The Adventures of Rasta Bowwow - Episode 3497 - 05 22 2023

Описание: Every day Maya gets to go to Loose Park, a beautiful park not far from her home in Kansas City, Missouri. Most days I record her there. I began doing so soon after her 4th birthday. Before that, starting from when she was just shy of 2 months old, Maya had been going to Loose Park every day unrecorded. Maya was born March 30, 2009, on a farm outside Seward, Nebraska. Her parents were recent arrivals to America from their native country, Spain. They were born on a ranch in the Andalusian province of Malaga. Andalusia is the heartland of the Spanish Water Dog (SWD). There, on the farms and pastures of the region, the ancestors of the SWD, including Maya's own ancestors, had for centuries aided their owners mainly in managing livestock, herding being their specialty. The SWD of today is the direct descendant of the most common form of sheep dog long found in Spain, going back to the Middle Ages.

Now, what prompted me to begin recording Maya at Loose Park was the nature of the interactions she and I were having with the people we were encountering there. Before moving to Kansas City, I had lived for 20 years in Santa Monica. There people tend to grant each other a considerable degree of personal privacy, especially in public places. Not so in Kansas City. Kansas Citians of all extractions are, if I may generalize, shockingly outgoing and friendly with strangers, even out in public. Add to that the fact that by 4 years of age Maya's coat had become strikingly unusual. The SWD is one of just a handful of breeds whose hair naturally dreads up as it grows out. At 4 Maya looked a lot like a canine version of Bob Marley. This combination of Maya's rasta-like appearance and the uninhibited friendliness of Kansas Citians gave rise to a number of memorable encounters at the park. Though not an anthropologist by training, I came to believe that these experiences were of sufficient anthropological interest, in what they showed about the human capacity for sociability, that they deserved to be documented and preserved somehow. With that motivation in mind, I found a hands-free camera and started recording.

From there the story has taken an ironical turn. The recordings of Maya at Loose Park form the basis for an episodic series. Each episode consists of footage shot in one long take, covering a journey Maya and I make through the park on a single day. The footage is then edited, but not primarily for the purpose of cutting anything out. From the beginning, starting with Episode 1, the prime directive I have adhered to in editing a day's footage is to show everything that happened that day; omitting nothing, no matter how embarrassing or unsettling it may be. Only one exception is allowed. The part where Maya does her business and I bag it up is always deleted. Except for that, every other scene is to be included. Gradually I came to realize that my adherence to the prime directive was having dreadful consequences for the watchability of the completed episodes. Our trip through the park typically lasts upwards of half an hour, a length of time too great for the resulting footage to be easily watchable in its entirety. I began to look for ways to save time for the viewer by shortening the edited episodes without abandoning the prime directive or cutting back on Maya's park time. Eventually I discovered two major time-saving tricks. One is to make use of an editing tool that speeds up scenes by displaying them in fast motion. Some types of scenes cannot be sped up without loss of content, however. A notable example is a scene containing dialogue. Fast forwarding through speech causes the words to be lost. Unfortunately, nothing is worse for making a scene run long than its having talking in it. So the second trick I have come to rely on is not to talk, wherever possible. The irony is, of course, not talking with other parkgoers defeats the purpose of creating the recordings in the first place.

Adhering to the prime directive is, then, so important that it outweighs every other consideration, including the series's original reason for being. Here is why. The hallmark of the series, and its most controversial feature, is how each episode begins with my sending Maya off to travel around Loose Park on her own, unleashed. The decision to release her to wander freely obviously invites scrutiny. It is natural to wonder whether giving her this freedom hasn't on occasion caused problems, either for her or for other parkgoers. I can honestly say that it really hasn't. No real harm has ever come of it. To the contrary, both Maya and many of those she has met along the way have benefited to some extent. If anyone should doubt this, the evidence is there in the videos for them to see for themselves. My adherence to the prime directive guarantees that the evidence has not been tampered with to conceal anything. Nothing is hidden from view (except for the whole "bathroom" thing).