{"id":554,"date":"2018-05-03T22:41:59","date_gmt":"2018-05-04T06:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/melancholymanbag.com\/?p=554"},"modified":"2018-05-04T20:18:39","modified_gmt":"2018-05-05T04:18:39","slug":"the-light-in-the-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/melancholymanbag.com\/?p=554","title":{"rendered":"The light in the dark"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The news has been insidiously getting to me recently, or at least since late 2016. Rules designed to protect the environment and the use of science in regulations are being rolled back, all in light of irrefutable evidence that global warming is happening and will continue. The income gap continues to grow, housing in most urban centers in this country is becoming unaffordable unless you are wealthy, and wages aren\u2019t going up. Racism, islamophobia and xenophobia are becoming relatively accepted in many circles and no one seems to care that our president lies on a regular basis, is quietly dismantling our system of government, is actively trying to impede an investigation into his conduct or that he probably paid a porn actress to keep quiet about an affair. In the past I\u2019ve been upset about policy decisions, but this time around it\u2019s more than being just being upset. I often wonder if this society can save itself, or if it\u2019s already irreparably damaged. I have tried to hold on to the hope that we as a society will come out this stronger, but I doubt it more than I believe it. Because of all this worry and despair, I think it has become harder for me to feel much of anything, so when something does move me emotionally, I take note.
\nI ran across a story in the NY Times about a series of rediscovered pictures taken during the summer of 1978 in NYC <\/a>.<\/p>\n

Apparently there was a newspaper strike that summer, and some staff photographers spent part of the summer taking photos in the city parks. I was 3 years old in 1978, and first visited New York in the mid 90s, so I don\u2019t have a strong emotional connection to New York but something about the photos really moved me. Perhaps it\u2019s related to my 70s influenced melancholy or an imagined nostalgia for that time period, but move me they did. Technically, the photos were stunning, but it\u2019s the life captured in the photos that impacted me the most. The vitality, and expressions of the people were so beautifully rendered, and perhaps looking back from Trump\u2019s America, the sense that certain things were simpler. People aren\u2019t absorbed in their phones, they are looking at their surroundings and interacting with each other. The photographer Joel Meyerowitz has stated that cell phones have killed the sexiness of the street<\/a>. Cell phones are here to stay, but it\u2019s sad to walk around these days and see people completely absorbed in their phones, often ignoring the people around them.<\/p>\n

NYC in the 70s and 80s was tough, and even in the captions they mention the city being in financial ruin and everything being \u201cbusted\u201d. I know many people were in crushing poverty and didn\u2019t feel safe in their city, but it was moving to see that life went on, people still managed to enjoy themselves and the photographers managed to capture the beauty in that moment in time. <\/p>\n

Along with photography, music has traditionally been a medium of inspiration for me, the banner image of this website is me listening to music through headphones! I\u2019ve actually been in a long patch where nothing has really made a big impact on me. It isn\u2019t that I haven\u2019t enjoyed music, but the songs or artists that really moved me were far and few between. I was afraid I was beginning to turn into Stan Marsh from Southpark, where <\/p>\n