Greetings from the telling silence, friendlies. I am in the midst of my periodic churn, this one coming at a time ripe with prep for the March show, and as my brother once said, Gee, It is Swell.
Honestly, I'd given some thought to scripting a smarmy metaphor about the recent hard freeze, a glacial hammering of the locals that penned all of us in for four or five days straight -- considerably much more time than you want to spend with your pets, or anyone for that matter -- something ridiculous about the cycle of life and whatnot, about ebbs and flows.
But honestly, the world is a much more absurd place than that. Occasionally you hate to sell the sucker short.
So while I'm excited about the evolutions and permutations pending, I'm eager to get the show on the road. But here's the rub, see. I can't. I'm stuck in a sort of professional purgatory here, for at least a while longer, while I carefully arrange my mojo and its burgeoning incarnation. Bill Hicks once noted that kids are smart: he said "I've never seen a child with a full time job...and children." And he was right. So note that there are changes on the horizon. They are coming.
But it's the things that stay the same that you learn to trust.
Last night on television, I watched an Andy Warhol documentary on PBS. Twice. Andy once said that each of us gets approximately fifteen minutes of fame. He got something in the neighborhood of two and a half hours. Figures.
I've been actively killing time this week (an inappropriate turn of phrase, perhaps, given my lead) in anticipation of a career change, and I had half-penned an exchange modestly titled "Bread Man Walking," which in retrospect could have either been about leaving one perfectly good position for another one, the fallout in between, and how each of us deals with change, or, perhaps, about the Mrs. Baird's bread guy going house to house, or something.
It's been an odd week.
We're gearing up to move back to Austin proper, a rather exciting prospect, and I've been reminisicing. Last week, on the lip of the Austin City Limits music festival, a group of us hit a local sushi restaurant, and, sat back-to-back up against what turned out to be the band Gomez, clinked glasses in favor of a variety of good news: one of us was getting married, one starting a new job, one recovering from back surgery, one beat cancer. If that's not life and fantasy intermingling, I don't know what is.
And in the midst of all this, I placed a smooth stone in my pocket, reminiscient of another such rock from an experience long ago. I was on the downside of an ill-fated career choice (the optimist would call it a 'growth opportunity'), in the same restaurant, and I found a smooth stone, which became in the days to come a sort of relaxation talisman, one I would need to cajole and manipulate through the rough times, or, moreover, the other way around. And I had in mind to build a metaphor around this rock, this low-fi good luck charm, its significance based largely on its aesthetic, tactile value and its proximity to the given situation, vis-a-vis, me.
This week I've placed that rock on my dresser. I'm aware that it's there, that we are on the mend together if I need it, and I may, even as good luck charm, take it with me as I rush headlong into new beginnings. But what I know, know for sure, is that getting your head in the right place is only part of the struggle. Surrounding yourself with rocks, smooth, sturdy, skippable across the smoothest and most malleable of surfaces, those are true finds.
And I, for one, will never have pockets to accomodate those kind of riches. You need not be famous or infamous to win that jackpot. You need only be lucky. And, in my case, fortunately, you need only be here.
Ben Kweller has a nosebleed. It's Saturday, Hump Day in Austin City Limits vernacluar, and the heat, though an oppressively muggy 90 or 100 or 1000 degrees or so, isn't what it was last year, when the mercury surged to 108 actual degrees against the business side of Hurricane Rita. All the same, it's hot as hell out here, and it's more than a little odd when Kweller solicits, then receives, a tampon from offstage, moreover something like thirty of them, and, as onlookers are first unsure, then amused, then grossed out via the fact that he's chosen to insert one of these "gifts" into the affected area, he plays.
ACL is a grab bag, if somewhat predictable, yang to SXSW's yin, and Austin has seemed to settle into a rythym of lull and peak that these annual events provide. ACL's 2005 success (the aforementioned scorcher notwithstanding), there as been, at least, an evolved expectation of the weekend's proceedings.
The first year (which, in fairness, I did not attend) featured a hodge podge of jam-bands in the lineup, proving once again that maybe all you need to start something is a free weekend, a couple of jam bands with a schedule, and a patchouli stand. Following years have metered out a who's who of up-and-comers, old stand-bys and others, but it's difficult to argue with the fact that in spite of last year's ode to World War II oven atrocities, a palatable quirk has emerged here.
It's yet another example of someone with passion and a given vertical of experience sorting out how to create the next big deal, and to Austin's credit, it certainly seems like the timing couldn't have been better. And no one here bats an eye at Willie Nelson playing up against Massive Attack, a battle of the Dukes of Hazzard generation and the Fight Club generation.
And when Ben Kweller's nose shares its contents with his guitar, likewise the crowd rolls with it. The beer lines are short (so far) the air-conditioned tent near (until we move) and The Shins are ramping up opposite the Long Winters.
Which, as we've learned by now, are really those times in between.
And for the first time in a long time, it was Sunday, and I did not rest.
We gathered our gear and ourselves (gear being a generous term: beer, chips, music, towels) and headed toward Lake Travis. The water level is low this summer, what with 105 degree days the norm and rain, or the lack thereof, a regular occurance. I half-imagined a giant sucking sound coming from the area, but there was none. Only tiers of well-sunned limestone, exposed to the enviroment by a relentless pursuit of heat.
We featured, as it were, a mostly familiar cast of characters: Ryan was home from Los Angeles, the product of a not untraumatic bout with a fussy (and ultimately dying) transmission in rural California. He proudly sported a VOTE FOR AL shirt, cribbed from a re-sale shop I like to imagine in Silverlake. Others we did not know as well: Adam and Mindy, friends of friends who've always been, well, friendly; Scott, the transplant from San Diego via Asheville, who's living with Hackers.
Somewhere around this time last year, we rented a pontoon boat and puttered our way into a cove. It had an older anchor, something like a tattoo, and after a half-dozen throws we learned somewhat how to toss it into an area that would keep us from drifting into the rocks. We swam and drank and ate and generally had what all agreed was a fantastic time, and when my birthday rolled around this June, I briefly entertained the idea of renting another boat and re-enacting the float. But we've always gone to the river in the past, and so that's what we did, and the river was flush with it's (un)usual accompaniment of collegiates with a love for jello shots, homemade boomboxes and hookers in training. It was the kind of afternoon that makes for revisionist planning.
And so, when we spoke of going back to the water, we openly spoke of the lake this time, of spending time with the friends we've chosen, and less with the ones you're stuck with at two miles per hour. By complete accident we rented this year's pontoon boat from "Just for Fun," and of course subsisted in making "Just for Fun" jokes on the trip down. There would be no serious boating. This would be Just for Fun.
Where last year's boat had challenges, this one had few: CD player? check. New outboard? check. About the only advantage last year's boat had on this one was the anchor. Last year's anchor was all business. And this boat's anchor looked, best I could tell, like a giant rubber bathtub stopper. To make matters worse it didn't much stop anything from moving, especially the boat, and each time we "parked," we'd look up twenty minutes later to notice that we'd since drifted, listlessly, into a slew of floating onlookers. It was like turning around in the park and your puppy's run off, this boat, except that where puppies are generally cute, this thing was a lumbering monstrosity that had our beer onboard.
Nonetheless...that was about the toughest part of the day. With the lower water levels and searing heat, lake traffic was sparse, and the four hours we had the boat flew by. A very practiced boat rental employee rattled off everything from the cost of the lake map we were using to the price we'd pay if we replaced the outboard motor. When we hit port, he remarked that we'd barely used any gas. "Where did you go?," he wondered.
I didn't answer. Sometimes it's best, even on Sunday, to float in place.
I had a friend once (still do, in fact), who, upon ruminating about his own life and its particular level of contentedness (at the time of his writing, high), noted out loud, somewhat wistfully, that he was unsure as to how someone might achieve a blissed-out state minus the blessings present in his own life. He mentioned all of the usual markers: his marriage, his toddler, the fact that regular trips, those being both literal and figurative through the taking of chances, recharged his batteries.
He mentioned, and I felt certain I knew who he was referencing, that one buddy of his had none of these things, and that yet, in spite of his utter confusion at how this could be so, that this person could be and in fact was...happy. He went a step further: he said he was sure of it.
It was a veiled compliment, to be certain, and definitively appreciated. And since that time I've done quite a bit of thinking about why that might be so. And I've come to an omnipresent conclusion.
You see, I'm damaged.
Yes, yes, of course, you're right. We all are. But not like this. And were I to mention this in the presence of another friend (who doubles as ersatz therapist), she'd no doubt tell me that no, no, in fact, you're not damaged.
And she'd be right. So which is it?
In a word? Both.
I've thought about this much, and the only definition that makes sense when I reconcile it is contradictory.
I'm damaged because I've taken things to heart. I don't know if we're all inherently the same or all delightfully different (again, I suspect both, which may be my way of not committing), but I know that when I was younger, I was more than naive. I was open. I still recall the day that I imagined the world a different place than my childhood. There wasn't trauma, or cataclysm. Only the sharp realization that everything I had known in the past, at least the things that I was at that point regarding as important, were somehow, well, wrong.
And with this came a new vector of responsibility. A seriousness. Nonetheless, I had left some parts open, vulnerable, soft underbellies. I could have known this with a smidgeon on honest introspection at that age...the pattern of crushing defeats the likes of which make Kevin Arnold resemble William the Conqueror (or perhaps a sneakered Cary Grant).
And as I grew older, determined to hang on, as it turned out, to at least the resemblings of the enthusiasm and misgivings of my youth, the part of me that believed in things like forever easily, effortlessly, like a kite in the breeze, that thing didn't die, but was no doubt wounded - scraped as it were - on the theoretical pavement of the jaded advancement of age. And of that particular mindset which brings with it the most happiness counched in terms of that which you cannot have: love lost, goals not yet reached, moments melted against times gone by.
Don't get me wrong: there's still enough of the silly optimist in me to believe in all of the things that I regularly espouse out loud. It still means something to me to create something from nothing, and to assist others likewise. And I may travel the well-documented road yet.
But it likely won't be traveled conventionally. Or with training wheels.
On the surface, you see the world through a camera the way you see the world in real life. That's why they call it a lens: it's merely the conduit to remembering what stands before it. But in actuality, of course, the relationship a photographer and his camera has is different. Evolved maybe. Different because we each know that pictures don't always turn out exactly the way we remember them. Different because sometimes they're worse, blurry, too dark, too washed out. Different because sometimes, those imperfections make them better.
That's how it was with my Russian Lomo camera.
My Lomo and I had an imperfect (if colorful) history. Lomos (as they have become known) caught fire in the late 90s as a creative alternative to standard, high-end photography. Featuring an internal gauge that helped determine how much light had hit the aperture in a given shot, you could, in theory, take low-light pictures without a flash.
It was at its inception a pretty revolutionary idea. In practice, however, the shots you'd get were a mixed bag. Sometimes the photos would come out nothing short of transcendent: rich hues that were never bleached by a sudden rush of light. On the downside, you would regularly see shots come back fuzzy, smeared with movement (because of the aforementioned gauge thing), complex.
I loved the lot of it.
I had shared a set of blurry shots with a conceptual artist in Honolulu to add to a piece he was working on some years ago; I pulled some throwaways which became a hazy extension of his creation: steel arms and legs with attached photos akimbo, providing a warm aesthetic where only hardened (if artistic) reality would have existed otherwise. Artists took to Lomo shots right away. There were never mistakes, only crisp, personality-laden captures and out of focus "experiments."
And over the years, the Lomo managed to wander off a few times: such no doubt the byproduct of shooting in bars, where the images played out like the memories -- fast, sloppy, the highs higher and the lows lower than you figured, likely -- but the camera always came home. Someone would inevitably call and remind me that I'd left it last night, that it contained my business card, that it looked dated, simple, and what kind of camera was this, exactly?
And so it was that the Lomo followed me to New York last week, and that I took it with me each day: the immediate plan was to take photos of buildings which I would, in turn, print oversized and transfer onto a large canvas. Think the Sgt. Pepper's crowd concept, only with buildings. But because of the way the low-light shots tended to turn out, and because the thought of missing a unique photo was one I couldn't bear, I carted the camera with me to Nevada Smith's, a NYC soccer-themed bar where a World Cup semifinal between France and Portugal was playing out. The place was stuffed with (mostly) French and Portugese nationals, many in full adornment, and for the next three hours or so we tilted pints and cheered and jeered with the masses in a variety of languages and temperaments.
When the game was over, we poured ourselves into a celebratory cab to hit another watering hole before dinner. The camera, best I recall, made it to the martini bar. You know how there are things that stay with you after you experience them? The smell of hotel rooms, how hard it was to open the doors in your parents' car with little hands? I find myself wanting a definitive experience to remember.
I don't have that here. I don't remember (clearly) the exact events that preceded the cab. In fact, a few martinis in and subsequently, I didn't remember taking a cab at all. Cabs in New York City are like rivers in Central Texas. Flowing all different directions at once, leading no doubt to a sea where, left to their own devices, your devices left in a cab are lost forever.
For about a day I was devastated. It's still difficult to talk about, these two weeks later, and now that Lomos are "deadstock" (no longer manufactured new), the price has gone up. They've been dolled up by resellers if you troll the web: leather facing, refurbished parts, colored flash gels. I believe in the Internet, and so I posted an ad to Craigslist's Lost and Found section and in The Village Voice.
No word. I've been contacted by a sociologist at UCLA who's studying the effects of losing things (I've been tempted to tell him, generally speaking, that the effect is, well, bad) and by a Spanish language publication who tried to sell me on ad space a la the Village Voice (but presumably in Spanish), causing me to miss a highway exit on the way to my sister's wedding. My own research seems to bear out that people in New York lose lots of things: cameras(!), laptops, wedding rings (why you took it off in a cab might be a good question to ask here), but more than anything, they lose pets. All sorts of pets.
I do admit that I took some solace in the missing items that were more valuable, theoretically speaking, than mine.
All the while, I'd give anything to have my plain old Lomo back. The first Lomo I ever owned was stolen out of my car years ago on a Sunday afternoon. This one seemed to have better bearings, and until last week, I never had to involve the police in its dissapearance. I have ten rolls of film I've shot throughout the past year, and I'm on the fence about getting them printed.
What if it makes the loss of the Lomo okay? And what, pray tell, if it doesn't?
