I hunted the streets, sidewalks, under tables in restaurants (in winter, found gloves everywhere); the floors in clubs and bars; now in digital time, there’s way less. What people throw out tells an untold story. (I’m not a garbologist.) There’s still purging among overinflated consumers of tech. Get rid of stuff and buy the new, so material shows up, photos left in a book, books tossed out everywhere; I’ve found thumb drives too. Meanwhile, garbage trucks drop cartons and garbage collectors run wild in the streets. The streets overflow with rejection.
Get up early, get home late, find stuff. I fall asleep when people awaken, because I like the night. Or I’m just up, sleepless. Maggie learned to sleep through it.
I call the streets a field, and “going into the street” is going into the field, both a concept and an activity. If journalists can talk about “the Arab street,” an ethnographer can employ it: what begins, happens, and ends in the street, it’s all an object for study.
Humans become runaways and homeless—on the street, you’re nobody’s child. The denizens of the street, their skin roughens from exposure, they walk, their eyes down or listless, straight ahead, some must wonder why no one cares, or are themselves beyond caring. Their lives are junk, they are expendable and called “eyesores.” Other people don’t want to “see” them, they walk with their heads down, right.
The eyesore characterization meshes with humans as images to themselves and each other.
“You don’t want to make a bad image, do you?”
Eyesores irritate another’s eyes. The image-condemned, at the least, should be relegated to invisibility, they should relegate themselves, they should live under bridges or in urban caves, because they’re ugly to the eye—not murderers, but the ugly can expect no pity. They should fucking disappear, right?
Previously “wanted material,” even cherished goods, turns into stuff, crap, junk. Broken furniture, sagging, tic-ridden mattresses, worn clothes end their lives on sidewalks and in streets, useless. Abandonment makes objects ugly.
Americans waste more food than any other people/nation in the world.
In my circles, in a year, people throw out more than most people in the world own in a lifetime. They coveted, bought, once loved that chair or teapot, but, fickle consumer-characters, they toss it out, not looking back, no regrets. Hoarders are Extreme Materialists.
Right, everyone’s talking ’bout “first world problems.” I say, Lipstick on a pig.
What’s called a “bad picture” ends up on streets. Half a head, blurs, generic tourist shots—no face can be discerned—and views of innocuous buildings by anonymous rivers no one remembers or even the country they were taken in.
The concept of “a bad picture” intrigues me. (A “bad relationship” also.) Like the beautiful, which relies on symmetry and balance, a “good picture” is produced by accepted ideas about framing and composition, though these can change.
What are the errors in seeing?
“You have a good eye.” Right.
Ordinary citizens might hope to take “good pictures.” For artists, good can be bad, bad good—artists say Fuck You to the beautiful; while standards of beauty shift every few years, anyway.
Take the “behind.” Rear end. Bottom. Ass. Booty. It’s taken years, but the big butt is again an object of overt desire. Ass enhancements in New Jersey.
Flat, white asses, they are so over. Thank you, J.Lo, Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, Nicki Minaj. Your bounty is our bounty.
The sublime, a wily notion about awe-inspiring terror and impossible beauty, found favor again in the late twentieth century; some art critics regularly applied the concept, especially to Caspar David Friedrich, an exemplar, also Gerhard Richter.
From the sublime, to the unwanted, to the ridiculous: thrown-out framed wedding pictures and candids of Christmas trees—holiday parties, happy scenes—stain the streets, lie in gutters, cascade from garbage cans. Generic, but each meant something specific or even important to people in them. On the street, nothing, detritus. Object-death.
Divorced people tear up their wedding pictures, take them off their walls, throw them in the trash, discard the guilty, painfully irrelevant in their new lives. The discarded, or dead love-mementos, if all were collected, would make mountain ranges as big and high as the Rockies. Picture it.
If you can, and you’re an artist, hey, man, here’s a project. Ha.
Some of the found wedding pix were shot at New York’s City Hall. So I went there, another field, and spent days watching people waiting to be married, in the most democratic institution anywhere, seriously, except for a public library; everyone’s included, no one’s denied, pretty much. Wedding parties range from simple, bride, groom, and one witness, to large families sitting and standing in shapeless groups, to women dressed in floor-length white gowns, men in tuxes or dinner jackets, to jokey costumes, and bride and groom wearing flip-flops and jeans. Bridesmaids and groomsmen follow their leaders, clucking after them, children racing, screaming or hanging onto their mothers and fathers. Lots of drama, weeping. Giggles. Anger. I was especially surprised by the number of sullen grooms, pregnant brides, and enraged mothers-in-law. They were
noteworthy.
The weirdest throwaways: a nuclear family’s albums, its history in photographs, to be incinerated. For just twenty bucks, I bought a large cardboard box at a thrift store in upstate New York: hundreds of loose photos, two albums, and many little photo books from a camera store, depicting at least four generations. Their anonymity becomes stranger as you look at them—this is an anonymous family, an anonymous man, woman, son, daughter, maybe an aunt, a grandmother and grandfather, mother and father to whom? Here’s a boy graduating from grade school. In one I’ve been studying, the portraits of their pets, animal companions, dominate. Here’s a family that didn’t have anyone to keep these photographs. Studying them, I see them aging. One person always absent—the family photographer. A man, probably. A husband, a father. But whose?
The greatest violation I ever committed? Buying this carton of photos. I a stranger now possessed them, and it felt creepy, as though I’d stolen the Elgin Marbles all over again. First, I looked at pictures of this family with a cold eye, a stranger’s eye that didn’t care about this anon family, had no connection to it. But who was that family, and why had the line ended, if it had? The stories came to me: when the last X died, the house was sold, because no one was around to keep it, typical family diaspora, or everyone was dead, and one day the new owner discovered in the back of a closet—in the attic, always the attic—a big carton. The new owner opened it, wasn’t curious, barely curious, and tossed it. Maybe the garbage collector brought it to the thrift store where I found it and paid my twenty bucks. I left the store like a thief. Legal thievery is ubiquitous in a material world, and I’m a material boy.
I became familiar with the family, and had the urge to name each person, each character in this silent album. I felt each deserved a name, was a character in this unwritten novel. James Clifford and others talk about ethnography as writing, even as fiction. I’d call this novel Anon.
The Bible started like this. A, B, C, D noticing, in their different lifetimes, all the strange shit, incredible rumors and tales reaching future religiosos in far-off villages, about a lamp that didn’t stop burning for eight days, about an infant in an anonymous manger, and the stories and the characters—too strange not to record. Right? The tales made the rounds, so there must be something to them, right, why else would we be hearing them. Like all urban tall tales.
Through this anonymous family, I apprehended my anonymity, to others like and not like me. Through these throwaways, I observed myself as a stranger. Our, and your, family pictures are nothing to a stranger.
Uncle Zeke, a happy guy with a flag behind him, or a nothing, a no one. Mother, Little Sister, Father, Clarissa, faces, bodies, bone and flesh, voices that don’t speak …
So, perceiving culture and society entirely in visuals, and before my eyes, I am u
p against my limits. I narrate through images, what they appear to represent, with my thoughts working as subtitles. But it’s false, in a sense, because all are essentially UNTITLED, OHNE TITEL, incapable of being captioned—or captured. The uncaptioned (photograph) suggests that an object can’t be named.
I see their common rites and rituals: birthdays, weddings, graduations. Cooking is done in a large kitchen or a cramped one, with an island or a rectangular table in the center of it, people always prepare food. Usually a female. People eat food on a table in that kitchen or at the island, or in a dining room. People take pictures of their meals.
I could be any one of them, and anyone could be anyone, you might be in one of these, I might.
When I was a child, whatever happened was special, ours, mine. Now nothing is. There’s no weird when all weird is expected.
Sometimes I think about Mother and Father, how it might have been between them, what their love was like when it was young. I can’t feel it.
throwaways
My attachment to throwaways became peculiar to Maggie; sometimes even I felt insane caring about a family that had no one to care for their pictures and stories. No one cared but me. But I kept going. Right, impulsive, also compulsive. My course work was done, and my thesis, Maggie closing in also, and, when we did finish, we’d take our fancy break, fly to London, no obvious language barrier or problem, though life is language problems, easier because CW would show us around. I planned to scout in London, studying “others (supposedly) like me” in their various images, social media, selfies, graffiti. Our stay would be temporary.
Temporariness is temporary and constant, too.
I hold these truths to be selfie evident.
Instant-capture belongs in the tradition of positivist photography. But proof doesn’t prove anything except its own apparatus.
I sometimes wonder if kids feel about it the way my father did Polaroid. Or the way I did, when I saw the magic in it.
When the cry goes out at a party, in a bar, “Let’s take a selfie,” people gather fast, one holds the camera, shoots. Then another, or ten. Everyone laughs at the result, sometimes surprised by a crazy angle, how good or bad the pix are. The picture produces an image of vivaciousness that may not have been felt in the party or bar: the image itself bumps up the spirit, retroactively and presently.
Selfies conjure instant togetherness in a way that Polaroids never did; they amazed because of their instant confirmation of presence. Working theory: in this (con)temporary life, lived virtually, often alone, teleporting, etc., people look for physical intimacy and closeness, constructing rituals for it, maybe reminders of intimacy. Selfies confirm physical closeness, proximity, they don’t document the way photographs did in the past. The selfie is ONLY about the moment, is eminently disposable, like moments themselves.
Things aren’t meant to be kept.
I like throwaways and can’t do it.
I’m thinking about what’s disposable and why, dead love. Ex-lovers.
“Let’s take a selfie”: a call for social cohesion is worthy of ethnographic study.
What anyone paying attention gets: The thrill is gone, it goes fast. It won’t do what it did yesterday. Thrill needs to be amped. Needs create their own needs, then others, and more, alongside business’s creating demand. Steve Jobs knew the thrill of the new, and how design lived in the mind as the current of the new, that was his object and he made it.
Then the cry is heard throughout the land: “How did we ever get along without this?”
You could say, This is a funny time. You could, but then you wouldn’t be me.
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
—Walter Benjamin
epistemological (and future) breaks
Time is a human construction, the twenty-four-hour day invented by the Egyptians, and divided into two twelve-hour partitions. A twenty-four-hour clock was first constructed in the late 1300s, mostly for astronomical uses.
Einstein wrote, or maybe he didn’t, if he didn’t, he should have: “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”
I’ve imagined not having clocks or calendar, the chaos then. Nothing could go forward, no one could know past from present. And there may not be any difference. Really.
I suppose that’s why belief systems function, to give us conceptual ruts to run, to dig deeper troughs each time. Animals use their instincts in ways we can’t, and I suppose they don’t have pasts like humans have, though elephants walk toward a burial ground to die. Animals have emotions, a sense of time; birds migrate, all creatures procreate. But our sense of time, our clocks, our duty to clocking in and out, that’s not a fair sense of time. That’s a fear of time, because we know we will die. We’re such time-sensitive creatures. Time-stamped, haha, but we can’t find the stamp.
Time passes; otherwise, you did. Sacred films and tapes of weddings and communions, anniversaries, get boxed and tucked on a shelf in closets, to rest in obscurity. Sure, everyone wants them; no one looks at them again.
The virtual album is a double negation, there/always not there.
The virtual fosters ephemeral, nonphysical attachments and formations, fast and fleeting so-called communities.
Throwaway cameras briefly decorated celebratory tables and mandated everyone to shoot the party pix, but albums are now atavistic.
The institution of marriage was helped by the legalization of gay marriage at the start of the twenty-first century. Stimulated the wedding industry.
I foresee a You Are Not Invited card. Just kidding.
The matte or glossy snapshots, in a drawer or album, represent images of a past event, but is it a memory, when stored away against time, and forgotten, then only recalled seeing it? Is that memory? Even if in time you recognize no one and nothing by them, even if you have the memory only because the photo exists. The photograph is only an elegy to a reality, or “elegiac reality”: a fact or document, and a memento mori.
I call these “kept images,” they’re rarely revisited. Sometimes I refer to them as “sad mistresses.”
Kept images bear “image-heaviness,” carrying the burdens from the past, as well as of present imaginings, which become concretized as fact—this happened—or metaphorical, and both figure powerfully in consciousness and unconscious behavior. To be “image heavy” might make you look in the mirror frequently, or shop all the time, uncontrollable manias toward looking fashionable, to mimic your fave star, that is, to project a not-you to maintain a sense of self by finding an image that protects you and projects you into the world; or, you might begin collecting objects that agree with your hoped-for image, things you might not even like, oddly enough, but which you believe others treasure and that align with a hidden, aspirational being. Image heaviness entails due diligence, maintenance of any tendency or habit. Keeping up, in all its connotations, is another way to think of it. Plastic surgery, new cars, fresh tech. My term is “image sickness,” for which there’s no doctor.
time: artificial and practical
Mr. Petey, sturdy, surviving “all of history” (phrase tossed around at home), was perfect, I idolized him, but couldn’t sidle up to him or pet him, though he let me touch his back sometimes, gently.
The more mosquitoes there were, the more PMs showed up, but I didn’t know the cause, then.
An insect was definitely not-me, but one loved me, at a distance, with hands-off love, which I came to maintain and promote. There are so many more kinds of love than “let’s live together and have kids.” Forever.
Mr. Petey says nothing about me. His cool was at odds with my jumped-up boy life, except when I was near him, communing with him, quieting down, and then he saw ME. I hoped I was like him, only bigger. I felt he knew that, and me. To be known, solid feeling.
Love is not a thing or a possession. It’s immaterial, evanescence itself.
Loving YOU gives ME no security, is not safe, you are not safe, I am not safe
.
Can YOU love without the object “saying” something about you? Is there a love without dependence or necessity?
People want love to make them feel safer, and select partners to “support” them; but they also want passion, which is not safe. Everything done, aware or unaware, promotes or debilitates chances for survival. Loving a creature indifferent to you wraps you in a blanket that doesn’t keep you warm.
I once was happy to be a malcontent.
I LEARN FROM ANIMALS.
I LEARN I AM AN ANIMAL.
I LEARN I AM DIFFERENT FROM OTHER ANIMALS.
I LEARN I AM A HUMAN BEING WITH A BIG BRAIN.
Use your brain constructively, Mother instructed, which means zip to a kid.
seeing is believing what you see
Objects now are so small, terabytes of data, a sliver of silicone; simultaneously there’s bigness in the Koolhaas sense, bigness for itself. Two divergent tendencies and practices, two sides of the blah blah. Then there’s volume, which, like the camera’s eye, does what its organic other can’t. And also can’t handle. Going blind, blow it up big. Going deaf, volume up, up. Hearing gone, tiny, invisible ear-helpers have arrived, so be cool. Faster, lighter digital cameras, phones, computers. The third millennium is war, terrorism, surveillance (anyone can do it), and swell tech toys. Divert and subvert, subvert and divert.
Humans enabled themselves to see what is not humanly accessible, the invisible becomes visible. Except there’s this obstacle: not comprehending what can be seen by the naked eye, or even when seeing artificially.
Special effects, the speed of cameras: these manufactured objects show what the eye can’t see by itself. Down the long evolutionary line special effects might become necessary for survival—when the species lives in total darkness, say.
So, no, art doesn’t emerge from Nature.
Also, to behold what the human eye by itself can’t proves the power of objects, tech, doing what limited humans can design. But where does the emphasis lie? Not on the being’s capacity—on the machine’s. Humans create machines that, in a way, diminish themselves, contributing to our species self-image-destruction, while the species destroys its environment. Relationship?
Men and Apparitions Page 11
