Marco Polo
August 2002
MISSIVES FROM THE OLD WORLD
PART THREE – BY DOC PICKLES
Documenting a vacation used to be so easy. A traveller would go on vacation, return home, and tell people about it. In those days it was common for somebody to be born, learn a trade, raise a family, grow old, and die without ever visiting the villiage on the other side of the hill, so such travelogues were fairly uncommon.
Things kept on keeping on that way until the 13th century, when the son of a Venetian trader joined his Dad and uncle on a trading expedition that took a wrong turn at the Black Sea, and several decades later, from a prison cell in Genova, dictated what was to become the first and greatest travel diary, The Travels of Marco Polo, a fantastic story of how a young traveller gained admittance to the inner circle of the greatest conqueror the world had ever known, eventually designing the new city of Peking. You have to read it to understand just how amazing an adventure it was, and I highly recommend it. A lot of people didn’t believe a word of it. For centuries, it was generally believed that his stories of armies of a hundred thousand horsemen, mysterious religions run by magicians, twenty-foot-long lizards, and places that didn’t even exist in myth, were total fabrications. Until history and archaeology caught up with the contents of Marco Polo’s travel journal, people would use the phrase "that’s a real Marco Polo" to dismiss any story that didn’t fit with the status quo.
Fast forward more than six hundred years, when an entrepeneur named George Eastman succeeded in replacing the phrase "that’s a real Marco Polo" with "that’s a Kodak moment." Suddenly the power of mythmaking was passed down from the elites of the publishing world to the common people, just as Ianna brought the concept of law to the people of ancient Sumer, or Apollo brought the concepts of art and music to the people of ancient Greece. Now everybody could document the most amazing places on Earth – or at least those who could afford to go there could do so. All around the world, photos of the upper-middle classes saying "cheese" in front of Ayer’s Rock and Niagara Falls began sprouting up to be duly filed away in family photo albums.
Throughout my walkabout I’ve been encountering people who have walked through their vacations attached to a camera. Their eyeballs had been replaced with a zoom lens. When their lens pointed towards a family member, the targeted person would stop what they were doing and dutifully expose their teeth, trying to convey a sense of serene happiness that was to be chronicled for all eternity in slide shows and dusty family photo albums. To the person who wore the camera lens, this was no vacation. Through the magic of the camera, these people simply existed day-to-day inside a very expensive photo album before retiring to their hotel room for some authentic hotel food and falling asleep in an authentic hotel room. The next day, they would strap on their Kodak eye and return to their photo album. A virtual vacation. One step closer to becoming a true cyborg.
With the advent of the portable video camera, the rest of the family unit is being dragged deeper into this unreal existence. The act of documenting a vacation used to be something that lasted just long enough for the target to say "cheese," the event being a minor inconvenience before the target could return to the reality of experiencing the new place they were in. Now, however, wth the video camera, the moment is no longer a single frame of time, but has become a linear experience, like a television show. Vacations with video cameras are almost like scripted MTV videos. I offer for your consideration the following three examples from the French city of Nice:
Exhibit A: "Allez, allez!" sings a gleeful French mother to her bewildered toddler perched atop a playground slide. The proud father videotapes the whole touching experience. The child, never having heard his mother sing, reacts apprehensively. A few minutes later, the glum mother pulls on a cigarette while sitting on a bench next to the suddenly argumentative father. The toddler is ignored, lost in a sea of forgotten toddlers in a playground.
Exhibit B: Two backpackers disembark from a tour bus and look around for some sort of landmark. One of the backpackers unholsters her videocamera and points it at the other. Faster than you can say "Marilyn Monroe," the backpacker is spinning around and waving her hands in the air like an outtake from a Madonna video.
Exhibit C: These two tourists are from Japan. The male scampers ahead and motions towards the woman. She walks down the pebble beach. She tries to act natural, as though this is the first time she has seen the city after appearing on the seashore. He gestures towards the sea that crashes against the rocks next to her and asks her to pick up a rock from the seashore and to examine it. The round pebbles give way beneath her feet and she falls ass first into the crashing surf. I’m sure that the videographer would normally have helped her out of the ocean but he was too busy videotaping the event. She had to crawl on her belly back up to dry land while he solemnly held the camera.