This photo, "Elevator- Miami Beach", published in Robert Frank's 1959 book The Americans (which I'd love to check out) is introduced by Jack Kerouac, who described this photograph as his favorite in the volume. He says: "And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what's her name & address?"
Michael Bierut of Design Observer uses this example as the best representation of bershon, a word for girl's, predominantly teen-aged, rolled-eyes, hate-the-world facial expressions in photographs like this and those found in any family's photo heap stuffed in the basement. He says, "So keep trying, girls. Right now you're surrounded by jerks. But somewhere there's a Jack Kerouac who's desperately trying to find you."
Sometimes I feel like putting on this face myself. When did I ever grow to discontinue the rolled-eyes look? I think it needs to be brought back. People don't mess with you when you give them this look. It's a perfect manifestation of utter exhaustion with the world combined with sullen hatred for both everyone and no one, while not knowing how to vent this frustration. So you brood. I finally vented to Erin recently in a very long e-mail. I started out saying, yeah, I had fun at the show at the Middle East last night, threw in words like feeling "extra single" and "karma coming back" to "we are told over and over again we should be strong single women, but after awhile that all feels like a ruse..." and escalated to:
is that so wrong? i actually found myself feeling comforted by an article in the boston globe recently about how women should spend their 20s looking for a mate (gah! that just sounds horrible on hearing it!) but when you look at the science of it, it actually makes a lot of sense. biology only lets you have children for a finite time, and you can have a career anytime. (and i also despise the pressure to "establish a career" in your 20s; that's just bullshit. no one establishes a career in their 20s! all you do is entry level gruntwork because frankly, people think you're too young to do important things. i want to wait to be famous (haha) until i'm smarter anyway! i think it's good to know your limits and not freak about them--i think we'll all get there, we should just give it more time and get the chance to live more). three of the top guys in my company's management admitted at a recent meeting that they were all hippies before they got serious about work. one said he didn't get a job till he was 30! so enough of this wasting our youth on career prospects- it's a big conspiracy to turn us into the clueless hamsters that fuel the big corporate machines. and that definitely does not mean i think we should husband-hunt instead, but i'm starting to think that people are so blinded by the pursuit of success that they forget about looking for happiness in friends and relationships first. that must be why i am so fed up with the impersonality of young people where we live, they are too focussed on success to connect and make real friendships and form caring communities, and i think that is a shame! if only there were some way to wake people up to re-evaluate their values and priorities, which seems to be made extra difficult by the fact that no one listens to anyone else since they're too obsessed with vociferating and screeching about their own opinions in their crazed effort to get noticed.
OK-- please refrain from thinking I'm a backwards stay-at-home mom wannabe, because I'm not in any way. I have lots of goals (too many, which may be my problem), and I intend to accomplish most of them, someday. And I don't mean to offend anyone who happens to love their job and wants to dedicate themselves to it; I actually think that's great, as well as lucky. I'm merely disappointed in people my age's ability to form meaningful relationships and communities, and how we just put up with life in a fractured world of sporadic communication with old friends from high school and college instead of looking after your neighbors and feeling looked after yourself. We've been taught to find ourselves. But how do we find our people?
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