|
 |
| I'm a dish-doer. Have been since I was a child. I remember one
night getting so into it that I did not only all the dirty dishes but all
the clean ones as well. Maybe they weren't clean enough. My mother was not
fastidious. She was one of those people who washed only the front of the
plate, leaving the back to develop the subtle yellow sheen of a thin layer
of congealed grease. So while the family watched TV in the next room I went
through the cupboards and washed every item in there whether it needed it
or not. It's funny what memories stick up out of the avalanche of amnesia. I've worked as a dish-cleaning pro, too. First at Noyes dining hall at Cornell (the history's been erased by name changes since pre-web days so there's no meaningful link) where I scrubbed pots and worked the line--a conveyor belt which delivered up to 2,000 messy trays per 3-hour shift--and my devotion was such that I rode the plastic-tipped prongs through the 20-foot long Vulcan dish machine as a farewell gesture and emerged with 2nd degree burns on my belly. DMO. I also did dishes at Doe Bay Cafe summer 2004, where I learned a lot about life from Sam, who disappeared mid-season back to India and Thailand, where, not surprisingly, he would miraculously eyewitness and survive the tsunami a few months later. Working a sink and sprayer somehow prepares you for whatever contingency water might bring. But none of this is to the point. (Then again, as one of my favorite professors once screamed in response to my question about the ultimate point of a story we were reading: "Point?! There is no ultimate point!") The point, if one exists, is that I recently bought a superpowered DV camcorder (Sony Handycam HC96) in order to shoot a music video for Gold Hick. I thought I would return it after the June 1 shoot at Alibi Room, but I seem to be addicted to its interval recording function, which allows for creation of time-lapse motion studies, of which this is the first finished example. |