Kansas City--A Photo Essay.1

If you tell someone from that you’re going to Kansas City to meet up with some old friends the most common response is an incredulous, Kansas City? As if you have just told them you are traveling to the moon because you’ve always loved its color. I discovered this last fall as I was preparing to leave. It appears that for most people on the east coast, Kansas City, is less a place, than a place you don’t go. If I’d said Savannah, people would have commented on the beaches, Chicago or even Denver, perhaps a comment on the weather and some vague comment about the downtown getting better. Occasionally, you find someone who’s been to Kansas City, and they will look at you askance and perhaps tell you that Kansas City is not the New York of Missouri like you’ve been lead to believe. People are cruel though and not always to be trusted, though, after so many snide remarks it’s hard to avoid a sense of foreboding. Why the hell am I going to Kansas City?

                I was headed out to Kansas City for a bachelor party. We decided on Kansas City because it’s in middle America, and my friends and I are on opposite coasts or Chicago. We decided to meet in the middle after a democratic voting process that involves rankings of cities in various orders along with questions, or synopses if any of the places have been visited or commented on by friends. The main goal of the city picking process is not to be the one who makes the ultimate decision. This is primarily because my friends are all very warm-hearted jerks, who will mercilessly ping the person who picked the city or the house if anything goes awry. For the record, I wanted to go to Milwaukee.

                This was supposed to be a photo essay. I brought a real camera on a trip for the first time in my life. I was flush with the power, taking pictures of everything from behind various windows, metro, plane, car, in the hopes of capturing the insubstantiality of travel, the being no place. The problem is that somewhere along the way I lost the camera. The fact is, it had gone dead anyway after ten or so photos and had ceased being useful to me. I am carless with things like cameras and feelings.

The first picture

I’m riding on the metro at 6 AM, a truly awful time to be riding the metro and a worse time to be dragging your suitcase down the sidewalk in the dark in order to catch it at 5:30. It felt like the walk of the damned, though I did see another person at the same time, a cheery woman walking her dog. That she was cheery is further proof that pet owners are insane. On the train, I take a picture of the sun, a sphere of orange light lifting itself between telephone wires, billboards, and old brick buildings. When I’m riding on the metro I can never decide if the detritus of the city: wires, bricks, graffiti, burned out buildings are hideously ugly or whether they are possessed of a transient sort of beauty, look on my works ye mighty and despair. I wonder if they are monuments of failure, to bring beauty, to connect, and whether that makes them meaningful.