OPM (Other People's Memories), or, The "lucky bag" principle of aleatory record buying applied to photography

aka Why Do Some People Develop the Lost Camera Films of Total Strangers?

Amelia Tait at the Observer, er, observes this strange subculture of hobbyists who purchase rolls of undeveloped film and then develop them - sometimes getting a bunch of blank grey images, sometimes nondescript snapshots, but occasionally something weird or poignant:

"Those who sell mystery film often don’t set out to trade in the stuff, instead it’s usually picked up by chance at house clearances, inside old cameras or in charity shops. There are many tragic reasons why these rolls could have been forgotten about – divorce, death, dementia – and many mundane ones: film processing is expensive and it’s easy to set aside a half-used roll to be finished later and simply forget about it. Used film can sell from £1 to £100 on eBay, and more and more people are gathering online to celebrate their hobby....

"For Levi Bettwieser, a 33-year-old video producer from Idaho, an interest in forgotten film can be both expensive and risky. Bettwieser estimates he has spent “upwards of $10,000” on rolls of film over the past five years, and says he “can get 10 rolls in a row that come out blank” due to the film being degraded. “A couple of years ago, I was winning and buying every single roll of used film on eBay,” Bettwieser says. “There’s always a feeling of overall excitement that you might get something amazing, something historically viable. Or you might get more cat photos.” Bettwieser now runs a non-profit scheme, the Rescued Film Project, where he encourages people to give him their old rolls which he then develops. “Part of the reason I’m doing it is because I like the idea of being the first person to ever see these images; even the photographer has never seen them.”

It's a bit intrusive.... a bit peeping-tom-ish, if you think about it.

It's also archive fever finding a new zone to flex itself in - again the idea that everything deserves to be preserved....

“I love so many images for so many reasons,” says Bettwieser, when asked about his favourite photo he’s recovered. “I try and look at every image I rescue as if I’m looking at it in 50 years – everything I rescue is history. People hold on to rolls of film for years and years in the back of a drawer, because we all know that pictures are history, whether it’s just a birthday party or not. Pictures are our only defence against time, our only evidence, sometimes, that we ever even existed.”

Postscript August 1st - 
interesting thoughts on this subject from Xenogothic, who is a collector of such images and is drawn to them for their "alterity"- 

"The main thrill comes from seeing something radically out of context. The anxiety of the unanswerable question that haunted Roland Barthes instead becomes a perverse thrill — indeed, as it was for Barthes though he seemed reluctant to admit it.


Like an object found on the beach in a ghost story, the energy trapped in a photograph like a fly in amber is a special thing that is highly susceptible to romantic flights of the nostalgic subject and, as such, to find such things in the world of the vernacular image is far past the pale of cliche...."

Xenogothic also says that another place to find such images is record covers

ArchivFieber (death by data)

Here's a piece I wrote -  for the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel - tagged to the Find the File symposium   that I participated in last week in Berlin. 

I boldly, even rashly, tried (using internet translation machines in the absence of any knowledge of the language) to come up with a bunch of German-wordplay headlines myself. Among them were "Delirium von Dateien" and "Dasein und Dateien" (yes I'm afraid that is an attempt at a Heidegger joke). The newspaper came up with their own headline and I'm sure that was the correct decision. 

There is a longer version - about three times as long - of this piece which I may well post here at some point.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 

In 1975, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida published a slim, dense book titled Mal d’Archive. It would be lying to say I understand all of his typically abstruse argument, but what struck me immediately and stayed with me is the brilliance of the title phrase as rendered in English: archive fever.   I imagine it looks and sounds even better in German: ArchivFieber.  

The word impacts me like a miniature poem, distilling the essence of how many of us live our lives nowadays. Since the launch of broadband internet, a mania for cataloging, list-making, documentation  and commemoration has enveloped our culture – particularly affecting music fandom and consumption, but not limited to that region by any means. The total recall and instant recall enabled by search engines means that we live in a proximity with the cultural past that our ancestors would have found inconceivable. Open-access archives like YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, and Discogs are somewhere between a library and a labyrinth: you could get lost in any one of these for a lifetime.

ArchivFieber and “retromania” are interchangeable concepts really: you might say that one of the main symptoms of catching the retro-virus is coming down with ArchivFieber.  And the malady has made me a sickly being, whose memory is tattered, whose arms and fingers ache from daily races back and forth across the internet. I get temporal whiplash oscillating between different pockets of the past.  Like a practitioner of “check list tourism” I can barely retain any after-images from the musical museums and sonic monuments I’ve visited.  I’ve tried to cram too much in. I don’t want to miss out on anything, so I end up just barely experiencing everything.

Archivfieber is a transitional affliction: it’s particularly chronic among those who grew up in analogue-era conditions of cultural scarcity and have only partially adapted to the digital abundance. People – such as my children – who are digital natives don’t have the same compulsion to keep and collect: they might bookmark favorite things but they feel no need to own the MP3s. People from my generation grew up inside that gnawing need for more music than you could then afford to buy or to copy (given that blank cassettes also cost money). That’s how come an individual with my particular mix of curiosity, wide taste and sheer greed ends up with thousands and thousands of hours of music stockpiled in an external hard drive, vastly more than I could hope to listen to even once during the remainder of my time on earth.

People predisposed to obsessive-compulsive disorder could get just as out of hand in the analogue era, of course – trawling into their homes unmanageable quantities of vinyl recordings, books, etc. But the digitization of culture – through its removal of the limitations of storage space and the disincentives of cost – causes the mania to balloon to grotesque degrees. The fact that it is out of sight, compressed into the miniscule cubic space of a computer, laptop, or phone, conceals the disgrace from other’s eyes, but it does not alleviate the squalor of the cluttered soul. 

For sure, rampant music-libido is a form of curiosity and pleasure-seeking, and in that sense belongs to the category of life-affirming Eros. But something about the internet’s effects on music consumption habits pushes into the morbid zone of repetitious and near-automatic behavior.  There is a neurotic aspect to archival drive: a denial of mortality. “We buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them,” said Warren Zevon, adapting a maxim of Schopenhauer’s. The same applies to records and MP3s.

So far, I have only discussed the anal-retentive aspects of music consumption in the age of overabundance: the residual impulse to collect.  What about the “anal-expulsive” – the people who are compelled to share and upload? In some ways, this is more mystifying, the motivation for these manic sprees of generosity (an artists’s entire discography laid out on a blog for the feasting - a gift to complete strangers). Although I’m vastly more a taker than a giver, I too have felt this archivist-sharer impulse to digitize rare things– cassette recordings of pirate radio broadcasts from early Nineties London, B-side 12 inch instrumentals that no one else has yet thought to upload to YouTube.  There is a vague feeling of virtue attached to these acts of unofficial archiving. But also a neurotic completism: you are correcting sins of omission, filling in gaps in the historical record

How does the metastasis of online amateur archiving affect music itself? In two areas: the listening experience of fans, the mentality of musicians. Giving that time is finite and we all have other things to do, fans confronted with a surfeit of choice -  unlimited listening both in terms of current music and the history of recorded sound– must listen faster, or listen while doing other things. Nowadays, anybody with access to wi-fi is in the same position as only music critics and deejays - who were sent things for free – used to be. So they listen like critics and deejays: playing something once and never returning, making snap judgments after partial listens.  They give things partial attention: listening while doing the kind of multitasking that computers and phones not so much make possible as enforce.

As music streams into our lives like a mere utility such as electricity or water, people come up with tactics to “re-enchant the commodity” (which of course is no longer a commodity, but price-less and therefore increasingly value-less). Bloggers set themselves tasks where they listen to just one album for a whole week, or attempt to digest an entire artist’s oeuvre in a one giant bloc of listening. You can turn the internet into a sort of sedentary, stay-at-home substitute for the record shop, “browsing” its virtual racks and discovering things you never knew existed. You can recreate the thrills of scarcity by fetishizing the impossibly obscure, pursuing either the absolutely (and deservedly) forgotten, or the exotically remote. There are blogs dedicated to the state record company releases of folk music from various Soviet republics, to  African dance pop of the 1970s and 1980s that was only ever released on cassette and never reached the West…

As for the musicians, stuffing their sonic guts with an overly rich and various audio diet, well, inevitably they excrete a maximalist music whose aesthetic I term “glutted and clotted”.  In these overloaded circumstances, it takes tremendous spiritual strength and aesthetic rigor to fend off the inundation of influences and create any kind of distinctive sound-identity.

This stubborn mettle is also essential for critics and historians, not just of music but in any field.  The archival overload makes over-research irresistible. To be a historian or a writer of a non-fiction book today involves an inverted version of Hercules versus the Augean stables: a gathering in of masses of shit which must then be cleared away almost entirely. Researchers  have to summon the ruthless will to consign details, incidents and characters to historical oblivion, forcibly imposing a shape on the material.  We see a version of this steely will to narrativize in current affairs: the rise of meta-journalists like Seth Abramson, whose role is not to do original reporting on Trump, Russia, Mueller et al,   but to process and organize what is already out there in the public domain, constructing timelines and connective threads that rescue events and disclosures that have already slipped out of the public’s short-term memory.  They used to describe journalism as “the first draft of history”, but figures like Abramson are annotating and abridging what would otherwise likely be illegible and indecipherable to future historians.  The dark side version of this drive to create narratives amid chaos is conspiracy theory, those secular demonologies of causation. Indeed paranoid schizophrenia has often expressed itself through a mania for archives, esoteric knowledge, and grandiose system-building. 

If we’re adapting poorly to the vast and immaterial info-world we’ve built, it’s because for millennia the human sensorium was oriented around immediate surroundings and the present tense. It’s really only been a little more a century in which recordings (phonographic, photographic, cine-video, etc) have existed. In just a couple of decades, individual access to archives has become freakily enlarged even as the archives themselves have expanded astronomically, while the scope for personal self-documentation and self-broadcast has likewise swelled to be almost limitless. Yet we still have the haptic and present-tense orientation bequeathed us by evolution. Is it any wonder that our nerves are shredded, our sense of ego boundaries and memory grow blurry and tenuous, that personality disorders proliferate? 

As we say in England, you can have too much of a good thing.

collect your self

"Many collectors feel synonymous with the objects they collect and use them to derive or define a sense of self. Though they may not have any objective value, objects collected are seen as uniquely interesting or valuable to the individual collector. Thus as collectors accumulate large numbers of valuable items, they construct the sense that they, too, are valuable by association, i.e., 'The more of this great stuff I accumulate, the more I matter.... [Obsessive collecting] tends to arise out of one (or a combination) of the following three basic human needs: the need for a personal self- definition of worth, the need for a sense of life purpose (or meaning), and the desire for immortality."

- psychotherapist Gaelen Billingsley, quoted in this piece by music critic Dave Segal about the trauma of the loss of most of his record collection owing to dodgy removals company 

I have often wondered what would I would feel if by some calamity or other - fire, earthquake, etc - I lost all my records

I would be traumatized, but ultimately I think I would feel strangely liberated

the gift of existential weightlessness bestowed by chance

un-encumbered

because right now, all that cumbering lumber of vinyl - painstakingly accumulated, chased, 1000s of man-hours of pursuit invested and embedded in it, the sunk costs of time and libido and life-force pulsating dimly - it is all just sitting there, unused

it is hardly ever played (same goes for the similarly vast accrual of CDs, the cassette tapes also)

because if i want to hear something, it's so much vastly easier to go to Spotify, YouTube, a sharing blog (how often have I downloaded things I already own, simply because it's quicker than trying to find the bloody record or compact disc!), Bandcamp, Soundcloud, et al

so what is the point of keeping all this stuff?

(50 percent of which isn't even here, directly accessible, but in storage, in New York)

since i don't have the will, or the time, to part with it voluntarily - to convert it into useful cash, or even to just have it hauled off by some charity

an act of Fate would do the job, and perhaps do me a favor

not that i'm asking for it, not at all  -  i still am fatally attached to these things, to the delusion of ownership and the counter-factual delusion that "you can take it with you oh yes you can"

the lady therapist is right in implying that to collect and to hold on to things (which chronic obsessive downloading is still an extension of, and in which OCD patterns I'm still enmeshed, hunter-gathering, turning YouTube and Vimeo into audio files - a new frontier of exploration, new vistas of long out of print or never even properly issued in the first place - e.g. soundtracks to experimental films and animations) - to do that is a vote of confidence in the idea that you have enough time left in your life to listen to these things

to download - as I might well do in a particularly OCD day - more hours of listening than would actually fit into that day, in excess of 24 hours of listening  - is a reality-denying, finitude-refusing act of faith in an infinitely prolonged and expansive future for the listening self

as said much more pithily by Schopenhauer:

"We love to buy books because we think we’re buying the time to read them.”


Well that's another subject in itself -  the chronic collection of books. I have in excess of 200 that have come into my possession - bought, sent, found, got through my books-editor spouse - that i really seriously desire / intent to read, but are sitting them, in unruly stacks, in various places in the house, reproachfully staring back at me unread.

but the actual number of owned but unread books is probably much larger, distributed all over, on shelves, in boxes in the basement... things acquired during research binges for various books of mine own... things acquired in the Eighties and never read...

[sigh]

Another piece by Segal, on the theme of "I Collect, Therefore I Am"

Neil Kulkarni's R.I.P. HMV  -- nostalgia, analogue vs digital, record shop as shrine and sanctuary for the vinyl pilgim

and

The British Record Shop Archive (via History Is Made At Night)

"The record shop was once the centre of every music lover's universe, from the beginnings of the vinyl 12 inch in the
1940's through to the digital music developments of the 1990's, millions of us browsed, socialised and bought music
in our local record shop or high street department stores.  Record shops were an integral part of the social fabric in local areas.  They launched pop stars, record labels, and were focal points for emerging music genres.  The aim of this site is to record the history of the record shop in an accessible archive, to hold intrinsic details that could get lost in the mix, and to celebrate the role that the record shop played. We are looking for memories through stories,anecdotes, comments, photographs, videos, record shop bags, posters and more.    For example, what  was your first record and where did you buy it?"  

Looked in the Hertfordshire subsection of the East England section, but no mention of the little shop on Lower King's Road where I got my Scritti EPs and Ian Dury albums. Or indeed the place on the High Street owned by Mr Peake (later the Mayor) that actually had headphones for platter-listening in the groovy early Seventies style and where the Goodies did a PA.   But perhaps both of these are too everyday to provoke the archival impulse. Just non-specialist record shops of the kind that the UK, in those days, was crawling with. You could also buy your records at W.H. Smith of course, or Woolworths, or from electrical goods stores like the one on the High Street where I used to be fascinated, as a 7 year old, by an album by Bread - just the fact that a group would call itself Bread.

                                               

 

 

curioser and curioser

"By building curiosity cabinets, early modern elites made their mental lives manifest: the curiosity cabinet displayed its owner's interests, tastes, travels, and "wit," yet it was also an assemblage of found objects, and thus a display of the external world in all its infinite variety....

"In the realm of art (following a circuitous path that leads us through Joseph Cornell's enchanting boxes and Robert Rauschenberg's combines), the cluttered, fragmented, eclectic aesthetic of the curiosity cabinet carried into the twentieth century... 

"I began to notice Wunderkammer-like displays in contemporary web presentation. Perhaps the internet loves curiosity cabinets because it is, itself, a curiosity cabinet -- in a manner of speaking, of course.... 

"In the ecosystem of Pinterest we find the same organic arrangement of contrasting items, grouped poetically (rather than rationally) around a nebulous theme. The eclectic and exotic are prized; color and visual interest win the day. And the context for each item? Virtually nonexistant. The objects that made up a curiosity cabinet followed circuitous pathways...  in the course of which they lost their original contexts, names, meanings. Objects that had once embodied human culture, like sculptures and coins, became mere ephemerata."


from "Cabinets of Curiosity: the Web as Wunderkammer" by Benjamin Breen, at the Appendix, a "journal of narrative & experimental history"

Breen points to further reading on this subject:

the internet as wunderkammer paper by Jessica Ezell

as well as his own earlier essay on 17th Century cabinets of curiosity at the blog Res Obscura

see also the collation of responses to the piece that point to other pieces and further vidence


^^^^^^^^^^

I argued a similar point -- collection as a decontext/recontext machine in the Toop  piece in the Wire earlier this year:


"What emerges as a subtext of Exotica is the idea of the collection--a public or private archive of recordings, texts, images—as a decontextualisation machine.   When a collection achieves a certain density and duration, the proximity of things of far-flung provenance allows for the remapping of cultural fields: strange connections cutting across time and space and genre become almost unavoidable. Ownership and location of cultural forms gets displaced from its proper setting. The Internet -- a vast collective collection, a non-space of absolute proximity between everything-- is just the nth-degree fruition of tendencies inherent to the archive."

Some months ago I had a very enjoyable conversation with Lisa Hix from Collectors Weekly about retro aesthetics, vintage, collecting, et cetera - it is now up on their website, with some nice illustrations