If you like them i wrote them. If you don't i've been hacked...
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I feel like I’ve been hired as an actor on an enclosed facility for demented people. As a labourer in a fake town dedicated to giving my boss the impression that he's a successful architect, instead of a man whose brain resembles Swiss cheese. We’re all facilitating this lunacy by being here, and by all of us I basically mean Christoph and I. Up until recently I was under the impression that he thought all of this was normal, and that this Sisyphean task somehow spoke to his prior life as an artist. But yesterday in broken English and clandestine DeepL correspondence I found a brother in arms. Or perhaps another inmate. “He’s unable to let go” he writes, I write back, “one man’s dream is another man’s nightmare”. And so the days drag on, in the midst of confusion. I’ve taken to calling the site, the gym, because all I seem to do there is pick heavy shit up and put it down again someplace else. Sometimes I move the same thing three or four times as though I’m rearranging a room for the bastard whilst he fantasises about the ways in which we might reincorporate a literal ton of rubble back into the building, totally ignoring the fact that the building is itself just a slightly more coherent pile of rubble. During my ‘interview’ he points to a precarious brick arch in the building more than once, it’s clearly a favourite. His voice softens imperceptibly when he talks about it. On my first day of work I knock it down. It being the only entrance to the full bowels of the site. It’s the first step I would have thought obvious to an architect. The next is covering the building once the roof that has been rotting for three years is pulled down. A point I try and make subtly whilst the clay walls in my backdrop literally wash away. In a bizarre attempt at compromise I build a roof that covers the top of the westerly walls but prevents the possibility of restoration, foreshadowing the ultimately pointless nature of my work. I’m saving what, for whom, for when? I’m a human digger, Imitating the noises. relying on parasocial relationships with the hosts of the endless podcasts I consume as I work, in lieu of actual company. Felix offered a week’s respite. He wasn’t getting paid so I took that as an excuse not to work too hard myself. I didn’t want him to feel guilty. Drinking beers and smoking cigs around the scarily large bonfire we lit every single night to clear the waste wood, he tells me it’s not so bad. Three beers deep on the job it’s hard not to agree. He’s older than me and tells me that having the place to myself, and managing the site, that I’m learning more than I expect, I’ve got it good. Well not good, but we’ve spent the past three hours throwing gasoline on wet timbers, daring the shocking ignition to leap back into the gas canister and blow us apart. It’s certainly getting more common for me to have some likely premonition of imminent injury before I do something that would totally justify it. I’m expecting to lose a finger in the coming months at least. I suppose it’s better than being in an office.
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Something dark is happening in the city tonight..
“Ich brauche Hilfe!” , he shouts into the open door of the bus to which the Slavic indifference of the drivers “no no no” blunts his desperation, and he runs off into the estate with a friend to what, I don’t know. Why were we even stopped there? not a hundred metres from where we were picked up two hours late, the recent amputee and I. He lost his lower leg in a traffic accident, and I wonder how long it has taken him to get back on the horse, to Frankfurt and on to Basel. For both hours, he sat in his wheelchair staring into the road, lighting the occasional spliff, and answering my questions cryptically in English that sounded better than it was. I even left to get a pint because the silence was overbearing, and found him exactly where I'd left him, a lighthouse lit between his lips. Now we’re both careening along the glitterball highway and I can hear the truckers talking to each other in my teeth, and when I do fall asleep I’ll be awoken by some jolt in the road bouncing my head off the glass into Paris and I’ll have to face my irrational fear of the French.
He’s staring at the back of my head the entire way to Frankfurt, unless by coincidence he happens to be looking straight at me every time I turn to check if he is in fact staring at me. “yes, yep” I think as I whip my head back around towards the seat in front. He seems to be rawdogging the whole trip, and the back of my head. He hasn’t looked at his phone once, and I'm not convinced he actually has one. I know he’s not a bad man, although by all accounts a very unlucky one, and we whisper a cordial, “goodbye”, “good luck” to one another as he hops down the bus stairs and into his mystery.
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Talking to Peter about my camera, and he’s just listening to the lens whine out, and then in, as he presses the on/off button. “Do you mind if I do it again?”, he says as he holds his ear up to the camera. “That’s all I need”, he says, grinning and stoned. Me too actually. Stoned and grinning that is. Peter tells really good stories, and because I like and admire the man, I try to tell some too. Mine are never as good, and betray a need to feel entertaining when I should just enjoy feeling entertained. What follows is not a story, but rather a rambling collection of thoughts I had reflecting on a journey I’ve taken with photos.
I used to take photos and never get them printed. Just negatives and scans. Until, just over a year ago, I started going to a different developer. Admiring the skylark printed seven times in as many formats stuck to the window, I decided to start getting my pictures printed. Standard photo size. 4x6”. This was definitely a step in the right direction. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, it seems clear to me now that due to the logic of the medium, the result should be physical, not virtual. But I didn't go far enough. The printed pictures still sat in the same little folder I got from the developers. Always the same, regardless of developer, since at least the eighties, regardless of decade. And in there they sat, faring no better than the scans on my computer. I must have gotten the idea of photo albums from my grandma. I often instigate, and never tire of flipping through a photo album with her as she points to grandpa's dad, my mum when she was my age, someone’s wife who’s the son of someone else… “They’re dead now”, she’ll say.
I was going to flea markets a lot last summer, rifling through another countries' junk, and finding a lot of photo albums. But not a lot of empty ones. I suppose it is quite understandable that the seller isn’t interested in literally disposing of their own memories. But it is a little awkward for the buyer who, the seller must presume, will be binning their family later, or worse, ‘treasuring their memory’. I was never able to bring myself to purchase a photo album full of someone else’s memories. I wouldn’t want to have to burn them. Not whilst knowing full well that one day my album will sit suggestively in a crate, posing the same question. In the end Grandma gave me an album. With sleeves ‘standard photo size’ and no room for captions. I didn’t expect to like it, but fewer choices means less pressure, and I’ve enjoyed filling it out and seeing the photos full bleed next to each other, becoming more than the sum of their parts.
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| A Polaroid attached to the staircase of a bar with two men drinking what appears to be whisky sours. Both incredibly handsome, although one slightly more so, winks at the unknown viewer. The man on the left has a slightly reddened face, which upon first glance, appears to be from inadequate sunscreen, but is actually due to a gluten intolerance and previously consumed beers. A picture of an unknown woman’s mugshot hangs to the right. The caption under the photo of the boys reads, LIAM + JAKE 4 EVER. They would never meet again. |
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Chess club is being held at the official club room, instead of the wood panelled cafe this Friday. We enter the small dimly lit room with chess themed inspiration posters on the walls, that say threatening things like, “In a noisy world make your moves silently, until it is time to say checkmate.” All of which are in English, and probably indecipherable to the children the club caters to. Wilhelm von Ottos’ booming voice is disagreeing matter of factly with the teacher's assessment of the computer's analysis of the game being projected on the wall. W.V.O* as he is affectionately known behind his back, is worthy of initialisation largely due to his otherworldly presence. The subject of legends whispered in hushed voices at the back of tournament halls. Rumoured to have beaten a man by opting not to wear his false teeth and drinking a large coffee, his opponent unable to focus on anything other than the large wet stain emerging upon his shirt under his regularly wetted and dripping moustache. I can personally attest to his twice yearly shower, having experienced both the musty regularity of his person, and the eye-watering intensity of his aftershave after a wash, obviously intended to last the next six months, and strong enough to literally telegraph his presence through walls. He is of course, very good at chess, 1700 ELO for those that makes any sense to, and by his own admission does nothing else but watch, play, and analyse chess games. And yet he is not the clubs best player, and is regularly bested by a socially well adjusted doctor that drives a BMW.
My own chess playing is characterised by an ability to blunder any conceivable advantage away. Blundering in chess, as in any other facet of life, is a move with zero redeeming qualities and obvious negative ones. I play them to keep myself grounded.
* in German this is pronounced phonetically as vee fow oh
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