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The Surreal Camera
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Mar. 10th, 2008 | 02:17 pm
From the dream archives: I was at a large outdoor party, full of stodgy people I didn't know and who didn't appear to like me. As an aside, I recall that the food for this party was all cooked in a little shack and that it consisted mostly of a grilled python (well, some kind of huge snake about a foot in diameter, anyway). The chef was dirty and constantly picked his nose. He kept pulling the snake from a back room, flopping big loops of it on to the grill. He would hack off cooked parts and let them fall directly on to plates he had positioned on the floor, and then drag more uncooked snake onto the grill. And in case it wasn't clear: this was all one big snake that stored coiled in some back-room. I know, because I got curious and looked in there and saw some rats sitting on the massive coils of uncooked snake. They were playing cards.
Anyway, the only amusing person at the party was the professional photographer who asked people to pose in unconventional positions and made them hold the poses for several seconds after he snapped the photo. He had a huge white digital camera with a number of odd bits stemming off of it—sort of steampunk, sort of cyberpunk, sort of a Hans Bellmer doll, all at the same time. It had a viewport you looked into like looking through a microscope to see the images already captured.
The photographer suddenly handed me the camera and asked me to take over while he had a smoke. I started taking photos, feeling self important, but none of the pictures I took resembled what I had seen when I took the photo. "It's a surrealist camera," he explained. I had that emotion of realization that's mixed with embarrassment, where you don't want to show how stupid you are by acknowledging that you didn't know something you should probably know. I tried to take the discovery of a surreal camera in stride as though I saw them all the time, but I lost my cool when he showed me all the pictures he'd taken at the party that day. Each one like something right out of a Dali painting. And then I noticed that the camera had a dial with other settings on it: expressionism, cubism, pointilism... The name of one setting had been scratched out and in marker was written "Van Fucking Gough."
Anyway, the only amusing person at the party was the professional photographer who asked people to pose in unconventional positions and made them hold the poses for several seconds after he snapped the photo. He had a huge white digital camera with a number of odd bits stemming off of it—sort of steampunk, sort of cyberpunk, sort of a Hans Bellmer doll, all at the same time. It had a viewport you looked into like looking through a microscope to see the images already captured.
The photographer suddenly handed me the camera and asked me to take over while he had a smoke. I started taking photos, feeling self important, but none of the pictures I took resembled what I had seen when I took the photo. "It's a surrealist camera," he explained. I had that emotion of realization that's mixed with embarrassment, where you don't want to show how stupid you are by acknowledging that you didn't know something you should probably know. I tried to take the discovery of a surreal camera in stride as though I saw them all the time, but I lost my cool when he showed me all the pictures he'd taken at the party that day. Each one like something right out of a Dali painting. And then I noticed that the camera had a dial with other settings on it: expressionism, cubism, pointilism... The name of one setting had been scratched out and in marker was written "Van Fucking Gough."