shot a couple rolls of film today, gradually confirming my hunch that film photography, and black and white in particular, really has become an utter waste for someone like me. i don’t know who needs to use that medium any more but it ain’t me. alas, i’ll stick with it for the next week or so or as long as it takes me to burn through these piles of film i impetuously bought last year.
a funny thing happened today. i was trying to find something to finish a roll of film. i didn’t want to leave a 36-exposure roll with 34 shots on it. that gets annoying. so i looked around, looked around, and spotted a sign that said END. that’s my favorite street sign, i think, with the exception of the sign that has two arrows pointing in opposite 30-degree angles. the sign signals that there are two lanes ahead, or a fork in the road. there is something adroitly phallic about that sign.
so with END i ended the roll of film, with 2 more shots following.
i got slightly inspired about my web business today after randomly spotting a web site of someone who does what i do, but who is far more sociable and open about her practices. i don’t mean that i keep anything secret (the public Internet is no place for secrets) but she is pretty much all out there with her livelihood. one of the reasons i think about abandoning this livelihood is hte solitude of it all. i don’t know anyone who does what i do. i don’t know anyone who does anything close to what i do. so a spark of recognition is enough to motivate me somewhat. as i’ve found in the past, though, a little bit of direction is a dangerous thing for me.
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i am really depressed about Rainey Park. it’s a little oasis of sorts, especially at the bottom part by the waterfront. it is there that one can feel like nothing else exists, becausee you cna not see or hear anything of Vernon Blvd. behind you. Alas, that escape is going to vanish as the waterfront gets paved over and converted to bike lane. that park has been blessedly devoid of bikes, but when the lane comes down to the waterfront i predict the bicyclists will get impatient with the lane and ride right over the grass, tearing it up.
in the meantime the park is off limits to the tax-paying public until at least July.
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i felt different shooting pictures today. i didn’t care if people noticed. some days i am timid nd self-conscious that someone will see me shooting a picture and point at me, shouting out at me, accusing me of theft. photography is theft. i wouldn’t disagree with that. some day i’ll get caught.
i think that if shooting film makes me feel less dangerous, or less vulnerable to the immediacy of picture-taking’s possible impact it is because it is film. the images can not somehow blast off straight from the camera into the gassy space of a global computer network. the travels of a film photograph are deliberate and anti-viral. the assumption that these images will be easily duplicated is less assumed than with digital.
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my mind is a confusing ramble-tamble of thoughts, memories, and ambitions. some things are wet with the dismay of failure, others gleam like the Rheingold amid the squalor of disorganized turmoil.
i thought of Vivian Maier today. the Chicago-area street photographer who left boxloads of undeveloped film from her strolls and rambles around Chicago.
her apathy for fame, nd for pursuing recognition, left her legacy precariously on the brink of oblivion. she was an accumulator, to be sure, but on the surface of the discovery she appears to have been a talented accumulator. some of us spend our full lives laying a foundation, but we never build on it. Some of us are seen in old age, conducting research at the library or on the Internet, studying and researching to our dying days, conducting study and analysis that is only useless. today i had a mild arousal of ambition. it was mild.
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i overheard wise words tonight. a 30-something man telling a 19-year-old co-worker “the old you get the more you’ll find that people need anger and they need to argue and fight. some people are starved for that.” true. true. one more reason why nice guys always finish last.
of my many character flaws i am starting to wish that being an asshole was among them.