genuine vintage in the annals of C

The intangibility of life these days may be represented by the simple task of switching computers. With a fresh-out-of-the-box PC on the dining room table and another at the soon-to-be-usurped place on the computer desk, it’s time to start moving the relevant files across and clear out the hard drive. With a tendency to prioritise eating, drinking, socialising and pretty much everything else above such onerous tasks as backing up the computer coupled with an ability to name and store files extremely illogically, I have recently had the joy of having to sift through folder after folder of old stuff. The funniest things to see are my forgotten happy snaps pre-iPhoto/Aperture library. There are random photos with incoherently numerically classified images sitting in unopened folders, it’s as exciting as digging up a time capsule. Some images were taken with my first digital camera and for some reason then, I was fond of date and time stamping my photos. I regret it now but they make a funny reminder of how time have changed (cue violin).   It looks like tragic college video-art but it’s an ‘actuality’ of sorts. I was in a Melbourne hotel and had taken tranquilizers to go to sleep. I was a chronic insomniac then and took them on a regular basis although I was told that I behaved bizarrely in the few minutes before I fell asleep. I wanted to see if this was true while I was alone so I proceeded to administer myself with the regular dose andwent on to attempt to set up a camera by my bed. The action of finding a place for the camera became a rambling clown act. Unfortunately, I filmed myself on a tiny camcorder that used a video format completely incompatible with anything else. I captured some still images of the footage back in Sydney and then threw away the tape. I consequently awoke after only a few hours of sleep the next day, went to see an 11am session of Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (now one of my favorite films and most certainly my favorite director) and for the first time in my life felt physically ill from watching something disturbing, in this case, the bathroom scene (the one with the razor not the hand-job). I got up and stumbled out of the darkness, only to fall straight to the floor. It was when I had woken up several moments later, still on the floor and alone (it was an empty cinema), that I realised I had fainted for the first time in my life. I went to the bathroom to wash my face, but as soon as I saw my reflection in the mirror I promptly fainted again. I remember slowly regaining consciousness with my face planted firmly to the cold tiles of the toilet floor. I was unable to get up and disgusted at the thought of lying on the unhygienic surface but simultaneously hoping no-one would come in so I could remain that way. I also remember getting up and being amazed at how green the skin on my face was. I looked really bad and really weird. So I took a picture of myself. I was feeling nostalgic about film then and developing and printing my own rolls, so it wasn’t a digital shot. Was it with the 6×7 or was it my old 35mm Canon? Now if I find a scan of that moment, that would be a most outstanding find in the tedium of clearing out this blasted hard-drive.