A City in the North

When I was about 10 or 11 years old, I looked in my atlas for a place called the Taymyr Peninsula. I'd been reading about the tribal people of Siberia, and I looked for this place, the homeland of the Nenets and Nganasan people, a vast zone of permafrost on Russia's Arctic coast. some 3000 kilometers northeast of Moscow.

And then in a tiny, Italic font. I saw the word “Norilsk,” indicating a settlement on the edge of the peninsula, the name of an impossibly remote city. I wondered, briefly, what kind of place it was – was it a real city of any size? Or was it just a garrison town, a few hundred soldiers on the edge of the wilderness. Or darker, one of the many islets of the Gulag Archipelago?

I don't think I ever looked it up. I filed the name away in memory, one of the many reference superscripts for which I would never look up the footnote.

And then I saw a set of photographs by Elena Chernyshova, documenting the city of Norilsk.

The city is substantial, a place of 200,000 people. As suspected, the rich mineral resources of the region were once mined by the primarily Ukrainian victims of Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s, who also constructed the isolated Norilsk Railway, which shipped the platinum, nickel, and palladium from the Taymyr Peninsula to the port town of Dudinka.

Nowadays, the metals are privately managed, by MMC Norilsk Nickel, a Moscow-based company. Its smelters at Norilsk run all day, creating a full 2 percent of the world's carbon dioxide output. The life expectancy is 10 years lower than that of the rest of the Russia, and the soil has become so fouled that it could, ostensibly, be economically viable to mine the topsoil for platinum.

And whether it's due to the city's economic importance, or due to its dishonorable distinction of being Russia's most polluted city, the place is off-limits to foreigners, other than Belarussians, whose own republic, a little reliquary of Soviet nostalgia adjacent to Poland and Lithuania, likewise heavily curtails foreign visits.

This practice remains common in this part of the world. These closed cities have been deemed too valuable to the national interest, in terms of their positions as centers of mines, manufacturing, military operations, or scientific research. There is Zvyozdny Gorodok, where the cosmonauts are trained. There is Snezhnogorsk, the shipyard town on the Arctic shore, near the Finnish border. There is Ozyorsk, the birthplace of weapons-grade plutonium, site of the 1957 Kyshtym nuclear disaster, and home to the radioactive Lake Karachay, the now mostly dry lake filled with concrete to prevent the underlying sediments from shifting, where the radiation levels in the murky water are high enough to provide a lethal dose within an hour.

This sort of environmental-horror photography is a kindred spirit to the ruin porn of Detroit et al that has spawned cult interest on the Internet in the past several years. It's a tradition that I first became aware of in Godfrey Reggio's sometimes intriguing, sometimes cloying 1988 film Powaqqatsi, which opens with men carrying crushing loads of mineral-laden dirt and rock on narrow ladders out of the Dantean pit of the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil.

The more modern purveyors of this subject matter primarily focus, likewise, on the grim legacy of attempts at modern industrial revolution, primarily in India, China, and the former Soviet Bloc. There are a few hallmarks. Close-ups of sweaty workers in the teeming mass, blasted scenery, the inevitable human-interest angle of laborers on their break, eating lunch or having a smoke and a laugh.

On the one hand, this brand of photography plays a role as a legitimate form of environmental and social protest, documenting lives and landscapes that would otherwise be near-invisible. What would be distant, solitary, unknowable comes across in intimate detail. 
 
And yet part of me cringes at the focus on the BRIC nations, as if to palliate the guilt of capitalists in the more developed world from their complicity, or to obscure the fact that the end product of all of this en-masse destruction can be found neatly wrapped at your local big-box store, ready for you to drop into your shopping cart.

Norilsk, the city in the North, is in all of us, in our jewelry, in the catalytic converters of our cars. And when I look at the rings on our fingers, in the passing of traffic, I can only a think of a metropolis caked in snow and grime, rusted mining equipment, and long-dead Ukrainians buried in the metal-laced soil.

Dutch Still Life in the Age of Instagram

How old was I when I first realized a still life wasn't necessarily just a still life?

I had of course, seen still life paintings for my whole life. They were the necessary accoutrements to tasteful, middle-class living for decades if not centuries, only to be relatively recently usurped by abstract expressionism. The bourgeoisie gathered paintings of flowers and fruit, whether painted by friends and family, or whether acquired at small galleries or in tourist towns, and placed them on mantles and landings, art as innocuous as the wallpaper.

And yet if we go to the arts of the Netherlands in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, we find that each angle was rich with religious meaning. Slaughtered birds, books, crystal goblets, mussel shells, and daffodils were imbued with meaning. A skull sits in the middle of a sumptuous chamber, to emphasize the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, while on oyster is a not-so-subtle reminder of lust. And at a time when Europe was being shredded by religious war, the still life became a Dutch specialty, a sort of aesthetic battle flag in the Thirty Years' War. 

Conversely, while the paintings of finished plates of food might on one level be a warning against immoderation, they are also the emblems of the Dutch Republic and its emphasis on trade. Those very same Calvinists who advocated a simple religion had no problem with the mass accumulation of capital. Without the religious agendas that marked, for instance, Spanish imperial expansion around the same time, the impetus of the Dutch colonial project was, above all else, the establishment of a network trading in what were then exotic commodities-- coffee, cloves, nutmeg, chocolate, and tobacco. And so the still life became representations of the ostentation and pomp of the new mercantile classes, the people who could afford elaborate breakfasts with lobsters and mountains of fruit.

Despite the fact that a great deal of this coded language and ironic double-meaning is lost on the modern viewer, the pleasing form of the still life remains-- probably something along the lines of what those merchant patrons were looking for. And its aesthetic DNA continues to the present day.

In a recent book of essays, Lawrence Weschler examined the portrait of Che Guevara's corpse, and found that it possessed the same composition as Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp.

Likewise, we live in a time when everyone is taking pictures of their lunch spreads, albeit showing them off on social media feeds rather than in sitting rooms. At brunch, we have inevitably become like those burghers of Haarlem and Leiden in an age of speculation and expansion, attempting to immortalize our luxuries.

Sunset, Saphan Khwai

Get off the metro at Saphan Khwai at sunset. Walk southwards, towards Pradiphat Road. Lunch shops are selling off the remainder of their curries for the day, signs for windowless “cinemas” down side alleys. New condos loom over the rows of empty shophouses quietly crumble in the humidity, down sois that until recently, terminated at the dilapidated remains of the once glorious New York Theater, a block of high modernism reduced to one of the neighborhood porn theaters before its eventual demolition. And off to the left, the ever-glowing pink neon sleaze of the Sutthisan Road go-go bars.

 

I'd walked this route countless times to visit my friends who live in this area. But it was only recently that I began to pay notice to the grim, lumbering building on the Northwest corner of the Saphan Khwai intersection.

From ground level, it mostly seems to be a row of shops like any other-- food places, wholesalers of cloth, jewelers, all of the normal elements of most Bangkok neighborhoods-- but look a bit closer.

Up above, there are a few more floors than one would expect, and doors to nowhere jut out from masonry walls. A security guard waves cars in and out of an underground parking garage. Looking through to the back of the shops, a large, empty space can be seen, the walls painted institutional green, with a large empty tile floor in the middle. And above a food center, one sees the railings of overhanging floors, the interior space hidden behind hung white sheets.

A little research, and I finally found a photo of this, the Sisupharat Arcade Building, as it was under construction in 1979, right at the start of the Thai economic miracle.

And as it stands today, after its last iteration as the Saphan Khwai Branch of the Merry Kings Department Store, another victim of the 1997 Financial Crisis.

The hivemind of the Internet has become immensely fond of dead malls, those malls that either are abandoned, or, more likely, seriously under-occupied, remnants of a consumer base that has since moved on. It's as if, in the continuing wake of the big collapse in 2007, there's something cathartic about seeing a material manifestation of the total obviation of the suburban, American dream.

Bangkok has contributed to it in the form of the New World Mall, the structure near Khaosan Road that became famous for having partially filled with water, and becoming home to schools of carp.

Thailand's 1997, America's 2007. At the bottom of the business cycle, inefficiencies will inevitably pool. Destruction, sans renewal, emerges as an inevitable characteristic of capitalism. And this is why there is something so compelling about those sites that remind us of this sobering fact. We live among constant billboard, fantasy consumer products projected at us from every angle. Which is why, on warm nights in out-of-the-way neighborhoods, it might not be a bad idea to look at the broken concrete that lurks behind.

The Americans

I recently said a goodbye to my friends outside a little bar on Thanon Rangnam in North Central Bangkok. I'd seen them off before, on 2nd Avenue in Seattle, before they moved to Southeast Asia, on a rain-wet late winter afternoon some two years previous.

They were going back to America, a country that is undoubtedly my own, but when I see it on television, looks foreign-- not unfamiliar, simply foreign, the same way an American might perceive England or Australia, with strong linguistic and cultural ties, but unquestionably different.

But occasionally I see glimpses of America in Thailand, and it's not as if I'm seeing a foreign country, but seeing my own country immediately revealed. A bleak strip of Charan Sanit Wong near the Sirindhorn intersection-- all gritty diagonal boulevards, forlorn shop fronts, smokestacks and steeples perceived through a tangle of electrical wire-- could almost be Chicago. The dusty side streets and vacant lots and concrete plants of Bang Khen are something similar enough to Des Moines. A beloved coffee shop on a rainy afternoon near Siam Square is a miniature Seattle. And a martini bar on Thong Lo with throbbing music and women with 30,000 baht tits is Los Angeles.

My daily life obeys the rhythms of Bangkok, and my language coalesces into a non-specific English, generically North American in accent, imparted with the slang of Newcastle and Cape Town.

Which, perhaps, is why I've become so enamored of Robert Frank's photo series The Americans. It's not that they represent an America I know or remember. On the contrary, I love them because they convey an idea of America. Were I to look at the sorts of places I actually remember-- forlorn gas stations late at night, dark Seattle bars, frozen rivers-- I might feel something. But when I look at Frank's photos, they're pointing more towards a meta-image of America that pierces through my memories of the real America and lets in the dreams and strange forms that lay underneath.

Since they were taken 30 years before I was born, I automatically view them as relics, as documentary evidence of an era before mine. And it was an era that we think of, nowadays, as something of an age of innocence, a picket-fence suburban postwar fantasy that existed far more in the public imagination than in material reality. No Malcolm X or Jim Morrison, minimal levels of postmodernism. The primary terror came from a far-off and peculiarly imagined USSR.

But Frank's subjects aren't this dull fantasy that has since been shoved down Americans' throats-- by what we retroactively and moronically refer to as "golden age" television, by the American Enterprise Institute and other vipers' dens of paranoid reactionaries-- but what lurks around the margins. We have nudists and drugstore cowboys, a hormonally charged teenage couple getting a Reno marriage.

Or a young girl with a candy cigarette adopting the studied pose of her mother.

Or a hallucinatory shot of the reflection of a cinema marquee in a car window.

Of course, lots of other Europeans have tried to present an outsider's view of the United States. There was Tocqueville in the early years of the 19th Century, there was Dickens writing his American Notes, and so on. And since then, there have been any number of writers who claimed that America could only be viewed by a foreigner-- among them, giggling sociological onanist Jean Baudrillard and impeccably dressed imperial apologist Bernard-Henri Lévy, both of whom wrote almost cartoonishly hyper-Français prose about their superficial tours of the Lower 48 as Francophone star academics, ensconced in various ivory towers and accompanied by legations of fawning Yanks.

But whereas so many travelers-- photographers, travel writers, and just plain visitors-- adopt the tourist's gaze, what I admire about Frank is that he doesn't. He grants everyone he photographs their own subjectivity, rather than trying to impose some master narrative onto their actions. Like all artists, he has motifs that he returns to again and again-- racial tension, odd placements of the American flag-- but ultimately it is vérité. Frank's camera, off-kilter, shooting at odd angles, slices America open.

And I think that's the America I remember, staring out taxi windows on long, equatorial afternoons, the America I still re-visit in my dreams. There is no cohesive structure. I'm assailed with a jumble of memories, images of memories, meta-memories that shift about in kaleidoscopic patterns.

Thoughts overlay themselves onto daily life like superimposed frames in a silent film. I look at the photo, and look up, at the gritty street outside: rush hour on Din Daeng Road, a boarded-up brothel, fried chicken stands, dessicated palm trees backlit against a fiery sunset. It's all here, memory on top of memory: Thailand in front of my face, the America I remember, the mythic America in the photograph, the general myth of America, anything, everything. I see it all, a sudden unity of the signs for a moment, before returning to whatever ordinary thing I was doing before.

Industrial Civilization

Lately, I've been spending hours looking at the photographs-- or "typologies," as they preferred-- of Bernd and Hilla Becher.  We see a water tower, a blast furnace, shot in a strict, almost clinical style.





Function is transformed into aesthetic. This plain, positivist architecture could some day be as worthy of beauty and admiration as the spires of the Hagia Sophia.

I've always had this fascination with industrial ruins. In other countries and other times, children could look around them and see the Romans and Cathars, the Wars of the Roses and the Ottomans and the Tokugawa Shogunate. Growing up in Middle America-- too far east for cowboys and Indians, too far west for minutemen and redcoats, too far north for Yankees and rebs-- this was the dramatic history around me. Past civilizations hadn't left cathedrals and battlefields, they'd left smokestacks and grain elevators.

When I first studied art history, I came upon Charles Demuth's paintings of the factories of his Pennsylvania hometown, and he called one of them "My Egypt."

And when I drove up to Minneapolis and wandered along the soft banks of the Mississippi River, it struck me as no coincidence that the 19th Century wheat barons had built their mills as the temples of industry, with Hellenic columns and massive arched windows.

As my home nation began its long, slow, brutal process of deindustrialization, industrial imagery took on a trendiness. 30 years ago, this was probably cool. Since then, it has become thoroughly obnoxious. We might fetishize shiny chrome and exposed brick, but we have scrubbed it clean of all of its implications. When I see a pile of rusting, jagged metal, it no longer looks like a pile of rusting, jagged metal, but a sculpture.

And now that I live in the new industrial sphere of Southeast Asia, the gloss dissipates, and I am left with the brutal contradictions of industrial capitalism.

I come home to the smell of welding flux wafting up to my apartment from the tangle of Chinese machinists' shops below me. The city of Bangkok is ringed by vast industrial estates. On the expressway to Chonburi, past the appropriately if charmlessly named Bearing Road, the landscape turns into Antonioni's Red Desert: low buildings covering acres of land; jagged rooflines beginning to rust in the tropical humidity; workers originally from Chiang Rai and Samut Sakhon dressed in identical blue boilersuits; 50-meter tall electricity pylons marching off into the sunset, the same pylons that grace the backgrounds of Stalinist paintings.

For the Thais, the imagery of industrial positivism is not retro, it is the present. They reserve their nostalgia for the old peasant Siam, memories of teak houses by the canalside, gardens of tamarind trees and jasmine flowers, the motion of the catfish in the rice paddies.

The old lie of post-industralism was that the new "information economy" would liberate humanity from the Dickensian mills. What has happened is that we are more dependent on the mills than ever before. Entranced by our computer screens, we are reliant upon a massive network of steel works, refineries, coal-fired power plants, mining operations for fossil fuels, tungsten, chromite.

Those of us who have or have had jobs in the suburban office parks and "revitalized" city centers of the west live in a tidy green illusion. In the tropics, one hears screaming from beneath the earth.

36 Images

I took a train to a remote area of East Bangkok to go to a movie. 36, a new Thai experimental film directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit. The theater stood at the wrong end of RCA, in a half-demolished shopping center surrounded by low-slung '70s brutalist concrete.

The film is a series of long takes, occurring chronologically but seemingly without pattern. Two movie studio employees, Oom and Sai, take photographs of odd places around Bangkok-- an apartment building, an abandoned love motel, a vacant lot where a clinic once stood. As Sai looks through her old hard drives, she finds her photos destroyed, with only a few oblique shots remaining. She returns to the places, and finds what has changed and what has disappeared. Oom has long since disappeared. At the end, we see the desktop of Oom's computer, with one photo of the two of them still there.

Over the past few months, my phone has periodically had trouble receiving text messages. So many phone calls have started with "Did you get my text?"

As I left the theater and turned on my phone, my inbox was suddenly flooded with messages. Here were all of the parties I hadn't attended, all of the reminders to bring something somewhere. I'd been relying on this little device to mediate my social life, and, in sequence, were all of the mechanical failures that had translated to personal inaction.

Digital memory supersedes organic memory. Our digital memory is supposed to be a metaphor for human memory. But unlike human memory, digital memory is but an imprint, stripped of any subjectivity, rendered in bright plasma screen colors and encoded in countless binary digits.

And while this digital memory is more visually and auditorily perfect than our own, it is equally immaterial, easily replicated and easily deleted. We may hold on fast to our personal recollections, constantly replay them in our heads over the course of our lifetimes, hunt down the photographs and souvenirs and albums that reflect those memories. By comparison, digital records are as fleeting and ephemeral as cicada shells.

Somehow the old forms of recording-- cassette tape, Polaroid film-- become objects of nostalgia. These devices that, at mid-century, seemed so cutting edge and blatantly positivist, now seem quaint. We use lo-fi recording and photo alteration techniques to smear the digital memory with Vaseline.

Because we're yearning for subjectivity, for some notion of authenticity and humanity. We stare at the screen, and it might as well be a void. Walter Benjamin was correct in that the age of mechanical reproduction, the work of art would be stripped of its ritual meaning. But that didn't mean that the artistic endeavor was married to the high-minded ideology Benjamin envisioned-- rather, it became far more of a commercial enterprise than he could ever have imagined.

The title of the movie comes from each of its consisting of 36 unmoving shots, each meant to represent one photo on a film roll. Digital representation trumps mechanical representation, old places are destroyed. But somewhere in there, we can still find sentiment.

I walk back to the canal boat pier through Makkasan past the ruins of old houses and offices, over train tracks, below freeways, beneath billboards and vinyl banners for new condo developments. I take a shortcut across what was once someone's tile floor. A spirit house is surrounded by climbing vines. Inside, a pudgy ceramic god guards over the people that left years ago.

Snapshot Image

I chanced upon the Russian photographer Sergey Chilikov when looking for the photo on the cover of Beirut's "Gulag Orkestar." You can find an archive of his photos here.

I'd forgotten the beauty of simple snapshots like this, photos without the pretense of memory. These are the ordinary people of what was once the Second World. These anonymous vintage snapshots are connections to a world I will never experience, will never see in any form other than a grainy, faded image, names forgotten or maybe even never learned by the photographer.

It is by mere accident that one of these pictures achieved fame. In an interview, Zach Condon said he first saw the cover slipped out of a book in a library in Leipzig. A very personal photo becomes universal, transformed from a memory-machine into an image in the public consciousness.

A photo, taken either for a personal collection or a now-extinct daily newspaper, is uploaded to the Internet, separated from its origins by yet another degree, and disseminated to a largely undiscerning global public.

Because holding a photograph and looking at it on a computer screen are different experiences, even though a photograph is "supposed" to be a crystalline representation of reality. The material photograph is a more direct link to another era, unmediated by a contemporary piece of technology. It's sepia-toned or washed out, and it smells of junk drawers and the dull, metallic smell of silver frames on dusty mantles.

This tells me the photograph is not merely an image, but takes on a life of its own that digital images, unless they're printed out, will never have. Think about all the ancient family photos you've doubtless seen on the shelves of tract homes and McMansions in outlying suburbs of American cities. They're most likely the only things more than 50 years old in a great many homes, a solitary fragment of past existences. We burn our cities to the ground, we build our new houses to last a single generation and yet, amid contemporary suburbia, the individual's line of memory is preserved as a photo, set in a respectable position on a matte-painted particle-board shelf in a white-carpeted den.

Despite the very American and very Protestant environment, it reminds me of those Chinese Confucians who honor their ancestors as a fount of authenticity and truth, even amid the rise and fall of dynasties and the building of 100,000-man factories in Shenzhen. The Confucian attitude seems to be that the truth of a righteous life is beyond material, beyond memory; it exists in an impossibly stable and a priori vacuum. Whatever sound and fury happens in China-- capitalism, Communism, and capitalism again-- that which Confucius called "the way" floats above, immaterial, impassive.

It's been years since I looked through any old snapshots of my own family. It's helpful to consider the photo as a universal subject when you've forgotten the snapshots that are supposed to mean the most to you. When, in some distant future date, I look again on pioneer great-grandfathers and aunts in beehive hairdos, what will I see? What will I feel? What truth will I ascertain? Will I feel a primordial connection to some ancestral imagination? Or will they simply be faded scraps of paper, chemical tracings on thin cardboard moldering in shoeboxes in a house 1500 miles away.