We Are All Random Film Stars

Capturing shit on film is kinda weird anyway, isn't it? I mean, who knows where you might be in a picture somewhere. Some family from North Dakota get their picture taken on the Boardwalk, you happen to be walking behind them and there you are, on some mantle in a room in a house in a town you'll never even know exists. Maybe in 1983 you took a picture, and beside a tree in the picture happened to be a girl you end up meeting and marrying 20 years later. Same with movies - e.g. the last scene of "Valley Girl," when the camera pulls away, showing the LA freeway packed with cars. What if you were in one of those cars? There you are, on film forever. - XMASTIME, 2008

Nostalgia can be nice but it can also turn cold like the opening to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man so I don't wanna go too far down the rabbit hole of these random old home movies of New York City that are suddenly popping up everywhere ("everywhere"....by that I mean "YouTube") like the one I rather brilliantly commented on yesterday, but they do remind of something I've been banging on about over the years & culminating with now believing that AI will be able to find every instance of every video/photo we might randomly be in; eventually, every person will have their own Inadvertent Shutterfly Albums (whoa whoa whoa did I just invent a business???LOOKING FOR INVESTORS PEOPLE 💰💰💰💰!!!).

There’s such a thrill to it all but with the shadow of melancholy drowning most of it out, but I keep getting pulled & pulled into wondering if there’s some sort of meaningful story out there that I’m chasing.

Probably not.

But you never know?