Kinescope

We were in the park
in Chicago, Illinois,
Autumn, 2000.

My friend had gotten married
at long last,
we were outdoors drinking,
and he came out and joined us,
he had an early digital camera with him
and we cycled through the pictures,
reliving a reception that we had just
walked out of for a cigarette

We did the same thing the next morning;
his father in law had people over for breakfast
and we plugged the camera into the television
and watched the slide show
cycle over and over
reliving priceless memories that were 16 hours old,
"Did you see that? Do you remember when he did that?
Do you remember that toast? That was beautiful!"

For thousands of years music was something
people played,
they sang, built drums, flutes, guitars
then learned these instruments, built songs around them,
took these songs from place to place.
After Gutenberg music became the way you
recreated something someone else had thought of,
after Edison it became the way you listened to
what people had done somewhere, sometime,
in a soundproof room in New York City

The Iliad was spoken around
fires, in caves, under stars
for 400 years before Homer put it on paper

There's no life in these words.
The best I can do on my best day
(and I rarely have them)
is a video capture,
stealing something that was once live,
turning it into magnetic impulses,
zeroes and ones,
then putting my name on it

Statistics tells me that a monkey
with a typewriter can do what I do
given a long enough timeline,
the art is in what you do,
but I'll be watching.