TUNES // Julien Chang – Of The Past
Post by Misha
There’s a thrift store in Williamsburg – not one of the pretentious ones where the inventory is curated and staged and priced accordingly, but a thrift store with aisles packed so densely and stacked so precariously it feels as though dislodging any one piece might set off an avalanche of dusty barstools and mismatched dishware sets. People squeeze by each other without breathing, clutching their limbs close and narrowly avoiding catastrophe.
Things seem very close to their histories here. The air is unsanitized and churchlike, heavy with memories that feel breathable, somehow. There is a large cardboard box wedged in between a wooden high chair and a stack of old-but-not-old-enough-to-be-valuable newspapers. It is filled to splitting with photographs. Not professional photos, just thousands of unremarkable moments. The kind that our parents captured when we were kids on those cameras that were the last generation before the digital takeover, and got them developed at Wal-Mart, and then brought them home in their paper sleeves, glossy and sticking together a bit. Flipping through to see which kid had their eyes closed during the family photo.
There’s something magnetic about this box of photographs. I get lost peering into the dark and blurry faces around a birthday cake celebration. I try to guess how they know each other. I wonder briefly about the significance of a maple tree before flipping on to a series of grainy and uncentered shots of the Space Needle at dusk (a family vacation maybe?). Some of the photos have dates burned in chemical orange, which makes them more intimate somehow. Someone woke up on August 7th and took a photo of the sky. On that day someone loved the sky enough to peel a piece of it off from the world to keep.
There are, without warning, flashes of almost intoxicating beauty. I can’t stop looking at a picture of a living room early in the morning. It’s empty and blue, with a pink glow blushing from a lamp on the floor. Everything is muted, separated by the merest suggestion of shadow. Bare winter branches are silhouetted against a cottony cobalt. The beauty is accidental and in some ways indistinguishable from the mystery of the photo itself, and this place where I find myself wearing other people’s eyes.
Buy Julien Chang’s debut album, Jules, here.