Tuesday, April 19, 2005


The keeper of images sat in the darkened room, staring at photos he had suctioned out of the Internet. He devoted his attention to each image for a fragment of a second. He saw youth after youth all around the globe forming their fingers into the gangsta signs. He saw cute girls kissing other cute girls, captured instances of a lingering quality. He glossed over gaggles of friends lying in the grass, heads forming a circle, bodies extending like spokes of a wheel. Weddings and birthdays, discos and parties streamed by in pounding regularity. Self-portraited adolescent girls displayed a pierced navel for a boyfriend or for personal study. Boys displayed the self-evidence of their masculinity. All of these were expected and observed in the miniscule time the keeper devoted to each picture, one of which blurred into the next. Uncounted thousands of images flashed before his eyes until one rare moment astonished him. It was a subtle hint of emotion in the eyes in combination with lips turning a thought into words, or a nuance of interaction between persons, two or more, an expression he had never yet seen. These were the images that riveted his attention: seconds, minutes, between dreams. The keeper had found something new. He wrote down the story and added it to his collection of archetypes.

Story #200

15 comments:

arthur decko said...

a bit autobiographical? good story...i like this one..

The Mushroom said...

Neither one of us look like that, though I will admit that I do feel like I look like that after a long day's browse through the collection. That guy looks like Uncle Fester, who was a fan of images indeed.

Indeterminacy said...

Thanks Retarius. Perhaps it is a bit autobiographical. Or not. Who will ever know? ;-)

Indeterminacy said...

Mushroom kind of inspired this one with his feedback to a photo dvd I sent him, about how certain themes kept recurring. For example, the Britney-Madonna kiss really caught on. Sadly, the Janet Jackson exposure moment did not.

roachz said...

He looks like a fat, bloated Mini-me! Too much coke?

roachz said...

I mean, Coca Cola.

Indeterminacy said...

Maybe it was both! I'll admit, I thought this face was the perfect archetype of me frantically looking for a picture to write about.

admin said...

Now I feel obliged to ask you the followling question:

Do you spend more time in writing a story or in looking for good pictures? :-D

Indeterminacy said...

Sometimes it really does take longer to find a picture I like. But if I concentrate on a particular picture I almost always find some detail that draws me in.

If I don't pay attention it is easy to become obsessed with just finding more and more photos.

Cori said...

Wow... that's the most "out-there" story I have ever read from you! Unbelievable! (wink)

The Mushroom said...

But it is true (and thanks for the trib)... go looking through a gig of photos you find -- cruise shares, go to collective websites, find people's hidden photo folders in personal webspaces -- and there will be distinct themes, such as how many people's heads you can get into a frame and what hand signs youth will make to the camera (especially those who have NO IDEA what they mean, what ever happened to Hi and Peace and F-You?). How many girls and guys will take two hundred photos of their face and little else. I'd wind up looking like Fester if I had to actually pay attention to the redundancy. (As it is, I just cruise through them as fast as my CPU can read them off the media, stopping only if the 'blipvert' struck a braincell as worth an actual look, and I resemble Cousin Itt.)

Indeterminacy said...

Cori: Thanks. My turn to say wow.

Mush: It's alright, if it's a pretty face, thought after the first 100 it gets kind of repetitious. P.S. I have no idea what those hand signs mean.

alix said...

he creeps me out because i can't read his emotion.

deryke said...

much better looking than we all thought!

Indeterminacy said...

Alix: My first impressions was that he's just found a photo.