Vaguely Similar Images

Two innovations I'm truly grateful to live with: the first, Shazam! I'm pretty sentimental, so I appreciate this app which puts to bed the fear of losing a song forever. I once stopped dead on the pavement right next to a man parking his car, to catch the music loud enough to seep out onto the street through his closed windows. The song, E Jibon Choribe Na by Shamim Ahmod, I discovered, had only been matched on Shazam three times before, and it's impossible to find online. No searches result in concise wisdom about who exactly Shamim Ahmod is, and yet Shazam was able to give me the answer, standing on a curb in the dark on Broadway Market. Even though I've never been able to listen to this song, which was my original worry, I am reassured that I have as much as I need to find it, if I really wanted to. How many nuggets of information like this, do we leave by the wayside, when the reassurance of not losing what might have been is enough to sate? To stop the exploration continuing further? Maybe it's the difference between an academic and myself, somebody who could while hours away on Instagram.

The other glad invention, is that Google Image search function that helps to identify an image. It's like having access to your own steely-eyed curator, only without a vast table full of transparents and a handsome little viewer (tools I imagine, archaically and incorrectly, all curators own). The Prada collections I was able to identify,  finally! when I was a hungry fashion blogger and Google first launched this miraculous innovation, instant dot-connecting gratification for a niggling itch.

What's wonderful, is that once your mystery image has been identified, you're presented with this lush long page of 'Visually Similar Images', arranged according to the shades of marigold yellows they share, or because they contain a sheepish cloud, or a dog in a corner. There's always an accidental beauty to the algorithm at hand, whatever it is. At first, I thought this collecrion was called 'Vaguely Similar Images', a name I much prefer.

The question 'Who edits Luncheon Magazine?' > this New York Times article > these words right here, in blue 

> Was the chain that passed through my fleshy brain cells to find this nice page >

Today, I learned that it was Salvador Dali who painted this wonderful loaf of bread, used on the Penguin Modern Classics cover of Plain Pleasures by Jane Bowles, and I am glad to know, to feel that I alone have drawn a thread through something, even if I was just making a use of a seamless design for curious people. I do wonder sometimes why I/we are so hungry for information. I think it makes us feel important, of use, absorbing as much as we can to keep us further away from death, or at least "full of something" when it comes!