Whereabouts Unknown

Sometime in 1978

Resurrecting Polaroid. Maybe.

The New York Times has run a couple of interesting articles this week concerning my favorite camera company Polaroid. The slow decline and ultimate financial failure of Polaroid's instant camera and film business was almost inevitable with the advent of digital photography. Still, there are a lot of people out there who love Polaroid photography for reasons more subtle and numerous than mere convenience, its competitive disadvantage against digital technology be damned. As the Times reported this week, a handful of scientists in the Netherlands and an Austrian entrepreneur are attempting to restore Polaroid's abandoned (and almost landfill-bound) manufacturing equipment and return instant film to the market. Article here.

The possibility of returning my SX-70s to active service is very exciting and I wish them great success in this venture. Dr. Land, I think, would be delighted. However more advanced and ubiquitous digital photography inevitably will become, for many people instant photography holds a unique and durable charm. Hopefully there's still room in the marketplace for it.

An expansive gallery of Polaroid photographs, submitted by readers, is posted on the New York Times here. It's definitely worth looking at.

Objects of Desire™

In an endless stream of fungible electronic devices, the life cycle of the mobile phone is among the most fleeting. They live fast, grow worn and scratched in our pockets and bags, then shoot off towards obsolence like a cannonball. As commodity items, cell phones rarely achieve any durable notoriety for their design, which is sad really, considering how ubiquitous they are. We talk, text and surf on them for a while then off they go to leak a lengthy list of nasty chemicals into some unseen landfill that never seems to be in our back yard.

The Sony Ericsson T610, released in 2003, was an exception. Designed by Erik Ahlgren in near-Bauhaus gloss black plastic and brushed aluminum, it was the first mobile I fell in love with as a design object.

The T610 came equipped with a mediocre near-VGA quality camera that produced grainy, oddly-colored photographs that were, in a number of unflattering respects, the digital equivalent to the liquidy and often equally indistinct Polaroid images I had fallen in love with some 20 years earlier. While the T610 didn't spit the photo out into your hand, it could transmit it by MMS, Bluetooth or email easily enough, which gave it some of the immediacy of a Polaroid camera.

Inspite of --or maybe because of-- its pixilated, closed-circut security camera quality images, this little phone wound up becoming my favorite camera until it finally grew so dented and frayed and wonky that I was forced to replace it.

Wednesday Afternoon

Great pho, even greater basil rolls

Dua Vietnamese Restaurant

53 Broad Street

Atlanta, Georgia

Hang On

"You get to a certain age. Your bones ache a little. You get up in the morning and you're not as gung-ho as you thought you were going to be. You hang onto who you were because you don't know any better."

Don Hewitt

On My iPod This Weekend

My Life In The Bush of Ghosts (Sire Records, 1981)

Brian Eno and David Byrne

The 2006 reissue has extended versions of some songs, several additional tracks and a booklet of interesting background and production notes. What it is missing is Peter Saville's striking, evocative original artwork (above). Pity. While I admittedly bought all things Eno often without so much as an advance listen, Peter Saville's album art probably closed the deal for me as much as anything else.

Lenoir City,Tennessee, Early Spring 1980

I'm Feeling Apprehensive

Breathe. And Stop.

December 2004

Those Disco Synthesizers, Those Daily Tranquilizers

This Is Tomorrow Calling

Objects of Desire

The Golden Age of the blobject may be years past its sell-by date (see Bruce Sterling's terrific 2004 essay here), but the slippery Aptera 2e plug-in electric, um, car is way beyond cool in that retro science fictional sort of way that I seem to be compulsively drawn to. The three wheeler looks like the love child from a marriage between Luigi Colani and Ross Lovegrove. It's pure Logan's Run minus the feathered hair and Dacron jumpsuits. 

The production model differs, predictably, from the even more science fictionally overendowed concept vehicle: external cameras providing in-dash rear and side-view video are replaced with conventional door-mounted mirrors, there's a bit more glass, a more conventional dash, and split, partially opening windows reminiscent of the DeLorean*. But none of these alterations make much of a dent in the appealingly whacky over-the-top design. 

Never mind the zero tailpipe emissions, the Aptera is the perfect opportunity to pull out that zippered silver jumpsuit you know you've been wanting to wear. You. Not me.

*and the lovely, beleagured and exceedingly peculiar Subaru SVX.

Milburn Drysdale Is Prologue

"The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semipathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."

John Maynard Keynes

To Understand The [Recent] Past You Must Understand The [More Distant] Past.

...or something like that.

My Dinner Was Delicious

I Deny You

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment"

Marcus Aurelius 

Another Damn Tune I Can't Get Out of My Mind

Listening to "Moonlight and Muzak" 

from M's 1979 album "New York-London-Paris-Munich"

Sift The Evidence Then Move

In Transit

7 May 2009

MARTA Station

On My iPod This Morning

Although it was released in 1977, there's little of the 70's about it. It may be 33 years old, but it's still Music of Tomorrow.

Wiretapping The Memory Palace

Japanese scientists have developed a technique that reconstructs images directly from the brain. The test images retrieved thus far are simple, monochrome characters but even at this early stage of development, the results are easily recognizable. The scientists assume that they will be able to reconstruct more detailed and complex images in time, including images retrieved from dreams. The applications of this sort of technology have been explored in fiction ad nauseam (see Wim Wender's film Until The End of The World, 1991), and the implications for art and privacy alone run the gamut from exciting to deeply creepy. Articles here and here.

Some aspects of art in general, and maybe photography in particular, are about externalizing the internal. In that sense, this new technology can be seen as a logical extension of the paint brush, or more closely, the camera. Apart from providing a grand new thoroughfare between the internal, physiological event of perception and shared, external reality, it also offers the very scary possibility of technologically updating Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon beyond his wildest dreams.

Late Night Storm

1981

Long exposure of a summer storm

Lenoir City, Tennessee

Volatile

...we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile"

William Gibson

From "Pattern Recognition"

It's A Godawful Small Affair

1983

Knoxville, Tennessee

I've Been Listening To This All Morning. And Afternoon.

She's Tidied Up and I Can't Find Anything

"There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it."

Don DeLillo