In Which A Blurred Photograph Is Still Undesirable

Types of Instagram Friends

by LARA MILLS

1 The one who only uses Instagram to post pictures of him/herself partying.

Photos look like: people, people, people, people, beer.

I say: I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, give me some.

2 The one who takes glorious photos with Instagram but consistently blurs out everything except his/her intended subject.

Photos look like: What might be the most stunning cliffside view of a foreign country you have ever seen except the cliffs are all blurry and the ocean waves are a smear in favor of highlighting one travel companion or significant other on the crest of that cliff who is permitted such exquisite detail by the Instagrammer that you can read the sports team motif on their trusty sunworn baseball hat.

I say: Your composition is so good that your intended subjects will be naturally highlighted. Please don't be paranoid and controlling and instead let us enjoy every detail of your wonderful photographs.

3 The one who only uses Instagram to post pictures of his/her family, family home, and family traditions in celebration of their wonderful family.

Photos look like: people, dog, cake, mom's pie in the window, dad being goofy, two or more relatives wearing matching costumes.

I say: I am so happy for you that your family is perfect but I live ten thousand miles away from mine plus we're really not cute or into each other or even ever really talk so I'm going to ignore these representations of the perfect American family but thanks for the assertion despite all my years of denial that the archetype actually does exist.

4 The one who lives in a foreign country and has fun relating daily street life back to friends at home.

Photos look like: Street food carts, adorable foreign babies, weekend trips into badass equatorial nature.

I say: Oops sorry this is me and about a dozen of my Instagram friends so I don't know how this comes off but people seem to like us okay. I admit it always makes me a little sad to share a foreign country with more adventurous travelers than I am whose Instagrams present some of the most stunning pictures of places I actually have access to by living out here but will never visit because I missed out on some weekend trip or another.

5 The one who somehow manages to take bad photographs with Instagram.

Photos look like: Zoomed-in latte foam which looks like rolls of naked human body fat; a chicken-shaped napkin holder on a table with its shadow; rotting oranges.

I say: I do not know how you manage to create such terrible images with the easiest, most intuitive photo editing software available on the market. Let’s reevaluate how you see the world and begin again with an online photography tutorial on composition and possibly a stronger glasses prescription.

6 Foodies

Photos look like: Perfectly arranged hyper-zoomed deliciousness framed by black or scrubbed-out white borders.

I say: How do you have so much free time on your hands to cook and consume such incredible meals seemingly every single day? You make me feel like an unhomely mess and I hate you and on top of that I'm hungry now but I don't want to eat peanut butter and jelly for the fifth day in a row so your picture of melon-ensconced prosciutto on a bed of radicchio leaves is making me want to go to the hypermarket in rushhour Jakartan traffic with a 100 degree typhoid-induced fever.

7 The one who thinks that hashtagged captions create grammatical sentences.

Photos look like: Oh, anything.

I say: #You #have #norespect #for #your #followers #if #you #think #wearewillingtoreadallyourhashtags #plus #ITDOESNTEVENWORK #if #you #are #makinguphastags #totes #random #whatevs. Double curses if they import their Instagram hashtags into facebook’s newsfeed because that doesn’t even make sense leave us alone.

8 The one who can use the word "selfie" in every day conversation with a straight face.

Photos look like: One big head at an angle plus half an arm backed by some famous historic monument or beautiful nature or at its worst, nothing particularly discernible.

I say: I'm biased against needlessly abbreviating the English language and especially abbreviations which just tack on a lazy "-y" suffix or its sonic equivalent so I find the word "selfie" inherently annoying. But I like you or else I wouldn't be following you on Instagram, so I do want to see your face in interesting places and will use selective blinders on your super hip hashtags because my word bias is my problem. However if you are taking pictures of yourself in a mirror again and again and then again in a different mirror then you are using up the wrong app's bandwidth.

9 The one who is really into his or her budding nuclear family.

Photos look like: Happy homebodies cheerfully snapping pictures with their significant others and especially their dog and in another year or two probably their baby(ies).

I say: Luckily my friends aren't child-bearing yet (though they're close!) yet a streak have lately adopted their first official relationship dogs which I guess is a precursor to toddlers except way more destructive given how many slobbered-beyond-recognition shoes or leery-looking beagles with a chew toy are popping up on my Instagram feed lately. Also I am not a huge fan of being subjected to a relationship's whole lifecycle from those initial months of cutesie look-where-we-are-together pictures through to dour shots of rain-soaked windows and ice cream tubs and breakup-friendly cats but this is another area where I realize that how you use the platform is your prerogative so good luck to you and I hope you find catharsis in at least making the pictures pretty.

10 The one who really likes his or her cat(s).

Photos look like: Cats looking grumpy, piled on top of each other, or snuggled in a lap in a carefully-framed self*e.

I say: Wouldn't it be fun if Instagram let us add big block Impact font letters to photos to insta-meme the cat pictures but then also everyone agreed to use one specific hashtag for all of their attempts and then Instagram let me filter out that single hashtag so I never actually had to look at them? That might work.

Lara Mills is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Jakarta. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"The Kiss (Jesse Perez remix)" - Ellen Allien (mp3)

"Need" - Ellen Allien (mp3)

 

In Which We Outstretch A Gloved White Hand In Singapore

Singapore Swings

by LARA MILLS

I was a backpacker equivalent the first time I came to Singapore. Over a year and several trips later Singapore is the only place where I land and pray I do not look like a backpacker. Now being scruffy feels like misrepresenting myself. Some might say this is progress or growth.

The Singapore immigration desk that stamps your passport at the airport gives you little mint or grape candies from a dish scooped out of itself. One foot beyond that is a plastic cup labeled “SWEET WRAPPERS ONLY” which is full of candy wrappers and nothing else. Soldiers pass with giant guns while you wait for your bag at baggage claim and later a little girl marches one-two in front of her mother’s cart before ordering it to STOP at the line of roughly fifty groups of people waiting for a taxi. Changi’s airport luggage carts brake aggressively. The girl and her mother are wearing matching black and white striped dresses. The line takes ten minutes; that’s five taxis deployed a minute, one every twelve seconds. Up front the old woman in charge is directing her clients to the refilling row of cars behind her with a white gloved hand and ruthless, silent efficiency.

My taxi driver has an iPhone which directs us in a calm measured voice to my hotel. The driver remarks on the different particulate sizes contained in the smog blown over from Sumatra last week and what facemasks can properly filter them. Huey Lewis starts playing on the radio, my favorite, favorite song when I was little. I used to stop walking in the middle of grocery store aisles and dance in spasms because of this song. I stare out the window and watch the city grow up around us.

Later I take a walk and let Singapore show me what it wants me to see. This is a perfect city for traveling alone. It answers every question I have and directs me towards everything I need and everything which sparkles. As I walk sometimes I notice hidden turnoffs and tunnels for workers – they are grey and uninviting and not intended for me. For the visitor there are lights and tree-lined walkways to follow. Often these walkways end at a finance center or mall. After all Singapore does need to pay for itself. It is not a cheap date.

There is only ever the present here but the present can be so damn lovely. Sitting on a low concrete wall by the harbor I inhale and send cigarette smoke into space. The concrete I’m curled up on is still warm from the sun which set an hour ago. The smoke twists over the water and takes on the million glassy colors of the skyscraper lights in front of me, all their colors visible and invisible, then disappears into the backdrop, first fading out as a sweet smell, and then nothing.

I smoke like this in cities the night before I leave them. The last time I was in Paris I knew it might be years until I was there again. I threw the cigarette into the river once it was finished; being a willful polluter bought me the cheapest landscape in the city, a permanent presence as an unwelcome piece of young American backpacker trash in France. That was six years ago. Here the harbor water looks immaculate. I think they might fine me if I throw my cigarette anywhere but a designated disposal. I will find a trash can. There are cameras.

And there’s a breeze – I could sit here by the harbor forever with this breeze. It doesn’t fill my pores with motorbike exhaust or my lungs with twice the tar I fill them with myself. It rolls off the water and brushes my hair back without a word.

“Excuse me can I buy you a drink?” “Huh?” A middle-aged man walking by would apparently like a cigarette and my company. I can’t tell where he’s from, maybe Indian. There’s no one else around. I give him an Indonesian clove and we chat a little. “So Jakarta, is it nice?” “Not really.” “Then why do you live there?”

I laugh this off but he doesn’t. He looks at me and watches me and really wants to know. I tell him that Jakarta is not a very easy city. I never say I don’t like it. He asks, “Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not hard because you have difficulty… blending in?” I have no idea what he means even though I might know exactly what he means. I consider responding in Indonesian but it’s not worth the attention. I shift from my wall to get back to my walk and wish him a safe night, a redundancy.

I walk for another hour or two without knowing where. Headphones at night are safe here and it is a pleasure to soundtrack the skyline. My iPhone says “NO SERVICE” yet google maps can somehow still show me myself, a moving blue dot among the boulevards. Singapore found me before I even knew I was lost. I don’t know where I want to go yet but it would like a say in the matter.

A day or two later I have to leave. After checking in to my flight I stop to watch an art installation outside security at Changi Airport. Hundreds of golden orbs are suspended on individual transparent fishlines while some mechanism in the ceiling above makes the orbs rise and dip in unison along each of their vertical tracks. It is hypnotic. A crowd starts gathering as music crescendos and the orbs accelerate up and down in concert with all the other orbs, beautiful movement from collective order, like ocean waves or backwards rain. 

I picture the headline: passenger misses flight because Changi is too beautiful. I start walking.

Once inside security I am asked twice how I am feeling. The first is a woman in AirAsia’s bright red uniform who walks up to me holding an iPad. The iPad is beaming as it asks me to use smiley faces to rate how I had felt about the airline’s check-in process and whether the check-in ladies had smiled at me. Sure, click. Then after I use the bathroom a smiley face on a video screen embedded in the wall asks me to rate my experience of the facility. I am almost glad it asked since the automatic hand dryer hadn’t been hot enough and cost me thirty seconds of my time in Changi. The rest was fine though so I give the experience a quick thumbs up. The smiley face winks and I walk out.

I mentally ask Singapore for drinking water and an internet hotspot and find both next to each other at my gate. My flight pulls away on time to the minute. By standards of execution Singapore is a masterpiece. The surveys I answered feel like a model asking whether I can see her wrinkles through layers of photoshop. I would never have thought to check but since she asked they must be there, and they must be on her mind. I imagine she might look relieved if I tell her she looks flawless.

Lara Mills is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Jakarta. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photographs by the author.

"Tahquamenon Falls" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)

"All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)

In Which All Morning Larks Must Die

They Start Singing

by LARA MILLS

The problem with staying up late in Jakarta is that Java doesn't follow a night owl's schedule: the mosques start singing around 4 a.m. as people begin their days often before I've ended mine. If you fall sleep at two and the morning prayer starts at the end of your first dream cycle, it will lift you out of sleep like being fished. You will curse and slam your phone when you check what terrible hour you were taken out of a dream, feeling tomorrow's morning preemptively destroyed by exhaustion. You go back to sleep to save tomorrow’s afternoon, but the afternoon is taken out too by the following prayer call at six which jolts you at another critical point of sleep. You fall back into dreaming, picturing masses of people waking up as if on cue, and this new dream compounds your powerlessness at getting the sleep your body needs more than water when your internal clock is hours different from everyone else in your immediate world.

Alarm goes off at eight.

I am jealous, jealous of morning birds. No one recognizes that the world accomodates early risers while the rest of us are too tired to notice. They affix the stigma of diet and sex to our night orientation and grant honor to being the first ones awake, yet never consider what it might take for them to sleep like us, to stay up until sunrise without substance or vice. I agree that everyone should experience the sun rise and reflect on the eternal passage of days, in the glorious moments of twilight when the sun and moon and stars are finally soft enough to meet each other, but I regret that only night owls get to experience how dawn is a daily moment which can be approached from two directions. 

My favorite city in the world is Jogjakarta, Indonesia, and my favorite place in Jogja is alone on a bridge over any of its rivulet valleys, listening to the call to prayer at either dawn or dusk. I feel this moment at sunset if I leave the city's main roads during my commute home and stop my motorbike on the bridge near my house, or I feel it at sunrise when I'm coming back from a friend’s house or a bar or club, and am trying to get home to sleep before the next day’s full sun becomes too disorienting. Especially at either side of sunrise, on my way home from wherever and inevitably alone, a rosier light than usual highlights the city's terracotta rooftops stretching up from the rivulets. When you’re still awake, the prayer calls layered over these beautiful sleepy rooftops will remind you that you're seeing a different end of the day than most people in your adopted city, and the moment becomes secret and exhilarating since you watched it begin and it belongs to you alone.

I feel guilty in Jogja though when I pass the traditional market near Tugu monument after morning prayer, seeing all the market workers shuffle to their stalls and talk together in quiet but gradually waking voices, rested and starting a day I'm still denying. I'm inevitably in my night clothes from the bar or the club and have probably just smoked a pack of clove cigarettes and condensed several beers into a few stretched hours of nongkrong hangouts that living in Indonesia is so amazing for. I pass the market on my motorbike and wonder how much my bare arms and shoulders or knees stick out at the next traffic light while stopped among a crowd of Indonesians wearing jackets and veils and gloves to protect themselves against the coming sun and the wind. I worry whether the cigarette stench off my nighttime clothes is leaving a trail for them to drive through in my wake, whether my hair will still smell like clove smoke when I go to work in a few hours, giving me away as the foreigner I am in any morning bird's world.

I live in Jakarta now and the infamous stranglehold of the city's traffic is in place every day from around 6-9am, and 4-7 p.m., the exact times of daily transition I was always free to revere in Jogja. Being productive at anything here takes twice as much effort and people often leave home at the 6 a.m. prayer to eat breakfast in the office kitchen rather than spend those same hours in rush hour traffic. Adjusting to this is proving impossible for me. I hate sleeping knowing that the purpose of nighttime hours here is simply to rest in order to fight traffic, which could be avoided just as easily by sleeping through rush hour instead of trying to stay ahead of it. I then feel guilty again for the luxury of my Jakarta life that I have a job I can do any time of day and can afford to live close enough to work to avoid a worse commute. I try to sleep and wake up at the same time as everyone else out of misguided solidarity, but my sleep in Jakarta is disturbed twice every morning by the prayers I used to rejoice at still being awake enough to hear. I arrive at work desperately sleep deprived yet at least three hours after everyone else has started their day, and when I enter my office through the side door, I am aware that keeping such a conventionally lazy schedule means that all my mornings appear to have started without a struggle.

 In Jakarta there is still one time of day when my schedule matches the attention demanded by the calls to prayer, at sunset if I'm home from work and have the time to sit on my rooftop and smoke the night’s first clove in peace. I hear the drone of sunset prayer rise up one by one from the neighborhood's dozen or so mosques and it calls me to my own prayer, the type treasured by the godless: silence to honor the passage of time, and gratitude for feeling sufficiently alive and happy to appreciate the calm of such a moment, to let it become my own transparent peace. The prayer at this time of day, maghrib, means to me that the day is finally passing into night which is my time to excel, my temporal home, feeling like the day itself by ceding to inevitable transition, but remembering always to honor its passage too.

Lara Mills is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Jakarta. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about Ariel.

Photos and video by the author.

"Autumn Wake" - Early Day Miners (mp3)