pixels on vermont

Thanks Pete Don for keeping pov going while I’ve been neglecting it. Jonotasterrific whipped together this hilarious video about pov which I dare not ruin the joys of before you watch it. So get on that.

Here’s my first assignment from my creative non-fiction course. The assignment was to describe an encounter in Burlington for 700 words. You’ll probably recognize some of these images when I post the video I’m working on…

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The headphones are just complicating things. Because sure, the soft, black cushions cupping my ears are possibly the best ear muffs ever, but they kind of have an erection. The wire juts down and out in a hard zig zag, stiffened by the cold air, with slack down to my knees. Maybe it’ll snap if I’m not careful. It’s plugged into my camera, which I’m holding at my side while I look for my next shot. It’s not recording, but the LCD screen nonetheless displays a crisp, miniature version of where I’ve been to my snowy footprints. I’m walking down the sidewalk looking for my next shot and the microphone’s live, pumping my ear muffs full of a continuous hyper-reality—an amplified rendition of Burlington’s live performance. I might have called it silence otherwise, but even in silence there’s a gentle roaring like a waterfall not too far off.

It’s highways of engines harmonizing. It’s enough snowflakes hitting the ground at the same time, and enough people shoveling them off down the road. I’m acutely aware of my own breathing and the sounds my walking makes; leather boots dirtying snow.

At an intersection I’m filming a close-up of a Nader ‘08 sticker and the cars are so loud it hurts. I close in on a ‘push for walk’ sign with “Nader Gonzalez” in focus and passing cars behind it blurred out. I pull it back slow while panning right. I try to follow a car’s turn onto Main Street with some grace, just to lend some motion to the shot, but the turn isn’t smooth so I try again. While I reset the framing and zoom, I attempt to find the joke I know has to be there. There’s the sticker, worn by time and element, slightly tattered but adhered to the sign. There’s the city that’s liberal but not that liberal. There’s the fact that the election is over and we know by now they lost, but it’s hard to call that a punchline when they were never really contenders.

Maybe it would have been just as funny before they lost, which is to say not that funny and just a necessary statement about the flawed two party system in our nation.

The joke will come to me.

Down the hill I’m looking at the evergreen tip of a signpost with an inch of snow in focus so sharp I can see the flurries locking arms. The headphones are back on, and when I turn the knob to shift the focus to the tree in the background, every grip, twist, adjust is amplified. I didn’t expect the knob to produce sound, but now I’m not sure what doesn’t. On the screen, I watch the focus slide too far past the plane of field I want and the whole thing’s out: the coat of snow becomes a sleeping ferret and the berries just look like leaves. Each individual berry, red wine red, is sagging under a tiny heap of snow, but you wouldn’t know. If I turn the knob back and forth long enough, foreground to background, background to foreground, there will have to be a salvageable shot in there somewhere.

What an artist I am.

All’s quiet in battery park and I’m overlooking Lake Champlain with my big-ass zoom looking for poetry (or something like it) in the image of the breakers separating snowed over ice from dark, still water when a siren blares twice at once. I hear it all around me from the headphones, and from over there through them. The sound grabs me by the rubberneck and directs my lens past the cannon and playground, and I’m reminded there’s a fire station. I do see a red pickup pulling onto the street with its lights on, but also two completely unalarmed figures, skating in the parking lot. It’s like a telescope with the shakiness and feeling of miniaturization but they’re playfully gliding amidst the cars. I can’t see their skates or the impromptu rink and I can’t hear a thing.

All of a sudden I feel like a voyeur and I turn my camera off.