I didn’t see fireworks today, unless you count the sparklers my cousins were twirling this afternoon. And, thinking about it, I’m not sure I care. It was the first 4th in a while, it seems, that I wasn’t watching at least a few fireworks. I think last year my friend Mark and I drank several pints at a bar in Old Town and then saw at least a firework or two framed by the buildings on King Street. Whatever the case, I don’t mind not seeing fireworks. It’s like missing an episode of a TV show you and a lot of other people watch. They’ll have that spectacle to recall, you won’t. And life goes on without serious hindrance.
But I took a walk to 7-Eleven a little while ago. I heard only ambient city hum for a time. Then I came within earshot of a crowd behind an apartment building on the hill to my right, their hubbub, and then music as a backing track, no doubt pouring from the window behind the group which also donated a faint light to the scene. It was James Brown, loud: “Please, Please, Please” as I walked to the store, and “Night Train” on my way back.
Forget fireworks — that’s July 4th: having a good time with friends, and listening to a musical trailblazer who fought for real freedom.
What did I do? Rode out with my daughter and my parents to Rawley Springs, where I saw various family members for a gathering. These are the cousins on my mom’s side of the family whom I see every year at Thanksgiving and yet seem to know less and less about as time passes. They accrue history, and I have only ten minutes over mashed potatoes each year to suss it all out. The accumulated children and homes and jobs and deaths blur in the reflection in the gravy boat.
There were some newcomers this year, such as a thin and intense man with a twirly handlebar moustache who has repaired cameras for 31 years. In just two years he found himself repairing 95 percent digital cameras. And people now buy new cameras at a rate far greater than they did when cameras were analog, giving the repairer of cameras fewer opportunities to fix them and thus stay in business. Consider that digital culture may be a sham to drain us of our time and resources. Perhaps this is not lamentable, that repairmen are shuttering their windows and closing their doors. It is just how things go. But I like old cameras and their heft and solid blackness and shiny metal. An old camera could sustain a fall off a 90-foot cliff and still take a good picture — or at least the camera puts up a good front. But dropping one of these wussy digital cameras would surely mean its demise. And I like the interiors of real camera stores. I used to go to one in Vienna and it seemed more like a hardware or auto parts store than a place where devices similar to those deployed by Alfred Steiglitz and Man Ray are sold. Riddled with parts, carpeted only functionally, inconsistent lighting, a man’s workspace, no glitz but the romance of interiors, the guts of the cameras all on view. Compare that to Best Buys, with their interior aspects no doubt designed to seduce you into opening your wallet, and the helpful blue-shirted staffers roaming like a squadron of factory-issue droids.
All this is why I felt a little sad about what the camera repairman told me.
Read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space — it might tie into this.
