But overcome space and all you have is here;
Overcome time and all you have is now.
And in the middle of here and now
Don’t you think we might see each other once or twice…
–Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Several months after my dad died I had a dream that I met him in his youth, at a time when he was serving in Vietnam. I saw him young and vibrant and full of laughter, ideas, hopes and dreams. I saw him the day he met my mom. They were having Vietnamese coffee on a sidewalk cafe, carefree, still alive in this strange parallel universe where life still existed and remained unwritten for them. I saw them in Kodachrome.
I discovered my dad’s super 8 mm camera in the trash can not long after. My mom had been blindly purging all of my dad’s things, yet somehow, the camera and I found each other. It reminded me that my dad had boxes of super 8 film and Kodachrome slides hiding in our house somewhere. I found them and took them home along with his old camera.
My goal is to spend this year unraveling and piecing together my dad’s life before I knew him, transferring his old videos and slides into digital format, and using his camera(s) to document my life in Kodachrome film — both super 8mm and 35mm. I have no experience with the Super 8 format, and there is very little information currently available, but I’m hoping to figure it out along the way. This is the final year that the sole surviving Kodachrome developing lab will be processing this film. After that, it will all be a memory.
2105 Hollywood Place is the house where my Dad grew up. Despite all his travels and relocations, he always considered it to be home. It seemed fitting that the videos and slides my dad took should ‘live’ here too. In a crazy way, I guess I think that at some point our lives on film will start to intersect somewhere in time and space and in the virtual world. In that way, we will meet again and exist together in this parallel universe/virtual world I dreamed about.
