Non-half-assed commentary

Date:             Sun, 17 Feb 2008 17:57:47 -0800

From:             Andrew Shaw-Kitch

To:             Brendan McCauley

Subject:             Non-half-assed commentary

Brendan,

When I think of commentary I think of you.  Yesterday I watched Seinfeld for the first time in a long time and it was great.  It was the episode when:

1) Kramer loses all of Jerry's shoes and forces a mom and pop store to abandon its 48-year-old shoe repair business


2) George buys John Voight's Le Baron (and Jon Voight bites Kramer)


3) Jerry is not invited to Tim Watley's party but goes and knocks a statue into Woody the Woodpecker


4) Elaine wins Mr. Pitt the opportunity to, with the common man, hold the Woody the Woodpecker float.



            I very much appreciated your commentary, as I know very little about photography, other than it interests me very personally.  On Friday a girl in our program said, with no inflection to illustrate its romantic significance, "I can never photograph the stars," after attempting to do so.  This of course is an essential metaphor for a lot of things.  I think your own words speak a lot to your best photographs. What comes immediately to mind is the inexplicable mystery of your friends' XBox-obsessed faces and the fact that the narrative is not in the photo, it occurs where they are looking (i.e. the video game in the opposite direction).  How are the photos these days?  I assume well if you think so astutely about the medium.  I request attachments for old and new times’ sake.


            Last night, in the bathroom of our room in the all-inclusive resort—a room that I shared with our old friend Ian, which had a single bed that I shared with our old fiend Ian—I found a shaving kit and decided to shave off my beard. However, I only got part way when I realized I would need scissors or else the task would require an excess of 1,000 strokes, for which I didn't think the cheap razor, nor I, had the patience.  So upon returning today I have done just that, with the help of my scissors, leaving my moustache, and no one knows yet.  I anticipate my mother's reaction.  I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of an all-inclusive resort, because I wasn't until I experienced it, though I had heard the term before: at any given time you can order any alcoholic beverage you want.  You are on the beach and you want a Piña Colada: you ask for one, you get it and you pay nothing.  You are eating your dinner (a buffet with a myriad of ridiculous choices) and a waitress asks you if want you want anything to drink and you say champagne, AND YOU ARE THEN DRINKING CHAMPAGNE!  You are swimming in one of the five pools and you want a beer and so you swim to the poolside bar and receive a beer!  You go to get coffee after dinner and you have fifteen varieties of alcoholic coffees available.  The bar closes at eleven where you've been drinking Cuba Libres
(Coke and Rum) and you are directed to the resort’s club to drink more for free. 
Considering the mentality of my drinking career, that financial issues are the only thing stopping me from drinking all the time, I didn't know exactly how to handle this, as I did all of these things quite unhypothetically (save the pool/beer scenario that I experienced vicariously through an anecdote of Ian’s) and thus the beer-zarre nonsense reality I was dealing with became even more ridiculous: Lewis & Clark College has sent me on a program that took me to a resort for three days and two nights with the educational value of whale watching Saturday morning and visiting Barrio Wilmore[1].  The most striking effect of course was an inside study of how fucked-up the Dominican tourist industry is and how decadent rich people are in the midst of some of the worst poverty in the northwestern hemisphere: they had security guards with shotguns at the end of the beach that was toward the town to keep the Dominicans off the private beach. And I can't handle how my life is always so predetermined to be so goddamn ironic: the most wretched thing I've experienced the whole time I’ve been here was spent under the guise of the most pleasurable things: "the honeymoon period" of culture shock ended in the place where people are supposed to have their honeymoons: I watched Seinfeld in a foreign country, etc.
 I'm sorry for spouting so much, but sometimes one needs to share their moustache and the circumstances that led to it. 


Love, Andrew

---

[1]. 1) This is a footnote to explain that Friday afternoon we visited a neighborhood settled by freed American slaves from Philadelphia in the 1820s
who were offered lots of land by Haiti (then occupiers of the whole island)
instead of returning to Liberia.  In the 1960s, however, the Dominican government tore down the neighborhod to make way for tourism and so only a few English speaking African-Americans remain, one of whom made us cookies, ginger ale and johnnycakes and told us stories.