Its Yom Kippur… one in the morning… I’ve been starving myself for a good six hours now… the lips are dry… the head is spinning… is it the lack of food… the lack of water… or the copious amounts booze I drank last night that make me feel so damned crazy???
Yes… last night was a true success… myself and two of my dear b-school friends went out to a ‘gastro-pub’ in alphabet city… who the hell came up with a name ‘gastro-pub’, I don’t know… to me it sounds like it could be one of two things… either a thing metrosexual… and hence unmanly… or an intestinal disease of vicious nature the clears one and all in its path… including the two boiled eggs you had for breakfast this morning… pieces of cheesecake floating around your innards from the night before… and even that tiny speck of pot you swallowed by accident while trying to clear your ancient pipe… right after the shower… and about ten minutes before you took off for work… the day was starting on a frantic note you see…
Anyway… if I had to choose one… I guess I’d have to go with the metrosexual thing… which is of course nauseating… but in a lax, pathetic, you can deal with it once every other gibbous moon sort of way… and that’s what it turned out to be… a very chic and modern sort of establishment… with white toothed waitresses… a wine list… and a menu exotique… full of garbled foods I never heard of… as well as fine cheeses and mussels and things of that nature…
Anyway… the drinks were as fine and as merry as drinks get… and I can get into this big whole complimentary shpiel about how great life was… and how drunk we all got… and yaddi yadda yadda… who cares… nobody wants to hear about the glories of my life… especially me… What I want to talk about are things dark, disturbing and unjust… perhaps bizarre, cynical and uneven… but certainly never happy, cheerful, well adjusted or even reasonable…
So this is where we get back to reality… for yesterday really was a momentous day… outside of the fact that I got into a screaming match with my beloved managing director (of finger pointing glory described in an earlier blog)… anyway, to focus on the story at hand… yesterday was a very important day in my life… it was a time of season… a time of change… a time to live… and a time to die… but before I totally go off on this tambourine man jibe… here is what happened…
I went out and got myself a digital camera… a digital camera of big expensive variety… the type you see geeks all over the city carrying, wrapped around their wrists, flinging around like sort of yo-yo’s… occasionally stopping to capture a particularly artistic shot… like say of a traffic light that’s not red, not green but in that fluxed state of yellow…. And the thing is that after spending half a month’s worth of my salary on a piece of electronic equipment, you’d figure I’d be feeling like a million bucks… I’d be feeling like I did something great and important… something that gave me a bright outlook on tomorrow… something that changed my life… (for that kind of money it better!)… but no…. I felt like a filthy traitor…
I felt like a filthy traitor because while my new camera is of the digital SLR variety… and its big and its heavy and its shiny and purports to make a great photographer out of me… at home… while I was out blowing my hard earned pennies on this piece of technological wonder…. There lay a black camera case… black in nominal terms for now it’s a combination of black and yellow from all the dust it collected in nether reaches of Ethiopia and Sikkim and Burma and Guatemala and who the hell knows where else… and inside that dusty black camera case is another piece of electronic equipment… not nearly as pricey or fancy as the one I just spent half of Kolkata’s GNP on… but valuable none-the-less… though a bit scratched up and dusty… and perhaps malfunctional and occasionally unreliable… but end of all ends… deeply… deeply… oh so deeply beloved…. And yes… I am talking of my best friend – my Minolta Maxum 5… of discontinued model variety… with eternal grease on the shutter button… hopeless scratches on the lens… and a film rewind mechanism that does whatever the hell it pleases… some people call it backwards and ancient… many a photography expert has laughed at me for still using a ‘film camera’…. I’ve sometimes wondered what the hell I was still doing with it… say when some of my finest pictures from Belize got exposed or overlayered thanks to the afore mentioned rewind mechanism boo boo…. But end of all ends, I LOVE MY MAXUM 5…
And now… like a filthy poseur… like a dirty traitor… I was abandoning my truly beloved, my truly trusted, my truly battle-tested companion for a hunk of metal that every six figure making, former Metallica loving, artist-wanna-be lugs around more for show than any artistic merit in of itself… and there I sat last night… drunk as an overfed swine… choking away on cancer sticks… listening to Cure… and looking at that black camera case on the floor… thinking of all the good times we had together… like when I fell in shoulder deep into monsoon swollen stream in Luang Prabang, Laos… and I thought my Maxum 5 was a goner… or when I took a bit of an aggressive picture of a very large African-American gentleman selling rags on Broadway and 27th… and we had to hold on for our dear life for that man, all six foot seven, 300 pounds of him, was coming to kill us both… or when I kept on pulling it out of my bag as I wondered through the woods of Sikkim and my Mexican companion kept on demanding to know why I was taking so many pictures…. Or shit… that time in Rangoon… where that lovely older gentleman approached me as I was smoking a cig… and talked to me… and my Maxum 5 was there… holstered in my bag… my trusted companion… my friend… (I am starting to get weepy)… what a filthy traitorous swine I real am….
Yes… last night was a true success… myself and two of my dear b-school friends went out to a ‘gastro-pub’ in alphabet city… who the hell came up with a name ‘gastro-pub’, I don’t know… to me it sounds like it could be one of two things… either a thing metrosexual… and hence unmanly… or an intestinal disease of vicious nature the clears one and all in its path… including the two boiled eggs you had for breakfast this morning… pieces of cheesecake floating around your innards from the night before… and even that tiny speck of pot you swallowed by accident while trying to clear your ancient pipe… right after the shower… and about ten minutes before you took off for work… the day was starting on a frantic note you see…
Anyway… if I had to choose one… I guess I’d have to go with the metrosexual thing… which is of course nauseating… but in a lax, pathetic, you can deal with it once every other gibbous moon sort of way… and that’s what it turned out to be… a very chic and modern sort of establishment… with white toothed waitresses… a wine list… and a menu exotique… full of garbled foods I never heard of… as well as fine cheeses and mussels and things of that nature…
Anyway… the drinks were as fine and as merry as drinks get… and I can get into this big whole complimentary shpiel about how great life was… and how drunk we all got… and yaddi yadda yadda… who cares… nobody wants to hear about the glories of my life… especially me… What I want to talk about are things dark, disturbing and unjust… perhaps bizarre, cynical and uneven… but certainly never happy, cheerful, well adjusted or even reasonable…
So this is where we get back to reality… for yesterday really was a momentous day… outside of the fact that I got into a screaming match with my beloved managing director (of finger pointing glory described in an earlier blog)… anyway, to focus on the story at hand… yesterday was a very important day in my life… it was a time of season… a time of change… a time to live… and a time to die… but before I totally go off on this tambourine man jibe… here is what happened…
I went out and got myself a digital camera… a digital camera of big expensive variety… the type you see geeks all over the city carrying, wrapped around their wrists, flinging around like sort of yo-yo’s… occasionally stopping to capture a particularly artistic shot… like say of a traffic light that’s not red, not green but in that fluxed state of yellow…. And the thing is that after spending half a month’s worth of my salary on a piece of electronic equipment, you’d figure I’d be feeling like a million bucks… I’d be feeling like I did something great and important… something that gave me a bright outlook on tomorrow… something that changed my life… (for that kind of money it better!)… but no…. I felt like a filthy traitor…
I felt like a filthy traitor because while my new camera is of the digital SLR variety… and its big and its heavy and its shiny and purports to make a great photographer out of me… at home… while I was out blowing my hard earned pennies on this piece of technological wonder…. There lay a black camera case… black in nominal terms for now it’s a combination of black and yellow from all the dust it collected in nether reaches of Ethiopia and Sikkim and Burma and Guatemala and who the hell knows where else… and inside that dusty black camera case is another piece of electronic equipment… not nearly as pricey or fancy as the one I just spent half of Kolkata’s GNP on… but valuable none-the-less… though a bit scratched up and dusty… and perhaps malfunctional and occasionally unreliable… but end of all ends… deeply… deeply… oh so deeply beloved…. And yes… I am talking of my best friend – my Minolta Maxum 5… of discontinued model variety… with eternal grease on the shutter button… hopeless scratches on the lens… and a film rewind mechanism that does whatever the hell it pleases… some people call it backwards and ancient… many a photography expert has laughed at me for still using a ‘film camera’…. I’ve sometimes wondered what the hell I was still doing with it… say when some of my finest pictures from Belize got exposed or overlayered thanks to the afore mentioned rewind mechanism boo boo…. But end of all ends, I LOVE MY MAXUM 5…
And now… like a filthy poseur… like a dirty traitor… I was abandoning my truly beloved, my truly trusted, my truly battle-tested companion for a hunk of metal that every six figure making, former Metallica loving, artist-wanna-be lugs around more for show than any artistic merit in of itself… and there I sat last night… drunk as an overfed swine… choking away on cancer sticks… listening to Cure… and looking at that black camera case on the floor… thinking of all the good times we had together… like when I fell in shoulder deep into monsoon swollen stream in Luang Prabang, Laos… and I thought my Maxum 5 was a goner… or when I took a bit of an aggressive picture of a very large African-American gentleman selling rags on Broadway and 27th… and we had to hold on for our dear life for that man, all six foot seven, 300 pounds of him, was coming to kill us both… or when I kept on pulling it out of my bag as I wondered through the woods of Sikkim and my Mexican companion kept on demanding to know why I was taking so many pictures…. Or shit… that time in Rangoon… where that lovely older gentleman approached me as I was smoking a cig… and talked to me… and my Maxum 5 was there… holstered in my bag… my trusted companion… my friend… (I am starting to get weepy)… what a filthy traitorous swine I real am….
2 comments:
My man - first let me explain the Gastro pub thing. The concept of a pub - good drinks, bad food, and a familiar/rustic atmosphere - has been fantastically successful in the British Isles througout the centuries, and the only innovation they had come up with for the last 800 years was the idea of actually cooling some (but strangely not all) of the beer. It took until the last decade for someone to come up with a revolutionary new concept - good drinks, good food and a familiar/rustic atmosphere. Somehow, it's been a great success...
On your second point - and speaking with some authority as a six figure making, former Metallica loving, artist-wanna-be who proudly lugs around a digital SRL - it's not the equipment (or how big it is), it's how you use it... your new tool could have been put to great use in Ethiopia, Myanmar or Laos... and I'm sure it will be on a number of future adventures.
so here are my two cents..
although i don't earn six figures (see magnus' earlier scathing comment), i do have a soft spot for metallica and i do believe there is an artist within us all.
and...
I HAVE A MAXIM 5!! well, i have a hypothetical Maxim 5. mine is a canon EOS 300 which i got for my 18th birthday and which has accompanied me on many of my travels and helped me take many beautiful pictures.
and now i have a digital.
and i also felt guilty and sad when the digital took precedence.
but.... i don't anymore because my canon and i have come to an arrangement.
my canon always has some black and white film in it and is always ready for those special moments when B&W photos on proper film are needed.
my canon is VERY good at taking beautiful B&W (it got A LOT of practice in angkor) and to me proper film is incomparable. then when i get access to a dark room, i spend hours working on making these photos perfect. and i love doing that. you don't take as many photos as with digital, but you end up with one or two beautiful pictures.
so my canon is happy. maybe a special job can be found for you maxim. or it could be given to someone who needs a film camera. i know that in malawi it is rare and expensive to get digital photos printed, and therefore there is still demand for film cameras.
hope this makes you feel better. i'm sure that psychiatrists could diagnose us with some problem for getting so attached to inanimate objects! but then again, us 'artists' never claimed to be sane...
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