Change is Good, Change is Good…Repeat Until Change is Good – Commencement Address to the 2010 Graduating Class of the Pacific Valley School

*Today I had the great honor of being invited to give the commencement address for the two graduating seniors of the smallest high school in America – the Pacific Valley School, which sits along a beautiful, desolated stretch of coast in Central California, an hour south of Big Sur. This is my speech.

“Change is Good, Change is Good…Repeat Until Change is Good”
Commencement Address to the 2010 Graduating Class of Pacific Valley School
By Corby Anderson
June 17, 2010

Good afternoon, and congratulations to the 2010 graduating class of the Pacific Valley School!

It is with great honor and humility that I stand here before you today. I do not live here in Pacific Valley, but I really do love this community. The very idea that you all live out here in this harmonious, respectful and self-reliant way, on this desolate fringe of central California actually lets me sleep easier at night. I take great comfort in knowing that there are people living this way still.

Who am I, and why am I here?

Indeed. These two simple qualifiers were meant to serve as goal posts for  a series of notes that I scribbled out when I originally set about conjurin up my points for this talk. But when I sat down to do that actual writing, I realized that those two questions had opened up some pretty heavy existential gashes in my mind, each of which commanded days of contemplation to even begin to answer. So here is the condensed version.

Professionally, I am a video producer, a director of shows and events, and a media manager. Maybe a writer.

How I got here is a loaded question, considering the need for brevity here, so that you two graduates can get on with the rest of your lives. I do tend to go on at times, so I will do my best to explain that question as succinctly as possible. Suffice to say, prior to moving to the Central California coast two years ago, I was living a rather fun and adventurous life in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado, when I was suddenly stricken with an intense desire to move to the coast and write a book. I would like to say simply that the process was as easy as making up my mind, moving, setting up shop in Monterey and living happily hereafter. But it was not. Things don’t always work that way.

What it was, though, was a true leap of faith – something that I have recognized and embraced along every step of my journey to this podium. I gave up a perfectly good job, managing a TV station while making decent money in one of the worlds greatest ski towns, Aspen, Colorado, and up and moved my new wife here to the coast without any jobs lined up, with just a few Santa Cruz-based friends to show us the ropes of living here, no savings, and a ridiculous notion that I was going to come to Monterey and write the Great American Ski Bum Novel, despite having never written so much as a decent short story and having zero formal training in the art. And I did all of this right at the beginning of the greatest economic collapse in several generations.

I found this place, this utterly beautiful, outrageous dream of a community when I was assigned to write a story about your teacher, surf coach, meteorologist, botanist, jade sage, and fishing instructor (have I forgotten anything else? There must be more!) David Allen for the Monterey County Weekly, whom I have freelanced for since I sent the editor, Mark Anderson, whom I believe, gave this address last year, a taunting letter challenging him to a dual of verbs and pronouns. I should preface that with the caveat that I don’t even know what a pronoun is, I just thought that it would make for a good duel. “Captain Lingcod”, David Allen brought me here then and has now asked me back to impart some bit of wisdom that I might have scrapped off in my long carom through the business of broadcasting and media.

I have a profound respect for Dave Allen. His life’s deeds and adventures, his dedication to education, art and nature are inspiring and legendary, even if they are not yet known to the greater world. So I am proud to stand here before you at his suggestion, and you all should be proud of him and all of the rest of your teachers, administrators, and coaches at this amazing school. Over time, as you integrate into larger and larger communities, I am certain that you will both come to realize just how unique and special it was to have grown up out here in Pacific Valley, amongst the wild, rugged coastline, the hovering hawks, the playful seals, the timeless whales, the watchful mountain lions, and that deep blue sea that stretches out forever.

I have a mantra that has served me fairly well in my career and personal adventures. Drummer, can I get a roll? Good people of Pacific Valley, you might want to join me in this chant. “Change is good, change is good, change is good. Repeat until change is good.”

That mantra has come in handy for me specifically because I happened to develop an early passion for working in the world of radio, television, video and film production, while also having the luck (good or bad has yet to be determined) of precisely the start of the greatest upheaval in the history of the industry – what has become known as the Digital Age.

When I started, in 1988, I was exactly the same age as you two. At that time there were very clear career paths within the industry, and time-tested processes for successfully entering into each tract, whether it was radio, TV, film, or video production. Broadcasting was considered an art. It took years of interning, apprenticeships, and a series of low wage jobs in small markets until you were considered a true professional.

When I started in radio, we edited our shows by cutting the actual tape with scissors, and taping the good parts back together with masking tape. Grease pencils were involved somehow. Anyone know what a grease pencil is? Me neither, anymore. Must have been cool though, because I remember the name. But I digress. Remember now, this is just twenty years ago, and yet we had no computers, anywhere at school, home or otherwise. There were twelve channels of TV, new music came to us over the FM radio, and there were just a few channels that were worth a damn, nationwide even. Documentary film, one of my great interests, was then considered an exotic art form practiced by auteurs and reclusive directors who had washed out of Hollywood. You could not find their movies anywhere, even if you looked. It wasn’t until years later that movie rental stores came along, and even then mostly all that you could find to watch were the Police Academy films, Top Gun, and, curiously, Cheech and Chong.

Eventually, I went to college, studied TV and radio until they released me into the wild, and wound up going to work for a series of small video producers. Well, they weren’t small, physically. They were average sized, on the whole. But the companies were smallish, as were the video projects. But it was good work for a recent graduate. As new technology became available, I learned to edit video on a series of hybrid video editing systems, which were still tape based, and had no real memory of their own, but allowed us to digitally make edit marks here and there without having to build a show from “left” to “right”, sequentially. These systems cost $30,000 each, so the field of videography was relatively uncrowded due to the cost of entry into the business.

Meanwhile, the newspaper industry thrived, and if you could really write, magazines would pay you a dollar a word for an incisive bit of investigative journalism or a well-positioned, defendable essay. The really, really good writers got book deals. And in radio, the really good DJ’s worked in big city stations and were well paid, and perhaps better yet, were just as well loved as the musicians that they promoted. The best camera operators went to work for the big networks, and eventually for the new cable entities that cropped up. There was plenty of work, and it was delineated. You were pretty much one or the other, and within those channels, there were even more specific jobs that were specific, stand-alone careers. A living could be made at each of them. And then an interesting thing happened. What was it? Drummer, can I get a witness?

Change! And what is change? Good!

Almost overnight, the whole communications industry collapsed, knotted up, and grew immutably all at once. There was total upheaval on a grand scale, and all because of a little silicon chip and a whole shit ton of fiber optic cabling that made saving digital files easy and sending them across great distances even easier. Radio fell first, all of the small family stations that made each market unique were swallowed whole and lost to corporate syndicates and their dizzy drive to automate. If you have ever heard Tom Petty’s song “The Last DJ”, it is really a true rendition of that situation. And that was just ten, fifteen years ago. Now, just years after the digital revolution, corporate radio and the music industry got upended by the democratization of internet radio, satellite radio, and home recording studios.

The same thing happened with TV and newspapers a few years later. The Internet evolved and suddenly everyone could get any paper that they wanted, and advertise for free on Craigslist, which single handedly severely maimed, and nearly killed the newspaper business. That was just within the past five years. Final Cut Pro was introduced as a cheap and highly capable editing system, and suddenly everyone and their mother, literally, were editing video at a professional level. Today, just seven years after a solid editing system and professional camera would cost you upwards of $50,000 and taken up a whole room in your house to store, you can get an iPhone that has a professional-level camera and edit system on board for $200.

So what did all of this mean to us in the media, this change? It meant that we had to be diverse in our talents. We needed to be able to aptly to ten jobs across five fields of media rather than one within one. We had to become adaptable to the new technology, to quickly learn and master new skills to stay ahead of the game, since every college in the world was now cranking out entire classes of professionally trained communicators every December and June. It is in all likelihood that whatever it s that you wind up studying if you go to college, those skills that you will be learning will be applied to an industry that does not even exist today. It will be the work ethic, the communications skills, and the ability to adapt that you will bring to those unknown industries.

What this great technological democratization means for you two graduates is that there is greater opportunity to be paid well for your talents immediately, or as soon as your creative instinct is honed and becomes marketable. Because the technology is no longer such a roadblock to success, thanks to the falling costs of the equipment, you can enter the fray as soon as your originality is up to a sustainable, professional level. It is up to you, and how fast you learn on your own, in school, or at the sides of your mentors. No longer do you have to climb a very long and arduous, not to mention financially ruinous ladder of training just before you can be considered a player, or a decision maker, who, by the way, other than the salesmen, make all the money in the business of communications.

What I mean to get across to you as you embark on your life’s journey is that nothing stays the same, ever. You are entering a crazy world when you leave this hallowed place, thanks to this technological quickening. You can steel yourself for that change by taking what you have learned from all of these people gathered here to celebrate your graduation today and go get right after your dreams. Be ready and willing to seize on the opportunities presented to you when change occurs. Be part of that change, be ahead of it if you can, because there is no doubt that it all – your career, your family, your physical location will all change dramatically over time. Sometimes, over a very short period of time, as my experience has been. Change is the only thing that you can really count on. Even when it seems bad, it usually turns out for the best. And that is a good thing.

I want to leave with you just a few nuggets of wisdom that I have picked up along my path. The first is a saying that my dad has always loved. He learned it from his dad, who worked in a place that was just about as remote as this place – a small coal-mining village in the mountains of Virginia and Kentucky.

“If a job is once begun, never leave it until it’s done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.”

And here is another one. I saw this note tacked onto the refrigerator of a famous writer named Hunter S. Thompson. He put it there as a cautionary reminder to himself, and those famous artists and raconteurs who gathered in his kitchen, where he did most of his work. I had the chance to film there. The note said:

“Do Not EVER Call 911. THIS MEANS YOU!”

I am not sure how that applies to your lives, but maybe it will come in handy someday. I think that it means to be self-reliant, to think things through before asking for help, when you can.

Here is one from a writer who I think was one of the best philosophers of the last century. “Cactus” Ed Abbey, who lived in and wrote about the desert, amongst other things great and small:

“Concrete is heavy, iron is hard. But the grass will prevail.”

And another: “Do not waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes, you are ahead, sometimes behind. The race is long, and in the end, it is only with yourself.” That was from Kurt Vonnegut – who had the distinction of being the only novelist to have ever been bombed by the Russians, the Germans, and the Americans all in the same war.

And finally, this is one that I came up with after working in TV for years and years:
“All that we can do is take the lens caps off for one another.”

In closing, I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I wish you both Godspeed, and the best of luck. The future starts right now. Go get it!