lend me ur eyes 073
[ 02 / 02 / 24 ]
The man sat opposite me on the tube has bought a new steam iron and his purchase isn’t bagged. He is resting it on his knee. To me, this lack of concealment is a tremendous gift––like those generous people who don’t draw their curtains at night meaning that when you walk past their homes, you can see how they have set up their lives inside. The man looks pleased with his iron, and I can see why. It looks like a good one. For whatever reason, I am overjoyed by this most boring slice of life that he is sharing with us other passengers, whether purposefully or not. Looking at the product and then up at its owner leads me to spiral micro-stories in my head. He must have a job that requires the ownership of a suit, of which there are now actually relatively few. Or if not, he may need an iron for a specific purpose: a wedding, funeral, or some other formal event. What he is wearing now doesn't seem to have required an iron, but perhaps the use of one is imperceptible, meaning that he always looks effortlessly and continuously box-fresh. I haven’t ironed anything in many years––or really even thought to––but it is feasibly something I could do. I could become one of those guys who fastidiously iron their t-shirts, a crisp, clean-cut guy who strides, crinkle-free, purposefully through the streets. I see people in the world or on the internet and I then have impressions of who I am now and visions of who I could become. I see them in me, and me in them. I could be a guy who bakes. I could be a guy who reads fifty or more books a year. I could be a shed guy, a metal detector guy, or some guy with two dogs running off one bifurcated lead. Some guys that I see stick and become a part of me, so much so that they no longer seem like things that others do but instead things that I have always done. Others leave my mind, or drop off after a half-hearted trial attempt at mimicry. Life is very long, and also impossibly expansive in even the most mundane of ways. I could be so many guys, but instead I am mostly just me. Steam iron guy looks back, probably wondering why I am staring at him so inquisitively and thinking that he should have paid for a carrier bag. He gets off the train. There are so very many guys. I will most likely never see him or his iron again.
PLAYING
I bought a Game Boy Camera from Walthamstow CEX recently, just to mess around with. The above images are a selection of those that were saved on the cartridge, taken by the machine's previous owner and exported by me. The game's save data tells me he is called Jason, and that he was born in 1987. I believe the top picture to be him. Given the birth year and the fact that the Game Boy Camera came out here in 1998, I'm assuming the device hasn't been used since the early 2000s when Jason was about thirteen or fourteen, and that these images must have sat on it for the twenty or so years since then, until Jason (or his mum?) found the Camera somewhere and sold it on to CEX. (There is a more identifying picture, a selfie with a clearer view, but I haven't included it here because Jason is a stranger now, and was also a child then, after all.) Launching the device, I didn't expect anything to be on it because the idea of wiping a product before passing it on has become so commonplace you expect all secondhand electronic goods to arrive blank. So loading it up and seeing these images was honestly a little creepy, partly because films like Ringu or The Blair Witch Project have codified the idea of found material as being inherently cursed, but partly also because the subject matter (crows, creepy cartoon characters, and, inexplicably, a trip to Stonehenge) and the low-fi, digi-distorted aesthetic combine to make something a bit uncanny, even hauntologically eerie-weird.
I've read about people who have a penchant for this sort of thing, finding rolls of 35mm film that were shot by a previous owner but never developed and then getting them processed in order to see stolen snapshots of someone else's life, and I can definitely see the attraction. (For instance, I love Nate Scheible's Fairfax, an ambient record made from laying musical compositions over heartbreakingly candid audio love letters that the artist found on a cassette in a thrift store.) It is kind of thrilling to stumble upon something you perhaps shouldn't have, and also to discover that the finding is of a real quality or value. The ethical questions that arise around this stuff are always a bit charged, but I guess you could argue that once something goes on sale, its contents enter the public domain. I would definitely consider Jason's creepy collection of images outsider art of a sort, and I don't think the nineteen images he chose to retain on the system's memory are random. (To be clear, nor do I think they are some kind of omen or hex, though there are certainly some aesthetic parallels with someone like Junji Ito there.) I'm sharing some of the images with you now because of the very real possibility that Jason wanted them to eventually be seen. It would have been easy enough to wipe the cartridge, but there seems to be something intentional about the images, like there is some unfinished story here to be told through the artistic selfies, arrangements of stones, and weird cartoon characters rendered in 128 x 112 pixel PNGs. Back in the '90s, you couldn't easily export and publish the Game Boy Camera's images, but it is much easier now. Jason's compositions, given the (admittedly very ahead of its time) hardware's limitations, are very good, and the images are striking, particularly that one with the birds. I see no way in which I could feasibly get these images to Jason, so I'm deleting them now, leaving this newsletter item as their only trace. Maybe in their place I should take my own glitchy pictures, leave them on the system for two more decades, and then put the device back on whatever the secondhand retro market is in 2044?
PERSONAL
Here are a selection of my own photographs. These are from a roll of Portra 400 I just got developed that was taken using this fun point-and-shoot I got off eBay (Canon Sure Shot Supreme) last year. I'm still not sure what I want from photography, but I keep fiddling with it because it is alluring and because there is no greater excitement than getting a roll back and seeing what you've got. I'm not hoping for technical mastery, but I do want to eventually take photographs that look good. I like the idea of full manual, but I don't want to do the work; instead I like the shortcut that a point-and-shoot with flash and autofocus offers: the look without the labour, an image––at the very least––for every shutter press. Mainly I'm after documentation, a substitute for memory that I can look back on later in order to remember where we went, what we did, what we looked like, who we were then. From this roll, I've taken out any pictures with people in, leaving a nondescript series of upward-pointing photographs that I took one sunny day in November while listening to Tirzah and walking around Milan.
lend me ur eyes is a linkdump of what i'm into month by month: music, books, games, movies, and other internet detritus, with misc editorial misgivings in the intro. lend me ur eyes friends, so that i can see.