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Physical Graffiti

Much as I seek these days to live in the present, in the physical world, doing so plays to few of my strengths. I have bent fingers and sore joints and a shoulder I can't sleep on to show for forty-odd years of recreational athletics, struggling mightily for mediocrity; though my liberal end-times post-petroleum paranoia has me out there in the fields battling drought (and now two days of rain; the beetles were back among the beans yesterday afternoon but I sunk to my ankle in the muck, so they survived to eat another day, most of them); and though I am too cheap and too stubborn to pay somebody else to build a CD cabinet for me...none of that means I'm any good at making more than sawdust.

The truth has always been that I am most comfortable living in and around my own head.

This is why, I think, I am so strongly driven to defend physical culture from the digital world. The Lexington Herald ran a front page story on independence day announcing that the city's only photo lab was closing its doors, down from a dozen employees to the couple who owned it and were finally going to take a vacation. Alice Wheeler just discovered that they've quit making her favorite color film; David Wilds, who resolutely hand-prints the black and white images published in No Depression has spoken of his frustrations with film stock that has the same brand name, but different qualities, and which chemistry that has changed, too. If they still make it.

A with digital music, there may well be ecological benefits to doing away with film and the chemistry which processes it. I wonder how that is offset by the ecological costs of manufacturing and disposing of digital cameras and flash cards and all the rest.

One more example of the devaluation of hand-made, home-made work, regardless. Of personal craft.

As an art director I tend mostly to trust the transition to digital photography when it is made by artists familiar with and expert at creating physical prints. Picasso could draw before he exploded the conventions; those who followed him seem, to my limited eye, less in control of their lines, less able to master the craft before splattering it. Generations which now take up the digital camera as an extension of their computer, innocent of the craft which once preceded it...some of them will produce challenging, deeply resonant work. Eventually.

If photography survives as a real skill. If it doesn't become the base art from which images are manipulated. If stock agencies don't put every young photographer out of work entirely. (We don't use stock photos in ND. We use promotional images, yes, for convenience, cost, and historical record. But no stock photos. I think they're insulting.) The art director is already expected also to be a typographer, and most haven't a clue (don't get me started on kerning again, you'll all be bored silly), nor are they gifted spellers and grammarians. And an illustrator. And a photographer. An interesting study in de-specialization, or the dominance of software. Or the gathering disregard for the printed word.

And yet there has been a knitting craze, there remains a slow food, locally-grown produce movement, house concerts continue to provide sustenance to some musicians, and people will pay $250 to see the reunited Police in some huge, anonymous building with a stage so big the tenuous trio don't really have to bump into each other unless it's scripted.

I was raised to think "cheap" was a pejorative phrase. My mother used it to describe shoddy merchandise and shady women, and she made the word sound dirty. Cheap cannot be the highest virtue of our consumer society, not if quality of life really matters. Not unless we can all be taught that vegetables have no taste and the fastest distance between two points is the only meaningful journey. Not unless we're prepared consciously to cede all our power and choices to major international corporations.

And I'm not.

I'm not ready to grow and slaughter my own chickens, nor to let a gun in the house, nor to hang all of our clothes out on the new line we installed on the back porch.

But I sure am looking forward to picking blackberries this weekend. If there's enough sun.

Posted by grant on July 6, 2007 10:40 AM | Permalink