Toward a Sustained Environmental Experience
Or, shooting for constant and renewable pleasure.
How does my obsession with coincidence open to include trends of populist politics or consumer production, and does that count as coincidence when it’s clearly just indicative of larger social trends? When does it cease to be coincidence and start to become a basic navigation of multiple instances? For example, I started noticing Tea Party stickers around the neighborhood. When I’d seen the third one, I thought back on my experience of seeing the first two and I started to make a mental map of locations where I’d seen them. By the fourth, I started to feel that it was getting less personal; that I no longer owned the experience of connecting those things. It made me think of cheeseburgers.
The way that experience is mediated by the reassurance of constancy and repeated consumption… well, this is kind of a different thought, but it does deal with repetition of experience. Things do remain constant, which in product-terms makes me feel that I also remain constant. A hamburger in Idaho, a hamburger in Japan… I don’t eat beef, but it’s nice to know I could if I wanted to… How do numbers and copies help to make us feel, oddly, more unique? Do they reassure us that we have a sharable experience–that, though we each own each moment, we can also relate to others’ experiences (without having to share our meat)? If you lose your copy, you can always pick up another. Do you remember the story of the pet dog that was cloned?
Is it contradictory to see ourselves as unique, even quirky, when the variety we encourage in people (differences allowed by, or sponsored by capitalism and competition (democracy)) is no longer reflected in what we produce or consume, which is most enjoyable when it’s most predictable?
After seeing the Gadsden flags I went to a Tea Party rally on the lawn of a Meijer (the regional Safeway) in Northville (the regional American town), where I enjoyed a refreshing Mountain Dew. It reminded me of childhood. I was accused of being an infiltrator. It’s true that I was there to shoot video of the crowd and I had been asking provocative questions, which I fielded with a concerned and neutral stare, but I wasn’t pretending to be sympathetic, which is different. I’m working on a video about the color yellow, and about the coincidence of seeing their flags in my neighborhood– and that’s just one aspect of it. I saw one particularly unique handwritten sign–words tightly written to fit as many on the board as possible, like the note cards students use on math exams. I thought it was a beautiful sign, so I asked if I could see it — the guy was waving it to oncoming traffic, after all–but he called me an infiltrator and said I couldn’t see it. Then he muttered something about having to be ruthless. I felt strangely hurt, but I guess I shouldn’t have expected a welcome party.
There was, however, a nice yellow dog in the audience.
Snuppy~
