Love Machines
i pass on from the mall to the multiplex. At the cinema i meet my oldest friend G. Love, the projectionist. He says in six years of showing ten screens a night he only noted one or two really good movies. Now, it's become just a job. He's very angry at the government and the society it fosters, particularly the 'child Support Agency's extortionate tax on romance, which has hit G love particularly hard.
This is the blunt end of things, not the metropolitan kaleidoscope of cools (we) know 'in town', but the weekend mega mall where folk from all over coach-in, two-by-two, to run-up more credit and fulfil the obligations of their social strata.
Gigantic as the mega mall is, it's always hopelessly overcrowded. The roof is glass and tall plants and waterfalls imply an Eden or oasis. It's a Busby Berkely interpretation of heaven for those who live to shop.
My vision has been tinted by glancing at Edward hopper, and when i see G Love he is lit from above by peach white light. We converse in a short, dog's-legged corridor with grey plaster walls and deep turquoise and red details lifted straight from 'Usherette', 'Gas' or 'Nighthawks'.
G love is wearing a uniform black waistcoat designed to evoke the history of his trade and the golden age of Hollywood. He wears spectacles and his silver hair sculpted into a standard barber's window cut.
When i leave, i order a cab to meet me outside the multiplex and thus am forced to wait for twenty minutes facing the cinema with my back to the vast, filled car park. This area is lit by the welcoming lights of logos and hoardings, and a queue of shuffling couples reaches off to my left, far away into the darkness. Immediately in front, shorter qeues bustle and buzz around the ticket office and it's plate-glass-protected mothpiece-microphoned sales girls.
i see no-one else here alone, everyone is in pairs, it's Saturday night at the movies. i think of the advertisements that i viewed through G Love's booth window, ads for aftershaves and alcohol, all blatantly sexual in their convincing imagery. i see the queue of couples leading far-off into the dark, and car after car arriving with more. i think of the mall with its crowds of extravagant young families, i thinks of the ads for drinks and aftershaves, i thinks this is crude, this is plain, this is habit, this is a machine, a love machine. But maybe i've just grown cynical?
i thinks of the photographer Weegee, outside, and above it all, awake all night and asleep all day, swooping like an owl, wired-up to police transmissions lie a hungry bat, revealing what hides in the dark with his catatonic blinding flash. i thinks of Jeff Wall, i thinks of David Lynch reconstructing banality to inflate the mystery beneath the comprehended surface. The surface of Saturday night.
i think of Peter Bogdanovich's 'Last Picture Show', celebrating and indicting poor mid-West towns as microcosmic. And john Steinbeck observing a radical shift in history -the point where a dream was implanted for some and a nightmare began for others. What Walker Evans called 'drifters' we call 'travellers' and 'crusties'.
i thinks about Hopper, and how, whatever your political sympathy, you must first begin with beauty and work your beauty hard, so though it gets corrupted, it grows strong and established in your vision and in your palette. Photographers, writers, sculptors and painters all have paalettes they refine and define. By aiming at beauty, the tales of your works will arise inadvertently and as slowly and gently as oil paint dries. This is the same for video as for stone, and the fact that some artist's works don't truly blossom until long after they are dead, is not an indivtment of the market, but a confirmation of the truthh of their living and of their relative position in time to that of their surroundings (duration).
The tales don't speak until the paint is truly dry. A century that is always anticipating more and the next has had to allay its expectations, and, in summing-up, concede that photography and its relationship with painting has been of crucial importance to the aesthetic development of both art and the mind. this, allied to the geographical organisation of culture into: rural, suburban, and metropolitan strata, as a map for storming society, place Hopper's works back into the arena for reappraisal and dissemination; but also, simply for admiration, as they grow to become archetypal illustrations of modern living -most notably 'alienation by industrialisation'.
These things pass through i's mind as i waits for the cab. i is self-conscious because i is not moving with the flow and i is almost on-stage in relation to the crowd. When the cab comes, i is relieved, i gets in the back seat and expects to drive-off, but after an awkward silence the driver says "just you on your own the is it?", i says 'yeah!' and only then can we leave.
End
© 1994 Paul O'Kane