Aperture

On camera rolls and the urge to live through them.

8 PM. Los Feliz. Several weeks ago.

I’m working at my job as a host at a restaurant. Leaning into the stereotype of an actor in LA. It’s lovely. Great people. Good pay.

I’m taking a group of young women who’d gathered for their friend’s birthday to their table. They smell like cherry blossom perfume and lip gloss. Somehow everyone got the memo to wear black with a pop of silver or gold accessories. If Bratz dolls shopped at Reformation, this is how they would look.

They set their wine glasses down and, like vultures descending upon a carcass, take their phones out to document the aesthetics of the table.

I wait patiently before placing the menus, not wanting to lower the tone with clutter. I get it, they’re at a cute restaurant having a cute time with their girls. It’s cute. They want to tell the world about it. I wonder which one of them got the best angle.

Two days from now, after they’ve posted these pictures, what then? I think of all the tablescape pictures I’ve taken. They’re now collecting digital dust in my camera roll. “Enjoy,” I tell them, “the chocolate cake is not to be missed out on.”

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My roommate gets paid to post pictures and videos of places she’s never been. Her boss sends her a picture of a spa she visited that day. She’s tasked with researching the spa and then posting about it as though she’d been there. So that other people will go and take pictures of it. By the time she clocks out and switches to her personal account, she feels as though she’s been around the world and nowhere all at once.

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10:30 AM. Griffith Park. Near the Mineral Wells Picnic Area. Last Tuesday.

I’ve come here for a long walk to clear my head. “I’m here as a sort of meditation,” I tell myself. I’m fasting today. “I’m going to find a clearing in the dense forest of my anxiety. I’ve left my air conditioned apartment to get out into nature and return home - like Mary Oliver would. And I need to get 10,000 steps in.”

I come upon a tiny stream, shaded by trees. Water flowing through the cracks of our inferno city! It’s a miracle. A flock of finches dive in and out of the stream. They dip their heads under and come back up, shaking the water over their feathers. Sweet tiny bathing rituals right before my eyes. The sun is their towel. They sing to each other. They are cared for; I must be too.

I’m careful with my footfalls. I don’t want my steps to scare them away. I stand in awe for a few minutes as they play in the water. “I must document this,” something says in me. The impulse comes with its own flock of thoughts.

“I want it, I want this moment, I want to hold it in my hands just a little longer, and send it to my mom so she sees I’m ok. Is this for me or for Instagram? Am I doing this to show *people* how mindful I am? That I’m a nature girl? That I take time to observe the small things? If a bird bathes in the woods and no Mary Oliver’s took their phone out to document it, did it even happen? But they’re so sweet! I want to own this little golden moment in time. Maybe then I can return.”

No sooner had I taken out my phone and pressed record than the finches flew away. The video I have is 1 second of flight and 15 seconds of an empty stream, glittering, giggling at me.

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A good portion of my grad school acting training took place on Zoom, thanks to the pandemic. On Zoom there is a button: Hide Self View. It keeps you from seeing yourself despite your camera being turned on. Two years out of Zoom school, I realize the “Hide Self View” button still applies. I don’t want to know what I look like when I’m working.

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1 PM. Magnolia Boulevard. Best of Times Antique Store. Yesterday.

I’m redecorating my apartment. Looking for pieces that “spark joy” and feel like me. In a dusty shop on the same boulevard that inspired Paul Thomas Anderson’s frog-raining film epic, I see it. In a large, golden frame, leaning on a walnut cabinet, is a reproduction of Gaugin’s A Vase of Flowers.

I’m struck by the intentionally unspecific saturation of the flowers. The darkness. The blobby shapes. If it were a photo, it would be blurry and shaky.

The National Gallery website writes of the flowers: “They look as though they are slightly past their best, and some blossoms have fallen onto the tabletop. What seems to have interested Gauguin is the pattern of decorative shapes and the delicate interweaving of reds, creams and blues against the gold background rather than the horticultural detail…In 1899, when the dealer Ambroise Vollard asked Gauguin to send him some flower paintings for sale, the artist replied that he had ‘done only a few’ because ‘I do not copy nature – today even less than formerly. With me, everything happens in my exuberant imagination.’ “

A moment, painted over the course of several hours, days, weeks. He began the painting in 1895 and finished it a year later - a century before I was born. A kind of picture taken through the aperture of the human eye, the pupil. The shutter speed a blink of Gaugin’s eyelids, and when too tired, closing for sleep, waking to imagine, to paint with light from without and within.

The shop owner tells me it’s cheaper to pay with cash. I have just enough saved in tip money to pay in cash, right then and there. The flowers now hang on my living room wall, frozen in their wilting. Alive a hundred years later.