exit rows and bulkheads offer enhanced legroom, essential for long flights. Some airlines have an Economy Plus section with a few inches more legroom. An aisle seat gives you much greater mobility during your flight. Be assertive in trying to get what you want from the airline or travel agent.
• Most airlines will let you pick or change your seat with an online seat map. In the days leading up to departure, when I’m working at my computer, I’ll often bookmark and check the airline’s seat map every couple of hours to see if I can grab an aisle or exit row seat someone else has canceled. Many cancellations occur in the last 24 hours before departure, so keep checking back.
• Some airlines cut off access to the seat map a day or two before departure. I had a middle seat scheduled for my return from Paris this week and couldn’t get to the seat map to change it on the last day. But our French production manager called a friend at Air France who was able to switch me to an aisle seat. Serendipitously, the friend had just been promoted, and we caught her on her last day at this job for the airline.
• On the other hand, if you’re small enough to fit handily into any airline seat and only need to go pee every eight hours or so, PLEASE take a middle seat. We need people like you to fill out the plane.
• Get one of those silly-looking nerd pillows to support your neck when you doze off, either a soft cushy one or an inflatable, which stores in much less space. Important tip: don’t wear the pillow with the opening in the front. This pushes your head and neck forward and does nothing to support your chin. Turn the pillow around so the opening is at the back, and suddenly you’ll find new comfort in the otherwise-despicable activity of sleeping-while-sitting.
• If you need to stay awake during the flight, expect to be bored by being sedentary and cooped up for many hours. This is an inevitable part of travel. Why should it be a surprise? Bring reading matter, music, movies, games, cards, and snacks, whatever you need to keep from going crazy or going to sleep. This is especially true if you’re traveling with children. Many airlines now offer individual screens and a wide selection of movies on international flights, great non-stop entertainment.

• It’s not uncommon to have great energy on the first day after a major time shift, but then get that heavy-lidded, oy-I-gotta-take-a-nap-NOW feeling on the second day. I’ll often take another Ambien on the second night home. Despite all my efforts, I still sometimes have a sleepless night several days after arrival.

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1. Good Night, Irene—Confessions of a Mileage Whore

Write What You Don't Know—a fine companion for bowling.

I’ve been a filmmaker and writer for most of my life, but I’ve never written a film. There was no screenplay writing class when I was in film school at Stanford, for some reason, and I never caught the bug.

Now, however, Julian Hoxter, my colleague in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University, has published a wonderful book called Write What You Don’t Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters. I can feel my life starting to change.

I thought a book about screenwriting would be technical and dull. This one is witty, chatty, involving, technical, and engrossing. I look forward to reading more of it every day, an experience similar to chatting with Julian, a gentleman of the British persuasion and a clever and amiable bloke.

The premise in the title is that writing what you don’t know takes you outside your comfort zone and encourages you to explore ideas beyond your normal world. Stimulates the creative juices, you might say. I’m sure I’ll soon be scripting feature-length versions of the Treaty of Ghent, string theory, astrokinesiology, or some of the other gazillion things I know nothing about. Watch out, Hollywood!

Who can resist a book that says:

Screenplays are not novels … One fast route into understanding this difference is through ‘show, don’t tell.’

Go down to your local tattoo parlor and get the nice inked-up bloke down there to tattoo the words: SHOW, DON’T TELL on the backs of both your hands in big bold letters. That way you can read them as you type.

Alternatively, and assuming you aren’t a complete idiot, stick a note on your monitor or something.

And, under Bad Reasons to Write a Screenplay:

‘I want supermodels on my d.’

Clearly you have never heard the oldest filmmakers’ joke:

Did you hear about the ambitious actor who had no clue? He slept with the screenwriter.

Stranger things have happened, but unless you already possess the skills and talent to entice the aforementioned supermodels onto your aforementioned d, this is a doubly stupid reason to start writing.

Chapter titles like these make me want to keep reading:

Oh joy, another screenwriting book

It’s all about the concept

‘Taming wild words:’ it’s all about the structure

It’s all about the characters: this time I really mean it

Dialogue is not just people talking

Julian’s blog: Write What You Don’t Know. He’s holding a contest for the best photo of his book in some unusual environment or locale. The prize is, uh, a copy of his book. But I’m determined to win that contest! I’ve already taken the book bowling, and to Paris …

Julian’s book on Amazon: Write What You Don’t Know

Full disclosure: No one asked me to write this, and I bought the damn book. You should, too.

Write What You Don't Know—a fine companion for traveling.

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News from Townsend 11, the writing collective I’ve belonged to for years here in San Francisco:

First—Volume 1 of our new book series, No Fixed Destination: Eleven Stories of Life, Love, Travel, was originally published in July as a Kindle book. But now we have made it available at most e-book stores:

• Amazon’s Kindle Store
• Apple’s iBooks Store (buy through the app)
• Barnes & Noble’s Nook Book Store
• Diesel e-Book Store
• Smashwords

This collection of 11 personal essays, memoirs, and true stories from Townsend 11, a group of award-winning writers, takes readers on emotional journeys and adventures from California to Croatia to China and back, Ethiopia to Egypt, England to New England, and Hawaii to Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Next—Volume 2 of the series, No Set Boundaries: Eleven Stories of Life, Misadventure, will be published in a few days on the Kindle Store, and through other e-Book outlets a few weeks later.

In No Set Boundaries, you can witness a Catalan ritual in Barcelona, shop the Italian way, freeze on an English beach, deal with prejudice in Ethiopia, backpack down a frightening road in Cambodia, rest in a California garden, and glide along on a French canal. You’ll learn about a bent zucchini that’s not a vegetable, try to help lost travelers, break a leg on a mountain trail, and dash through an ancient city in India.

And finally—Volume 3, No Definite Plans: Eleven More Stories will be out this fall. More on this as we get closer to publication.

Townsend 11′s authors are: Jennifer Baljko, Carol Beddo, Jacqueline Collins, John Dalton, Larry Habegger, Dana Hill, Barbara Robertson, Bonnie Smetts, Jacqueline Yau, Bill Zarchy, and Y.J. Zhu.

My contributions: a story in each volume, our website, and cover photography on Volume 2.

BUY OUR BOOKS: Volumes 1 and 2 are now available at most e-Book stores.

No Kindle? No iPad? You don’t have to own an e-reader like a Kindle, iPad, Nook or other tablet to enjoy our e-books. You can probably read them on a device you already own.

Visit our website at townsend11.com.

Like us on Facebook.

For additional information, email info@townsend11.com. To find out about our next book, email nextbook@townsend11.com.

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1. OUR NEW BOOK—No Definite Plans: Eleven Tales of Laughter, Love, Travel—Volume 3 from Townsend 11
2. Townsend 11 Publishes Volume 2: No Set Boundaries
3. My Writing Group Has Published a Book of Stories—No Fixed Destination, by Townsend 11, Vol. 1 of Our New Series

All photos Copyright 2011 by Bill Zarchy

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1. Back to Brazil

It’s not easy being a mileage whore. Sometimes you have to do things that don’t seem to make sense.

United Airlines operates a major hub in San Francisco, and I’ve whored for their miles for years now. On my trip to Brazil last month, because I wanted the mileage, I had chosen a longer United itinerary through Newark going and Washington coming. But when things got complicated on the return, I had to decide if the miles were worth it.

We wrapped our week-long shoot in São Paulo on a Friday night—amid much hugging and thanking with the cast and crew—and had time to relax over dinner that evening.

Saturday was the first day all week I didn’t have to set my alarm for 5:30, and I luxuriated in sleeping in. I had plans to meet Mush for breakfast before his 3 pm flight back home to Salvador, Bahia, further north up the Brazilian coast. My own departure for the States was scheduled for Saturday night.

But when I awoke with a start Saturday morning, I had an email and several phone messages from United, warning me that my scheduled 10:15 departure that night to Washington-Dulles had been pushed back five hours to 3:15 am Sunday, because of “late aircraft arrival.” I didn’t mind leaving Brazil later, but I did the math and quickly realized that I would miss my connecting flight from Dulles to San Francisco.

I thought it odd that United knew so far in advance that their aircraft would arrive late; the plane was probably still hours away from its scheduled departure. I checked the Internets to see what was up. Good night! Hurricane Irene had made landfall in South Carolina a few hours before and was, at that moment, devastating the Washington area as it moved north up the coast.

I called United, to the special Premier Executive Mileage Whore number in the States, to discuss my itinerary. The agent was sympathetic to my plight and cheerfully re-booked my Dulles-SFO connecting flight.

“But I have to ask,” I stammered, “Is it safe to fly through Dulles? I mean, isn’t the hurricane kind of a hindrance to air traffic?”

“Well,” the agent replied in measured tones, “Dulles hasn’t shut down. It’s one of the few airports in the Northeast to stay open, though we’ve had many cancellations there today.

“You can accept this reservation now and still change it later if things don’t look right,” she told me. “We’ve temporarily waived all change fees, to make it easier for people to reroute their flights around the bad weather. All our Brazil flights go through the Northeast, but we can always try to route you through Houston or Miami on another carrier.”

So, did flying directly into a hurricane seem like a prudent idea? No. Was I willing to keep the same itinerary in order to stay on United? You bet. Also, I’d spent time on United’s website since landing in Brazil, checking their seat maps regularly and improving my Economy seats as better ones became available—aisle seats in the slightly-more-legroom section, closer to the front. If I switched airlines, I was afraid I’d get jammed into a middle seat for ten hours on some other carrier.

I surfed through some weather sites and bought a new weather app for my iPad, trying to determine if I’d be heading right into the eye of the storm. Most weather prognosticators were guessing that Irene would continue to head north.

Meanwhile, I headed out for a Brazilian brunch, a feijoada (fayzh-WHA-duh), with Mush, Ricca, and Marcello Bartz, the producer I worked with on my trip to Brazil last year. The feijoada is a traditional Portuguese dish of beans usually served with rice and various meats. Our feijoada that day included thin strips of meat, thick chops, and sausages—pork, pork, and pork—delicious, though a bit heavy once ingested.

After lunch, I bade Mush farewell and saw him off to the airport, then went shopping for gifts with Ricca. While driving to the market, I received a confirming email from United for my newly booked connecting flight from Dulles to San Francisco … on Saturday afternoon.

Big problem. It was already Saturday afternoon, and I was still in South America. Somehow, it seemed, United’s computers, huffing and puffing from the strain of rebooking thousands of cancellations, had allowed on my itinerary a Saturday connecting flight to SFO that left before my Sunday morning flight from Sao Paulo!

I called the airline, and the operator at the special Mileage Whore line chuckled over the mistake, saying, “That’s impossible. The software can’t actually do that.” Nevertheless, it did. She rebooked me for a second flight that would actually leave after my first flight arrived, then announced that my departure from São Paulo had now been put back another hour, to 4:15 am Sunday. The good news was that my request to upgrade from Economy Class would probably go through.

At one time many of my jobs flew us in comfy, wide Business Class seats. But in recent years, they usually send us in Economy, and it’s become nearly impossible to upgrade. I’m a big guy, and I have a lot of experience folding myself into small Coach seats. But with a quarter million miles in my United account, if the opportunity came along to upgrade to Business Class for my long international flight segment, I’d be happy to sacrifice 25,000 miles and a few hundred bucks for a ticket that would normally cost several thousand dollars and greater comfort.

Then I found out … (drumroll) … that my flight to Dulles featured “two-cabin service”—Economy Class and First. No Business Class. So I might be able to upgrade to First Class, the Holy Grail of Mileage Whoredom.

Late Saturday afternoon, I bade Ricca goodbye and went for a walk in the upscale neighborhood of my hotel. How could I tell it was upscale? The Ferrari dealer on the corner was one clue. The very expensive pizza parlor and French bistro in the area were two more. I spent a long time wandering slowly through the streets, taking pictures of people and buildings, absorbing as much Brazil as I could before dark, conscious that I still had a long time to wait for my flight.

I’ve posted some of my snaps here: Streets of São Paulo

Back in my hotel room, I haunted the weather sites, checking their predictions for Dulles the next day, glomming onto ambiguous, sketchy guesses that the DC weather might be partly cloudy “with a 20% chance of tropical storm conditions” on Sunday, whatever that meant. My obsession with the weather, a nap, and dinner helped me pass the time till my midnight ride to the airport, knowing I’d be up most of the night waiting for my plane.

In my carry-on luggage, I had carefully packed the power supplies for my laptop, my iPhone, and my iPad, anticipating that I could get stuck for many hours in some airport, either a further-delayed departure from São Paulo, or a much longer layover in Dulles. At least I would have stuff to read and ways to communicate, as long as there was electricity. I wondered if I should bring sandwiches or food or flashlights. Was I crazy to be flying right into the hurricane? I thought about all those lovely miles, and decided it made perfect sense.

I did manage to upgrade to First for the flight to Dulles, and we left right on time at 4:15, six hours late. I quickly realized how lucky I was: this aircraft’s First Class section featured fully reclining lie-flat bed seats. I’d never had one of these reclining bed capsules before. After a week of short nights, long days, and non-stop activity, the comfort was worth every mile and every dollar!

In the end, the hurricane was a non-issue. I got off much easier than the poor folks who lived in the path of the storm. Irene did pass through Dulles a full day before me and was already tearing up New York on her way to Boston when my flight from Brazil made landfall, right on time, in DC. Partly cloudy never looked so good, and I saw no “tropical storm conditions.” I cleared Customs, rechecked my bags to SFO, then found the gate for my connecting flight and was delighted when the agent handed me another First Class ticket.

Upgrades were available because Irene had scared many fliers away from the Northeast Corridor. I could have come back through Texas or Florida, if I hadn’t wanted my United miles. But since I stayed on plan, like a true Mileage Whore, I was rewarded with First Class on both legs of the journey. Obviously the secret to upgrading on an international flight is to fly through a natural disaster. Or near one.

I tucked into a complimentary glass of red wine, my personal movies and adjustable footrest deployed, my cushy First Class seat reclined jauntily, and settled in for the ride home.

One Thing I Won’t Miss About Brazil

Signs like these are ubiquitous, even in hotels. As in many Latin American countries, Brazilian septic systems are subject to clogging. The signs advise you not to flush your toilet paper or towels, but to discard them in the cans provided. The sign below reminds you that others will use the toilet after you, and also requests you not urinate on the floor.

Related posts:

1. Sky Jockey: Conquering Jetlag

Shooting on the Avenida Paulista, as Ricca tries to hail a cab in the background.

Less than an hour after my last post (Brazil: Some Days the Bear Eats You), my friend The Dave Mitchell responded on my Facebook page: “Nice, Bill. Easy days are completely forgettable.” Isn’t that the truth?

“But,” added The Dave, a freelance gaffer/key grip, “I’m available if you’ve got any coming up.” If only!

After our tough time at the tower, the next couple of days shooting in Brazil were smooth as silk. Just as The Dave said, I can remember little about those shoots except for what we did and where we did it. I always find it amazing that I can easily spin out 1500-2000 words describing a bad day, but smooth shoots leave me with less material. That’s why OO stories (Overcoming Obstacles) are so popular in movies. It’s hard to find a narrative arc in a yarn about a happy professional crew cheerfully moving apace from setup to lovely setup.

Even though the next two days did leave me with little emotional baggage, I do remember what we did:

By Thursday, the previous day’s fog had lifted, and we had sporadic sun throughout the day. We met our new group of actors in Ibirapuera Park in central São Paulo. Outdoors! Fresh air!

Here we staged a soccer game between a dad and his sons on a greensward with the city skyline in the background. Then Dad, in our scene, recorded video of the boys kicking around the ball and sent the video to Mom. In another scene, Mom laughed happily as she watched the video on her smart phone.

Ibirapuera: Outdoors! Fresh air!

We used iconic backgrounds at Ibirapuera for other shots:

• On a eucalyptus bench with a rubber tree in the background: one of the boys playing a game on an iPad
• On the edge of a stone labyrinth: the other boy playing and sending an email from a Samsung Galaxy tablet
• In front of a colorful mural: another young man talking and texting on his smart phone

... and the next shot is ...

After lunch, we left the park and made four more stops:

• Another train station: avoiding another $5000 location fee by sneaking in the 5D camera in a backpack, we grabbed a scene of our actor on a smart phone, with trains in the background. Security was much lighter here.
• Sidewalk area with a distinctive South American pattern: a boy with a smart phone.
• Pizza parlor: a moody scene with a young girl and a PC laptop, taking care to dress and light the place so it looked like a home, in the narrow angle we saw on camera.
• Colorful Brazilian café: a scene with a man and a woman conferring over a business deal and a video chat, using a Mac laptop and a webcam made by our clients.

Sidewalk pattern typical of Rio de Janeiro (though we were in Sao Paulo)

In most of these scenes, I filmed medium and close shots of the subjects, as well as closeups of their technology screens. In order to provide footage that would be useful in multiple ways, I often had the actors use the handheld devices in several different orientations—smart phones were shot at the actors’ ears, as well as out in front in horizontal and vertical orientations, to simulate talking, texting, watching video, and speaking on a video chat.

All the devices were actually switched off when we shot them. Screen material was to be inserted later, during postproduction. In addition, whenever possible, I grabbed subjective shots of each subject looking and speaking directly into my camera. These shots could be used to simulate a video chat, by inserting them later into shots of other devices.

Cafe consultation

I continued to use the Canon 24-70mm f2.8 lens, as well as the 70-200 f2.8, and occasionally the 16-35mm f2.8 for a wider perspective. I used the Zacuto Z-finder at all times (how could you possibly focus without it?) and the 7” LCD monitor when I could slow down long enough. Since most of my subjects were static, I didn’t need the follow focus much. I’ll try to post a sampler of the footage soon.

Friday was a run-around day shooting a young man hailing a taxi in front of a museum on the Avenida Paulista, as well as scenics, crowds, traffic, neighborhoods, and skylines. At one point, Ricca took us to the tallest building in the downtown area. Getting a high-angle shot of the city from the highest floor of the building took a half hour of waiting in line and slowly signing in, with IDs and carefully filled-out paper forms for each person (because the computers were down), then up two elevators to a tiny observation platform for a five-minute gander at the vista. I brought the 5D and my sturdy monopod and managed to grab four different skyline shots before we were shooed back into the elevators.

Mush Emmons rigs the GoPro camera on our van.

I had bought one of the amazing little GoPro Hero HD wearable/riggable cameras for this shoot, and for several days, Mush suction-cupped it on the roof of our van to shoot timelapse footage as we drove around São Paulo. We also shot several setups of traffic, especially at night, with the 5D and the Canon TC-80N3 intervalometer. Some of the footage is pretty whacky and exciting. I’ll post an edited version of all this timelapse footage soon.

Cafe shoot

Related posts:

1. Back to Brazil
2. Brazil: Visiting the Rental House
3. Brazil: Some Days the Bear Eats You

The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley.

My dad loved that Robert Burns quote. He would chuckle over the funny Scottish words, the unpredictability of life, and the way that plans could oft go astray.

When I was in film school at Stanford, our teachers pushed the idea that preproduction planning was the key to making shoots work, and I’ve always stressed intelligent forethought with my own students. You’ve gotta have a plan going into the shoot—a shot list, an orderly progression through your day, a list of what you’re planning to accomplish and when—and the wisdom to accept that plans often change in production. But sometimes your planning gets trumped by outside forces, and your day gets messed up in ways you could never have predicted.

I flew to Brazil a couple of weeks ago to shoot for a Silicon Valley company. For budgetary reasons, I traveled alone, without a producer or crew. The production company I was working for in the San Francisco Bay Area hired a Brazilian producer to put together our locations, casting, crew, and other arrangements in São Paulo. I was in Brazil to shoot and direct B-roll scenes of people and technology.

Some of the locations we needed were fancy office spaces, very difficult to find available for our midweek shoot days. So the Brazilian branch of our client company in California agreed to cooperate and allow us to shoot in their high-end, high-rise digs near the Pinheiros River in central São Paulo. We scouted the tower on Tuesday, the day before the shoot, and the high-tech décor and seeming accessibility of the offices were perfect.

Tuesday ended up a very long day checking a dozen locations, shooting timelapse footage of traffic, and ending up at the rental company to pick up our supplemental camera gear, all the while slogging through ridiculous traffic in this sprawling metropolis of 20 million.

It was after midnight Tuesday by the time Mush and I had eaten, downloaded and checked our timelapse shots, then charged, loaded and prepped for the next day.

After a very short night, our Brazilian producer Ricca picked us up at our hotel at 7 am Wednesday, for an 8 am call time at the office tower. The city traffic is often gridlocked but always unpredictable, and somehow we zipped along and arrived at location at 7:30. Unfortunately, our contact person didn’t show up until nearly 9, supposedly because of stupendously bad traffic from another direction.

The building security people refused to allow us to sign in or even off-load our equipment to the sidewalk or the loading dock until our contact showed up and called them from a phone extension inside the building. So we had an hour and a half of gnashing our teeth in the parking lot to start the day.

Once our contact arrived, the building bureaucracy (or “burro-cracy,” as Ricca termed them, because of their legendary stubbornness) granted us admission to the loading dock, where it took half an hour to sign in six of our crew, with carefully scrutinized IDs and multiple phone calls upstairs. (Later we had to sign out to go to the shopping mall in the same building for lunch, relinquishing our security badges, then sign back in laboriously after lunch, then sign out to go to the train station for a couple of pickup shots in the afternoon, then sign back in upon our return).

That morning, the security folks told us where to park and unload our gear, but once we had everything loaded onto carts, we realized we still had a 15-minute walk—through an enormous garage under the three-building complex—to get to the freight elevator of the tower where we were shooting. We had hired six actors for the day and planned seven shots in the building, on three different floors. The office suite on each floor had a reception desk with an attendant to buzz us in from the elevator lobby.

It was nearly 11 by the time we attacked our first setup on the 26^th floor. Things started off badly. Brazil has gone through rapid economic development in the past few years and is becoming a wealthy country, but the electrical power and wiring, even in new buildings, can still be … surprising. Several familiar types of plugs are in common use, but the voltage might not be what’s expected. One of our crew, without checking, fried a Kino-Flo ballast (a transformer which helps control these special fluorescent lighting fixtures used in film production) by plugging it into the wrong outlet. We had other ballasts, of course, but it was an ominous way to start the day.

I met the actors, whom we had cast from photos. Despite our specification that each of them bring three or four changes of clothing and dress for a corporate workplace, two had shown up with only the clothes on their backs. This was annoying and limiting.

During our scout, we had noticed that the windows in the tower had great views of other tall buildings, and especially of a unique suspension bridge, which we had planned to feature in the backgrounds of our shots. But the weather on our shoot day was disappointing—hazy with low, foggy clouds—which partially obscured the views and made the windows look awful in our shots, almost completely white.

Nevertheless, we worked around the glary windows and cranked through four good-looking setups of people interacting with technology. Our client company makes Internet devices, so our mission on this shoot was to provide shots of Brazilian-looking folks in Brazilian-looking locations, using iPhones and Droid smart phones, PC and Mac laptops, teleconferencing and telecommunications equipment made by our clients, and iPad, Galaxy, and other tablets. There was no dialogue, but the actors still needed my direction on what to do and how to react.

After a late lunch, I ran off to the railroad station for a couple of shots with Ricca and two of the actors, while Mush started a lighting setup with our crew on another floor of the tower. The station authorities required a location fee of $5000 (!) for shoots on the premises. This was out of the question for the few simple scenes we needed, so we had decided to steal the shots with my Canon 5D camera in a simple handheld configuration.

It was a bit of an adventure, as security people patrolled both the Metro and intercity train platforms where we wanted to shoot. But basically no one cared … or noticed. I slipped the camera into the station in a backpack, pulled it out when the security people weren’t looking, and grabbed a few shots of our actors in the two stations without incident.

I used the 5D handheld with a short zoom lens (the Canon 24-70 f2.8) and the Zacuto viewfinder. No follow-focus, no monitor, no tripod. It looked like a still camera (it is!), and no one really gave it a second look, but I was shooting 1080p 30fps HD video of our actors watching videos, texting, and calling on their smart phones, with other commuters and trains streaming through the frame behind them.

I’m sure we were a bit of a circus to watch, as I had to yell over the din of the station to direct them: “Look at the phone. Turn it horizontal. Now smile, and say something to the person calling. Now look into the phone and listen.”

As I yelled, Ricca would translate to Portuguese, and each actor would respond facially and emotionally. We avoided the security people, separating ourselves with a pillar when there was one.

When we got back to the office building (after signing back in for the third time), we still had three shots planned, but our late start had schtupped us at the end of the day. It was winter in Brazil and sunset had hit just before 6, making the shot Mush and the crew were setting up on the 2^nd floor look awful—lots of white walls reflecting in windows, not enough crew or resources to black it all out, nothing to see through the window. I couldn’t bear to shoot it.

We discussed a change of concept. Mush offered to run upstairs at 6:05 pm to get another light or two and a different lens, and discovered that all the receptionists had left at 6 and we were locked out of every floor. At that point our gear and crew were spread between the 2^nd and 26^th floors, and we had still planned to shoot on the 18^th as well. Big problem.

Ricca called our contact person, who had left for the day and told us there was nothing she could do, the offices closed at 6. Period. Of course she hadn’t told us that before, even when we had run into her during the afternoon, or we would have planned around it and put off the station shots for another day. We had been squeezed for time at both ends of the day.

Ricca went off to investigate and found a cleaning lady who offered to help us get out of there, but told us we couldn’t stay, in any case, after 8. I called my producer back in San Francisco, and she agreed we should pack it in for the day. I took stock of the situation. We’d gotten four of our seven shots at the tower, plus the two setups at the station. We hadn’t met our ambitious goals, but we had shot a lot of good material. Most of our plan had worked. How could we have predicted we would be squeezed for time at both ends of the day?

The cleaning lady let us back into the 26^th floor, so we could wrap our camera and lighting gear, slink out of there through the labyrinthine garage, and hit the streets.

Adding insult to injury, it took nearly an hour and a half to zigzag through Sao Paulo rush hour gridlock back to the hotel, a trip that had taken 20-25 minutes that morning.

Quick dinner, then bed. Tomorrow’s always a brand new day.

Some days you eat the bear, and some days the bear eats you.

Related posts:

1. Brazil: Smooth as Silk
2. Back to Brazil
3. Brazil: Visiting the Rental House

On my first day in Brazil, I visited the rental house with Mush and Heeka.

I brought my Canon 5D, a slew of lenses and two GoPro cameras with me from the States, but we’ve arranged to rent a second 5D camera body, two tripods, a small monitor, a wide angle lens, and some accessories from Universo Imagens here in São Paulo.

Visiting the rental house is a time-honored ritual on international shoots. The most interesting rental house experience I can recall was in India several years ago. In a small warehouse crammed with a variety of battered and somewhat obsolete lighting instruments, a dutiful staff brought out each light we were renting, then plugged in and turned on each one. I’d seen this ritual before and was impressed that almost every light actually worked.

Then I noticed that, because of rain pouring in under the rollup door, the floor was wet. In fact, the staff members were standing in puddles, barefoot, as they plugged in and demonstrated their lights. I backed cautiously away, nodding approval at the demonstration, but a bit cowed by the unholy mix of water and electricity.

On another shoot in Taiwan, the staff demoed all the lights, in the usual manner, then offered to sew black cloth onto their open flag frames, overnight. As long as we rented the frames, they would do the sewing for no charge. It was then 10 pm on a Sunday night, but the timing didn’t seem to faze them.

I was amazed, but satisfied with their service, and trotted off to use the powder room. Humming a happy tune to myself, my ballcap pulled down low over my eyes, I bounded up the three steps to the men’s room, failing to notice that the top of the door frame was about 6 feet above the ground. And I’m 6’ 4”.

Bam! I slammed into the doorframe, stunned, and fell to the ground. A man standing at the urinal, his junk still in his hand, heard my impact, turned, looked down with concern, and said over and over, “Okay? Okay? Okay?” And after a minute, I was okay.

But back to Brazil. Along with Mush Emmons (who will shoot second camera) and producer Ricardo Goncalves of Brazil Films, we stopped to examine and probe the gear we’ll rent locally. I’m very lucky to have Mush on our crew. He’s a native San Franciscan, and I worked with him years ago on shoots in the Bay Area. Now, married to a Brazilian woman, he’s been living in Salvador in the Brazilian state of Bahia for ten years, and many San Francisco-based crews have hired him to shoot, light, or produce their South American shoots.

Mush (on right) and Heeka (aka Ricca, second from right) negotiate at the rental company.

Mr. Emmons’ real name is Andrew, but he still goes by his old family nickname of Mush, the origins of which are lost in the obscure reaches of my memory (or his). Ricardo goes by the nickname Ricca. Since R’s in Portuguese are pronounced more like breathy H’s in English, this nickname sounds more like Heeka. Thus my rental house visit with Mush and Heeka.

(By this same oddity of Portuguese, “rock and roll” is pronounced “hock and hole!”)

The first rental items we looked at were the two Sachtler 15 tripods we had ordered. On closer examination, though, we realized that, despite looking just like the equivalent models made by the venerable Munich-based Sachtler company (including the requisite seven gears in both pan and tilt modes), these tripods bore a logo strangely similar to Sachtler, but slightly different. It turns out they were made in Beijing, clever knock-offs of the real thing.

Sachtler knock-off tripod, made in Beijing.

I wasn’t surprised. Arri lights have long been duplicated (down to the exact color and design of their instruments), manufactured in China, and sold factory-direct on eBay. And I’ve heard similar stories about other film equipment items.

The Beijing tripod knock-offs worked pretty well, though they seemed a bit less rugged than the real Sachtlers. Despite the tripods seeming to be pretty new, one of the tightening latches for locking the leg height was already broken. And the imitators failed to include the Sachtler side-carrying handle, a huge mistake that makes the tripods just as awkward to carry as most non-Sachtlers.

The 5D, "tarted up" with 14mm Canon wide angle lens, follow focus, monitor, and Zacuto viewfinder.

The other things we checked out were accessories for the 5D camera. All these were standard issue items, but it’s always fun to see my little 5D tarted up with accessories: follow-focus, monitor, Zacuto viewfinder, and extra lenses.

At the rental house (from the left): Bill, 5D, Mush.

We went on to scout a number of locations, including a park with a bench made of eucalyptus and a very cool mural, and a train station built by the British which resembles Covent Garden in London. But tomorrow we’ll also stop at our lighting rental house. Since Brazil is a pretty sophisticated country, I doubt we’ll have puddles on the floor.

The author, on a eucalyptus bench, in front of a rubber tree at Ibirapuera Park.

Metro station with photo installation.

Estacao da Luz, the old train station in downtown Sao Paulo, built many years ago by the British. Doesn't this look like Covent Garden?

Related posts:

1. Brazil: Smooth as Silk
2. Back to Brazil
3. Brazil: Some Days the Bear Eats You

On my first trip to Brazil in 1993, I was shooting for a Japanese high-tech company. We arrived in São Paulo and went out to scout at our client’s manufacturing facility nearby.

We met with the general manager of the company, a Brazilian who was impressed by this visit from corporate headquarters.

“What can I do for you?” he asked our clients from Tokyo. “Where would you like to film?”

“We are here to film the manufacture of our cellular phones,” they responded.

A frown crossed the general manager’s face. “Cellular phones?” he asked, then consulted in Portuguese with several of his colleagues.

“We have not made cellular phones here for three or four years now.”

Somehow, the geniuses in our client’s PR department hadn’t gotten the word that the cell phone manufacture had been moved to the Philippines a while before.

We did some filming in the factory anyway, but we still needed a compelling story. Through our local production company, we found a sports radio reporter who used a cell phone to issue soccer game reports from the sidelines. Pretty advanced for 1993!

Last year I returned to Brazil, this time to the smaller city of Ribeirao Preto, about four hours north of São Paulo, to shoot a different story for a healthcare company, a touching story about a woman whose life had been saved by a clever medical diagnostician.

Now, less than a year later, I’m back in Brazil. I just landed yesterday in São Paulo, shooting this time for a Silicon Valley-based technology company. We’ll be hiring actors to appear in our scenes, though there’s no dialogue. Our main goal: to film people using Internet devices of all kinds in a variety of environments. It’s important to them that the people and places clearly look like South America, as they already have many shots of this kind set in Europe and Asia. I’ll be using my Canon 5D Mark II (plus a second 5D rented here) and two GoPro cameras.

Stay tuned. More to come.

For rent.

Museum on Avenida Paulista in Sao Paulo.

Ecuadorian musicians we found playing on the street in Sao Paulo. I bought a CD of their music.

Related posts:

1. Brazil: Smooth as Silk
2. Brazil: Visiting the Rental House
3. Brazil: Some Days the Bear Eats You

No Kindle?

You don’t have to own a Kindle, one of Amazon’s e-readers, to read our e-books. You can probably read them on a device you already own.

Download free Kindle reader apps from Amazon for each of these platforms:

• Mac
• PC
• iPad
• iPhone
• Android
• Blackberry

The apps are quick to download and easy to use. When you buy a book with your Amazon account, you can read it (and sync your current page) across several devices.

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2. OUR NEW BOOK—No Definite Plans: Eleven Tales of Laughter, Love, Travel—Volume 3 from Townsend 11
3. Townsend 11 Publishes Volume 2: No Set Boundaries

The author framing shots on a Sony HVR-Z1U, with the camera away from the body, on a shoot in Mexico City.

Shooting handheld for documentary, commercial, musical, and even dramatic films can challenge, vex, frustrate, exhaust, and exhilarate—often all at once. Handholding the camera lets you improvise angles quickly, stick the camera in places a tripod can’t reach, or float with innovative, flowing moves difficult to duplicate from a dolly. And if you’re tall like me, throwing the camera on your shoulder enables you to see over crowds at news events, rallies, shows, and parties.

The first movies were filmed from tripods and later from rolling dollies. Handheld shots appeared late in the silent film era, dependent on the invention of smaller, more portable cameras with spring windings to replace the original hand cranks. But these developments were quickly trumped and the camera immobilized again by the advent of “talkies” and massive, boxy, silenced cameras at the end of the 1920s.

Not till after World War II did James Wong Howe shoot the boxing scenes in “Body and Soul” from roller skates with the camera on his shoulder. This same era saw the release of the first lightweight 35mm camera—the Arriflex II—and the first 16mm cameras.

Deep in the second hour of the second set on the second night: stay strong and focused, optically and mentally, concentrate on following the music. Check the earplugs to avoid hearing loss. Onstage at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, right in front of me, Phil Lesh and Friends rock out.

In the pit in front of the stage, I review my assignment from directors Jay Blakesberg and Bob Sarles, who will also be shooting the concert, not calling shots on a headset. I’m charged with keeping Phil Lesh in frame at all times and mixing up the shots on my handheld Panasonic DVC Pro SDX-900, one of six cameras on this shoot. My game plan at the start: stay in tight during Phil’s vocal and bass solos, ease out to wider coverage when someone else is singing or playing lead.

Looking up at Smokey the Elephant at the Oakland Zoo, with the camera on my shoulder. Two months later, Smokey crushed and killed the trainer shown at the right.

Unskillful handheld work can look amateurish and undercut the effectiveness of the visual material. But a Levi’s 501 Blues campaign in the late 80s popularized the wobbly “shaky-cam” look as an edgy, urban, hyper-authentic imitation of life. Suddenly steadiness seemed old school. This aesthetic (where looking more amateurish is more … real) lives on today in directors who sometimes create more camera shake by slamming me in the shoulder at irregular intervals during takes.

Unmooring the camera from the ground provides excitement but can allow the operator to wander into awkward or dangerous positions. While shooting in the control room of a milk plant years ago for Safeway, I inadvertently brushed against a panel of switches, which controlled the plant’s processing paraphernalia. My left shoulder flicked a switch that shut down a huge bottling machine, but the incoming flood of milk continued unabated. In seconds, hundreds of gallons of milk filled the processing room. Alarms squawked indignantly, and we left quickly.

Before a concert shoot with The Jacksons (when Michael was still a teenager), I was warned, without elaboration, to “watch out for the pyro.” While shooting later, I roamed too far onto the stage and was saved by a roadie, who grabbed my collar and pulled me back to safety just as a glitter-rock flash-pot explosion erupted where I had been standing.

Stay wide, stay wide, show the whole stage, wait for the solo … now zoom in slowly on Phil as he picks up the riff from the lead guitar and takes it to a higher plane. Stop in a medium shot, showing his face and six-string bass guitar, hold that for one chorus, then push in all the way to the strings, showing both hands. Wait one more chorus, then push into the left hand, follow it up and down the strings, try to keep the movement as lyrical as the groove of the music. Wait for the end of the verse, then glide down to the flat pick in the right hand plucking the thick metal strings.

In film school at Stanford, I learned two techniques for shooting handheld walking shots, and I pass them along to my students at San Francisco State:

• Keep the knees bent. The “duck walk” enables an operator to reduce the side-to-side, stepping movement which is unavoidable when you walk normally with the camera on your shoulder. This awkward-looking semi-squat step with bent legs can smooth out walking shots.
• Match the subject’s steps. When walking with an actor or narrator or reporter, try to match the rhythm of your gait to that of your subject. If you’re following, walk in step with the subject. If you are walking backwards and leading the subject, as he/she steps left-right-left, you step right-left-right at the same cadence. Even though the shot will still include your telltale stepping motion, matching steps makes the picture appear smoother.

Oops, Phil has moved, and an LCD tablet on a low stand—which many musicians use for song lyrics—is blocking my best shot between the audio monitors. Quick! Scurry to the other end of the stage, wink at the security guard who shifts position to let me slip past him, find a clean angle.

Behind me, a thousand paying customers are mellowing to the music. Earlier tonight, a young man launched himself from the balcony in misguided exhilaration, breaking the collarbone of an unsuspecting music lover in the orchestra below. “I hate it when they do that,” said the security guy. Sniff the pot smoke in the air, absorb the vibe, enjoy this privileged position so close to the players. Above all, transcend the shoulder pain and take pleasure in the music.

Cradling a camera in my lap from a special rig strapped to the side of Billy the Bulldozer, while shooting the computer game "Kids on Site" in Healdsburg, California.

After film school, a good friend who found work shooting racing and other sports told me his cardinal rule: when you pop the camera off the tripod, zoom out and walk in. Get close to the action and shoot on the wide end of the lens. Wide-angle shots provide dramatic perspective and nearly endless depth of field, lend themselves to interesting compositions and flowing, dramatic movement, and can easily be handheld smoothly. Telephoto shots, obviously, are more difficult to keep steady and in focus.

Early in my career, I met a cameraman in his 50s who specialized in documentary work. After decades of shooting handheld, the shoulder muscles on his right side were noticeably more developed than on the left. He called it his hump. When I first experienced back pain in my 2os, from schlepping gear and shooting, a chiropractor advised me to use the camera on my left shoulder half the time. I laughed and explained that most viewfinders only allowed for right-shoulder shooting.

She thought for a moment, then asked, “Well, when you’re running around with the camera, are you actually shooting all the time? If not, why don’t you carry it on your left shoulder in between shots?” To this day, I’ll sling the camera up on my left side from time to time when I’m relocating or between shots, in order to balance the load on my back, shoulders and neck.

There’s nothing natural about running around with a 15-25 pound machine on one shoulder, struggling for hours to keep it pressed to your eye and perfectly steady, trying to freeze in a relaxed posture, to avoid sweating and fogging up the eyepiece. On concert shoots, the cameras—even the handhelds—are often kept far back from the musicians. I am 15-20 feet away from Phil, but fortunately, I can lean my elbows on the lip of the stage for steadiness. Oh, and since I’m also the DP, I try to keep an eye on the color and intensity of the lighting, despite the fact that my viewfinder is black-and-white.

Handholding a Sony HDW-F900 camera at a village internet kiosk in Sathnur, near Mandaya, India. Note fingerless gloves and shoulder pad under shirt.

Camera design, not surprisingly, has always had a major influence on the ergonomics and aesthetics of handholding. On my first shoot abroad, about a year after film school, we followed a group of tourists on an eight-country Asian tour called Orient Escapade. I brought a 16mm Éclair NPR and, at the director’s insistence, a shoulder brace. I tested and quickly discarded the brace as too limiting and confining. If all my shots had been from a standing position with the NPR on my shoulder, it would have made sense, but I found the rig cumbersome to use and limiting for low-angle shots.

The author, as a young pup with attitude, posing with the "injured" Eclair NPR camera, in front of a Haka village outside Hong Kong.

This Éclair had a pistol-grip handle and custom bracket on the front right side for handheld shots. Remarkably, most cameras at the time lacked this handy accessory, an aftermarket item never sold by Éclair. This grip enabled me to rest the camera on my shoulder and steer with my right hand in an upright position, rather than having the right hand cradled under the camera, which was less steady and put all the weight on my bicep. But on long days following the tourist “geese” on and off the bus and bullet train, my hands got sore. So I cut chunks of foam from one of our cases and fastened them crudely with white tape to the pistol-grip and the handle on top of the camera. Though much more comfortable, the camera now seemed to be bandaged, which elicited unusual responses from people who, oddly, thought it had been injured. I considered adding red dye to the “bandages” to simulate blood, but no one else thought that idea was funny.

Handholding the Eclair NPR with bandaged pistol grip, from a rickshaw, while shooting Orient Escapade in Penang, Malaysia.

On that trip we also traveled with a wheelchair, to provide an easy platform for rolling handheld shots and to facilitate baggage handling. Inevitably, though, as we checked into hotel after hotel in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bali, and Hawaii, the bellhops would stack our gear on their own carts, then look around for the sick person in our group, shrug, and throw the chair on top of the pile of luggage. But the wheelchair and the “injured” camera enabled us to film gorgeous moving shots at every stop.

After more than seven hours of performance over two nights, even as my soul is soaring with the exhilaration of the music, my muscles are starting to tire. Under my shirt, on the right side, I wear a slice of dense Ensolite foam, cut from a camping pad in the shape of a fat figure-eight, to prevent chafing as the camera’s bottom slides forward and back on my shoulder with each change of shot.

Handheld shots often involve squeezing the camera in odd positions off the shoulder, shooting from the hip or cradled in the lap. Fingerless wrestler’s gloves pad my palms from sharp metal and plastic edges, and they improve the traction of my grip, so I don’t need to clutch the camera as tightly for hours at a time. Tonight I’m also wearing neoprene elbow and kneepads for support as I lean and kneel on the stage. I feel like the Bionic Man, but if baseball players can wear small sheds as protective devices on their elbows, why can’t I use my little tricks to attenuate the discomfort?

Handholding a Bolex 16mm camera in the rain in Macao.

Smaller prosumer video cameras present a new challenge. Built-in electronic image stabilization on many cameras in this market does help with steadiness. But ever since Sony released the Handicam in the 80s, camera designers seem to think that handholding means just that—holding the video camera in your hands like a still camera or the old Bolexes, not leaning it on your shoulder in the traditional manner. Since many cameras in this market have swing-out video screens, crappy electronic viewfinders, and ubiquitous, bumpable buttons, I often find myself shooting with shoulders hunched, the camera held in both hands, palms up, at chest height, and 8-12 inches in front of my body, as if I’m timidly offering a plate of cookies to a pack of hungry eighth-graders.

This non-ergonomic position concentrates the stress and weight on the wrists and makes it challenging to hold for long periods or to blend smoothly the flow of the camera and the body. Fortunately, the newer JVC ProHD camera series, including the GY-HM750 and GY-HM790, has begun to stretch the form factor in smaller camera design from short-and-compact to long-and-narrow. In many cases, a small adjustable shoulder mount allows the operator, once again, to handhold the camera in the usual way.

Groveling on the ground for a low-angle shot with my old CP-16R, in a park in San Francisco.

For years I owned a CP-16 reflex camera. The first professional film camera with a slot for the battery right on the body (instead of drawing power from a battery belt through a squiggly cable), the CP was a wonderful machine for its time, originally made for news—easy to handhold, with a built-in, adjustable handgrip and trigger up front, and inexpensive, lightweight plastic film magazines. On a project with a Japanese crew when I was still a young pup (long after the silent film era), the director, with great ceremony and booming voice, nodded at my CP-16, flexed his right bicep and tapped his shoulder suggestively, requesting that I shoot with “hon-dee kah-mah-rah.”

I shot a lot of Grateful Dead concerts with the HL-79, Ikegami’s workhorse video camera of the 80s, and tonight’s long-set jam-band show with Dead alum Lesh reminds me of those shows back in the day. The product manual for the HL-79, I recall, specified that “HL” stood for “Handy-Looky” (the same branding universe as “Walky-Talky,” I suppose). Ikey first used the name for their earliest portable cameras built for CBS in the 60s. Next to me in the pit at the Warfield, operator Steve Davy raises his small DV camera on a monopod to see back over the crowd.

Using a monopod braced against the ground, a wall, furniture, or the operator’s body can help with steadiness and avoid fatigue. For low-angle shots, a sandbag or bean bag under the camera provides a simple platform near the ground. It’s cleaner and easier to maneuver a handheld camera resting on a bag, rather than groveling directly on dirt, carpet, grass, or concrete.

Freezing on the street with a Sony HDV camera, Shanghai, China.

Heavier cameras are obviously more tiring to handhold, but more mass on the shoulder does make telephoto shots steadier. When shooting from the shoulder, finding a restful standing posture is a must. An LCD screen, either built-in or an accessory mounted on the camera, is useful for viewing shots when access to the viewfinder proves tricky or impossible, or for walking shots where the camera is carried by the top handle, low to the ground.

Between sets, I joke about the pain with Jarid Johnson, the technical line producer for our video production and the other camera operator toting an SDX-900. When I shoot stories or commercials with actors, handheld shots are typically short, no more than a few minutes long at most, and crewmembers stand poised to fling a furniture pad down if I start to kneel, and to snatch the camera off my shoulder when the director calls “Cut!” Here at the Phil Lesh concert, each take lasts an hour and leads directly into another. I find myself wondering if the security guard now ten feet away from me would notice if I fell over during the show, or if he’d mutter “Far out!” and assume I’d inhaled too much of the interior smog.

Shooting a Sony 900 in the coffee fields, San Marcos de Tarrazú, Costa Rica.

I’ve shot handheld in Costa Rican coffee fields and on Bombay streets, under elephants and strapped to bulldozers, perched on rickshaws, cherry pickers and forklifts, leaning from helicopters and planes, the front ends of locomotives and subway trains, the rear ends of trucks and vans, and the hoods and interiors of cars. Often, on shots from moving conveyances, I’ve used a down vest stuffed into a small nylon sack (which I call “my blue sausage”) to help cushion shocks and vibrations between the camera and my shoulder.

My oddest handheld angle ever was a fromunda shot during a concert shoot with the Buddy Rich Band.

The band performed on a stage constructed for the show in a studio in San Francisco, and the director, with startling creativity, had Buddy’s drum kit placed over a 4×4-foot sheet of clear Plexiglas built into the stage floor. Several times during the show, on cue, I abandoned my normal position on stage right near the keyboards and bass, ran to the back, waited while a stagehand removed a wooden brace under the Plexi, then crawled through a tunnel under the stage and shot straight up at Buddy playing the drums. I started in tight with a low-angle shot of his sticks on the snares, cymbals, and tom-toms, then pulled back to see his feet in my foreground working the bass drum and high-hat pedals, and his head in the background of the shot, bobbing to the beat. An angle no one had ever seen, fromunda Buddy.

During the first set, the director noticed blurry splotches on the Plexi, which puzzled us all for a while. But later in the show, during my next visit to the tunnel under the drum kit, we discovered the source: on one of my close-ups during an intense drum solo, we watched a large droplet of sweat form on Buddy’s nose, work its way to the tip, and fall to the clear surface between Buddy and me, in hypnotic slow motion. Fortunately we were able to clean the Plexi between sets!

Finding interesting angles with the camera held away from the body, Mexico City.

Camera technology has evolved over the decades, but the principles of handheld shooting are eternal. Choices about shaky-or-steady handheld movement, scene coverage, and camera obtrusiveness must always be made in the interest of serving the material and advancing the story. The tricks of wide-angle movement and telephoto steadiness, zooming out and walking in, duck-walking and matching steps, finding restful ways to freeze the body or support a handheld camera, innovating angles and grooving to the music, all still apply, no matter what machine sits on your shoulder—or at your hip.

Keeping my Arri SR camera out of the water on the klongs near Bangkok. These Thai canals serve a variety of purposes, including transportation and sewage. Moments after this picture was taken, my soundman Conrad Slater accidentally dropped his headphones in the klong, just as a dead animal floated by. Reluctant to touch the water, he shrugged, cut the phones free and let them drift away, then reached for his spare pair.

First published in StudentFilmmakers Magazine, January 2008

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This Seagull right-angle viewfinder offers great flexibility of camera angles for my Canon 5D Mark II, but only when shooting stills. Solidly made with 1x and 3.3x viewing magnification, 360-degree rotation, click stops at 45-degree intervals, and an adjustable diopter eyepiece.

Lens Construction: 9 elements in 5 groups, high quality glass roof prism. It’s sharp, lightweight, inexpensive (about one-third the cost of the equivalent Canon product), and includes the unique Usage Manual below.

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“Pinch me,” says Susan as we cross the Seine from the Left Bank to face the sun-drenched Gothic towers of Notre Dame. “I can’t believe we’re back here.”

We peel off jackets and join the throngs of tourists and worshippers outside the Cathedral. Despite the lyrics of the Cole Porter song – “I love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles” – it’s only April, but the temperature this afternoon sizzles near 80.

We’ve visited Paris at earlier stages of our lives – nine years ago with our teenagers, when we witnessed a suicide at the Eiffel Tower and a young woman in some ecstatic trance dropping her dress at Chartres Cathedral; 25 years ago, during our disastrous Open Relationship period before we had children; and separately back in 1968, long before we met, when Susan spent a year in a study abroad program and I coincidentally buzzed through Paris on a speedy trek across Europe with my college roommates.

This trip is different, and our lives have changed. Back home in the San Francisco Bay Area, we’ve left behind an empty nest; our kids are no longer teenagers and now have their own lives. We’ve evolved way past the very early distracted-by-other-people phase of our relationship, and our only agenda now is to enjoy a relaxing week together in the City of Light – April in Paris – and to find each other again on our first trip alone together in many years.

We sit on the wall facing Notre Dame and embrace like a pair of young lovers in a Cartier-Bresson photograph. “Thank you for bringing me here,” she whispers as she nuzzles my neck. We wander back through the warm streets of the Left Bank and rest in the shade of the Luxembourg Gardens, where we recall renting little boats for our kids to sail on the pond. Having them grown and gone has been particularly difficult for me; being Dad was always my favorite job. On this trip, I’m sure, we’ll revisit some of the places we took them – Chartres, the Musee d’Orsay, the Louvre, Giverny, the Rodin Museum.

The timing of our trip is a bit odd. Two months before, I celebrated my fifty-tenth birthday, but my freelance career is sputtering at a low ebb, and work and cash are hard to come by. On the other hand, two of our closest friends have recently been diagnosed with cancer and started chemotherapy. Life and our good health feel very precious. Seize the time, I tell myself. Besides, we have lots of credit, more than we should ever use.

We’ve been very lucky. On a business trip to Paris several months before, I reconnected with a cousin I hadn’t seen in many years, who invited me to come back and visit in the small studio apartment he and his French wife keep for visiting family and friends. So we cashed in 100,000 frequent flier miles for our roundtrip tickets and made plans to farm out the dog.

Unable to book seats to Paris, I opted to fly us to London instead and take the train through the Channel Tunnel. Amazingly, a colleague of mine in England then offered us his London flat for our two layover days there. This vacation is partly a reward for Susan, who spent a year in behavioral therapy overcoming an elevator phobia that had limited our traveling. She thanks me again for the trip as we ride the Metro to the Champs Elysees one day. “You earned it, kid,” I tell her, and we lean comfortably against each other while standing on the train.

Cousin David takes us to a Bistro in the 15th Arrondissement, near his home, where we savor a degustation – a tasty white soup, a remarkable veal dish, green asparagus with a light vinaigrette and transparent thin bacon slice, homemade Madeleines, and a fine Beaune Burgundy – all for a price that would feed a family of twelve for a month in some cultures. But the food talk is scrumptious. We’re enchanted that each night’s menu is an exercise of discovery for the chef, depending on which fresh, seasonal ingredients he finds that morning at the markets.

We do go to the Louvre and revisit some old favorite artworks – Delacroix’s revolutionary “Liberty Leading the People” (bare-breasted, for some reason), Gericault’s morose but vaguely hopeful “Raft of the Medusa” – and stumble on some new ones in the pristine sculpture courts in the Richelieu Wing.

On the hottest day of our visit, we stroll out into the Tuileries Gardens. A young couple occupies a wall near the Place de la Concorde, limbs entwined in a position that would suggest intercourse, if they weren’t clothed and motionless. We head for an empty bench, but it seems all of Paris is out today in the fine weather, and a young family sprints ahead to beat us to the seating. After several similar failures, we secure a bench in the shade and pass the time watching the parade of humanity and reading our books, both set in Paris – Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities for me, and a Georges Simenon mystery for Susan. Soon I get drowsy, recline on the bench and snooze with my head in her lap as she strokes my hair.

We visit Montmartre and are shocked by the densely packed tourists patronizing the portrait artists in the square, even mid-week in the spring. Ducking into an authentic-looking café, I order a croque monsieur and realize it was pre-made and microwaved. We walk for hours across the city on another steamy day, down the Boulevard de Magenta, through the bridal and formal clothing districts, and eventually meet David for falafels in the Marais.

On the day we had planned to visit the Musee d’Orsay and Rodin Museum, I get a call from Eric, a Parisian colleague of mine who invites us on an outing. “Those museums will always be there,” says Susan, and we visit Eric and his family in the suburbs east of the city. They graciously take us into their home for champagne and then out for lunch to a guinguette, a traditional cabaret/restaurant on the banks of the Marne River.

As we watch Eric and his wife Paule, both in their 40s with young children, we see ourselves years before – we were older parents, too, both working professionals, thoroughly immersed in the job of raising kids. Paule tells us she often gets home late from work and uses familiar shortcuts to prepare meals, even frozen foods. Would parenting have been easier if we’d done it when we were younger, I wonder? In some ways, yes. Certainly we might have had more stamina for the sleep torture inflicted by our infants. Were we ready? Absolutely not. Do I want to go through it again? No way, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.

In the end, we revisit few of the places we took our kids. We linger in bed each morning, getting a late start on our touring, but relishing each other’s company.

Years before, the summer after I graduated from high school, my parents went to Europe for the first time. I think about them frequently as we swelter on our way to the Picasso Museum, near the end of our stay in Paris. Now I understand their desire to travel. I was the younger child in my family, about to flee the nest, but I had no clue that my folks were grieving, in their own way, for the tight family we had been … until the same thing happened to Susan and me. That first trip ignited a mutual passion for travel that took my parents to many countries in the ensuing years. But they liked to get up and out by 6 and would have hated our relaxed attitude toward touring!

We walk to the Seine late in the day and hop a ride on the Bateaux Mouches. The cool air on the river is refreshing as the sun sets behind the city. “You’re my life,” says Susan as she squeezes my hand. The haunting song lyrics sneak back into my consciousness: “I love Paris every moment, every moment of the year.” We sit very close, embrace in this most romantic setting, and face the future together.

See Photographs: April in Paris

An edited version of this article first appeared in the anthology Chicken Soup for the Soul: Empty Nesters, October 2008.

Click here to order the book.

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