There is something terrible that happens when the image, or the picture, I’ve got can be had on the fly, in the moment. Far worse than losing touch with, moving away from, the thought of taking a picture and the act of having taken that picture—which is abolished now—worse than seeing Bob Dylan and flashing the shadows of his band on the Big Screen for all the world to see while you yourself happen to be there, haunting the shadows yourself of Cooperstown, NY, or somesuch faraway (or local) place yourself—is the conversion of yourself into that other. The self-induced narcotic of self into object is the backdoor pass of petty narcissism, subscribed to by Heads of State and healthy, young volleyball-playing anybodies on the beach alike. Terrible enough was the practice of performing for the ears (and the eyes) of others, which must have begun sometime when or after John F. Kennedy took off his hat in public. But, half a century later, the fascination with the world as backdrop, the common enough use of metadata and algorithms, quite unthinkable just a handful of human years earlier, is a bad surprise of our age. Rather than the burn-out wunderkinds of Kurt Cobain, we’ve all got a digitized piece of Courtney Love in us. Rather than doing our stuff and then dying, we are more and more become attached to ‘living’ in perpetuity, however base and calculated be our every gesture. The bluebird who sings, the bluebird who once sang, I am afraid we have smashed that tune to smithereens. In fact, while I was walking somewhere far deep in the woods today, I thought I myself had heard one; and, having matched that to another bluebird appeared on my handheld screen, by which my app confirmed its identity, I flipped my iPhone’s point-of-view around, and taped a headshot of myself, so wiry and persecuted, overhearing its crackling song.
Egbert Starr 