Four Ages
Inspired by The Three Ages of Wonderchicken and my birthday today, a fat set of files for your perusal.
The criteria seem simple enough on the surface: songs that “put me in the mind of being” a certain age. I soon found it was more difficult, because each of the ages (18, 28, 38, and 48) were quite complex. At eighteen, it was just before some really interesting events. I wasn’t very social at eighteen. I lived in the middle of nowhere around the corner from a dairy—adjacent to a potato patch—but with an excellent view of the lights of the city after dark. The wind and dust blew solidly, day and night. There was an iron Ben Franklin fireplace on a flagstone slab. Many memorable times involved The Burning of the Midnight Lamp.
The morning is dead, but the day is too
There's nothing left here to greet me, but the velvet moon
All my loneliness I have felt today
It's a little more than enough to make a man throw himself away
And I continue to burn the midnight lamp alone
Now the smiling portrait of you is still hanging on my frowning wall
It really doesn't really doesn’t bother me too much at all
It's just the ever falling dust that makes it so hard for me to see
That forgotten earring laying on the floor
Facing so coldly towards the door
And I continue to burn the midnight lamp alone
(Loneliness is such a drag)
So here I sit to face that same old fireplace
Getting ready for those same old explosions going through my mind
And soon enough time will tell about the circus and the wishing well
And someone who will buy and sell for me
Someone who will toll my bell
And I continue to burn the same old lamp alone
The hazards of doing this sort of thing on a birthday is that all the songs seem much more “angsty” than is really necessary. Things weren’t really that sad, it’s just the criteria of “putting oneself in the mind of” after so many decades tends to accentuate the atmospheric, rather than any specific ennui. At twenty-eight, I didn’t have that fireplace anymore. It was more like watching life go by from a car, or better still, from the heights of a plane. My first marriage was a year old; the rate of change was balanced by a wandering spirit moving against the grain. I took a lot of pictures of empty things—Roy Harper’s Twelve Hours of Sunset pretty much sums it up.
Norwood, MN
Two cabinet cards from Norwood, MN
Back in Minnesota briefly; another trip soon. Pictures in the same old place.
Worlds of Fun
Kansas City, MO
Tainted with Vulgarity
All discourse about photography takes on the artificial air of an exercise in rhetoric, because feelings or tastes are being engaged without being applied to their proper objects. Since it has not been properly socially consecrated, photography can only be granted value at the whim of each viewer, who, because he likes it and not because it is imposed by cultural propriety, may decide to promote it, as if in a game and in the space of a moment, to the status of an art object.
Thus, dedication to photography can only be maintained insofar as consecrated activities, like going to concerts or the theatre, museums or art cinemas, do not compete with it or devalue it. It follows that senior executives in Paris, who, as we know, play a greater part in cultural activities, practice photography much less often than senior executives in Lille. Similarly, while a higher proportion of the children of senior executives take photographs during childhood, the proportion who then go on to engage in an intense and fervent practice is smaller than it is among the children of clerical workers and junior executives.
Thus, out of a population of literature students, the proportion of photographers is always greater among the children of clerical workers and junior executives than senior executives, the reverse of what we observe with regard to the most consecrated cultural behavior (apart from membership in film societies). Similar competitive phenomena may be noted in other areas: if the proportion of television owners is barely higher among senior executives (35.8 percent), despite the differences in income, than among junior executives (31.5 percent), if ownership of a record player and ownership of a television are mutually exclusive, and if senior executives are keen to point out that they use television only selectively, this is doubtless because consecrated practices devalue less prestigious practices, and perhaps also because members of the upper class seek to distance themselves from distractions which are tainted with vulgarity by their very diffusion.
Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art (1965), p. 65-66
Different
Bella Vista, AR
A few hours after I passed through here, there were severe tornados that picked-up pick-ups and planted them on the roofs of surrounding homes. The owners weren't amused. There were 107 tornados in Missouri the same night; some of those lifted semi-trucks; I hope it didn't have much to do with my leaving. Of course, the scene was a little different back home.
Carthage, MO
Bee Discount
Touristic Attitude
While almost all photographers do their share of family photography, many photographers confer upon it other functions which are, in fact, only variants of its archetypal function. The intensification of photographic practice is very closely linked to holidays and tourism, but we should not conclude from this that all photographs taken on holidays or outings can escape being explained by the family function, or that the simple fact of an increase in the number of occasions which may be photographed is enough to determine the appearance of a practice vested with new functions. If the proportion of practitioners is higher among those who have summer holidays than those who have not, this is probably partly due to the fact that photographic practice, like the opportunity of taking holidays, is related to income, but also and particularly because of the fact that the holiday is one of the high points of family life.
In fact, the variations in the objective occasions for taking photographs which are linked, for example, to the length or the location of those holidays do not bring about any noticeable modification in the intensity of the modal practice, because this depends less on incentives such as the beauty of the landscapes or the variety of places visited than on socially defined occasions. Inasmuch as holidays are the occasion of more intense family relations (for example, for people who go to stay with their families) and more frequent social gatherings, it is natural that they should encourage the intensification of a photographic practice that has always had the express function of immortalizing the major events and high points of family life, so that holiday photographs generally remain photographs of the family on holiday.
Moreover, holidays determine the broadening of the range of the photographable and produce a disposition to take photographs which, far from being of different nature from the traditional disposition, is simply an extension of it: in fact, a practice that is so strongly associated with extraordinary occasions that it could be seen as a festive technique is naturally reinforced in a period which marks a break with the everyday environment and the routines of normal life. The adoption of what we might call the touristic attitude means escaping one’s inattentive familiarity with the everyday world, an undifferentiated background against which the forms momentarily separated from everyday preoccupations stand out . From that moment on, everything becomes a source of astonishment, and the travel-guide is a constant call to admiration, a manual of armed and directed perception.
Photography is what one does on holiday, and also what makes a holiday . . .
Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art (1965), p. 35-36
Rich Hill, MO
No Regrets Knives
Butler, MO
Butler, MO
