My studio mate Gage invited us over for dinner a couple of weeks ago. He lives in the neighborhood I grew up in, an area that has changed dramatically over the last years, both aesthetically and culturally. In fact, a German friend staying with us talked about how much his neighborhood, St. Pauli, in Hamburg had changed in the 15 years he was there (much like the East Village in NY). He so wished he had tracked the changes, through video or photography. But alas, the evolution is only evident in his memory. But back to Gage. We had gone to get some beer and the shopping bag from the corner store was a collage of discarded medical records from the medical school near by. Why had someone taken the effort to create such disposable items as paper bags...I found the intersection of something so impersonal as a shopping bag and something so utterly confidential as a discarded medical record (albeit an anonymous one) infinitely interesting.
