What if you spent less time worrying about which of the things you like is cringe and just liked those things more intensely instead?
I’ve always liked cautionary tales like House of Leaves because they reminded me of me and the need to check my obsessions, but as all true believers will tell you, there’s something religious about excessive devotion.
We started talking about that because I’d just come out from giving a talk where I’d mentioned my feeling of kinship with James Acord, the artist born in the year of “Hiroshima” (just like I was born in the year of “Chernobyl”), who spent the rest of his life wrestling with what it meant to make art in the atomic age; I said that I saw myself in his obsessiveness, totally forgetting that “obsession” was in itself a shared interest.
The word “worship” came up several times. Given the company I’ve been keeping lately, it is absolutely refreshing to be militantly cringe.
These are what I’m very loosely calling “camera tests” of an idea we’ve been tossing around, which may or may not ever pan out, who knows anything about anything anymore anyway?
The first is taken with my old Canon PowerShot that I found on my trip to Lebanon before last; the second is from a $3 AliExpress purchase that I snagged before the will-they won’t-they tariffs kick in, because there’s a trade war going on and you can’t afford to be neutral on a moving train.
We didn’t plan to turn coffee and fries at Lost Lake into a shoot, but sometimes the ideas just line up effortlessly with the circumstances we find ourselves in. And no, I haven’t watched Twin Peaks, okay?