I was on a train this a.m. with an iPhone, which is the devil’s plaything–meaning a very handy tool for wasting time. On this trip, I played with the question of whether to “sharpen” a photo or otherwise alter. I find this type of decision difficult, especially when working on the tiny screen. Sometimes I can hardly tell the altered picture from the original. Can you? Hmmm….
Dear Steve, thank you for catching me the moon. Thanks for letting me put it in my pocket.
More than than that, thanks for equipping me to somehow see it better.
Yes, I know all about being here and now. (I know about it as a concept at least) And I know about the barriers the digital world makes to the real world. (Very very real barriers that can definitely get into this woman’s way.)
And yet, and yet…when I look at that moon with iPhone in hand, I really do look at it. And yes, I know I could have done that through a regular camera, but I never did.
And now I do. I joyously ponder and snap pictures of the moon on the same implement that was just used to speak repeatedly to the woman who’s helping my aging parents (my dad fell, but he’s okay), the same implement just used to send emails to my boss (no, I didn’t finish everything I planned) and the same implement used to check the exact name of Rilke’s wonderful poem ” The Lay of the Life and Death of the Cornet Christopher Rilke,” which reminds me of Rilke’s beautiful descriptions of soldiers’ faces as they speak of home, and, well, somehow, I find myself taking even more pictures of the moon, and really really valuing then.
So, thank you, Steve, and goodnight, Moon.
Pearl, Nature, Butterfly, iPhone
Yes, yes, I know it’s undoubtedly a character flaw. (At least this is the implication in the side-long glances, ahem, glares, I’ve been getting from certain family members.)
And it’s certainly not very zen.
But the fact is that I’m addicted to electronic gadgetry.
Not TV or gameboxes. (I think I may be combining X-boxes and gameboys there). The communicating kinds–the ones that you mis-type little messages on.
Sometimes, I really do make do with an old-fashioned composition book, but I also have been carrying my iPhone or iPad around with me a lot these days, even on little hikes in the country (where I am staying right now.)
It’s terrible. I know that when I am taking these walks, I should probably just be in nature.
But electronic gadgets feed something very ravenous in the ManicD personality.
The obvious: a hunger for words–our own, those of others.
Even more important, a need for purpose, possibility. When you carry around an electronic device, you know that at any moment you can start and perhaps even complete some not-yet imagined task. It may also be a completely imaginary task–did you really need to respond to that email just when you were passing that small waterfall–still, having that warm little radioactive slab on your person can grant some palpable glow of self-importance.
I’m thankfully moving a bit beyond this aspect of the gadgetry. Using the device to ensure non-stop availability can soon make you feel more harried than efficient. (I also don’t have very good reception here.)
Did you know, however, that you can download and carry around a poem on the screen of your iPhone or iPad, which will show up even when you have no service, and that then you can look down every few moments during your walk and memorize it?
Okay okay. Some of you may not have taken a vow to do anything (other than giving up wine at dinner) to salvage your remaining brain cells. Some of you (i.e. my husband) may not think that repeated glances at an electronic screen and mumbling even deeply poetic lines promote the contemplation of nature.
So, how about using your phone or tablet for photography? You are required, after all, to stop and look at what you photograph.
Yesterday, for example, Pearl and I and iPhone spent a fair amount of time on butterflies, beavers, water, stones. Some internal quiet did, eventually, ensue, despite the device in hand, the repeating rhymes in the head.
The family members also forgave us.
I’d like to blame it all on Steve Jobs, but the fact is that I was a bit of a rule bender even before I constantly carried a little portable camera on my phone.
In my defense, I don’t bend rules that make sense to me–I’d never walk on struggling grass, for example, or let my dog hinder the health of a city tree. But, lately, when it’s come to non-flash photography and museums (especially museums without competing post cards), I’ve found it a little hard to follow the straight and narrow.
It started in Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay where one buys a single pass to about six small town museums. I really enjoyed these museums, several of which were housed in Colonial buildings and showed wonderful artifacts and reproductions of artifacts of Colonial life or depicting Colonial life, especially when I could take little photos of them (as shown below.)
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Though there was also a sense sometimes that town curators were pushing just a bit too hard to give visitors their money’s worth. Take, for example, the Armadillos in the natural history portion of the Museo Municipal (otherwise devoted to Colonial furniture and armaments), the stuffed Caiman under a table and the framed 1950’s poster of the evolution of canine breeds.
This feeling of an overly-pushed curatorial envelope was intensified at the teeny Museo del Indios in Colonia, which primarily displayed shelves and shelves of stones, some of which seemed pretty certain to have been used in native slings. (Fine. I liked the rocks. But none of them looked like they would be hurt by non-flash photography.)
Maybe this past arbitrariness was what put my teeth on edge today at the much more sophisticated Malba, Museo de Artelatinoamericano de Buenos Aires. Or maybe it was the head lice. (One of my family members picked some up in a youth hostel and we have spent some portion of this trip making sure that they were all ALL gone)
Both factors came up in the context of a beautiful drawing by Rodin. The Delousing of the Siren, I mean, Toilette de la Sirene.
The drawing, part of a terrific Works on Paper exhibit, begged to meet my iPhone. But I had already been advised by one very handsome and incredibly fashionable museum guard on a lower floor, a guard whose coiffed hair and bored expression seemed ironically calculated for a shoot, that photography was forbidden.
The guard at the works on paper exhibit was also handsome and fashionable. I was not even certain that he was a guard, until he looked up from his cell phone and began to focus on me, at which point, a quintessential guardness seemed to come to the fore. (I smiled. Probably a mistake.)
Although, to tell the truth, he may not have been focusing on me at all. The fact is that the Rodin drawing also hung in the only room of that exhibition that had an upholstered bench.
What to do? As I walked into the other rooms of the exhibition (he stayed on the upholstered bench), I tried to figure out how to turn off the clicking noise on the iPhone camera. ((I ended up with several photos of the floor.)
Every time I walked back to the Rodin, there he was. Should I pretend I didn’t know the rule? It wasn’t like I was carrying a yellow card from the first guard, but, at a certain point, I seemed to have smiled just too darn much, and I couldn’t somehow snap.
Finally, we went to a completely different floor and exhibit–Christine Pippa, a woman who makes rather political art with laminated meat and dessicated cow’s blood. I was going to settle for a surreptitious photo of the meat, despite the effect on my stomach, just to get some of my own back. But the first guard, the one who had actually seen me with the camera, had been moved down to this lower gallery, and I’d still not figured out how to turn off the iPhone’s clicking noise.
In short, I gave up, until back in our room, online, on the Malba site, I found it—-La Toilette de la Sirene! A much nicer photo than I could ever have taken.
What makes it even better: everyone’s heads (and consciences) are clear.
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