twosday

back with the slr

a few charming things about taking photos with my dad’s pentax mv:

it makes everything look like the 1970s.

the impulse to capture on film with such a clunky thing means i don’t use the pentax very often. which means that a single roll can encompass more than a year for me. which means that i have no idea where the following photos were taken.

if this city looks familiar, i’d appreciate the help in identification. sf maybe? chicago?

finally, light and shadows are cast in dull (as opposed to vibrant) ways. colors shift in corners where i don’t think they should. like a layer of instant nostalgia. ah, the 70s.

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musical imprints

in the past year i’ve accumulated three cousins, an aunt, three nephews, and two nieces in vancouver. a veritable L family gaggle. i drove to vancouver for the nephews’ and nieces’ birthday party, bearing toys for the boys and flowers for the moms.

in L family fashion, the kids weren’t allowed to have their cake until they’d played games and sang songs for their guests. the song selection was excellent, if a bit dated. or excellent because dated. my nieces and nephew crooned 1930s standards and cowboy songs favored by their grandmother, who was in attendance. it reminded me that i probably have my mother to thank for instilling an appreciation for doo wop, simon & garfunkel, and neil diamond. johnny cash, billie holiday, and louis armstrong aren’t bad aesthetic bases to start from either.

15 years from now, when my nephews and nieces hear “help me make it through the night,” they’ll be catapulted back to these sunny moments in their backyard, next to their father accompanying on acoustic guitar, their voices echoing through a ten-year-old amp: a 1940s country dance hall moment transposed onto a scene of filipino immigrants outdoors, on the grass, in the pacific northwest suburbs.

tulips, two cameras

i was able to catch one of the last days of the tulip festival an hour north of seattle, and finally broke out the cameras. i suck at macro photography. perhaps i had better luck with the slr, though i won’t know for awhile. where does one get film developed anymore?

the fields were predictably more dramatic than the gardens, which were overrun by children groping at the flowers — a $3-a-head, well landscaped playground. the fields weren’t perfect. boasting only row after row of four types of tulips, they weren’t any less planned for consumption than the disney-fied gardens, but there was a sense of a sweep of flowers. there’s some joy to be had in quantity and density, i suppose.

—

i’m not one for gardening, though i enjoy a pretty, sweet-smelling flower as much as the next person. more so, i enjoy many sweet smelling flowers in one place, with the simulation of their naturalness (of course they grow in rows! of course each petal is perfect!).

this is to say that i’ve no sufficient horticulture fetish, so that it was uncomfortable to be walking around these massive flower beds as mostly latino hands started to pluck flowers as if these workers were part of the exhibit, and I could find some humor in their cavalier style of quick picking and slinging over their shoulders. one couple watched them work sort of reverently, whispering to each other, ‘they’re picking the best ones so that they can sell them.’ the worker walked swiftly down the row toward the couple, swiping individual tulips here and there. when he arrived at the end of the row, in the road where the couple stood, i heard them ask for confirmation of their speculation, but couldn’t hear his answer. i only saw him unceremoniously dump his large bunch of tulips near their feet, which seemed to leave the older couple looking a bit dumb. he turned around and walked down another row to start another round of tulip plucking.

the joys of accumulation

npr’s morning news aired a series last week on debt. the second installment related the story of ms. love, a woman $21000 in debt who, with the help of a debt counselor (also interviewed), has made several sacrifices to start climbing out of the red.

this is clearly the individual, atomized counterpart of the large financial crisis. i’m sure the story and series are meant to give listeners a sense of how americans are dealing, and perhaps to assure the listener that she is not alone in her financial woes, and that it’s possible to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

love’s is a familiar story, familiarly related, and as such could use some investigation. if i were to begin some loose cultural inquiry into the segment, in the posing-of-a-how-question style of my advisor, i might ask: how do the questions surrounding financial crises — and thus the focus of responsibility — get turned from the state and collective responsibility to ‘what did you do wrong in your life’? how does it become atomized, and why do we allow it to?

there’s some difference, some affective work done, in the focus on the individual’s shouldering of responsibility, admittance of guilt, taking on of shame. the end result is a displacement, of course. any anger we might aim at large, face-less corporations and at the federal government for mis-managing their finances, for espousing socially immoral credit practices — this anger gets displaced onto our fellow citizen consumers for their inability to manage their own lives.

we might find this in the style of the interview, the manner of questions, the relationship on display between the counselor and the financially irresponsible. the woman is slightly ashamed, put on defense (and yet not defensive) when questioned about the accumulation of her credit cards. when it is revealed that she has whittled her debt by one-third in the span of a year and a half, the pride in her voice validates everything she had to give up to gain these steps toward financial independence, including her own home and presumably most luxuries. and in turn, the counselor is imagined beaming at this pride, matching love’s redemptive pride with her own sort of motherly pride, at having put another pilgrim on the path to (american) progress — a validation of her knowledge, of the economic and socially liberal frameworks that animate her job, her life.

the initial line of questioning about how love got into the bind she’s in rings of a sort of financial confessional. rhetorically, i see where the radio host is going — she tries to establish that love’s problems are common, the woman is like everyone else, trying make ends meet … and yet she’s also an extreme case that is difficult to wholly identify with if you’re the average npr listener (she is black by the sound of it, without the possibility of productive participation in the economy because of disability, and even potentially unproductive because of how deeply in the red she is.*) perhaps as a result of the paradoxical simultaneous market necessity of debt and the social unacceptability of excessive debt, the woman and her responses are shrouded in equal parts shame and the corollary feeling of hope and pride produced out of the redemptive process advocated by this particular radio segment. she has to be a bit squirmy about the question of how she came to have 11 credit cards. she’s forced to defend her consumption practices (’we didn’t just go out and buy a big plasma tv [with the credit cards]’), a line of questioning that aligns her with the welfare queen of the 80s, abusing another source of money. under the veiled accusations of financial indiscretion, love has to acknowledge the neutralization of her productivity due to her disability, and then explain that she was on state funds and still — still — could not make things work for her (and if there’s any obvious entry point for criticism of the state, it’s here, glossed over of course. but i don’t think this is the only or even most productive entry for such criticism).

in her shame, we are to sympathize, and perhaps for a moment during the show we might feel like we could have done (or already do) better. most importantly though, we feel shame through the ways in which we identify with her — overspending, over-reaching or taking advantage of our access to credit, essentially gorging when we shouldn’t be. but we feel no indignance at the wide availability of credit which isn’t just a matter of a free market, and we feel nothing for her lack of help from the state that would virtually force someone to use this credit as a last resort.

—

*(but we know that this system of credit is indeed what makes this whole market system work in the first place, at least this current iteration. that is, being in debt, according to liberal social/moral philosophy is bad! and yet it’s necessary in the very mechanics of the market as we seem to know it. my lack of economic knowledge keeps me from further articulating anything clearly about this.)