Folkcal Fraim 3
The Very First Flat Screen Salesman / Times Square / TSE / 2014
A crossing is a changing (or a form of translating), so when you cross the English Channel, via Eurostar through Eurotunnel (also known as the Chunnel), the atmosphere shifts and you undergo a mental wash. The language, like fog or the misty literal definition of Auld Lang Syne, dissolves from English to French or French to English depending on the direction you’re traveling. Time travel, travel time and “the time it takes to travel” all mark the unraveling of motion. Traveling, then, might also be seen as translating, a re-clothing of the wordy motor skills of movement as they flow, high and low, from one world to another. Having a camera serve as a translator during such a rave allows the photographer to stare into time. To flatter and flatten it, to make a glass screen of both sides of its profile, to soap up an optical depth that self-rinses too frequently to be perceived by the current state of human vision. Face it: our vision is stuck in an age, in a year, in a cavity not wet enough to recognize the aspects of Atlantis all around us. And what we receive from beyond our minds into our brains, our head-seeds, fish-eye or not, is not all there is to perceive. And thus we are taught to see and are shown the things that the makers of eyes, those who grow and groom us, deem worthy of re-seeding. We speak what we see. Our seeing is what we speak. From a seed comes sight, slanted light. If you do not see in the same manner as everyone else, you are called a seer. The “r” is where the tripod will be after we lose our legs. All channels are seas, most diseased, polled and polluted.
To a camera, memory is just an information store in a slot, sliding in and sliding out — a card, a deck of cards, chip-sized and gigabyte-dealt. Thus the need for storage, and video’s capacity to rerun the purchases of reality in both minds, internal and external. If nothing else, the eye of photography, the camera, teaches us that we are always in the middle of a mind. The middle of the mind is what the Q-tip wants to reach. The nose poke is a pineal killer, an attempt to de-photosynthesize the silver-gelatin at the end of the roll. Like the debt implied by a contact sheet or a cancelled check, to what, then, do we owe light-sensitive knowing? Photographers are always at the mercy of their own hypnosis, and cameras know nothing beyond the stationary stillness of function. Please keep in mind that eyes neither open nor close; they are merely covered and uncovered, receiving external light or not receiving it. Eyelid, lens cap. What if it is the external light that blinds internal sight, and the internal darkness that blinds external sight? The dilemma of how to present the interior makeup of an object, organic or otherwise, as if it were as familiar (to the viewer) as the exterior makeup of an object might require a special effects integrity overhaul, or even a recall of those devices that have been successful in hiding the pictorial evidence that all bodies are worlds. Television, which offers also a way of seeing and, sadly, re-seeing the same seeing (or using used light) falsely mistranslates the language of our conversation between inner darkness / light and outer light / darkness. Television unravels the time within light and sends that light in both directions, inward and outward, across many channels into our reality. This could not have been accomplished without photography or video or water, the airwaves, the substance of electrical current. Every time we process a frame, we are (perhaps) being self-ravished by the rudiments of television. Even during daylight there is an invisible darkness in the space between lens and subject. We have not experienced complete light, nor have we experienced complete darkness.
Books begot radio. Radio and books begot television. Television, radio, and books begot computers. Computers, television, radio, and books begot smart phones, phones got greedy and got screens, and screens (remembering they were once the big photographic wallpaper of cinema) got brains in search of a self as in: “I Google, therefore I am.” A self-reflexive selfie study might be titled: The Descartography of Camera Phone Photography. The Internet, like the studio floor, knows we are made of organs that are also engines, veiled engines behind screens (the plasma versions of our senses) dependent on the faces of fingers. Surveillance, too, has its servants. Cameras you can program may decide for you from which side of the propaganda of perspective you view a photograph. Two eyes, twin lenses, the civil war of slightly different retinas. If an object is a thing standing in our way and in the way of its own emptiness, then not only is a code a sign system arranged in a regular pattern, but also a pattern consisting of rituals that invoke a prescribed reality. When I became a photographer, I agreed to behave according to the camera's code. Here I am mixing Vilém Flusser with the percussive iodine of yours truly because sometimes we need a lexicon of basic concepts to escape the up-high sunken place of the rabbit hole’s rabbit-ear antennae; and because sometimes one must simply avoid the loud traffic of the permitted protest in order to be purely revolutionary.
When I look through the view-finder, I don’t see / feel the same world I feel / see without the view-finder. The glass, the great-gaze-game of it and through it, officiates an activity that is an end in itself. It is an end that magnifies reflection, an end that prism’s the pictorial prison. Framed not scripted or of scripture unless, of course, I was an easy mark for the miracle of photography with all of its flashes, enlargements and revelations of reproduction. If the human body accepts the apparatus, the apparatus becomes something of a limb making it easy for the script of craft, an Art Scripture, to enter the Photographic Universe. Almost all of Western Literature, especially the novel, novella, and the short story, is scripture’d or attempts to be in an effort to add the invisible stuff of substance which can also be called the weight of the soul. As elusive as nuance is, it is still detectable when all our senses are engaged, which is why music hides itself in all art forms. The choices made by a photographer, where to stand, whether or not to kneel, to shoot up from the ground or from stairs above, to take the camera from the face and place it on his hip or head or, simply, to abandon his / her eyes are all results of the influence of music. One translates (not just) the self but the sound and image of the selves when one moves from the possibility of one self (the reality self) to another self (the picture self). These stages of nature are often called developing or processing or maturation. And no one or nothing, not pictures or people, can develop or grow without being soaked in water that is desirous of ascension. The fluid that leaves us, upward, is spiritual (shedding both youth and juvenilia); while the fluid that leaves us, downward, is medicinal (containing not waste but liquid healing). Battling time, the glossy prints from my childhood still shine. You can still see the water, the process of it, the slow evaporation of sharp focus, losing the fluid of focus, as those images journey back to the dryness of blankness.
The star at the end of Eurostar drops a double truth about the fabric of photographic paper, that sheet of tree that reproduces representations of life as it imitates the sky on which all days are printed. The day is but a light being to the camera-sky-eye. This is what the numb, oops, I mean, numbered calendar mimics. Write what you accomplished in the date-box on any calendar, then revisit the box in a few months and those words will have become pictures. Those dates turn days into devices. The sky clock and the technology of noon or noon day or noon night are all just too much for some folks. “What do all of those numbers mean?” is usually one of the first questions asked when showing someone how to use a camera for the first time. What the camera has gleaned from reality, analog to digital, is definitely a mode of math-humanity, a reset, a wash, a remote beneath the sea reloading the geographic tub. Photographs change the atmosphere surrounding the bodies they contain. Programmed into boxes by boxes, we are the contents of the day, the ray’s song hidden in praise song, the citizenry of “a significant surface of which the elements of the image act in a magic fashion towards one another,” (Vilem Flusser), the supreme fictitious inhabitants of the sun projected onto the work of Post-history. Ever wonder why stars are represented in the shapes of fish, starfish, when in fact stars look nothing like fish? They look like light, like light swimming through a lens, like shutter ghosts, schools of retina-less eyes, translucent in liquid. Nothing has betrayed the celestial sea more than CGI. There would be no channels without cameras, no changing of the station or register, no electric wash to watch, no product baptisms, no daytime soaps. No current, no wave, not a single broadcast and not a sea to see. No one to help you dress for the weather, the weather of texture moving through air, no weather channel, no mirror to place in a room, no symptom tom-tom drum to beat back into an automatic machine. No thunderous storm pounding the dome. No such room, dark or censored can afford to ignore the image pest strip of Ilford or the chemicals on the surface of a plaything pearl. Matter, a matte finish. Satin, a Saturn in a ring turning channels. Traveling, with camera, there is always a small TV screen to look through and, nowadays, a slightly larger TV screen to view. You may not sit above the beach and guard the lives of many wading lifetime actors or acknowledge the redundancy of tides in an epic poem about Greta Anderson, but the fact that you need a passport to pass over large bodies of water (or the land beneath the water) should tell you that some sort of ship is involved or that you, yourself, are (perhaps) no more than a constitutive element of astral gesture having a physical experience within a vessel of goods, or that you are the vessel of goods (or gods) and the carrier of important fluids, bodies of bodies, blood vessels, ancestral travel, the pictures in the blood, the mirrors and cells of Space, an ancestral television set sent to plug everyone in to the opposition of Photocapitalism.
On the Channel (or any channel), direction has more to do with facing the rise of memory, your moon-pulled memories, and not so much to do with the direction your seat is facing. Do seas have faces, do they face up or down? The reproductive organs of flowers face up. The reproductive organs of humans face down. The reproductive organs of cameras face other faces. When you raise a camera, people look toward it as if their attentions have been magnetically pulled, sometimes in pleasure, sometimes in disgust, sometimes in the in-between combination of both, a sort of entropy or the tendency towards numerous facial and gestural states. The same is true of when you place a plasma panel display in the room or above a bar. An eye can travel toward an LCD or away from it because (because faceless and facing in or out) the resolution in front of an eye is the same as the resolution behind it. Eyes are complete absorbers, not partially ionized gas orbs. Mars, a marble. Photography helps the past drown the present and the present resuscitate myth. It is thus, via myth-mory, one can enter or cross the Channel facing the severest version of seasonal ratings and protect one’s mind from the downpour of canned or photoshopped applause. White noise, snow, or the imperfect storm within a faulty picture tube. The more direct your TV, the more tubes there are to lie to you or to tie you in, like a test, or the channel surfing of non-multiple choice. Break a TV screen and there stands Babylon looking like a combination of the set of Metropolis and Dr Jekyll’s laboratory. Surfing is how the mind waves goodbye to everyone else’s dying. No channel ever completely washes the mind of the stain left by another channel. The chain reaction magic of the channel, not channeling, is that no matter how often you change it, it never changes. No scrubbing the info mind. No swapping out of one teleplay for another ever quite restores the realm of ontological existence back to its previous normalcy or normal way of low-earth seeing. “Don’t put me in a box” we like to say, but it is there (as constant occupants of boxes or sets and consoles) that original thought and the activity of creation, individual creation, is watered down to the quickest networks of weakness. Without water or washing, the thinning of memory (on the studio floor where the teleprompter makes language an instructional manual for obedience) nor would photography have acquired wings and have floated up into a flood onto satellites. Breast-stroking in thought, the hertz, a cycle per second, the washing we get when we over-watch or are watched-over too much. To wash a town, a whole town of washed minds, what Washington does. It burns itself, every flash, to ashes.
When we speak of brainwashing, we are speaking of those corridors and creases of the brain (often portrayed as lines and squiggles) that are carved by frequency like gulfs, bays, rivers, lakes, ponds, canals, dams, pools, and live streams that cause a gap between the truth on-the-ground and the truth in the air. Gyri, ridges. Sulci, grooves. We are also erecting an area where reality can be agreed upon without the influence of provocateurs or paid protestors. It is a gap that tells us that no matter where we wash our hands, a viral deception is waiting to remove the necessary bacteria that makes every image a foe of the false world. A germ-less photograph is like a neighborhood block without an immune system, a pane of clear glass that has yet to be assigned a position between one thing and another thing, a barrier that is easily broken by its own deceptive nature. Every digital image made or programmed is a version of reality that has infiltrated our world via us, via the assistance of our sensory programming, first, being pulled into the screen world and then the screen world, returning the favor by entering and replacing us, another us, in our world. Cells become the lords of celluloid aided by plasma-leaks and the Top Secret files and folders containing the formula for the production of blood. Is there a there to be-in in a camera, or is the photographic-place where an image is going (and where it has been), only ever in existence in a museum-like tomb here of varying mobs of pixels? Without the aid of the nose-like lens of the camera, could the screen reach out or abduct us with its lure of adding us to the panoramic pandemic mic-check with its promise of making the material of where we are, being down here, the material of rising and being there. The two most important lens caps in the word “Brain” are rain (which is Ra In) and A.I. both of which represent some aspect of the spiritual technology of thought or, should I say, ideas (seeds of the id), re-entering (as an App of nourishment) a very alive and geodesic dome. Dome is slang for head. Every lens contains a dome, the nose of its head. The glass curves like the top of a State Capitol Building (doesn’t matter which state as they are all designed the same and photographed the same) curving like a thing separated from the service and purpose of its other half. The other half of Television (and we have the non blinking camera-eye to thank) is reality. When TV entered us, we entered TV. We replaced ourselves with an avatar of our avatar, an actor of our lives that we could save, archive and re-march out any time we need the ridiculous solidarity of soft scenarios to be found in sitcoms. While being distracted by commercials, we didn’t realize that it wasn’t the Programming, it was the watching that was the washing, the constant looking for something to re-cord while unaware of the flickering emergency alerts between id-die-out birth box and willing viewer-victim. Photography does not desire to be a repeater station of this. Was it Samsung that admitted that its products spy on the viewers, “…a gateway for hackers to come into your home.” Gateway technology: the devices that divide us. TV is not just an abbreviation of television; it is nearly a brand-moniker-portmanteau of television, a symbol with numerical value. T is the 20th letter of the alphabet. V is the 22nd.
Here, then, is an un-washing of the brainwashing that comes from too much reading and too much watching: “Yes. I like to watch.” Those are the words of the character Chance, Chance the Gardner, Chauncey Gardiner from Jerzy Kosinski’s superficially scripture’d novel Being There. The most important occurrences in the novel are the death of the old man in the beginning and the death of the old man at the end. Chance is the vessel of currency that continues the old men. Coded and presented to the reader as an accident, Chance is abducted or transferred from one walled-in shelter to another. His whole existence has been infused with images from television and the experience of garden work. He has only known handlers, and when he is delivered to the (in real life) Biltmore Estate, he is given a series of public screen tests, after which his vessel is prepared to receive the entity known to the reader and filmgoer as Ben Rand. This makes Being There, both novel and film, a scarier and more esoteric object than advertised. It is an “Initiation Film.” If art is the flat screen of humanity (pretending depth) then genre is the flat screen salesman of art, the figure or mode holding the sign (with a message on it) in public and in private. Chance is put through a series of tests to make sure that his awareness never leaves the intellectual level of simple garden work, and that the public is programmed to receive his every referential comment as political metaphor. During his last test, he successfully and comically resists the sexual advances of Rand’s younger wife, EE, also known as Elizabeth Eve. The device he has used the most in his life, aside from garden tools, is a television remote and, while Eve attempts to sexually arouse him, he points the remote toward the TV, changing channels with an erect arm. Shortly after Chance has become something of a behind-the-scenes popular and enigmatic political figure, Ben decides to stop having transfusions, that his time has come to pass from one body of life to another. The hospital (or medical lab) at the mansion is not your average care facility. It is a high-tech occult transference center. Ben has more than likely been waiting for one of the safe houses, stocked with bloodline adult orphans and financed by a secret cabal, to have an available full body donor. Chance is a getaway vehicle or a get-back-to life vehicle, sort of an Officer Tippet to JFK. In many ways he visually resembles a clean white corpse on whom anything can be written. Chance leaves the funeral just in time for his walk on water to coincide with the body being interred. It is a rebirth scene. He cannot attend the full service because it is, partially, a service for him. The movie poster shows him in the air above the mansion, an upper-class sky walker foreshadowing his ascension. With his back to us, it is hard to tell if he is a banker or an ambassador or a one-size-fits-all member of the elite. In the film, Sellers utilizes the gestures and languages of silent cinema with humor and masterly patience. The film hides its cameras well, but they are everywhere and, like the novel, it is layered with very few flaws, however, with so many mentions (in the novel) of
TV (97)
Telex (1)
garden / gardener / Gardiner (97)
television (15)
televised (1)
telecast (2)
cameras (10)
film cameras (1)
cameraman (1)
channel (7)
screen (23)
scene (1)
images (17)
photographers (11)
photographs (3)
photography (3)
photogenic (1)
photowiring (1)
picture (4)
motion picture (1)
film (1)
flash (1)
flash-guns (1)
flashbulbs (1)
videots (1)
It’s a shame we don’t get a final shot of Chance’s face after he sticks his umbrella into the water. In order to resurrect a new Chance, the perfect Manchurian, Kosinski finishes off the character created by the TV Power Group with, “Not a thought lifted from Chance’s Brain. Peace filled his chest.” Like a channel, Chance has been changed. We can chant into him just as the reader has been made to chant into himself, TV, television, channel, cameras, screen. He is now as empty as an unloaded camera. He becomes the turned-on television set with nothing on, the thing to be pointed at, watched, aired, and rated.
I met Peter Sellers, Hal Ashby, and Caleb Deschanel when I was 15. They were set up in my neighborhood filming. I asked what film they were making and a man said, “I’m Hal Ashby. It’s called Being There starring Peter Sellers,” and I responded, “The Pink Panther guy!?” And he said, “Yes,” and I said, “Where is he?!” And Ashby said, “He’s standing next to you.” Sellers fooled me. I didn’t recognize him. He was pale, with very short hair, and did not look funny or what I thought an actor should look like. He shook my hand and I asked to be in the movie. And Deschanel came over (with the biggest camera I had seen to date) and Ashby said I could be in the movie if I went inside the playground, The John F. Kennedy Adventure Playground, and kept the basketball moving while Mr. Sellers walked by and looked in. I was thrilled! A few of my childhood friends were already on “the baby courts,” the courts for teens closest to the fence. The baby courts made us look like little giants. We dribbled, checked each other, shot, and fought for the rebound. It seemed like a lifetime, but only translated to 2 or 3 seconds on film. I was so busy trying to look good, I never heard Ashby say, “Cut!” The last words of the film are “Life is a state of mind,” but as if asleep in a photographic negative awaiting the demise of reproduction and rerun, the word “poetry” appears just once in Kosinki’s book.
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.