There are times in one's life when listening to music with lyrics that can be understood is less than a pleasurable experience. When dodging any chance of introspection but not wanting to listen to awful electronic music, Scandinavia can be your melodic oasis. 

The Swedish language seems to agree with me in particular. Not spicy like a Romantic language, nor guttural like German, it flows with clearly-enunciated, straightforward expression. It's as if it's devoid of accent yet manages to remain beautiful, intriguing.

                                         

I've played this video and listened to this song more than any one human being should have. It's Swedish and soothing.

                                        

I had the fortune to meet Robert Rauschenberg in 2006 at his studio in the Lower East Side (I think it's the LES). I was picking up a pair of books that he'd signed, which at that point due to his having suffered a stroke meant just his thumb print. As I took the elevator up to the 3rd floor, there was a sign warning me to be careful when exiting because his turtle might be right in front of the opening doors, as that's where it's sunny and where he likes to bask in the afternoons. Sure enough, the turtle, whose name I can't remember (he wasn't very talkative), was sitting right where the sign said he would be.

Bob was there with a couple of assistants. The books were lying out in front of a window so that the ink from the signatures could dry. We spoke for a few minutes about this and that, during which he asked me to call him Bob. He seemed like a kind, gracious person. 

One of the assistants came over with the books. I said goodbye. We smiled at each other. I passed the turtle as I walked out and took a cab back to work.

So, we've been invaded by technology. There are cameras recording countless moments of our lives. Take a moment tomorrow and count how many cameras you're being recorded on -- seriously, count. There's one at the bodega where I get coffee. There are at least two or three on the J platform. Another one or two at the subway station where I get off. That's about five or six, conservatively. Now imagine I go to Bestbuy after work. That's a few dozen. What about the Manhattan Mall instead. That's probably approaching a hundred or so. Just being anywhere near that area of town, 34th and 6th, means that there will be security cameras pointing at me from every doorman'd building, garage and business. It's getting a little absurd but let's say 200. That's a lot of me being caught and stored where I can't see.

So here we all are. Our lives and travels, caught by some form of optics and saved to God knows what kind of media for some indeterminate amount of time. Yet we're okay with this. This is part of our everyday lives and no one bats an eye or gives it a moment's notice. To be perfectly honest, I don't care either and it's not because I subscribe to the notion of "If you have nothing to hide." I just don't think it's that big of a deal. This is because, unlike what we see in Hollywood, I am obscure to those cameras. I am just another face and set of appendages in a sea of, well, faces and appendages. In a sense, although I am captured, my identity is unknown as are my intentions, origin and destination. I am a portrait but nothing more, just another thread of the urban tapestry.

But this is where I find a moment of disconnect.

If you've ever had to look for a business and you really want to make sure it's there, you can use Google's Streetview. It's fairly amazing. A van with an array of cameras pointing out in all directions drives up and down the streets of your town/city/neglected outer-borough and snap, snap, snaps images and stitches together a 360 degree panorama of everywhere it's been. This has obviously not gone over well with some people, especially privacy advocates and the Japanese (they really dig their personal space).

Now I'm all about keeping a handle on the intrusiveness of technology but there are some trade-offs that we make when we dance with the devil. For every particle of ourselves that we give up, we get a unit of advancement. For every moment of anonymity we lose, we gain a moment of efficiency.

There is more to be gained though. It's intangible and it's real. There is art here. I've felt it.

At first, what I wanted to capture on the corner was a line of people, thirty deep or so, waiting to get a delectable Magnolia cupcake. I wanted to highlight the absurdity of waiting in line for a baked good. I am very familiar with this behavior, having enjoyed many of their pleasant little frosting-covered treats.

This is what I got instead. I got a mother tending to her child. I got a moment. A real moment. Inside a series of cold machines, on a platter spinning at revolutions per minute that I can never fully appreciate, lives this moment.

If you take just a second to realize that your life is nothing more than a series of these moments, crouching down to help your daughter tie her shoe, overlapping and bleeding together, than you can understand that what we have is, on one hand, an overload of information that no human will ever be able to analyze, but on the other, moments like this, caught, indexed and written in the indelible ink of ones and zeros.

Andy Warhol brought his art to the masses. He said, "I like boring things." You could look at this as a "boring thing" or you can see it like a Warhol, as a point in time, pulled from the blackness of past and salvaged to affect anyone who wants to look at it and see more than an anonymous event but rather a split-second of a life as important and meaningful/less as our own.