YORICK 9

38

People take pictures of the summer just in case someone thought they had missed it and to prove that it really existed. Fathers take pictures of the mothers and the sisters take pictures of brothers just to show that they love one another. People take pictures of each other and the moment can last them forever—the time when they mattered to someone. You can’t picture love that you took from me when we were young and the world was free. Pictures of things as they used to be. Don’t show me no more please. Picture of me when I was just three, sat with my ma by the old oak tree. How I love things as they used to be. Don’t show me no more please

La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la—

I ought to subtitle this post Portraits 2 but I still refuse to drop my digit-stands-alone subtitle naming convention because I think there’s something to that. And anyway. It’s debatable whether two of these are actually portraits to begin with. How corporeal is the tone of Native skin to you? How corporeal is San Goku in a Nissan? I suppose I could have filled those spaces with more photographs of actual humans, but I felt bored by the notion of writing about everyone in the images this time around. Hell, maybe a couple of subjective depictions of “people” being in the mix even results in a little sequential impressionism. How corporeal are your feelings for the faces you gaze upon?

That lyrics make poor poetry is a commonly held take which I sweepingly agree with, musical backing and vocal tone doing a lot of heavy lifting for text that would otherwise read unremarkably on a page. The cleverness of Ray Davies’ People Take Pictures of Each Other is an outlier to this rule to me, strong enough a song to work on its own as a piece of writing. The lyrics up top are placed with only tiniest bit of adjustment, and I feel even when read aloud atonally they carry the same uncomfortable foreboding as when sung in the Cossack vamp style of The Kinks’ recorded track. Perhaps even more so with the double negative in the refrain (don’t show me no more) doing some further load bearing in print—uncertainty!—and the la-la-las at the end functioning more as childlike “I’m not listening to you” than charming ditty; a banishment from the memory palace. It’s a futurist piece, and I wonder how much of Davies original intention was about connecting the things pictures do to us, and how much of it was a prediction of the image obsessed culture we find ourselves in the thrall of. A compelling notion to pull from a great pop song: The photographic medium in such vicissitude that our dedication to pictures is being frantically abandoned. Like realizing it’s not a god and merely a hedge on fire. No longer certain what’s real… But if It makes us feel is It real enough anyway? The globe throws one deadly tantrum after the next trying to make up its mind. Don’t show me no more please.