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There are a gizillion songs out there about some themes- love, broken hearts, love of country, religion- heck, there are enough dance songs for an hour of dancing about Shabbat... So why don't people write songs about say, doing what you have to when you don't want to? Or heck, about breaking up when you're not the one with the fractured heart unless they're miserably vindictive? Or about the ambivalence of life? Or maybe I'm just not listening to the right things. If you've got any for the above less populous categories, or other good missing ones, let me know.
There are a gizillion songs out there about some themes- love, broken hearts, love of country, religion- heck, there are enough dance songs for an hour of dancing about Shabbat... So why don't people write songs about say, doing what you have to when you don't want to? Or heck, about breaking up when you're not the one with the fractured heart unless they're miserably vindictive? Or about the ambivalence of life? Or maybe I'm just not listening to the right things. If you've got any for the above less populous categories, or other good missing ones, let me know.
I was just looking at Alana's pictures from Hora Keff (http://www.lordalana.com/pics/photo_album.2004-08-31.2742545116/), and it was striking how different pictures can give one a completely different image of who someone is, or who they were at a particular point. It's easy to take one photograph as how someone looked around that time all the time, rather than how they looked from one angle at one specific second... It's too easy to generalize. But really, what else can we do? It seems to be human nature to generalize- we need to, in order to have any sort of a cohesive world view rather than little tiny images and ideas that don't mesh together to mean anything.
However, unlike one of my eccentric friends, I'd think that this would be more a reason to take More pictures than none. The more pictures you have, the more complex and therefore accurate a mental conception you can create: from enough angles and moments you can put together a fairly full composite. Whereas from nothing you only have a fuzzy memory sort of picture. And I know that my memory is pretty inaccurate about some things- not faces, but height certainly. When I don't see someone for a while, their height tends to sort of morph in my mind to be closer and closer to my own. So folks who are significantly shorter seem taller, and those who are taller are shorter than their actual height in my memory. It just becomes a sort of non-issue: not part of the image. Although remembering images is funny- I feel like I'm seeing them without actually seeing them- almost like there are a series of screens, and if they're recent/particularly vivid memories, I can throw them onto a forward screen with some concentrated effort, otherwise they default to a screen that feels somehow farther back, and less like regular vision. ALmost like I'm more feeling the image than seeing it. ANd yet they're accurate in some sense- when I saw Greg this summer I hadn't seen him in 4 years, and I recognized him immediately. Admittedly he looks almost exactly the same. But still- I don't have pictures of him to work from as reminders. It seems like a very different sort of visual memory than ones working from photographs: those at a certain point get overlayed with memories of the photographs, but that fades after a bit. And then they're just good reminders: useful pieces of nostalgia. Do they weaken my memory? I don't think so- usually my strongest visual memories are ones that I don't have on film: they preserve another side of events and people than the more emotional ones that I'm likely to keep in my memory. It isn't like writing that weakens the ability to memorize, from what I've been told. It's a different file, a different sort of tool than visual memory. Maybe that's where I see the value in either very, very candid shots or ones where people have the time to pose.
In general, it's easy to be ambivalent about visuals. They're too easily interpretable in too many ways. Not like anything isn't, but I've always been baffled at how different different people's opinions of the same image can be- not just their opinions, but how they've actually seen it- or how they present it. I mean, it's easy to make that the usual philosophical question of whether or not we all really see the same things, or what if someone sees what we call green as what we call red- is it still green? But presentation is so much of how a person looks. I was looking at some more of Alana's pictures, and Rachel, whom I met at camp, and I have fairly similar builds- and we don't come off as looking alike, particularly, because we present ourselves so differently, and it isn't just the clothes. So I'd guess that we'd look more alike in pictures than in real life. I don't know- I don't think this is terribly coherent. I have a point, but it isn't quite making it to words. Maybe later.
However, unlike one of my eccentric friends, I'd think that this would be more a reason to take More pictures than none. The more pictures you have, the more complex and therefore accurate a mental conception you can create: from enough angles and moments you can put together a fairly full composite. Whereas from nothing you only have a fuzzy memory sort of picture. And I know that my memory is pretty inaccurate about some things- not faces, but height certainly. When I don't see someone for a while, their height tends to sort of morph in my mind to be closer and closer to my own. So folks who are significantly shorter seem taller, and those who are taller are shorter than their actual height in my memory. It just becomes a sort of non-issue: not part of the image. Although remembering images is funny- I feel like I'm seeing them without actually seeing them- almost like there are a series of screens, and if they're recent/particularly vivid memories, I can throw them onto a forward screen with some concentrated effort, otherwise they default to a screen that feels somehow farther back, and less like regular vision. ALmost like I'm more feeling the image than seeing it. ANd yet they're accurate in some sense- when I saw Greg this summer I hadn't seen him in 4 years, and I recognized him immediately. Admittedly he looks almost exactly the same. But still- I don't have pictures of him to work from as reminders. It seems like a very different sort of visual memory than ones working from photographs: those at a certain point get overlayed with memories of the photographs, but that fades after a bit. And then they're just good reminders: useful pieces of nostalgia. Do they weaken my memory? I don't think so- usually my strongest visual memories are ones that I don't have on film: they preserve another side of events and people than the more emotional ones that I'm likely to keep in my memory. It isn't like writing that weakens the ability to memorize, from what I've been told. It's a different file, a different sort of tool than visual memory. Maybe that's where I see the value in either very, very candid shots or ones where people have the time to pose.
In general, it's easy to be ambivalent about visuals. They're too easily interpretable in too many ways. Not like anything isn't, but I've always been baffled at how different different people's opinions of the same image can be- not just their opinions, but how they've actually seen it- or how they present it. I mean, it's easy to make that the usual philosophical question of whether or not we all really see the same things, or what if someone sees what we call green as what we call red- is it still green? But presentation is so much of how a person looks. I was looking at some more of Alana's pictures, and Rachel, whom I met at camp, and I have fairly similar builds- and we don't come off as looking alike, particularly, because we present ourselves so differently, and it isn't just the clothes. So I'd guess that we'd look more alike in pictures than in real life. I don't know- I don't think this is terribly coherent. I have a point, but it isn't quite making it to words. Maybe later.
I was just looking at Alana's pictures from Hora Keff (http://www.lordalana.com/pics/photo_album.2004-08-31.2742545116/), and it was striking how different pictures can give one a completely different image of who someone is, or who they were at a particular point. It's easy to take one photograph as how someone looked around that time all the time, rather than how they looked from one angle at one specific second... It's too easy to generalize. But really, what else can we do? It seems to be human nature to generalize- we need to, in order to have any sort of a cohesive world view rather than little tiny images and ideas that don't mesh together to mean anything.
However, unlike one of my eccentric friends, I'd think that this would be more a reason to take More pictures than none. The more pictures you have, the more complex and therefore accurate a mental conception you can create: from enough angles and moments you can put together a fairly full composite. Whereas from nothing you only have a fuzzy memory sort of picture. And I know that my memory is pretty inaccurate about some things- not faces, but height certainly. When I don't see someone for a while, their height tends to sort of morph in my mind to be closer and closer to my own. So folks who are significantly shorter seem taller, and those who are taller are shorter than their actual height in my memory. It just becomes a sort of non-issue: not part of the image. Although remembering images is funny- I feel like I'm seeing them without actually seeing them- almost like there are a series of screens, and if they're recent/particularly vivid memories, I can throw them onto a forward screen with some concentrated effort, otherwise they default to a screen that feels somehow farther back, and less like regular vision. ALmost like I'm more feeling the image than seeing it. ANd yet they're accurate in some sense- when I saw Greg this summer I hadn't seen him in 4 years, and I recognized him immediately. Admittedly he looks almost exactly the same. But still- I don't have pictures of him to work from as reminders. It seems like a very different sort of visual memory than ones working from photographs: those at a certain point get overlayed with memories of the photographs, but that fades after a bit. And then they're just good reminders: useful pieces of nostalgia. Do they weaken my memory? I don't think so- usually my strongest visual memories are ones that I don't have on film: they preserve another side of events and people than the more emotional ones that I'm likely to keep in my memory. It isn't like writing that weakens the ability to memorize, from what I've been told. It's a different file, a different sort of tool than visual memory. Maybe that's where I see the value in either very, very candid shots or ones where people have the time to pose.
In general, it's easy to be ambivalent about visuals. They're too easily interpretable in too many ways. Not like anything isn't, but I've always been baffled at how different different people's opinions of the same image can be- not just their opinions, but how they've actually seen it- or how they present it. I mean, it's easy to make that the usual philosophical question of whether or not we all really see the same things, or what if someone sees what we call green as what we call red- is it still green? But presentation is so much of how a person looks. I was looking at some more of Alana's pictures, and Rachel, whom I met at camp, and I have fairly similar builds- and we don't come off as looking alike, particularly, because we present ourselves so differently, and it isn't just the clothes. So I'd guess that we'd look more alike in pictures than in real life. I don't know- I don't think this is terribly coherent. I have a point, but it isn't quite making it to words. Maybe later.
However, unlike one of my eccentric friends, I'd think that this would be more a reason to take More pictures than none. The more pictures you have, the more complex and therefore accurate a mental conception you can create: from enough angles and moments you can put together a fairly full composite. Whereas from nothing you only have a fuzzy memory sort of picture. And I know that my memory is pretty inaccurate about some things- not faces, but height certainly. When I don't see someone for a while, their height tends to sort of morph in my mind to be closer and closer to my own. So folks who are significantly shorter seem taller, and those who are taller are shorter than their actual height in my memory. It just becomes a sort of non-issue: not part of the image. Although remembering images is funny- I feel like I'm seeing them without actually seeing them- almost like there are a series of screens, and if they're recent/particularly vivid memories, I can throw them onto a forward screen with some concentrated effort, otherwise they default to a screen that feels somehow farther back, and less like regular vision. ALmost like I'm more feeling the image than seeing it. ANd yet they're accurate in some sense- when I saw Greg this summer I hadn't seen him in 4 years, and I recognized him immediately. Admittedly he looks almost exactly the same. But still- I don't have pictures of him to work from as reminders. It seems like a very different sort of visual memory than ones working from photographs: those at a certain point get overlayed with memories of the photographs, but that fades after a bit. And then they're just good reminders: useful pieces of nostalgia. Do they weaken my memory? I don't think so- usually my strongest visual memories are ones that I don't have on film: they preserve another side of events and people than the more emotional ones that I'm likely to keep in my memory. It isn't like writing that weakens the ability to memorize, from what I've been told. It's a different file, a different sort of tool than visual memory. Maybe that's where I see the value in either very, very candid shots or ones where people have the time to pose.
In general, it's easy to be ambivalent about visuals. They're too easily interpretable in too many ways. Not like anything isn't, but I've always been baffled at how different different people's opinions of the same image can be- not just their opinions, but how they've actually seen it- or how they present it. I mean, it's easy to make that the usual philosophical question of whether or not we all really see the same things, or what if someone sees what we call green as what we call red- is it still green? But presentation is so much of how a person looks. I was looking at some more of Alana's pictures, and Rachel, whom I met at camp, and I have fairly similar builds- and we don't come off as looking alike, particularly, because we present ourselves so differently, and it isn't just the clothes. So I'd guess that we'd look more alike in pictures than in real life. I don't know- I don't think this is terribly coherent. I have a point, but it isn't quite making it to words. Maybe later.
.