The waiting room of the Department of Motor Vehicles is of course a dismal place: expectedly generic cream-coloured walls, empty except for an L.E.D. number call board and the state logo plaque, a television in the corner and a single formica counter top with ball-point pens on chains attached to it. The rows of chairs are arranged in two directions, presumably for maximum television visibility, but most people look down at mobile phones anyway, or stare into space somewhere beyond the range of the television set.

But today it is an exciting scene to return to, and waiting vacuously feels like a nostalgic act. It looks exactly the same as it did when I came here many years ago, the same bureaucratic cream wall for the same bureaucratic procedure. And for all it’s clichédness, i’ve missed the variety of colour presented behind all that blankness of expression that can only be witnessed in North America. There are probably as many planets and cultures here as there are individuals in the waiting room, but they’ve cleverly staggered the numbering system so that we don’t examine things too linearly. An Asian boy wearing a shiny black down jacket sits down next to me, his transparent document folder neatly organised with all the required paperwork. He doesn’t have to wait too long, and when his number is called I feel the surprise in the black-rimmed eyeglasses slouched on his nose as he walks away. There is a bearish old man who inches across the room with a walker, but his loud, craggy voice with a strong southern accent (enough to satisfy Michael) flirts with the DMV employee like a slick, young stud; other people in the waiting room smile with their heads down. Everyone is polite.

A skinny, stereotypically troubled looking girl (black eyeliner) wears a sleeveless short dress and lazily kicks her three bags——two black and one teal with an E.T. airbrush print on one side——on the ground in front of her as she moves up the queue. A mother and her two daughters, all dressed in black, wait seated together in the row in front of me. The girls take turns using their iPhones or handheld mirrors to check themselves in preparation for having new ID photos taken. Mother gets up at one point to remind the DMV employee to replenish the toilet paper in the women’s restroom and upon her return, says to the girls, “Well…that’s taken care of.”

Beyond a staggered numbering system of waiting, it is difficult to know whether or not we exist in the same time-space. How did you assume that there was a consensual notion of reality? When could we have used the word “us”? For all our attempts to describe it so, how do we know a relation?

My thoughts move from the backs of people’s heads through to the ninja movie on TV. Flying black-clad zombies are pierced by tips on how to save money and political campaign advertisements. There aren’t any plants here. The mini-blinds along the windows are all open to differing degrees. It’s cloudy outside.

Attention diverts to my own electronic devices now, too. I brought the silver and black mobile phone you left when you moved away. I put my SIM card in it and suddenly our lives are mingled into one interface, except that much of mine is sharpened into little rectangles of an unrecognised encoding. Bureaucracy, an organised form of protectionism, just as easily renders us illiterate as it claims efficiency. For the same reason it is not possible to delete the folder of your text messages, so these few months of your life stay stuck in my hands, another life in another city not here, amidst 60 odd foreign faces at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Everyone looks bland here, but somehow it makes certain relations all the more apparent, and I feel close to you somehow, looking inside-out. I wish you were here to pass the time with me, to run errands together and wait in line and make bureaucratic procedures intimate, like bitter jokes about getting married and having kids.

These are momentary islands of waiting for another radical shift of the senses. Waiting is like insurance for belongingness, and realising now that I’ve missed you all this time I feel a closeness that only occurs in distance. not sure whether I prefer it this way or not.

I ask the attendant behind the computer how long the wait is. “That’s the question of the day”, he quips, and of course we both know that we can never really know how long we have to wait. Ask how much work we can get done in an interim period, or ask how a simple quip and come-back rides us through the day. Ask a slippery American tongue, ask for a decade. When I asked her once about love she said she would choose the option that gave the most possibility. But even no is a possibility. So I try not to count too much.

a monument to stubbornness

or what else is -this- ? all of -this- ? a perverse kind of loyalty. a “then-ness” carried on into now… a gift. not gifted. gifted to you all here, in vein of mister aarsman (photography against actual gifting):

Posted by a | reply »

archival stuff: the elbows

pending other posts, possible posts, about loss and grounding, and journeys, and drifting, always drifting, of course. an old image from the last days with the scanner at 12 warmington tower. i left london for beijing the day after. to return and to leave. a last one from this series before the year ends. this series that brought together and parted. a conversation with the silence of one. a silence that had started then and is still a silence today. before the year ends. the elbows. the scratches are from a long bout of forgetfulness resulting in negatives and prints being left at the konica place on dongsinandajie for nearly a year. upon returning i had still forgotten and was lucky that the staff had still remembered. scratches possibly from the tea flask of the guy with glasses, or a pair of scissors, an ice-cream wrapper, a pencil, the edge of the drawer, a quick doodle of a bunny rabbit, a paper clip, shopping or to do lists, an enlargement order, the order of a ballerina portrait to be printed on stone, slate stone, or bassie en adriaan or weiwei and her husband who also grace the interior of this store. not far from tiananmen. tiananmen. we spoke of tiananmen today. here. away. “yeah, you know that market, behind there, behind tiananmen square.” “i can’t remember the name.” “the wholesale one.” “no, not tianyi.” “just a second, let me ask.” ….”xidan.” “i went back in august this year and bought loads of things there.” “there was this handbag i bought and everyone here thought it must be over a 1000 dirhams or something but it was only 70 kuai.” we speak of inflation at the dinner table. the elbows. the elbows resting on the edge. the elbows of a you i have left. a you who was not there on this day. a you who’s elbows are in a far darker place than merely the shadow cast upon us by someone standing behind.

Posted by a | more »

went to peru. visited factories. clothes are made. pictures were taken.

…lots more here and here.

Posted by joe | reply »

kind of, sometimes

to the old lady working at the internet cafe, whom i could slam a hundred times in aftermath but only saw my childish smile in backwards retreat, we could make an example of you in our courteous, civilised new metropolis, as per a certain someone said i was often wont to do, some sort of ethnographic approach to what lack of humanity there may be in world of screens and headphones, of blank faces and pounding hearts, why in the world should i wish to make an example of you, sickly woman with cracked face who sits in the dark by day, your rule this world perhaps and i am mere observer, a hasty brushing off sends me away, without being able to engage in the very services that you offer. or the mistake that we make in this situation is that working for the money (the system that creates low wage working conditions, the worker that desires to fill this position for lack of better opportunity, because it is easy, because it is simply what is there) eliminates the very ‘you’ of this equation, for You, Other, are simply no longer there. This is not an issue of being looked down upon or prejudiced, it is the disappearance of another all together. Combined with the last 61 years of our lack of self, we come back in full force with an overbearing subjectivity that oppresses all not-self as well. it leads us to a form of exchange without humanity whatsoever, but what sort of presumption was that, anyway.

i cringed when he mentioned that words had been missing of late, but the lack of literature could have been a parallel to a similar decline of the sense of being. i am present, perhaps, in some way, a childish half-smile, but it’s only half-shock, a blinding before anger sets in, what was that about to solidify, hard-set equations, exchange is never all that, i kind of hate you sometimes, kind of, sometimes.

Posted by 丫 | reply »

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