Miniature Soundtracks : Episode Five

Miniature Soundtracks is my small experiment in mp3 blogging. I'll be using a beloved image from my flickr photostream or favorites, reflect on it for a few sentences, and then give you a song that evokes the same feelings. If your photo or song is featured and you'd rather it not be, let me know and I'll take it down immediately.



This is me. Sometimes when I'm alone and bored, I take pictures of myself. I don't think it is all that weird of a way to pass the time in and of itself -- it's just like looking at a mirror, but fancier! But because of the internet inviting us all to share more and more of our alone time with everyone else on the face of the planet, it has become pretty weird. I'm certainly not the only one, as a quick glance at flickr can reveal, but... still. It seems to be a symptom of a larger phenomenon of the control that 'social networking' gives us over our own image. I had an argument about this a few days ago in which I asserted that we exercise plenty of control over our persona in real life too, and the internet isn't really so different in this regard as people make it out to be. I think that's true. I don't think that trying to assert a charming, intelligent, attractive face on the internet is all that much more common or different from dressing well, choosing your words carefully, or cleaning your apartment before people come over IRL. That said, the internet -- especially lately -- does provide us with a particularly juicy chance to reinvent ourselves and to pick and choose the qualities and angles we reveal. But it's more complicated than that: the internet provides us with the opportunity to be 'alone' and to communicate and interact with other people, at the same time! I don't even think twice about sitting in front of my computer in my underwear and a t-shirt and some kind of weird food like an entire bowl full of broccoli or an ice cream container with a package of pecans dumped into it, all the while composing some kind of stunningly poetic list of the times and places I like to hear music so that my friends and crushes can marvel at my magic heart. Or LastFM!! You know that I'm listening to Alejandro Escovedo at my apartment at 5:34 in the morning! Why am I awake? Shit!

I digress.

A couple years back, I remember having a conversation with Sarah Go about how the pictures we like most of ourselves and the pictures our friends and family like most of us rarely overlap. The pictures where I think I look my best are, for the most part, decidedly not pictures that my momma would put in a frame. I'm grabbing at straws as to why this is, but I'm thinking that we don't see our own faces all that often when we're having any kind of real life experience: laughing, crying, arguing, or even listening. We see our faces in the mirror (or the digital camera viewfinder) and our brains are relatively free from outside experience in those moments. Your face when you're alone is the face you're used to, but your loved ones see you differently: they see you reacting to them (and the world in general). I'm not arguing that the picture above is 'fake'. It's me, just as real as laughing, dancing, or laying on the floor at the Texas Women's Conference with a hoodie scrunched over my face is me. But... I'm alone. This picture is like a tape recording of a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it. For better or for worse, the internets (and the cameras and the iphoto) encourage us to do with photos what people have been doing for centuries with words: communicate the impossible beauty and mystery of our solitary inner lives. Or, y'know, feel pretty.

Just Be Simple (acoustic) - Songs:Ohia from the Magnolia Electric Co. bonus disc.