Past Factories

There was a movie in the 80s, sort of Romancing the Stone crossed with Indiana Jones, but less memorable than that mix should have been, in which the bad guy was always taking photographs of his crimes. In a deep, heavily accented voice, he would say, “A moment, captured in time,” and then leave the heroes to die.

Earlier this summer I read a book called “Time Travel,” by James Gleick. It’s an interesting mix of history, physics, and philosophy that draws from H.G. Wells and Einstein equally to examine the concept of time travel. He talks about “old light,” and the fact that when we look at the sky and see stars, we are seeing light that has traveled millennia. The stars themselves may no longer exist by the time we see them.

I’ve been thinking about that idea lately. The building in this picture was once a fish factory. For years it stood empty, except for a few days each summer when underground musicians tracked extension cords across the puddles on the floor and set up their equipment for a series of off-venue concerts in the middle of the Eistnaflug festival. The rest of the year, the building sat unused, gradually decaying in the wet and cold of Eastern Icelandic weather.

In the year after I stood inside this building watching hooded violinists play black metal, this building was torn down. Some of the bands that played in that building the year I took this picture are world famous now. The building itself is gone, though. I can look at it right now in my picture, but it is long gone, like the music scene it once housed.