It's been said that being in the moment is a powerful way to live. It keeps us present and centered. However, reliving warm tender memories can often be comforting. Not so much as a wish for reliving the past but as a reaffirmation to how we arrived at the present.
Once while exploring a flea market I purchased a box filled with about a thousand memories from someone’s life that had been discarded. These were significant moments for the people in the pictures. Weddings, holidays, births, vacations, graduations, etc. Cost me ten bucks.
It bothered me to realize that no one wanted to preserve their ancestors experience or recall these snapshots in time. Then I thought of all the memorabilia, film, video, and pictures that I had accumulated over the years. Decades upon decades of seeing value in things others had discarded. What would happen to all that stuff? Would it be discarded? Would it wind up at a flea market or garage sale? Or would someone else find pleasure by turning trash to treasure?
Like many of us when the government ordered us all to "lockdown" in order to save humanity from the "deadly plague of 2020", I began going through closets and accumulated boxes of stuff. Not at first mind you, the first two weeks were spent making homemade bread, then I ran out of yeast. But that's another blog post.
And so the sorting began. I looked at rooms stacked with boxes filled with photos to scan, film to be transferred and video that needed too be digitized. As the theme song from Sanford and Son, looped in my head, I began to compile an inventory while contemplating a way to share these snapshots in time. I started to think there may be others out there that would appreciate these peeks into the past if they were practicable.
Short of recreating Tesla's work in quantum physics and time travel, I thought a platform on the world wide web might be the answer. Free of the constraints of traditional media outlets, censorship and tight scheduling, a domain that was "always on with very little static", might appeal to like minded cinephiles, collectors, curators and children of the atomic age.........or their spawn. If presented properly this could be a frequency people would frequent. A place to gather and share memory.
With each scanned photo or restored film reel Transistor TV began taking form. Over the next year, the form took shape and became real. Finally these forgotten moments have an opportunity to be experienced by a whole new generations or relived by older ones.
Now we can all share in a collection of consciousness from earlier eras as if we fell between the folds of the space time continuum. Join the journey if you will. There are many stories to be told, film to be rolled and pictures to behold. Because if we don’t share them…did they really happen?
PS - What do you suppose will happen to all those selfies on your phones when you are gone?