Thursday, July 03, 2008

ways to tell you are getting old #23564

back lit wineglass


Amanda & I were out for dinner yesterday at a rather fine sushi restaurant, with not-so stellar service. I was in the restroom and heard a song I recognized floating over the background muzak. It was Janes Addiction, and early, non-popular Janes Addiction at that, from the first album.


I remember them being one of my favourite bands as a teenager and one particularly wild and crazy gig at the Edinburgh Playhouse stands out as one of the best I ever saw. Fast forward 10 or 15 years and here it has background music in a toilet in a posh restaurant. Once sort of edgy and alternative, now cliched and banal.


I feel like I'll sound like Brooks Jensen here, but this makes me think about photography and how much of it is generational. The things we see now and might feel are fresh and exciting will be out of fashion and boring to the next generation. Much of the early work of photography feels like that to me, styles and conventions of a bygone age, not particularly relevant or interesting to me, no matter how much those who are closer to that generation try to explain why it was exciting and modern. Nothing Shocking in that I suppose.



1 comments:

Paul Allan Martin said...

I don't think photography is generational at all. Nor is music. Nearly all of the images I like, and nearly all of the music I like, was produced by people who are much older (and deader) than me, or much younger than me.

I do think that BAD photography and BAD music are generational, in the fashionable sense. But everything fashionable is bad ... and is soon revealed as such. Pictures of wineglasses, for example.

Alas, I suppose that thinking as I do is just way #23565 to tell that you are getting old.