Culture: May 2004 Archives

A few days ago, Noel and I noticed that we basically don't watch TV any more.

We moved down from DirecTV to cable because we couldn't justify the channels we were paying for, and now we rarely even turn the TV on (This Old House is in reruns). Most of what is on does not appeal to us (reality TV or crime/drama shows) or is on when we're doing other things (um, like, everything). I think the only time we've watched TV in the last three months was on a Friday evening when we wanted to relax and be entertained, and were not feeling up to going to the store to pick up a video.

It's funny how TV makes you rearrange your life. Even if you go to the expense of something like TiVo, you still have to make time to watch what you record. That's time that we fill up with things like running around in the yard with the dog like a pair of fools, doing weird art projects, or browsing around on the web finding new sorts of weird art projects to do (well, me at least).

So Noel was suggesting that when I go away to CalPoly in the fall, he would get the cable shut off. And I said, "Why wait until fall?"

That was when the INS knocked on the door to revoke our citizenship.

I've been feeling, for the last several years -- indeed, since the Clinton administration -- that the press has been unusually lax in its chasing down of real stories, and has allowed politicians to tell it what the truth is.

Yes, I do know that the press is actually a number of individual people, but in this regard, they have been acting pretty much the same. So I was heartened to read that the New York Times is admitting that they were falling down on the job:

In an unusual note from the editors, "The Times and Iraq," the newspaper said it found a number of instances before the March 2003 U.S. and British invasion of Iraq and early in the occupation, of "coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been."

The note said editors "should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism."

Now let's see if this admission leads to any real change in policy, at the Times or other newspapers or reporting agencies.

I've been going through a huge pile of negatives. Negatives from every picture I have ever taken. Negatives I have been carrying, adding to, cataloging, and minding for more than twenty years. I am throwing more than 90 percent of them away. And it feels amazingly good.

Photographs are a way of trying to hold onto the past. Several years ago I decided to go on a vacation without a camera, and instead of taking pictures of things, or of me doing things, I would try very hard to remember the experience. To feel it fully and be there, and have it in my head to go back to when I wished, instead of glossing over the events while I was there, and having it on a piece of paper in a book to be forgotten. That trip stays in my mind as one of the most real and gorgeous moments of my life, a time when I was really truly present for the first time ever.

Ever since then I have been throwing away photographs.

It's hard to convince people to put down the camera. Memory is faulty, and you will forget things, and somehow, we have become convinced, as a culture, that forgetting things is bad or a great cultural loss. I have become convinced that forgetting things allows us to see the parts that were really important. We forget the details because the details don't matter. What mattered was that on our wedding day, we were overwhelmingly happy to be around friends and family. What matters is that when we held our puppy for the first time, we felt an overwhelming love for her. It doesn't matter that she was not wearing a collar, or that the sun was very bright, or that Noel was wearing a blue shirt. Those details get in the way of the really important memory.

What has been interesting, in going through all these negatives, is the progression of my photographic style. At the beginning, all the subjects are far away, dead center in the image, usually very little emotion coming through. As the negatives progress, I get closer and closer, get better at framing, get better at waiting to capture a moment. This is especially true of my "sports photographer" phase, when I was on the cross country and track teams but because of my astonishingly bad knees, unable to run in races. I took photos instead.

It took a while, but near the end of the series, I got good enough that the photos actually show the personalities of my teammates, rather than a bunch of distant blurry figures running. Part of that was my switch to using mainly a zoom lens, which allowed me to get closer to my subjects than I could from the sidelines. The other part is that after one season of taking photos and giving them to the subjects, I was able to get closer because my teammates were willing and eager to be photographed. People asked me to photograph them during certain events (I just found a series of photos of one teammate going over hurdles) so they could see their form and have a cool picture of themselves in action.

I'm throwing all these negatives away.

High school wasn't too bad to me. I didn't work as hard as I could have, and got by on my excellent memory, but overall it wasn't so bad. On the other hand, I don't need to hold onto a hundred photographs of people who were only nice to me because I would give them a copy of the photograph, not for decades. They take up room I could use for something else.

There are some negatives I am saving. Pictures of my family when I was a kid (non-crappy ones). Pictures taken on my trip to France, carefully weeded (about half had to go). Pictures from Brazil, also weeded through. Pictures which answer the question, "What was X like, anyway?" Pictures that are intrinsically beautiful, that are artistic of themselves -- and there are remarkably few of these.

So now I have a couple dozen more negative sheets, and room in my life for more photographs, better photographs. Culling through things and getting rid of what is unimportant allows what is important to take the space it deserves.

I've been feeling not so very happy about the way this country has been behaving, and I have this horrible sinking feeling about the sucking festering boil on our national honour that is the war crimes in the Middle East. Then I happened across this little gem, written by an Italian woman. Here's a little snippet from What America means to me:

But maybe it's because this strange, unclear, ultimately rather unsettling feeling that the US is more real than the rest of the world. I've been thinking about this, and I have found no other better way to phrase it. Put it down to cultural imperialism. Put it down to the world becoming globalized, and my country only supplying the shoes. Put it down to our imagination being colonized. Put it down to this being the cradle of the best and of the worst

If you have time, Anna's other posts are also interesting, if not as long.

There's something about the anonymity of highrises and downtown landscapes that makes people think that they're invisible, and that brings out the worst sorts of behaviour.

Our friend Stevem has had numerous people use binoculars or telescopes to stare into his apartment, and he's taken to photographing them in action.

I walked into my bedroom to get my slippers, and he was sitting on the bench staring up at my apartment. It was a little irritating, but not too intrusive as the distance makes it difficult to see clearly into my bedroom. But a moment later he jumped up and used the binoculars to peer into my BEDROOM.

I try to stay away from politics, because it makes me unbelievably angry, but this cracked me up.

I was looking through some bookmarks I have saved this evening and I found some celebrity blogs. I found these fascinating the first time I saw them, read the main page, then bookmarked them and never returned. I think it's because the last thing I want to do is get inside the head of a complete stranger (this does not explain why I read the blogs of gay men in New York City who I don't know, but stick with me here).

Most celebrities are, well, kind of boring. They don't have much to say, and when they do say something interesting, it's because somebody else wrote it. Somebody who I would be far more interested in talking to than the celebrity. It reminds me of a party I went to once, where I ended up standing with a Famous Actress, who was apparently bored by the conversation about a book everybody else had read and exclaimed, "When are you going to say something fun? This is a party, not an English class!"

Wow, that made me wish I could be her best friend, I assure you.

So this evening I went back through my bookmarks of celebrity blogs and weeded out the most vapid. Most of them I don't read, admittedly, because I simply do not have enough time to read everything every day. Even Miss Manners has fallen by the wayside this semester, on account of my spending eight hours of every day in a studio or a darkroom, well away from Internet access and covered in toxic chemicals or mud or both. But the rest I don't read because the more I read them, the more I disliked the particular celebrity, whose work I liked before I found out what a brainless twit he or she really was.

I can't quite figure out how I started reading the blogs of a bunch of gay men in New York City who I don't know, but they are charming and interesting and fun to read, and every now and then, one of them posts something that resonates with my sensibilities the way discussions resonated in college, during late-night discussions at a cafe where students undertip and irritate waitresses and older patrons.

Today's resonant moment was courtesy of David Buscher, who I don't know at all. In his Friday posting, The Great Divide, he talks about how there seem to be two Americas overlaid on one another: the America of intolerance and ignorance, and the America of intelligence and understanding. Like our own Israel/Palestine. Except without the suicide bombers. (Our combatants prefer to live to see the fruits of their violence, I suppose, or they don't really believe that there will be eternal salvation for killing people.)

Anyway, check out the post, and check out the rest of David's blog. You'll like it.