Nika Aila States

Minolta x-700, a roll of kodak gold 200 I bought at the Lee Vining Market

2012 has been treating me so well, so far. There’s really nothing else to say.

dappled people - blue columbine

son, tell your feet / tell your feet not to hurry / let them be / let them season like pine and blue columbine / let them lie // son, tell your hands / tell your hands they’re too heavy / how they carry the air / as if air were a stone or a spear / let them spare me / spare me my only heart // fill your breast like a beaten hull / or take the metal off / silver, bronze, or tin, or gold / or cold, cold copper to cover what you ought not // you’ll have your turn / have no thirst but your brother’s / pass the urn and the earthenware cup / when the first’s had enough you’ll have some // but have no pride / have no pride but what’s offered / how you rise from the wine / as if wine were his shield or his shrine / how you shy from him / you shy from my only heart // 

…

This is garageband, this afternoon in my bedroom. I’ve been fighting off a sinus infection the last couple of weeks, but I took some zicam and laid down the guitar track in one take, which is pretty ridiculous, because I never ever play this song anywhere near correctly. I’ve been doing a scratch track a day just as practice; maybe it’s paying off.

If you’ve spent time in my company you may have heard me say, blithely, once or twice, that I’m not into visual art. I have a very large bedroom with very bare grey walls (I’ve been threatening to paint these since I moved in, but it is a very big room) which, save for a nail for my keys and a bamboo dry-erase board, are entirely unadorned. It is true that I would not frame and hang a painting or a picture on my walls, and it’s also true that I’ve never bought a single print or book of photography, or spent much money on the cinema, or on museums. All of this may seem strange to many of you, as I suspect most of you have experienced me largely through my photographs, and I would have to agree with you; it is strange. But when I have said things blithely it is usually because my feelings about something are more complex than I’m willing to admit or ready to discuss. 

I have been carrying a camera for about three years now, which is roughly as long as I’ve been playing guitar, and particularly in the last year I’ve spent a lot of time trying to appraise my relationship to those different mediums and the communities that surround them. In those three years I have found the practice of photography and the practice of music both to be incredibly fortifying, educational, and elating, but I came to them for very different reasons. I began taking pictures because I found myself, one day, with a borrowed camera in my hand, unable to let it go simply because it allowed me to recontextualize and more vividly remember my own experiences, and because it came to motivate me to seek out more beautiful experiences, especially once I realized I could use it as a means of communication and not just a means, so to speak, of storage. I had no previous inclination; it was an accident. I had very little technical or historical understanding of the medium and its culture beyond what I think one must pick up through a lifetime of automatic exposure to journalism, advertising, and books distractedly perused from their seats on so many coffee tables. I had no desire for it, as an art. It was not something I consumed or loved deliberately.

I began playing guitar, finally, after years wasted on insecurity and doubt, because I loved music, and could not bear any longer not to make myself a part of it. I do not remember myself before I had begun to sing - I was too small. Until my late teens, I do not think I managed for more than a handful of nights to fall asleep to silence, and on the street I tried always to recall without aid the rise and fall of a melody, and in the car the games were all ways humming games. And even when I fell asleep to silence more often it was only because I’d started sleeping with people less willing than myself to be sung to sleep.

I came to photography because taking pictures was (and remains) a useful tool in an ongoing recovery. I came to music because it was always there, because I have consumed it and been consumed by it, and, if I am honest, because it is the one thing I love more than myself or anything outside myself. And I have always felt, somehow, a little uncomfortable, a little bit unjust, a little dishonest about my work, as a result.

For a long time I was always asking myself:

• Can you responsibly create in a medium if you don’t love it for its own sake, if you do not teach yourself its history, if you do not, after all this time, know the names of its gods?
• Do you disrespect yourself by working in a medium you respect only very conditionally?
• if your creation/product is in a certain medium, should you feel obliged to consume/purchase works within that medium, and if so, why? Is the obligation to consume an obligation to your peers, your supporters, your medium, or to yourself, and your understanding of your practice/product?

If you’d like to tell me what you think, please do. I am very curious to know whether any of you who create are absorbed by the same or similar questions, and, if so, what conclusions you’ve drawn. I still ask myself, often. 

That is not to say that I work entirely in a vacuum, or that I never enjoy looking at a photograph. Every day I look at photographs from young people, most of whom seem to work generally outside the gallery circuit and for their own pleasure. I view these exclusively on the internet, and I am predictable: I like photographs that make me want to go specific places, or do specific things. I like the photographs of Anna Shelton because I know I have honored and will continue to honor the impulse to explore those places she and others like her have photographed. For a small time one could find online images captured across the US in the 1970s by a woman named Sharon Tingley. The flickr account her daughter kept for her has since been emptied, and while a few of her photos remain in dusty parts of the blogosphere, I have not found my favourite: close up, in red flannel, the head and shoulders of a young man laughing, the girl’s jean-clad ass slung over to the left. I think they must have been in the woods. I loved that picture, and many of Tingley’s pictures, because they were a reminder to live well. They told me to get off my ass and get happy, instead, somewhere beautiful filled with beautiful people. And if I ever have room on my very bare grey walls for a photograph, I know that I will have to hunt her down. 

I value these photographs because they inspire me to live a life worth photographing, but I don’t revisit them. I would not return to them as I do to records I loved at 9 or 15, as i’ll someday revisit the records I love now.

Which brings me to this:

What interests me about the above flyer and its corresponding event (and you thought it was only tangentially relevant!) is that I actually want to go see the show. I have never felt the least bit inclined to visit a gallery for an exhibition of photographs. Here there is another context in which the medium is made valuable to me; I have a deep appreciation for the work of John Vanderslice, NoisePop, and Bay Area local music. Peter Ellenby has been NoisePop’s official photographer for the last 18 years, and as I understand it the exhibit will feature pictures of Vanderslice from the last 15 of those. I want to see 15 years of someone like Vanderslice, whose all-analog studio Tiny Telephone is probably the one place I’d like to drop a good chunk of change, and whose albums I love and respect tremendously because they are both intelligent and affecting. I want to know: how does an artist like Vanderslice create themselves? And, essentially, Can I get me some of that? But I am also very interested to see what happens to Ellenby over those 15 years. What changes come to his camera? What, if anything, does he notice and focus upon as time passes? Does his lens love people more or less the longer he knows them?

My question is, really: What happens to you when you work in one medium for the sake of another?

Partly because I feel this: if I am to take pictures, I think I ought really to start to value my work not just because the practice feeds me but also because I believe the product is worthy. I make the vast majority of my income as a photographer, and some good portion of that is doing work I don’t love. But I have saved up in a my chest a tiny dustball of hope, which hasn’t yet succumbed to the ills of the current economic climate and popular notions of the arts as being necessarily impractical. The dustball has a big label on it that says: Here is where you can find sustenance, both emotional and professional, in a thing in which you have real belief. I have always been self-involved, selfish, even when I have also been lovely, but I do hope, in the end, that whatever work I do will feed the one thing I have always known to be bigger than myself. 

So In 15 years, if I am not either some John Vanderslice or some Peter Ellenby - I mean, if I have not spent my time making music or using whatever other skills I have to make sure good music reaches people, then I won’t have done what I set out to do, and you should all tell me I really fucked it up, big time.

Lolo Scheiner, Scott Thomspon, Owen Adair Kelley, Ruthie Knudsen, two brunchtime crooners, and one young man, solitary, lovely. Kodak Gold 200. Minolta x-700 & Canon AE-1

I worked NYE, having failed to realize it was in my contract when I joined HB last April, and essentially everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, so I spent the first hour or so of 2012 running around and tearing my hair out and also maybe crying a little when it became clear exactly how much of a clusterfuck the shift had been. In the end I drove home and curled, shivering, into bed, to wake the next morning to some astonishingly good weather. Lolo and I had planned to get brunch at one Temescal establishment or another, but when we set out on foot towards that bright stretch of Telegraph we stumbled upon some friends of hers, neighbours of mine, planning a gathering of their own. So Lo and I skipped (yes) the half-block back to my place, and a returned (walking, and a little more winded then we should have been) with tangerines and raspberries and raw goat cheese to offer up in the great feast that followed. I had a slice of what was probably the best quiche of my life, and people with whom to play music, and outside there were fetching twenty-somethings doing handstands in the middle of Clarke st. I could not have complained. 

We struck then upon the idea of an adventure, so we got in Lo’s car and drove North and then West, without any real destination, but with four grape lollipops in one of the cup-holders, a bag of dates, more tangerines, and a big bottle of sparkling water, which is all you really need. We got very excited about the idea of Bolinas, and somehow made it there before the sun had drowned itself completely, around that time of day when all the surfers have exhausted themselves and come streaming in from the shore. I would describe myself in that moment as being absurdly grateful for such good company and such beautiful surroundings. Also, full.

Since then I have mostly spent my days trying to remind myself that it is, in fact January. It’s hard not to forget. Today I walked maybe 15 blocks to pick up some film and took off three layers getting to the shop. I realize this is a sort of absurd and idyllic existence, that it is a little comical to spend this much time sitting around at farmer’s markets with Ruthie or laughing at Owen, who’s so good about making me laugh at myself. Scott is always playing his cello in the other room, which makes me feel happy, and also a little lazy. I’ve got some shows set up and I’ve got a block of cheese in my fridge that is so good I have to eat it straight, because melting it or putting it on something else would corrupt it. It is that good. A lot of things are that good, and most things that aren’t are trifling. 

Hi everyone.

Provia in a Minolta X-700. Two more from the trip to Mono.

The Minolta, which I purchased last year for $50, is now almost unusable. I’ve still got the lenses & various cases and cleaning kits that came bundled with it, courtesy of an old hobbyist in Livermore, CA, but I lose anywhere from 2 two 25 frames with this camera. I’ll get rolls back that are mostly unexposed, though there’s nothing to determine why or which frames while I’m shooting. I loved that little camera. I want it back.

There are monsters under the lakes east of the Sierras. I think they are winter monsters; their bones creak and they moan low and mournful and they gulp at the shallow ceiling of ice. I hear them dissolving in the sun, which the waitress at Nicely’s Restaurant tells me has lately been unseasonably intimate, and enveloping.  Nicely’s is full of postcards of beautiful things with their names written on them in really ugly fonts. I take this to mean I probably don’t deserve Nicely’s, that Nicely’s is for people who wear cotton scrunchies and trainers and look like our moms did in the eighties or maybe for strangers smart enough not to be bothered by the word ‘tufa’ printed out a hundred odd times in Papyrus. It’s Christmas Eve and I’m eating steak and writing on one of the postcards, ‘I am a horrible snob’ and ‘I love you’ and sniffing furtively into my tea because of how I’m happy, and afraid.

And it’s very sunny. Christmas breakfast involves off-brand cereal in a styrofoam cup from the motel bathroom and tea that’s never cold enough to drink until someone else has drunk it all. We go off looking for one or another dirt road and mostly go back and forth, up and down 395, looking confused and slightly sick from the altitude. Mono, the shore, when we make it down there, is hoary and smells like Alviso smells, of saltwater, bird bones, the vast hoard of alkali flies and their larvae, and in the last few years this has been my favourite smell in the world. If I could harvest it and hide it in my pocket like I have done chamomile or lavender from the trails at Sibley and all those Rockridge front yards, I would maybe suffer the social fallout just to smell it everywhere.  A group of tourists strip off their winter jackets and bear their arms as if the unbroken blue of the sky will produce a dissonance with which their loved ones will not be able to cope, and we take so many pictures of them training their own faces out of laughter and into poise. I act like there are no pictures of me doing anything at all.

We drive to Nevada, at some point. It’s long enough ago now that I can’t remember when it happens. It’s weird how the land grows less captivating across the state line; the contours still impress, but the skin settles into its hues and refuses to ornament itself. We try to drive to Hawthorne but the way seems long and beige and daunting. It’s not far back to California. In California we climb into the big clean beds and try to return to real life, which I think is characterized mostly, these days, by playing scrabble on facebook and marveling at Verizon’s all-encompassing fist, how even in that crater motel we receive messages from the seaboard, and feel loved by them.

l get messed up about it sometimes, that I am romantic. That we kick up a cloud of dust on the way to Bodie and that I disappear up the hill on my own to look down at a town that isn’t there and feel moved by it, without actually understanding it. I try to imagine 10,000 people eating and fucking and exchanging money and meaningful glances in this place, once, and I cannot. There’s nothing but sage. There isn’t a single tree, but most all of the houses are made of wood. On the map the park ranger gives us there is labeled (without explanation): Dog-faced George’s House. About the only thing that makes sense to me about the place is the thought of poor George sitting on his porch, chewing jerky. I can imagine one person living here, alone, but in one of the buildings there is still a bathtub, and I guess that once there was such a thing even as opulence here, and pride, and that people shat in the same way we shit, pretending not to, and anyway when I come back down the hillside I’m very tired.  

This whole time I am trying to finish old songs and only really starting the same one over and over again.

We chase down some more tufa, and the lake eats our shoes, which have gone white and crusty. I feel, as I do in the best of places, like laying myself down and being swallowed, and I’ve taken more photographs than I need and I haven’t even bothered putting my headphones in for days; I could stay here and let the coyotes drag me into the bush like they’ve done all the little bird bodies, but I stumble back through the chaparral breathless and kind of strung-out to the car and lay instead on its warm green hood and don’t eat the Pemmican I’ve stashed in my jacket. (I ate it the last few days for breakfast back home, thinking of Elisha Kent Kane, who lived on it, and it is just about as easy to starve in Oakland as in the arctic, if you’re too lazy to go grocery shopping, but Pemmican solves all).

At Gull Lake we discover the monsters. We walk across and they moan at us. The lady at the post office is deathly ill, the sun is high, I’m sending those cards that all three say I love you in one way or another. I used always to write cards but never bothered to send them. Things mattered less, then.

And then we crawl back over the mountains. We eat lingenberry jam on crackers with a couple of strange men on our way through Tioga Pass, in the middle of Tenaya Lake, an interlude which makes the whole trip feel somehow very much like an American Holiday and about which I’ll want to tell you more, sometime soon.  It takes longer to get back not because of mileage, but because of the foothills. Though Tioga is a farther stretch than Sonora (I spend that weeping, because I’ve suddenly remembered the good sound of water running under ice, and I have needed, very badly, to think I am getting away from it all,) it’s really just that going west you have spend all your time looking back over rolling grass and cattle and trees washed a little red, softly, before evening turns the oaks to wild, shadowy men, and the cows all stop lowing and the grass loses its lustre. If you drive east, what happens is that you wind your way over and around these lovely things, and then you turn, suddenly, and realize you have just fallen a very long way, very quickly, and there is a great big spine jutting between you and those things you know, even as they’re calling you out, by name, over and over.

.

Since I have been back I’ve held a lot of people. I’ve been held.

I am unused to finding so much comfort in that.

I’m trying to be more brave.