Beneath the Waves

"It's worthless - ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless."
So said Dr. Rene Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Well, time after all is relative and about ninety years at the bottom of the north Atlantic is probably roughly equivalent.
Yesterday day I went to see the Titanic exhibit at DMNS and was struck by a rather curious irony. You see Molly Brown was bringing some artifacts to the Denver Museum on board the Titanic when she sank. Now the most common items from that ship, many costing a good deal less then ten dollars at the time, are an exhibit in the very same museum* and have become priceless.
There are of course a number of things that make one think, a pair of spectacles, a gage from the engine room where the firemen stayed behind to keep the generators running. But for me the most sublime was the two ton piece of Titanic’s hull, perhaps because it was not sequestered in an antiseptic case, but merely hung there as a monument to man’s arrogance. As a musician I was somewhat disappointed that there were no musical instruments among the artifacts. The brass and woodwinds I would think might have survived. But upon reflection it is most likely best that they stay where they are, with the musicians who played on…perhaps to the very end, and perhaps on a clear moonlight night on the north Atlantic you hear them playing still. 
But what I found to be the most thought provoking part of the exhibit was the replica mailbags. Though the ship carried over a thousand passengers and no small amount of cargo, it was these bags of Dears and Sincerelys that gave it its designation, RMS Titanic. In a way they represented something almost mystical, the union of democracy and majesty. It might be a letter from some East End charwoman to her wayward son seeking his fortune in America, but once in the bag it became, along with letters from Dukes and doctors, princes and millionaires, the Royal Mail. These letters, or rather their spectral implication, speak to us of a lost time and humanity in a way even more than the artifacts. Written with quill and ink the letters in such bags contained much more than sentences and paragraphs. Indeed Sherlock Holmes once solved a mystery partly do to an unsigned letter being written in a lady’s hand…try doing that with an E-mail. Back in Perry Mason’s day the handwriting expert was indispensable, now they are all but extinct. The world now has more people but less character, as communication is now filtered through a one size fits all keyboard and spell checkers stamp out any remnant of personality. Regardless of class or station, letters are the communiqués of ladies and gentleman, not as clumsy or random as a text message; they are an elegant form of communication, for a more civilized age.

*Yes, I know it is a new wing and would have been a botanical garden at the time but still.

Blank Post

There is nothing to see here, you can go about your business, move along…

The Fall Classic

Well I hope all those crazies who put on the freak show at Coors Field over the weekend are happy with themselves. After fourteen years of people saying that Rockies fans are just a bunch of Bronco fans who got lost, we finally have a World Series and what do they do? Go and prove everybody right, or at least the ones that could afford $200 a ticket to get on television in their stormtrooper gear. And what that Penguin guy all about? The only thing I can think of is perhaps Little America Wyoming; it is only about tow hindered miles away as the crow flies, I am not sure about penguins. Then there was that kid who kept sticking his face in the center of the target, one might almost excuse it for the cuteness factor if it wert for the mugging for the camera factor.