61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Hooksexup's videogame blog: Little Big Planet reveals itself to be truly and wholly insane. We go crazy with it.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian 90210 braves new levels of incomprehensibility while we skip the debate to get drunk. Tuesday is saved! Plus: Hef's harem loses a bunny and SNL continues to ruffle feathers.
Scanner by Emily Farris Today on Hooksexup's culture blog: We put our politics where our boobs are.
PERSONAL ESSAYS
posted 3/10/2008
promotion
If I seem like a killjoy, it's only because I see little value in taking a bazillion posed, poorly framed and lit photographs, with the purpose of creating fake memories. And I think excessive documentation is particularly tainting in romantic relationships; it's made them seem less authentic, a bit too implausibly lovely, a little too ready. Whenever I'm dating someone new, friends immediately ask to see a photo of us together — they assume I captured on film the transcendent magic of dates one through three. They want to know why I don't already have his photo as my screensaver to prove that I'm head-over-heels. Forget about the actual experience of coupledom, an awkward, non-linear affair that's hardly ever picture-perfect. I find over-documenting relationships to be like showing too much skin — the unrecorded knowledge of what's underneath should be part of the allure, not something you can upload and crop until it's flawless.
The next evening Alexy and I visited my friend at the Googleplex. Sergey and Larry had gone overboard on design: a huge model airplane hung from the ceiling, cubicles were made of inflatable tents. Alexy wanted to document himself in the vicinity of all of it: sprawled on a beanbag chair in the play area, eerily staring through the glass phone booth illuminated by florescent lighting.
I didn't know what to do. He was so immensely focused on creating fake memories of our trip that our actual experience was lost — particularly mine, since I was watching the whole thing through a viewfinder.
I shivered in the car, watching him demonstrate his personality flaws in real-time.
But I couldn't tell him he was acting ridiculous, because this is what people do now. The tourist haunts were filled with Alexys: dads holding up camcorders for forty minutes at a time, walking slowly with the gadget in their outstretched arms like a Frankenstein sightseer. We passed the office of a Google employee who'd hung dozens of photos of himself with famous visitors, creating a wall-sized montage: Google guy with Bill Clinton, Google guy with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Google guy with celebrity after celebrity. Alexy positioned himself in front of the wall and asked me to take his picture.
My patience broke on the way back from Google. Alexy wanted to stop so I could shoot him standing next to the Golden Gate Bridge, despite the fact that we had photos from the other side. Now it was cold, and I didn't have a coat.
I dutifully clicked, documenting the lack of fun. Except his camera had, shockingly, run out of batteries, and I couldn't make mine focus at night. He fiddled with it. "Shoot. We need to figure this out."
"Alexy, I don't think we need to figure this out. It's the most photographed place in San Francisco. We can buy postcards."
But a postcard wouldn't work in the iPod slideshow he'd make when we got home. He continued taking photographs with my camera for another ten minutes while I shivered in the car, watching him demonstrate his personality flaws in real-time. At home, I uploaded the photos, and realized there is one small benefit to overdocumenting vacations: In the few photographs with me, I'm grimacing and clearly annoyed; he, of course, is wearing the same goofy grin. Our body language is horrific, our hips pointed in opposite directions, like two strangers smooshed together on a bus. You can watch the relationship fall to pieces, frame by frame, in brilliant high-resolution color.
It was all over a week later. He ended things, perturbed by my inexplicable hostility to his need for infinite self-portraiture. "You know, I've been picturing where I am in my life right now . . . " he said by way of dumping me, but I already knew — I'd caught the slideshow. n°
Hear Arianne talk about the tricky task of writing about her exes. It's on the Hooksexup Insider blog, here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Arianne Cohen's work frequently appears in New York, Life, The New York Times, Marie Claire and Popular Mechanics. She is the author of Help, It's Broken!: A Fix-It Bible for the Repair-Impaired. Her latest project, The Tall Book, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2008.
