New Film Rolls / The Speed At Which It All Happens (Patreon)

Hello! I am so behind on film rolls. Here's a handful: 35mm Portra 800 dev'd back in late February, and 35mm Portra 800 dev'd recently (although mostly also shot back in February). My gallery on Flickr is updated with both rolls. 

Unrelated, but my gallery was a success this weekend (by my standards, which is that "I had fun" and "people seemed to like it"). It's actually still on display at Common Area Maintenance for the week, if you want to see it. I printed a run of prints for it that I did not sell out of (including one where I'm donating all the proceeds to Palestine Children's Relief Fund), and I'll be trying to rework my website to offer those for sale soon. Patreon subs get a discount.

Onto the thoughts.

One of the most daunting problems I'm running into lately is not a lack of inspiration, but quite simply too much of it. When several crises (civil rights, due process, scientific, economic, cultural) all collide at once and we have a mid-2020 information environment in which everything, suddenly, appears to collapse at once, everything becomes signal and noise. The car industry's Decade Of Trouble that looms large on the horizon is simultaneously a symptom of broader problems and a cause of them. The impending industry pain becomes wildly, paradigm-shiftingly important, but is still triflingly small.

My first-ever professional blogging gig was weekends for Jalopnik. The first weekend I wrote I was supposed to do 6 or so articles in a day. It was the third weekend of March 2020 when I started. The main news of the time was "everything is on fire, and everyone is terrified", and that was how I first learned how to write for a Real Website. Ever since that very first peek at being a Real Writer, I've been trying to react to the world as fast as I can - the take has to be not just good, but quick.

Worsening this impulse is a long-running fatalistic streak of mine that gets a lot more severe during extreme turmoil (like, say, when the US is running a soft denaturalization campaign against trans people, or is calling us all potential child traffickers). I am in a rush to create. I am always in a rush for everything. I feel like the end of my life (or at the very least my ability to write) are just around the corner. I have tried repeatedly to stop being in a rush and defeat this feeling, but I am growing convinced I simply cannot help myself, because these motherfuckers really want to kill us and I can't really ignore it very well when the volume gets cranked up.

It is very loud right now.

...

The worst part about trying to achieve self-awareness as an American is realizing which parts of our collective mythology have seeped into your cognitive groundwater, poisoning your entire worldview. I believe the worst parts for me are twofold, and they egotistically fuel my frenetic haste to react.

One half is a grindset hustle, planted by an overbearing mother who was disappointed with anything less than a full ride to an Ivy League school, nurtured by years of boom-and-bust freelancing. There is a simplistic belief within me, not one I hold intellectually but in the deeper self, that I can simply out-work the material conditions. Structural issues be damned. I will be the first transsexual character in a Horatio Alger novel, and I will diagnose the problems and achieve success.

The second half is an irrational, burning urge to be recognized, someday, as someone who spent a life making art and writing that was worth spending a life on. Intellectually, this is stupid. This, too, is largely dictated by chance and isn't the kind of thing that correlates well to actual merit, given the large number of artists whose work is only appreciated once they're gone. And it's not, really, conducive with the life I've lived: my window of time driving around the country developing a photographic style and a narrative flourish are over. I need to focus on, you know, teaching myself to cook more than two meals and, like, getting a real job.

But inside, where the Horatio Alger novel lives, I want a gallery in the MoMA.

So, despite knowing it won't help, I drink from the firehose. I see the myriad ways that the country is cracking. I, not entirely irrationally, do worry that the window in which I can exist as an artist (or as Victoria, a transgender woman) is closing. I feel compelled to try and rebut it all now, to make the ultimate response to a culture in crisis, to cement my writing and art as the perfect understanding of times beyond sanity and in doing so, I will help stop the bleeding.

And I end up creating nothing because the fucking firehose is drowning me.

My main goal, for the next week or so, is to simply stop crafting narratives and responses to things as they happen. There is nothing more I can say, there are no smart posts, there is no rebuttal. It is all very bad, and it will probably get worse, and I feel really bad for everyone who is suffering, and we are all going to suffer more. Any analysis beyond that and I simply need the dust to settle.

I have some fiction I'll probably share soon, and a basically-evergreen article I'm trying to run at a mainstream outlet(!) in the near future, which I'm excited for. Beyond that, we'll see.

I hope everyone is doing alright.

Vicki <3