A study performed at the Montreal Neurological Institute in 2001 concluded that after a PET scan study, subjects responded negatively with unpleasant or mildly unpleasant emotions when introduced to varying amounts of musical dissonance. Adversely, in cases of rewarding stimuli, such as recreational drugs and food, intensely pleasurable emotions result in activity in the limbic and arousal processes. Likewise, similar cerebral blood flow changes were measured when the subjects selected their own music, which elicited the highly pleasurable experience of “shivers-down-the-spine” or “chills.” In short, the pleasure derived from a song or musical performance can have similar effects as illicit drugs and sweet candies.
I feel a similar effect from some photography and paintings but in a much slower, more serene reveal that is manifest more so in reverie and awe than a jolt of serotonin brought on by a preferred timbre. As I listen for continuity, dissonance, and refrain in music, I similarly scan paintings and photographs for juxtaposition and composition, searching for some elusive meaning, rapt in the mise-en-scène, a moment when the motionless subject appears caught off guard in an instant of genuine revelation. I look and listen for the nervous system beneath the surface of the skin, amidst the legato, and between the pixels and brushstrokes.
These two arts have been diametrically apposed given that one art is visual and the other primarily aural. Then I met a guy named Alex and found the confluence of the two arts and recognized them both as expressions of control by each exacting a visual and sonic radiation.
*
I perch myself on a dingy stool at the horseshoe-shaped bar in The World Famous Golden Nugget with the unlevel shuffleboard behind me, and four pool tables to my left, looking for Alex and World Series updates on the silent flat screens adorning the racks of half-empty liquor bottles. I order water from the bartender, Kevin, who doesn’t mind if I avoid libations for the evening knowing I’ll leave him a few bucks when I depart.
I’ve known Alex for exactly 31 days. He’s a photographer by trade and a sponsored angler. He lives alone in a two-bedroom house that a friends’ parents own and they call him every other month or so and ask him indifferently if he’s found a roommate—in the meantime they pick up the loss of rent. In one of the living rooms of the home he stacks large, industrial tubs ribboned with stainless steel bracings full of photo equipment: lights, lenses, flashes, screens, reflectors. He has a sprawling workstation of three monitors and a massive hard drive laden with music, images, and editing software for both formats. The place looks like basecamp for the digitally inclined.
In another living room there are hulking six-foot duffle bags stuffed with oars, fishing rods, deflated float tubes, an outboard motor. Various barbells, a jump rope, and medicine balls explain the thick musk. Alex is an outdoorsman who does reps and runs for cardio.
Soon he arrives and also orders water with the future intent of a whiskey/ginger and Kevin knows to bring him his water in a mini-pitcher, which Alex clutches with both hands like it’s the fundamental substance that gives life. He breathes deep, I ask what songs he’s going to perform, and he brushes off the question as though he has no interest in singing, as though he’s not going to take center stage. Alex is also a karaoke aficionado and plays bass and drums in a couple local bands. There is a Battle–of-the-Bands coming up in which he’s participating and he presses me often to help him sell tickets.
He knows I intend to write about karaoke and he takes his time before and between songs to wax philosophical about the affair. He likes to break things down into simple binaries to demonstrate that he has given the presented question much consideration and has, before the conversation, already arrived at a calculated and thoughtful conclusion. His examinations include statements such as: “There are two types of people who sing karaoke. Those who just sing because their friends are singing, and those who have the playlist on their Spotify or Itunes account labeled ‘Karaoke.’” He’ll modify this consideration later and say that four out of five people have no desire to be better singers, but that one out of the five imagines themselves musical, or is musical, and works at getting better at the songs they know. I scribble notes and drink water and Alex walks over to the Karaoke Jockey, trades a few lines of dialogue and asks for a song without filling out the little scissor-cut squares of request paper. He runs into another karaoker and the two of them converse under the blue and amber spotlights and I think of Alex’s photography.
His photography employs a technique called light painting or flash luminescence. He shoots multiple long exposures at night and races around for the ten or so seconds the shutter is open and with multiple flashlights brightens bushes, tall banks of trees, patios, decks, cabins, and people, which all present the illusion that an axe-blade moon reflects intense sunrays to one pinpoint on the dark side of the earth. His coloring is vibrant and his style is precise and clean. He shoots for gun magazines, fishing and hunting outfitters, DIY and self-sufficient living rags. His work is crisp and usable, marketable. It’s designed to be seen, not considered. It’s a calculated, staged spectacle that requires the accompaniment of language for explanation. It’s informative and lacks any narrative impulse. Some shoots conflate the pastoral with easy living and promulgate the myth that living off the land is romantic, necessary, and viable. Other works make guns look pristine and flawless, like an alien technology with the devices’ sharp steely lines. Nestled in an eggshell lockbox the weapons look desirous of a handler, like they can’t sit still for long.
The photos seem to be contending with something. It’s as if they were a little brighter, tidier, if they had even crisper lines down to the slightest pixilation, they could effuse that language they so very much need. They’re flashy and set without the mystery of motion in a still shot. They’re not photos in the traditional sense: neither a screen-click from a phone nor that archaic twitch and wind of a disposable camera. Rather, his method turns photo taking into a prolonged, glacial gaze. This slowing process has an entertaining but disingenuous effect. His photography disrupts the most rudimentary dichotomy—the original juxtaposition—light and dark. Alex takes the imposing form of black, of shape within and without shape, and contrasts it. He makes the natural world most unnatural and infinitely pleasant. He introduces the spotlight to the wild and lets it linger.
And then, at The Nugget, he gets on the mic.
*
Good karaoke is a consideration of intensity and time. A song of sustained dynamism, anything by Rage Against the Machine for instance, quickly descends into racket. And a prolonged, meandering jam-band will bore the daylights out—“Free Bird,” by Lynard Skynyrd, should be stricken from the hard drives of karaoke machines everywhere. But this isn’t to suggest that long songs can’t stick a landing, and for his first performance, Alex chooses “Space Oddity.” This tune has all the necessary elements of a great karaoke song, despite its five-plus minutes. The lyrics are slow and discernable. The tune is catchy and the chorus is belted in the subtlest of English accents as to drown out the over-enthusiastic sing-alongs yet still provide venue for participation. There’s even an eighth-note double-clap at the end to distinguish those who know the song and the dilatants humming along. And I sing along, and I clap, and I applaud when he’s done.
After his performance, a middle-aged, bald man is astounded, approaches Alex, and offers to buy him a drink. Alex abides and the man opts for $1 shots of sour-apple whiskey and Kevin pinches his face at the order. Middle-age Bald repeatedly compliments Alex on his untrained booming tenor voice and mediocre, inconsistent vibrato that trills and drops a couple notes on the last two beats. He tells Alex that he can’t do nothin’ like that but if it came down to a push-up competition, he’d take the prize.
In an instant, he’s on the ground hammering out military-style push-ups and Alex is counting off like a drill sergeant. Middle-aged Bald hits forty and rests with his arms straight, his body planked, and Alex screams in his face, “You give my ten more, goddammit. You get to fifty.” And Middle-aged Bald huffs and dips his ass to pump out ten more. He stands, whoops, high-fives Alex and Kevin leans over the bar and says, “Marty, I’m calling you a cab.”
I step outside for a cigarette. From the open doorway peaking in, beyond the radiance of the pool tables where the performers stand, a skinny blond kid chokes the mic and pushes his glasses high on his sweaty nose, reads a melody and then vanishes into the afterglow of the dim bar where he receives subtle praise from his people. I think about Alex and his consideration of this art, of performance, and of his photography. Susan Sontag writes, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” Alex’s photos attempt to exact that moment for as long as possible. Because he records split seconds with his camera, and because he calls back nostalgic minutes in the songs he covers, Alex makes a brief memorandum to his own mortality, his helplessness toward the unavoidable, which reminds him that he is inevitably fleeting toward the endpoint of his own biological timeline. As he records a trice in time with his camera, he becomes more aware of the instant in which it was taken. He knows the date, the position of the sun or moon, the exact alignment of the planets as he captures the image. Then he edits the photo, another cessation. Later, he will see the photo in a magazine with a date on the cover, and yet again be reminded of time passing, of worlds revolving, of the end. And he will find this corporeality a little too dull. There, in the editing booth, he’ll change the nature of existence. He’ll turn night to day and make a technological attempt to turn back the clock, to again find the sun. And he’ll fail, but it will be pretty to look at.
On stage acts as one long flash and instead of aiming the lens, now he’s the subject. He banters and glides through the crowd. He touches women on their shoulders and winks at them like a lounge singer. He becomes fictional and representative, a simulacrum of Alex, and then he returns to his seat to receive the warm praises and one-dollar shots this existence has to offer. There, without a spotlight, singing decade-old songs and homages to high school adulations, Alex summons countless possibilities of worlds, and on each one he is not on this one. He’s somewhere further from the sun but closer to the light, where the years pass slower around our star and his mass and gravity draw a host of admirers who might remember his performance like the storms of Jupiter.
*
Under the most basic consideration, karaoke and photography are practices of control. The photographer manipulates the image and produces a gaze of the natural world as she sees fit. Likewise, on stage, the performer bends the will of the audience to an aligning state of emotion with the intent to invoke immense, temporary pleasure, a tingle in the spine. And the reaction of the viewer and listener is to want that control for themselves, to be envious and desirous of praise attained through control (this is why karaoke exists and why all of our phones have cameras on them), but not everyone can sing and not everyone can take a decent picture (see Instagram and the built-in editing features that transform brunch into an old-fashioned, patina-glazed reverie of caloric intake). With thousands of karaoke bars nationwide amassing almost $400 million dollar profits annually, multiple phone apps that feature solo-modes of the biz (one company has recorded over 4 billion minutes since its launch in 2010, that’s over 23,000 hours per day), and the countless forms of photography widely disseminated across the globe, humans appear to need reality confirmed. Photography and karaoke provide the venue to enhance experience and set the subject at center stage where lights flash in slow motion and for an extraordinary moment, a person can go supernova in the darkest, shapeless corners of the universe.
I look inside the bar and Alex is opening another song with a big, trembling roar, mic to his mouth, his left arm reaching out to space for something.
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