In the early days of the internet’s available to the general public, as opposed to the military, for whom it had originally been created as ARPANET, there was considerable earnest discussion over whether or not it would amount to anything. Could people do, you know, REAL things over the internet, get REAL work done, have REAL relationships with other people. We now know that the answer to all of those questions is YES.
The internet has certainly been important to me. As a scholar and thinker without any academic affiliation it has made possible an intellectual life that would otherwise have been all but impossible. But that’s not what this is about – thought if you’re curious about that, check out Personal Observations on Entering an Age of Computing Machines. This is about something more intimate and personal.
Back in the early days of the academic blogosphere, which has all but disappeared beneath the traffic on social media, I hung out at Michael Bérubé’s blog, American Airspace, which has now disappeared, though you should probably find traces of it through the Wayback Machine. There I met Bruce Simon, online at the time as The Constructivist, who was with his family in Japan on a Fullbright. He would post photos of his two young daughters at one of his blogs, Mostly Harmless. Before you knew it I was posing Gojochan (a small plastic Godzilla figure) and Sparkychan (a colorful plush doll) for those daughters. That activity grew and grew until it became The Collected Adventures of Sparkychan & Cojochan (Thus Far). (I tell this story in greater detail in this post.)
And that’s how I became a virtual exotic uncle to two young Japanese American girls living in Japan. The oldest is now in college and the younger will be going next year. I’ve never met them in real life, nor their father for that matter, though we keep tabs on one another through social media. But there’s some kind of real relationship three, not deep and strong by any means, but real nonetheless.
More recently I’ve been following the YouTube videos of Kwak DaKyung, a Korean trumpet prodigy who started playing when she was quite young.
She was eleven when I first ran into her videos. Trumpet prodigies are rare, probably because it is so difficult to get a sound out of the instrument. In contrast getting sounds out of the violin or piano is easy; playing those instruments well, that’s a different matter. Moreover, she was interested in jazz. So I’ve followed her quite closely, and wrote a blog post in which I examined eight of her videos.
I also commented on her videos, often with very specific comments about what she was doing. In that way I developed a relationship with her father, who ran her YouTube channel, and indirectly with her. Sometimes we would have a little conversation, back and forth, in the comments section of her videos. Then, a bit earlier this month, her father post of video with just the two of them playing “It’s You or No One,” a jazz standard.
It was excellent. Even before it was finished I was moved to comment: “Love it from the beginning. Nice tempo, nice bounce.” As it finished I realized that I’d heard something else, a new maturity in her playing (after all, she’s now 13!): “Do I hear a young woman emerging from the chrysalis?”
It's a wonderful age we’re living it. Mixed up and crazy and scary, but wonderful. And to be an exotic uncle for young girls half way around the globe, is that not fantastic, the stuff dreams are made on?
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