At the end of 2010, Dwayne's Photo of Kansas ceased its Kodachrome processing operation, the last in the world. This is old news to photo enthusiasts, I suppose.
I had heard that the Kodachrome developing process was complicated, but I'd had no idea just how complicated. This 10 minute documentary makes it a little clearer.
This sort of nostalgia is a little strange. It's nostalgia for a medium, conveyed through other media, which are only facsimiles of the original, in the same way that any photograph is a facsimile of something else.
I won’t be the first person you’ve heard say that the holiday season sucks. Because it does. Suicide statistics and the smoked salmon inside Dan Akroyd’s Santa costume and the music being piped into the fluorescent-bright aisles of Rite Aids all around the nation at this very moment say it better than words ever could anyway. It’s definitely the least wonderful time of year for a lot of people, full of all sorts of pressure and accounting and reminders of how we’re not doing as well at the job of being a human being as we’d like to be doing. The last thing any of us need is the added stress and extra shopping that this barbaric ritual entails. Let’s give ourselves a break.
I don't go out of my way to watch TV, but even I couldn't help but notice television advertisements this year for (if I recall) American mega-retailers Best Buy and Target that enticed viewers with the possibility of getting an entire season's Christmas shopping done in a single day, on a single trip to a single store. That feat filled the depicted shoppers with satisfaction, glee, and relief. What does it mean that the major beneficiaries of our materialistic ways aren't afraid to acknowledge that many of us secretly dread the traditions that earn them their profits? How trapped do they think we are? Could they be right?
Yesterday I told my wife that if we could just nix the present thing, Christmas would be more like a second Thanksgiving, and we could thoroughly enjoy it again. And to my surprise, she more-or-less agreed with me.
So maybe this is the year to end it, for me at least. I haven't bought any presents this year, and I don't really plan to. I will give a few people some cash. I'm going to bake a lot of cookies. I'm going to try to show people I've been thinking of them without loading them up with stuff they don't really want. (Unless they hate cookies, I guess.) I won't mind a bit if they return the favor.
My Opera
