Dark Room

Spring or summer of 1986. Karen got her drivers license well before me, because, well, her birthday was before mine, and I think, she had her shit together; my shit was unequivocally not together: it was all the hell over the place. I was spread out all over the map, almost the opposite of a patient etherised upon a table: not numb, still, and incapacitated but more like a bag of sunburned snakes: hypersensitive, twitchy, and incessant: perilously in love with Joann Bolte; vestigially compulsive about tennis; neurotically self-obsessed in poetry. Karen also needed her license because of the Midmar Imperative: a long trip from out there to LHS, to downtown, and everywhere else. When I got mine, I slowly earned access to the two-tone tan Chevy Malibu. On Fridays or Saturdays, and sometimes weeknights if things were clicking, I would drive over the hill, past the Alpenrose Dairy—which seemed a kind of strange theme park-slash-bovine playground-slash-array of sports fields that somehow kept a small part of some older Portland alive—and down to her house. But once Karen started taking photography and became friends with Matthew, a new and, to me, both odd and cool scene presented itself: Matthew had a darkroom in his basement, and Karen would go there to develop prints, even when Matthew and his dad were gone. Traditionally parented to a bewildering degree, to me, being alone in a house with a friend was disorienting; being alone in a house with a friend unrelated to the owner of the house was completely strange. Add a darkroom and it was a displacement: plucked up by a starry hand from where I was and gently ensconced in a calm parallel cosmos. All in a good way. It was there, in the tangy moist air, in the warm dark lit occasionally by the red bulb, enveloped in the delicate sounds of trickling water, that Karen talked me through exposure times, shaking the paper, and other tricks she used to make her pictures so compelling: we’d work on contrast or how to develop a razor sharp line; how to solarize with a flash of light or make images grainy by blowing up a detail. In the dark and water and quiet, with bleached pride and washed out defensiveness, I actually picked up the careful movements and their underlying principles. Karen was a good teacher: steady, calm, funny, nice. I have utterly forgotten all of the steps now, how the machines and chemicals worked, learning each action’s legible consequence. I remember instead the feel and taste of the air, the measured directions, the music beneath the water, and Karen’s intense focus and stillness.

The Velvet's "After Hours" is kind of exactly right: we were doing a lot of VU then, and the close miked fragility of the song is perfect. Gavin Bryars' "The Sinking of the Titanic" (here, "Hymn III") is the slow submarine music; not something we listened to in 1986, but K gave me the CD.

The Velvet Underground, 'After Hours'


Gavin Bryars, "Hymn III"