May Fowler among the chickens
As far as I can tell, this is my great great aunt, who possessed some serious rippling tresses. Look at her little boots! And the chickens!
I like old family photos that are a bit out of the ordinary. They let you get a glimpse that people were people, even then. Your great grandparents were silly, had sex, burped, cried, and had doubts and fears like all of us. The stiff formal portraiture of the past makes this hard to comprehend sometimes.
Ryan Rinker had this amazing picture of his grandfather and grandfather's friends goofing around in a very homoerotic way with a bayonet (I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that), all while dressed up in their army uniforms. Very strange and funny.
Once I was looking at pictures with Mum, my paternal grandma, and stuck right in the family album were pictures of heaps of dead bodies stacked like cordwood in some islandish place. They were taken by a relative who was in the Korean war, she explained. Then we turned the page and went on...to more pictures of mother's with babies and shiny family cars; my paternal great grandmother with her huge potatoish lumpy face like a man's.
Now it's not only photographs, we leave our mark digitally all over the place. The "Dead people on Myspace" website (and recent stalking murders started through web forums like Myspace and Friendster and Livejournal) makes me wonder how long things like this- blogs, personal websites, community forums, online communities, etc- will last and if or when they will become like graveyards. Maybe they should have an automatic profile deletion when the normal human lifespan runs out, or 100 years have passed. I'm not one of those tech visionaries who sees innovations in the digital future, so this might be ill-informed (and morbid) speculation. If so, please illuminate me. And don't say that soon we will all have the internet in our brains and we will be able to "jack into the mainframe" by winking our left eye. William Gibson is one of my favorite authors in the world. You can't pull anything on me.
posted by The Sensualist @ 8:54 PM
1 Comments:
I've been thinking too about the impermanence of the internet and the way it has altered media, not just wide-spread media like news, but also personal photographs, journals, art, etc... I was buying books for the store a while back and getting the privilege of seeing material that is so scarce and important I will probably never have such a fortunate opportunity ever again. I've been sorting through, poet William Everson's personal collection which contains the original, unpublished works, chapbooks and such of many of the beats and other great writers. While having the pleasure of touching chapbooks by these now famous writers, I was thinking about how some of my friends are just as worthy of the recognition many of the beats received posthumously or in their late-life. I wondered if their recognition would come in different form though as a result of the internet. I wondered if the chapbooks or unpublished journals would become extinct as generations become saturated with new technology and air their early thoughts, journals and works in electronic forms rather than on paper and in later hard-to find scarce copy because there is only one original only accessed if that one piece of paper and ink can be found, not just by typing author's name into Google or some unknown future technology that let's the world have access to it all right NOW. I've thought about the sadness and cheapening of art now that it is so readily viewed, but I also think that it is beautiful that I can see the paintings you post or hear my friend's music or read my friend's new poems before they are staple bound or xeroxed or bound in cloth. It's beautiful and it's decadent and it's sad all at once.
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