Is the future here yet?

I’m currently sitting in the World’s Tiniest Laundromat on Karasuma-dori in Kyoto, waiting for the wash and dry cycle of the giant incomprehensible machines to complete. This is an interesting down time for us; laundry day while traveling is generally boring, but this trip I’ve tried something new: I rented a pocket wifi hotspot, so amazing between that and Skype my iPhone works more or less just like it does at home. (Also, we seem to have entered an era where cell phones really do work all over the place – despite Japan’s notorious CDMA incompatibility, HSPA seems to have fixed everything. Assuming you’re willing to pay extortionate roaming fees, anyway.)

This has proven to be something of a boon for communications, and I strongly encourage anyone traveling with a smartphone to look into it.

It’s 2011. I am often fond of rhetorically asking whether we are living in the future yet. Sitting in a laundromat on the other side of the planet from home, composing a blog post with a wifi access point in my pocket, while the 70-something obasan next to me sends text messages on her phone, I can safely say that in this department at least, yes, we are living in the future.

20110515-190734.jpg

Lost arts

I was rooting through the freezer the other day in search of a frozen treat when I came across a whole box of them: my entire collection of unexposed film, shoved in a basket when I came back from Europe five years ago with a busted 35mm camera, frozen, and then never touched again — even after my film cameras were fixed. It was a very strange pang of nostalgia as I emptied the basket out and sorted through what I had. It turns out to be an eclectic collection of new and old, in-production and out, and it brought back a lot of memories of a time when, as a photographer, you had to hold a lot of information in your head more or less continuously while working with the stuff. The upshot was that you got really familiar with a handful of films, and stuck with them come hell or high water.

So I have three unopened boxes of Kodak Portra NC (probably the single-best general purpose low-contrast print film in production mid-last-decade). A box of Portra UC I never tried. A whole whackload of pre-paid RVP 50 — obviously pre-dating the release of Velvia 100F — I ought to see whether the lab will still process it for me! A bit of Provia, from back when Provia wasn’t so good. A couple rolls of Tech Pan and Ilford Pan F 50, slow films that you can’t buy anymore (and that I probably can’t get developed anymore, either, since I was never a big fan of doing my own processing). A bunch of Astia in 120 that I really should load in my Mamiya and go shoot. Lots of Tri-X, in a couple different formats.

But it was the two yellow-wrapped 120 rolls that caught my eye, with the rubbed-off markings, and I realized what I was looking at: Verichrome Pan. This was, arguably, the best black and white film most people never heard of, in large part because the it was never available in 35mm format. But if you worked in medium- or large-format, and you shot B&W — or, heck, if you had a Brownie and were playing around with B&W film in the 1950s — there is an excellent chance you know exactly what I’m talking about, and why it was so good. There’s an excellent chance that you’ve seen pictures shot on VP; it has a characteristic look, a smoothness and a richness and a tonal depth that isn’t there in a lot of B&W films. It was tolerant, it handled high contrast well, the grain structure was damn-near nonexistent, and unbelievably it really was a 125 ISO film, so some degree of handholding was possible.

I used VP pretty extensively for a stretch in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and really liked it — this was, of course, right around the time that Kodak decided they’d discontinue the film. For a few years, up to about 2005, you could still buy the stuff new; a good many serious B&W photographers still have a couple of boxes squirreled away for that special project that really needs “the look.” My stock has, eventually, dwindled to these two rolls of 120, and while I’d dearly love to go shoot them, I have no idea what sort of project I’d do to justify their use. Yeah, okay, it’s just film — but this is really good stuff! Don’t believe me? Other people have the same issues I do.

I’m told Ilford Delta 100 or TMAX 400 (rated at 320, developed as per the box) are supposed to be reasonable alternatives to this stuff. In my head, I keep thinking that the chromogenic B&W films should have the same grain structure as VP, but for some reason when I go back through my archives I can’t seem to find any evidence to support this. Of course, at the same time, I haven’t shot any film, period, in something like five years. Maybe there’s an argument that I need to go and take some (real) pictures…

On-Time Soundcheck Sunday

Edie Carey, “Love” and “I Never Thought I’d Say This”

Let the whole thing play through. Sadly this is a video from a house concert last fall, and therefore not very good (and the sound quality is a bit lacking, too). Music starts at around 1:45, if you’re impatient.

My crush on Edie Carey has been thoroughly documented elsewhere, and, wouldn’t you know it, she’s got a new album out. Which is every bit as warm and hug-inducing as “Another Kind of Fire.” I really like it; it’s the sort of record you can put on (ok, ok, “the sort of collection of digital files you can play on your music device”), put the big headphones on, and tune out the world. It’s the sort of thing you used to listen to in your room in the dark, and it has that kind of heart-tugging quality that most of Edie’s music has.

Over the summer, I criticized Sarah McLachlan’s new album for not being, well, new. “Laws of Illusion” wasn’t fundamentally anything we hadn’t seen before, and I was a disappointed that she seemed to not be making progress as an artist. I invited comparisons between McLachlan and another Sarah (Harmer), someone who seems to reinvent herself with every new album yet manages to stay more or less the same at each step. Edie Carey is heading into a third category: people who make the same kind of music on every album, which is fine, because it keeps getting better.

Pat down

I’d been lucky in the six-ish months since the Tray Stacking AgencyTransportation Security Agency introduced the Freedom Frisk enhanced pat down procedure for air travelers to, from, and within the United States. Not once in my travels had I been forced to go through the Nude-o-ScopeAdvanced Imaging Technology scanner, and not once was I subjected to the Government Gropeenhanced pat down. I had been tagged for a trip in the microwavemilimeter wave scanner at YVR transborder a few months ago, but politely declined and got a relatively benign CATSA-approved physical search. And that’s been it: every other time I’ve had to be screened in the United States it’s been at a priority lane or some other kind of checkpoint that hasn’t used the AIT devices, or I’ve ended up in a normal lane, so I didn’t have to opt out.

Continue reading →

Belated Soundcheck Sunday

I was in transit on Sunday (well, not really — I was in transit Sunday night, and sitting on a beach for most of Sunday itself), so here’s the Soundcheck for this past week. We apologize for the delay. Not that anyone actually cares, mind you…

This week’s Soundcheck isn’t really about the song, but rather who is doing the singing: Hayley Williams of Paramore. Those of us who aren’t quite as hip and with it (and, also, not teenagers) might have first run into Williams and her band as part of “Guitar Hero: World Tour” where “Misery Business” featured rather heavily in one segment of the game. Paramore always struck me as kind of a twee band, sort of like Avril Lavigne but with actual musical talent; it was hard to get enthusiastic about a band that was made of people under the age of 20. And, let’s face it, when you’re over the age of 30 you probably shouldn’t be listening to stuff that’s made by and popular with the under-20 crowd — it’s, I dunno, creepy.

But here’s the thing: Riot! was really good. And Hayley Williams is so good, and has such a shocking voice (warning: obnoxious but illustrative video lives on the other end) that it’s hard not to pay attention. I’m not going to run out and chase Paramore or Williams’ tour bus down or anything like that, but yeah, they’re both great.

Getting back to normal

I’ve spent the past week and a bit in a stupor, trying to wrap my head around the triple-threat disaster unfolding in Japan. It’s grim stuff, the kind of thing that makes reasonably good backplot to any number of anime stories (seems like we’ve maybe been down this road before, no?), and the scale was just incomprehensible. There’s a not-insignificant part of me that wonders if the devastation here felt more surreal, and more awful, because of my connections to Japan and my love for the country; I’ve never been to, for instance, Haiti or New Zealand or Chile, so I can’t really comprehend the scale of the disaster that befell those countries. Nor could I really get a handle on the devastation following the Indonesian earthquake and subsequent tsunami — southeast Asia was too foreign for me. This might be something we could term “first-world disaster privilege,” as though we only really understand disasters when they happen to people who are sufficiently like us — but then, I don’t really get why the Christchurch earthquake didn’t inspire those feelings of dread and horror.

Continue reading →