Now listening:
Cat Power
"Metal Heart"
Live in 1998
Thinking about Xanga. Thinking about how I had emailed them so many times asking them to just delete my page because I was so embarassed by it but I couldn't remember the login info and I didn't have access to my old hotmail inbox. Then one day it was gone and replaced with some statement about the end of Xanga or whatever. In the last year or so I realized that I really wish I had saved all those posts instead of just being embarssed by them. Now I wish I had them and I feel like I let a journal I kept for years get thrown into a fire.
But then I think just as much about letting go as I do about holding on. I think about David Horvitz's piece Nostalgia and how I am horrified as much as I am in awe of the action, how I could never but wish a little bit that I could.
Nostalgia is an ongoing artwork started in 2019 that takes the form of deleting digital photographs from my personal archive. These photographs have been made on various digital cameras since the early 2000’s and stored on computers, hard drives and memory cards. Their subjects are diverse: ranging from personal moments, to visual note- taking as a mnemonic device, to photos used in artworks. (And some I just don’t remember or know why I made them, maybe from a drunken blur.)
When exhibited the artwork is presented as a digital projection. The photographs are exhibited once for one minute and then deleted. The number of projected (and deleted) images equal the number in minutes an exhibition is open. For example, in 2019 at La Criée centre d’art contemporain in Rennes, France, Nostalgia consisted of 19,080 digital photographs projected for a total duration of 19,080 minutes. If no one is in the exhibition at the moment a photograph is projected, no one sees it.
(The photographs become ephemeral like the moments they originally capture.)
The natural transformation of memories. Energy just gets recycled. Maybe something is lost by refusing to forget. Like always having the answer a few taps away. Imperfection in life, in the minutiae of everyday life, has come to feel painful because we are convinced that perfection is something real and attainable. It's only a few steps away if you know what you're doing and put in the work and listen to the right people and buy the right things. You must maximize everything, including time, in what feels like the only escape from the life of an average wageslave. But it all feeds back into exactly what we're trying to escape.
Everyone is always looking for an escape that by definition upholds the very system we want to escape.
The Cat Power trio of 1998 was a perfect combination of style and sound. Chan's cooly dispassionate strumming and downtown punkishness is at a confident high (relatively speaking) and Mick Turner snakes around with some nasty rattling guitar licks while Jim White, one of my all time favorite drummers, is holding it all down, unhurried and relaxed but powerful. I'm partial to the 10/10/1998 Starry Plough show (MP3 / FLAC).