Roll the Cameras
A little flash backward/a flash forward/some flash fiction, and here’s where we’re at:
It’s 1993. It’s my first acquaintance with what it means to be working at a factory, vicariously…and that’s enough. I’m 13 and devastated. My artist father has all but given up the Dream. By necessity he’s taken employment at a cookie factory—mindlessly repackaging Nabisco from one perfectly good package to another “variety pack”… it may sound hardly like work at all, but it’s intensive labor. Eight hours a day pounding feet across concrete to the partner tempo set by the conveyor and the Q.C.’s figurative cracking of a hot whip: Faster!! Hustle!!! And everyone in the dim lit disco shuffles, lifting stacking, performing an age old dance to the heavy metal of the machine. Through gritted teeth. And they do dance—grabbing moments in between, my father tells me, to break into song and extraneous steps and laugh as best they can—trying to reclaim a little personal freedom and dignity, no matter how costly the singe of reprimand …
Lights flash in my mind. It’s like a warning sign. In this Silk & Wool factory—are we making good? Exploitation whispers: the silk worms, the sheep, the people from the street… high end commodities only upper echelon sees. Price tags credited; interest never repayed… interest compounding; compounding second by second. I catch my breath and my mind spins—do we dance and laugh and sing—in this corporate cage we’re tethered in? And we do—for the sake of our sanity—for keeping in touch with an individuality that seeks release—for all of Humanity…
It’s 2017. Let me tell you about the kinda factory a stone’s throw from here—where we make over minds. Does it sound sinister? Well perhaps, that’s how it is in our public schools. But take comfort in knowing that we are striving to subvert the system…the students and I and some of our staff. I’m going to tell you about the music we make in our Photo class. A little circumlocution in this write? You’ll have to understand that we are adamantly against linear thinking and things like that… I’m subbing, hence am always on my way out—dispensable. Art being pushed to the peripheries per usual, the trend ever towards part-time “specials,” and to demands that art teachers teach gym as well—I kid you not. We have just one week left together and I know what the kids want. They’ve been rehearsing ever since we met…music making. They drop beats on whatever is at hand…tables, boxes, soda cans, with pencils or their bare hands. So that’s it: they choreograph and videograph. To their disbelief—they are guiding their own destiny as we're pounding out a rhythm in the closed sanctuary of the Art Room with dimmed lights and black drapes, loud, totally in sync, hands dance… and they ask me: “Is this still...Photography?”