#43 An Intimate Relationship with Rock

Is everything good made of rock?

Oct 22, 2024

There are certain insights you get into your life by looking at the images on a single roll of film, especially one that sits in a camera for awhile. Recently I processed a roll of black and white film that I had in an Olympus XA2 for 2 months. I’d grab the camera every now and then if I was going out of town or wearing a pair of pants that it could fit in the pocket of. When I finally developed the roll I realized something. I love rock. Almost every picture on there had something to do with rock. Big rocks we climb on, to tiny little rocks that make up the beach we surf at, to friends made from rock music. This realization made me curious- first of all how do all those tiny little rocks get to the beach, and second why is it called rock music.

The sand part is kind of obvious, big rocks turn into little rocks over time and get washed down rivers into the ocean where they pile up as sand. But the interesting part is how sand can be so different on beaches that are so close together. I personally love a course sand beach, it just wipes off your skin in such a satisfactory way. But it’s crazy you can have a course sand beach only a few miles away from a beach with very fine sand. And the more I think about it I’m sure that sand composition changes the way sand piles up under water and effects the surf at beach break spots too. What if I actually like course sand beaches more because the waves are better and I just never realized that I enjoyed wiping course sand off my feet because I just fucking scored, and I hate wiping fine sand off my feet because the waves were awful. Sand grain diameter vs wave quality will be my geology thesis in the next life.

The rock music part I had to look up and it’s pretty entertaining so I’ll summarize what BBC says. Rock and Roll was a phrase from 17th century sailing that came to mean rhythmic movement of any type, by the 1920’s it became a popularized and slightly taboo term for dancing and sex (also fond of this rock), by the 1950’s the term Rock and Roll had become a little more tame and just referred to dancing, then a DJ named Alan Freed used it to refer to a kind of hyped up country mixed with rhythm and blues music.

So thanks for going along with me on the journey of rock. Feel free to analyze yourself by a roll of film or a section of the camera roll on your phone, but not before you look at some of the pictures that inspired this rant and some links to some videos.