I’ve almost always had facial hair since my mid twenties. While I had hair on top, it was most often a mustache or full beard; once I started shaving my head I generally had a goatee. Every now and then I’d go clean shaven, just hate it and grow it back as soon as I could.

One style I haven’t done until now is a long beard. I first tried it a couple of years ago, but gave up on it after four months because it’s such a nuisance. I’ve found myself regretting giving up on it, though,  so I’m trying it again this year. I started growing it in January, and aside from a couple of snips to even it out a bit, and make it easier to eat, it’s been growing ever since.

It’s still a nuisance; messy while eating, and it tends to curl. It would look better trimmed, but at this point, I feel like I have an investment in it, and I’m curious to see how long I can let it grow. I’m hoping to last the year. Eventually, I hope, it will even out and I can neaten it up a bit.

I wish I’d done this when I was younger. I’ve seen guys with long dark beards, and on some of them, the look works. Unfortunately, my beard is nearly white. This week, I seemed to have crossed the Santa threshold – suddenly, I’m getting comparisons to Santa from everyone.

The first one was from some random guy on the subway Wednesday night. I had an empty seat next to me, and some father was asking his son if he was afraid to sit next to Santa. Next up was one of my co-workers. Then this weekend, I saw a bunch of family members for the first time in a few months, and heard it again over and over again.

It isn’t a surprise, of course. I know what color my beard is. I did expect it to take longer, though, and I think it’s kind of funny that the change in reaction was so binary– last week, nothing, then this week, everyone is noticing it. So far, I think I’m fine with it.

Me with a 5 month beard. Photo by Michael O’Hara

Actually, I think at this point, I look more like Poseidon than Santa – it’s not quite long enough, or quite white enough. But who knows what it will look like in December?

I saw the new Avengers movie a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t my cup of tea. While I’ve seen a lot of comic book movies over the years, and in fact, did see the original Avengers movie a few years back, it’s been a while since I saw it, and haven’t seen any of the other Marvel universe movies in the meantime, so I had a devil of a time figuring out what was going on through the first part of the movie.

I also got very impatient with all the special effects. After you’ve seen a city trashed one or two times (or three or four) it gets very repetitive. I’m not a fan of visual action (which, come to think of it, is probably why I don’t care for spectator sports either). For me, the best parts of the Avengers movies are the jokes and the banter between the characters, not the action scenes.

Last Saturday, I caught the end of the original Star Trek episode “By Any Other Name”. In it, invaders from the Andromeda Galaxy take over the Enterprise for the trip home. At the end, Kirk convinces the alien commander to release control of the Enterprise and turn back. I was watching the remastered version, and there’s a longish shot of the Enterprise making a long swooping curve and turning around, and it felt vaguely wrong.

I was able to put my finger on what was bothering me yesterday. The original producers did not have a big budget for effects, so they had to exercise restraint. The original version features a stock shot, used in many episodes, of an aft view of the Enterprise. The camera is tight on the rear of the saucer section, positioned above the secondary hull and between the nacelles, which extend past the edge of the frame. We see the ship start to turn, and then dip down and out of the frame.

Is it a less ambitious shot than the remastered version? Yes. The shot was probably created very simply, by tilting the camera so the ship falls out of the frame.

Is the image quality pretty cruddy? Yes, especially since multiple generations of copies were needed to create it.

Did they overuse this particular shot? Unquestionably.

But, because the shot is tighter on the ship, the focus is much more on the ship, and not the surrounding galaxy. Because of the necessary restraint used in framing the shot, I feel the original sequence is actually stronger dramatically. I’d love to see a high quality remastered version of this shot, with maybe a little variation between episodes.

You can see a similar situation comparing the old Superman TV show with the Superman movies. The TV show was very cheaply made; to show Superman flying, they’d start off with George Reeves hitting an offscreen trampoline, bouncing into the air, then cut to a medium shot of him in air, in front of a motion blurred rear projection background. By the time the movies with Chris Reeve were made (I haven’t seen the more recent ones), the producers were able to place Superman in a scene with buildings and other scenery more or less convincingly.

Unfortunately, showing a long shot of a tiny Superman flying around a bunch of buildings reduces his importance in the shot. He’s just a part of the shot. While the series definitely suffered from the jump cut from Superman taking off to Superman in mid air – with no shots taking the viewer from the ground to the air, it was obvious that the series was cheating– the inability of the television budget to show Superman over the city meant that the producers had to tighten the focus onto Superman himself. And for most flying scenes, where the point is simply to get Superman from Point A to Point B, it’s probably a better dramatic choice.

I think current day movies could stand to exercise similar restraint. I think they would be improved by tightening the focus on the characters. It’s great that they can do so much photorealistically – but any photographer can tell you a big part of making a picture is deciding what to focus on, what to get close to, and what to leave out.

I got a phone call at work today from some salesman trying to push an extended service plan for the car. It was one of those scummy outfits that try to pretend that They’re An Official Part of American Honda.

I really detest this kind of fraud, and was already irritable from a sleepless night last night, so I went into Mike Wallace mode and just lit into him. The fact that I had an audience at work probably spurred me on a bit too. I ended up yelling at him before hanging up on him. I should have handled it more politely. I definitely stepped over the line, and regret it.

But not enough to buy his scummy plan.

Slowly, slowly, the snow is receding. The front yard is mostly free of snow, except the big banks by the house, which are in the shade. I freed a a few branches of the bushes from their burdens of snow this morning, but several of the others are still matted down. I was able to retrieve the outside thermometer, which is usually perched outside the living room window, from where it had blown during one of the storms. I was also able to hop over the remains of one drift of snow to get to the side yard, where the daylilies are starting to green up.

The back yard is another story. It’s shaded, and we blew and threw a lot of snow into it, and it’s still mostly snow covered, except by the stone wall. The wall of snow that came off the porch roof is still pretty high, and the mound of snow from the driveway/back walk still makes getting into the backyard impossible. It’s been receding from the warmth of the walkway, but it’s still about four feet high. I’ve been attacking it periodically when I get home from work trying to spread it out so it will melt faster.

I’ve seen a couple of motorcycles on the road this weekend, so I tried starting up the bike. The battery had enough juice to light the lights, but not enough to turn over the engine. Hopefully a little trickle charging will take care of that.

There’s been a lot of local coverage lately about the 25th anniversary of the Gardner Museum theft. For me, though, the much more important event of that week was the murder of Victor Roman.

Twenty five years ago, I was working at Photo:Hour, a chain of one hour photo labs, as a district manager. I was switching between stores, sometimes working in Harvard Square, sometimes in our original store in downtown Boston, sometimes checking in on the other stores in our chain. The manager of the Winter Street store had hired a young kid off the Street, Victor Roman, to help out at the counter. It eventually became clear that the manager there was in over his head, and I spent more and more time there, and got to know Victor pretty well.

Victor was about 18 at that point, and, from what we could see, was just a great kid. Limited in certain ways – he never did master the printer, and he was definitely having trouble in school – but always very willing to pitch in and help out. He was good at the counter, and had very definite ideas about right and wrong. He was into comic books, and some of his own drawings were amazing. Tom Giampapa, the owner, was interviewed for an article in the Boston Globe later, and said, “He was really a likeable kid. He just had the values that you look for in people…We used to discuss Victor in staff meetings because we loved the guy.”

I remember the night we took up the original tile floor at Winter Street – it had been poorly installed, and we decided to replace it with rubber flooring. Victor stayed late that night helping to rip up the old tile and cart it away. I drove him home that night, and was shocked at the neighborhood he was living in.

Victor was very much still a kid, especially when I first met him. He laughed and joked a lot, but he was also offended by injustice. Many of us can see something wrong, look at it, and sigh to ourselves, and say “that’s just how things are.” Not Victor. He was impulsive. I remember him buying a car, and losing it a couple of months later. Ironically, it was an impulsive act – fathering a child with his girlfriend – that helped steady him the most. He loved his little daughter, and wanted to be a good father.

At the beginning of 1990, we had Victor working for us full time. He’d dropped out of school and was covering shifts in both Harvard Square and downtown Boston. Harvard Square was a bit of a stretch for him, but he was always willing to help out.

My cousin Bill died that March, at the age of 30 of some sort of heart condition, leaving two young sons behind.* It was a shock because he was so young and seemingly so healthy.  I remember working in Harvard Square with Victor that Friday before heading down to Newport that Sunday for the wake, with the funeral on Monday. I stayed overnight with my grandmother, so that I could take her down for the funeral on Monday.

There had been a lot of gang violence in Boston around that time. It wasn’t rare to hear on the radio in the morning that another young man had been killed, and after a while, one tended to tune out the reports. I was only half listening as I was getting Grandma into the car, when I heard the name of the latest victim, then rushed to get a newspaper – sure enough, it was Victor Roman, of Mattapan.

I’m still not sure of the circumstances. What I heard was that he had been stabbed by a 14 year old gang wannabe, because he had interfered with a mugging on the Orange Line. I remember him saying that he had to be careful because there were people out to get him, but he said it with such cheerful bravado, that I didn’t really take it seriously.

I don’t feel responsible for his death. I didn’t wield the knife. But I do feel responsible for failing to stop it, for failing to get him to safety.

The Globe ran an article about his murder a few weeks later:

Victor Roman loved comic-book superheroes and even modeled himself after Spiderman. On the streets of Boston, Roman, on more than one occasion, found himself acting out the exploits of the fictional characters he idolized.

In January, he interceded when a youth was going to get stabbed for his coat. And that same month, relatives said, he thwarted the plans of youths to mug an elderly woman.

“He had a lot of principles and a lot of values,” said Thomas Giampapa, who was Roman’s boss at Photo:Hour in Cambridge, a photo processing store where Roman worked as a lab technician. “He was making his choice and his choice was to do the right thing.”

But doing the right thing in helping the woman apparently led to Roman’s death in March.

A 19-year-old Dorchester man and a father for two months, Roman died last month every bit the hero he dreamed of being, relatives said.

Relatives said that while riding on the Orange Line of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, Roman overheard several youths planning to mug a woman passenger and he intervened.

The athletically built Roman apparently confronted the group, took a knife from a smaller, 14-year-old youth, slapped the youth several times and told him that causing trouble was no way to live, a police source said.

At the time, the youth, who later was charged with Roman’s killing, said he would seek revenge, said Roman’s uncle, Victor Mejias.

But Mejias and others said although Roman believed some gang members wanted to teach him a lesson for interfering, he never showed fear.

“Everybody warned him to be careful, but he said they weren’t going to do anything because they were just kids,” Mejias said.

I’m not sure now what the full story is. A few months later, one of his friends brought in some pictures of Victor; among them was a picture of Victor holding a gun in front of stacks of money. Whether he was friends with someone in the drug trade and was merely clowning around, or whether he was actively engaged in it, I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d guess that he’d been involved with a gang, decided to get out, and was killed for it. But if so, we never saw that side of him.

For me though, it doesn’t really matter. I know what I did see. I did see a kid who worked hard. I did see someone who was trying to better himself. I did see a young man who was always willing to help. I did see a young father who wanted the best for his daughter. It’s because of Victor that when I hear about people like Trayvon Martin, that I can’t just dismiss them out of hand.

*It doesn’t feel right somehow to mention Bill’s death merely in passing. We were very close growing up. But while shocking, and a huge blow to the family, his death was an act of nature, like a lighting bolt out of the blue.↩