The Way Back Machine

Originally Posted Wednesday, June 5, 2013

I bought an old Diana camera a loooong time ago before they started making them again.  They were/are plastic cameras with a single plastic lens and hardly any controls.  You just put in a roll of 120 film rated at 400 ASA/ISO and went outside on a sunny day.  There are approximate focus controls on the lens barrel and you look through a little plastic window that should give you a very vague idea of where you are pointing the camera.  When they were difficult to get, they became all the rage with fashion and fine art photographers.  And because they are naturally imperfect and grungy, I just had to have one.  I ended up with several because that is the way I am.  Online, I learned how to prevent light leaks and get the maximum grunge quality from the camera.  I got some gaffers tape and taped up all the seams and started taking pictures.  Eventually, though, they began making Holga cameras and there was a fellow who would modify them so that they gave you the same grungy pics with less trouble, so I bought a bunch of them.  The Diana got put on a shelf where it sat for not quite two decades. 

Things on shelves become invisible after a while, and the Diana sat where I'd put it for all that time.  I know, I know.  I still have feminine products in my bathroom drawers that are from the same era.  But last week, I picked the little aqua and black camera up and saw that there was film still in it, so I took it out to finish the role, then I took it to the camera store for processing.  Crazy.  There was a picture of my ex-wife.  I'll post it sometime without identifying her, but she was a petite blonde, what my friends referred to as a "pocket model."  The photo was taken just before she told me she wanted a divorce.  I remember the day I took the photo at the beach.  It wasn't very much fun looking at the photograph. 

Here is another picture from the role almost twenty years old.  It is a photo of a friend's little girl.  She is ready to graduate from high school now, I think.  I can't be certain because they were better friends with my wife and she got them in the divorce, and they are smart and won't let me around their daughter.  Stop it.  That's a joke, sort of, at my own expense. 

The images are rather cool nightmarish visions.  I want to use the camera more.  I want to use a lot of cameras more.  It is good to capture the past this way.  I wish I could develop twenty year old film every day to be surprised by what "was."  I am infuriated that I didn't do more. 

But the past is falling away faster than anyone can capture it.  The largest hotel in NYC, the mid-town Hilton, has just gotten rid of room service.  Other hotels are now expected to follow.  I rarely use room service because I am not wealthy and it is such a big ripoff, but I always felt better knowing it was there.  I want it to always be there and to be an elegant relic from the 19th century.  It has always been for me something to aspire to. 

Elsewhere, vandalism in the National Parks is rampant.  Social media, they claim, is responsible.  People can paint over rock paintings and post it to twitter or instigram instantly.  We have given people an over-abandance of self-worth, apparently.  Everyone's a rock star with instigram.  So the past is not just drifting away but is being painted over and chopped down and otherwise destroyed by the children of postmodernism to whom we taught that all things are equal in value and that preserving hierarchies is simply a way that those in service of the master narrative can maintain power.  You can do the same thing with a graphic novel as you can with a Shakespeare play. 

Goodbye, old world, goodbye.  Old Diana cameras can never save you.