2014-06-11

Metapsychology




I have had those unprocessed films for years; I kept them hidden in a box to avoid feeling guilty. 2 of them belonged to a school friend who entrusted them to me for processing. That was 25 years ago. I don't know why I never processed those miserable 2 films because at the time and many years after that, I was always processing films, I always had the chemicals; perhaps the fact that my friend went to Japan for a year and that we sort of lost touch afterwards explain my negligence. Perhaps, I had processed her films and those were something else entirely, some of mine, perhaps the best pictures I had ever taken were on those films. On the whole, I hadn't a clue about what was on those films and I gave up on them, I threw them in the river in a shamanic ceremony with chanting of "you will not dwell upon the past, you will have no regrets and the unknown you will not fear".
All in all, in was a very emotional moment, I had not open a 24X36 film for 15 years perhaps and I had forgotten how tough the little devils are. I took time to show my daughter what the past looked like.
These I did because I was looking for some old films to put into my little MJU Olympus camera. I have about 30 B&W films I have kept all this time just in case. Most of them are years out of date, but I'll have a go anyway, thinking that poor quality film will always be better than nothing. I want to fill a photo album. I'm fed up at looking at images on my computer.

2014-06-09

2014-06-04

The Waste Land





Since having a go at making sense of T.S. Eliot The Waste Land, I have become mildly obsessed with mythology. Like myself, Eliot was a snob - while  he had reason to be, I'm still trying to unravel my confused self…
What I saw in this, I'm not sure, chaos, alchemy, iron, gold dust, the compass of love, the cosmic mountain…
The fact is that my toilet lock/door handle is definitely busted after a first repair a year ago. This metal dust is all that is left of one essential mechanism part. Now I have a good excuse to go lock hunting in all the salvage yard in town (one and counting) instead of filing boring MA application forms on-line.