August 9, 2012
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Crisis, Change and Continuity
Sounds like the title from your second-year sociology class, doesn’t it? Well, that’s the way I talk sometimes, I can’t help it.This is a picture of me taken in the spring of 1995. I was in Seoul, Korea overseeing the installation of a children’s museum for the Samsung Corporation. I had just heard that one of our suppliers had suffered a panic attack, locked himself in his hotel room and wasn’t going to come out. I am about to burst into a fit laughter that continued for over five minutes. It wasn’t that I thought it was funny or that I was being cruel or hysterical, it was just that I was pretty much at the end of my tether that day. (okay, so maybe it was a little hysterical).
1995. Best of times, worst of times. I had three of my exhibition projects going – some of my best work: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Exhibition at the National Library of Canada, a major temporary show on Muhammad Ali in Kentucky, and the Samsung Children’s Museum. Trouble was that all three shows ended up opening with three weeks of each other. But it all turned out okay. I liked the results, so did the press and public — all was well except that I never was quite the same person afterwards… I was a lot twitchier…(that was the “crisis” part of the story).*
It’s interesting to look at that picture and notice the ways it does not look like me in 2012. The mass of no-grey knarly hair, the baby face (glad to see that go), that sport coat that I bought there for about $20 CDN and really wish I still had. (that was the change part).
Please note the odd little black device sitting in front of me. Someone said it looked like a mini-synthesizer. It is not. It is a Tandy WP-2 Portable Word Processor and even in 1995 it was considered ancient. I bought it in 1989 to help me write exhibit text for another children’s museum, this one in Lexington, Kentucky. I loved it then and I love it now. Thanks to something called NADS-Box technology (NADS stands for New Age Digital Storage), I can still generate files that I can transfer to contemporary computers and manipulate them. I am looking at that machine right now. It is sitting on my desk and I will likely use if to write some fiction on tonight. (that was the continuity part).
Just a bit of personal time-travel.
*I am still not sure if having to manage the installation of three major exhibition represented spectacularly bad planning or was actually part of a plot to kill me through over-work.
