Letter from Slim Wolfe
Technology – March 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Ed,
I enjoyed your account of your high-tech wrenching; I think it is analogous to fixing your harness or maintaining your saw for the modern-day writer and it’s good to gain an understanding of the tools of one’s trade. As you have previously explained, you’re compelled by your industry to use these tools, and the magazine continues to be an attractive product whereas today’ computer-generated graphics sometimes (in the hands of the less-tasteful) take a bit of getting used to. Short of being a contrarian like Dean Coombs who also puts out an attractive publication (the Saguache Crescent) on the old-fashioned Linotype, you are making the best of this thing called progress.
However, I recently attended a conference on organic farming during which the presentations were far from organic. After a couple of hours I was wishing for the old Kodachrome slides and projectors which would have given better images and smoother transitions.
The new digital-camera-plus-laptop-projection system, from my viewpoint, was the perfect example of how we’ve been boondoggled into something inferior. It’s damned irritating when the icons pop up on the image, first one set and then a second while the operator flips the pointer around, all just to move on to the next shot which will still fall short of the color and resolution we knew forty years ago.
Of course no one would dare walk into such a conference in this age with an old-style carousel/projector, any more than one would take a real-live piano to the usual bar-gig. Welcome to the age of fuzz and flutter.
Anyone who enjoyed the excellent story on the Jewish settlers in Cotopaxi might like to know that Imperial Russia also mistreated minority Christian sects (called old believers or Deukhevors) who were farmer-pacifists and likewise would wind up fleeing to Canada and the U.S. to encounter new difficulties.
A good account of Russian politics from the 1850s to 1905 can be found in Adam Yarmolinsky’s Road to Revolution. The heavy-handed Czarist governments continued to provoke new crops of refugees and bomb-throwers. Not much new under the sun, is there?
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
