Tuesday, November 14, 2006

I Am Formica

Memory as a function of film stock: how even the most specific, individuating features of a past--aunts lined up on a lime green couch, mom in her macrame poncho, gold-flecked formica kitchen table--come to seem interchangeable with those of anyone else about your age whose parents used the same Kodak.

Or music: that momement when your most formative bands, the ones you would have killed for, resolve into "early '80s", same Rolands and big drum sound, now a digital patch ("tube amp") in a menu of effects options.

Awareness of color as position on a palette.

4 comments:

Kasey Mohammad said...

Yes, one of the greatest postmodern ironies: the memories are lost in that they're supplanted by the micromaterials of the media that are designed to preserve those memories in the first place.

Ronald Palmer said...

I was driving route 1 south and I had one of those memories, I was listening to the radio, it was Elton John from the 70s or with Kiki Dee or something and I was suddenly playing with my sister's barbie in her fancy pink camper and I was in the commercial all plastic daisies available separately and California substitutes for wherever you're from because the East Coast belived in the sunshine and surfboards and blonde curly hair all silky on the nape of the neck.

Stanley Bishop Burhans said...

One nice thing is that when you remember something that didn't happen no one can take it away from you.

Unknown said...

I'm still looking for that Philip K. Dick filter in my copy of MS Word that turns my memos into "Martian Time-Slip" and then kills me at 53.
-Dan