It Chooses You - Miranda July [27]
I clicked through all the pictures Brigitte had taken so far. What was looking for? I supposed I was looking for calendars. More pictures of calendars. And there they were. Everyone had them, and they were all hardworking calendars. They seemed weirdly compulsive for a moment, as if I’d stumbled on a group of calendar fanatics, and then I remembered that we all used to have these, until very, very recently. We all laid our intricately handwritten lives across the grid and then put it on the wall for everyone to see. For a split second I could feel the way things were, the way time itself used to feel, before computers.
Trying to see things that are invisible but nearby has always been alluring to me. It feels like a real cause, something to fight for, and yet so abstract that the fight has to be similarly subtle. When I was in my early twenties, making performances and fanzines and trying to conceive of myself as a filmmaker, I felt certain that this task was harder not simply because there were so few movies made by women, but because this felt normal, even to me. So I set out to make myself able to feel the absence of these movies made by women. I interviewed teenage girls and busy mothers and old women on the streets of Portland, stopping them and asking, “If you could make a movie, what would it be about?” I compiled their answers and portraits into a poster called “The Missing Movie Report.” Some of the answers were interesting, most weren’t. But was I feeling the absence now? Now that I’d called upon them, were these unmade movies changing me, like ghosts? The results of the report were inconclusive.
It was a similarly annoying question, but I doggedly asked each PennySaver seller if they used a computer. They mostly didn’t, and though they had a lot to say about other things, they didn’t have much to say about this, this absence. I began to feel that I was asking the question just to remind myself that I was in a place where computers didn’t really matter, just to prompt my appreciation for this. As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension.
I don’t mean that I really thought this, out loud; it was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn’t occur to me what wasn’t there. My appetite for pictures and videos and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immeasurable, how would I notice? It’s not that my life before the internet was so wildly diverse – but there was only one world and it really did have every single thing in it. Domingo’s blog was one of the best I’ve ever read, but I had to drive to him to get it, he had to tell it to me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could be found only accidentally.
Scientifically, my interviews were pretty feeble, as questionable as “The Missing Movie Report,” but one day soon there would be no more computerless people in Los Angeles and this exercise wouldn’t be possible. Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it’s not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren’t always easy, and they take so much time. In twenty years I’d be interviewing air and water and heat just to remember they mattered.
DINA
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CONAIR HAIR DRYER
$5
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SUN VALLEY
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Sun Valley was familiar to me; earlier that year I’d worked with a fabricator based there who helped me make a series of sculptures. I had driven through the area a couple