WEBVTT

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[ radio noise ]

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[ sstv radio signal ]

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- My great-grandfather worked for Standard Oil of California

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- He was superintendent of the Division of Telephones and Telegraphs

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- He designed radio systems

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- His name was Josiah Arven, or just Arven

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[ 50's cabaret music by Ruth Wallis ]

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- It's been hard to find out much more about him

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- I never met him, or knew him

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- I scour old Standard Oil film footage to see if I can come across Arven's face

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- Everyone in these films looks a little like him

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- I haven't seen him yet

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- [ announcer ] ... the vitality of the American system of free enterprise

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[ announcer ] a system which, from this new frontier, is pumping into the trade of the world: Oil

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[ announcer ] one of the materials which is making a truly great contribution to our modern civilization

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[ oil well and pump noises ]

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- I'm captivated by oil infrastructure

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- It's perversely relaxing, watching all this quiet sadness strung across a landscape

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- My grandmother has a story about being on a road trip, and pulling over

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for her father to pick up a phone call 

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on a ringing telephone in the middle of an oil field

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[ pipeline pressure hissing ]

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- I imagine him saying something comically evil into the receiver

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- I'm ashamed at being implicated in oil's ruination of life

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- I walked down to the water, and I tried to offer myself to the Bay

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- She wouldn't accept, she knew that I wasn't serious

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- Arven designed radios

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[ various radio signal noises ]

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- His electromagnetic waves might still be bouncing around the radio spectrum

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- I try to use my body to pick up his signal somewhere

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- I try to muster some combativeness and speak back

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- To say the things that I don't say to living relatives

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- To say "look what you got us into"

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- You absolute fucker

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- I haven't heard his voice

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[ radio noise ]

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[ oil well noises ]