Me an' my photos

Time is a funny thing - it ebbs, flows, passes, lags, etc. One way to capture it is through pictures - one second in time forever frozen, based on what you were seeing or thinking about at that particular moment. This process has changed so much since the invention of the cell phone - the term "viral" has taken on a new meaning due to these devices.

Once upon a time, we had cameras - stand-alone portable devices that were used to capture images on film. Film was available in different formats based on your camera type, and different speeds. For single lens reflex (SLR) cameras, 100 to 1000 was the typical range - the lower the number, the less grain, light exposure, and slower image capture speed you got. The most "instant" images we could get were from Polaroid cameras, whose film packs allowed pictures to develop before your eyes.

You only had a particular opportunity to snap your picture the way you think you wanted it to look - I won't go into the myriad settings on a camera (especially a SLR) other than Auto being my best friend. Once you were done with that single shot, you were at the mercy of how many pictures you had left on the roll - a concept lost to time nowadays. Then it was off to a photo developer (I used to use O'Henry's a lot in NYC, and Fotomat was a popular store) to turn your film in and have to wait a week or so until your photos came back.

Now you were ready for "discovery" time! This was where you'd review your shots and either say "That's exactly what I wanted" or "Who/what/where is that?" Unless you were very meticulous, a few of your shots were completely incomprehensible and remain a mystery to this day! On the flip side, there are pictures we have that may have held meaning at some point but no longer do, victims of the ravages of time on the memory.

Those days are really gone.

Now we have photographic devices integrated into our portable devices that allow you to not only capture an image, but even text and sounds INSTANTLY. The new term for this is "viral", in the sense that the time and "distance" to see and share these images has respectively shrunk and grown. You also no longer have to guess about images you've taken - you see them a second later, and you make the decision whether or not to save it or trash it.

Another thing that's changed is the actual media itself. Polaroid discontinued their instant film packs (good thing Fuji realized there is still a market for them), and film rolls take up less space in stores. Now you just purchase large capacity memory cards (and I still think Kodak missed the boat on this ENTIRELY) and save your images on a chip that can be moved to different devices. Going to make prints from your images is an afterthought, not the only option, and most people's printers are good enough to create prints. You have now become the photographer, editor, processor, and developer of your life.

Is this a good thing? That's a double-edged sword - it was kind of nice to have mystery and limits to what pictures you could or would take in a given situation. On the other hand, we can tailor or experiences on the fly to reflect our mood at the time rather than at a later time. Heck, we can even group them together in a virtual album and theme it in almost infinite ways.

Me an' my crayons

Red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, orange and purple.

Once upon a time when I was young, probably around kindergarten, I was given my first set of eight Crayola crayons. Now, that may not sound like much, but think about it a second. A rainbow only has seven colors but those colors are the visible spectrum - the colors that we see. I remember when the world seemed simple enough that eight colors were enough to express it in. If you look at a child's coloring book, there are no true guidelines for children to use to color with. It's whatever they have available to them - even one color can be expressive enough in the right hands.

I had so many coloring books and blank pieces of paper on which to draw and color - I think blank sheets are best, although to defy the hidden rules of lines and boundaries by coloring outside the lines is true art. I recall teachers and students telling each other (me included) that coloring outside the lines was bad, and doing so showed a lack of fundamental understanding. As an adult I object to that because it creates very rigid thinking, hence the overuse of the phrase "think outside the box." The better phrase to use should be "there is no box" - any object seen on a printed page happens to be lines and curves that are placed in such a manner as to convey a familiar object, nothing more.

While I was writing this and searching the Crayola site, they displayed a book I think I'll pick up that addresses the issues I brought up above, albeit in a different manner - it's called Celebrate The Scribble.

When first grade arrived, I thought I'd flex my color muscles and go for the uber-pack of crayons - yes, the humongous 128 count crayon pack WITH the sharpener! I can still remember the various color names of new colors - raw umber, Indian red, flesh (yeah, I had a REAL problem with that one!), aquamarine, indigo, lavender, maroon, and other spectacular colors. Although I had all of these, I would still revert to the basics primarily because I did a lot of outdoor-themed pictures. Picnics, farms, beaches - all of these could be accomplished with the primary eight. I even made a "mistake" and colored one color over another - aha, a revelation occurred then!

To this day, I still adhere to using the simplest "colors" to convey a complex world, because it isn't about how much, it's about how you use what you have.

Me an' my toys - Sharp VCR

Ah 1983 - what a year, and with it the portent of becoming a high school graduate! At the beginning of the year, I was working for Marvel Comics on Blip magazine (and that's about as long as it lasted!), so I was pulling in some serious dollars for a high school senior still living at home. I had a subscription to Video magazine at the time so I started to educate myself about VCRs and the wonderful technology they were introducing to consumers, albeit on a very small scale. I had just gotten cable at the apartment and wanted some means to record some of the programming I was watching.

A bit of history here - this was a period where Hollywood was very concerned about people recording broadcasts and keeping them. They had no control over the process, but the rules behind recording were very nebulous and made one wonder about the legality of video taping. Eventually this fell by the wayside and made the industry what it is today. Read more here.

Anyhow, the new mission was to get a VCR before graduation - and virtually any VCR would do. The major players at the time were Sony (with the Beta (read: superior) format), Panasonic, Sharp, JVC (the inventors of VHS), and a host of others. Back then, the real differentiator between machines was whether or not it was a top loader (Panny) or front loader (Sharp). I personally wanted a front loader simply because I had to put it on a shelf with not much clearance height-wise. I looked at the Panasonics based on brand name alone, and I almost bought one, a story unto itself.

Back in the 70s and 80s, Times Square was a squalid and generally unsavory part of NY that you didn't want to linger around for too long. There were some slight benefits to that in the sense that the streets were lined with electronics stores that competed heavily against each other. These were way before the major chains would be vast resources for consumer technology, although Crazy Eddie's and The Wiz were sources as well. I went to one of these stores that advertised a $350 Panasonic top loader in their window, but get this... they wanted to charge me $150 for coaxial cables! That's right, the cheap little cables that you get for free! That soured the deal, and I went to a competitor of their's right down the block and bought my front-loading Sharp VCR instead.

You wanna talk about basic functionality? My VCR had a wired remote that only had one function - pause/play. That's it, and if you think about it, did I really need much more than that? Well, FF and Rew would have been nice, and power on/off would have been nirvana! I still have all of the tapes I recorded with it, much of which were movies on HBO and Showtime. I had a little day planner that I used to schedule shows with - I think the recorder had single program functionality. The first tape I made was a 4-hour VHS with two movies on it - Star Trek II and Star Wars, and I can still play it to this day, but why would I want to?

Me an' my movies

Since 1998 when I bought my first DVD and DVD player, I have striven to become a student of film. In that pursuit, I have created a massive library of films, but there are a few that truly stand out as masterworks. Here are my choices from the Criterion line:

Charade - please see this film and skip the terrible remake known as The Truth About Charlie
Ace In The Hole - Billy Wilder's fine commentary on the media, and let's not forget Kirk Douglas' amazing performance
Le Trou - very suspenseful and based on a true story
Wages of Fear - you'll be on the edge of your seat, over and over again
The Bad Sleep Well - excellent film-noir-ish Kurosawa
High and Low - morality tale with a twist
Sullivan's Travels - "Veronica Lake is on the take!"

Then there's the standard Hollywood fare:

Star Wars (and yes, I call it that and not Episode IV or A New Hope)
Star Trek II (Wrath of Khan, still my favorite Star Trek movie of all time)
Outland (this film just resonates in me because of the time and place when I saw it back in 1981)
Superman The Movie (December 3rd 1978 was when I went to see this, and I still love the time travel sequence)
Die Hard (the first movie me and my friends went to where we couldn't help saying "Oh, s***!" every time something blew up!)
Tron (ah, 1982, cheesy acting, groundbreaking CGI, and a video game!)
The Road Warrior (yep, I know this is known as Mad Max 2 everywhere else in the world except the US)

Me an' my toys - ColecoVision video game system

1982 - ColecoVision video game system

In February of 1982 a friend of mine visited the Toy Building in NYC and picked up brochures for a new video game system called… ColecoVision! It was a departure from Atari and Intellivision because their major focus was arcade game emulation. The slate of games they were promising were current big hits like Venture, Cosmic Avenger, Zaxxon, not to mention the pack-in game… Donkey Kong! The system was slated for release in August of that year – we couldn't get enough information on this thing!

The other big thing about ColecoVision is that for 1982 it sported near-arcade quality graphics for $200! I picked up every magazine and kept my eye out for when the system would be available. I used to call and write Coleco so that I would have the most current information.

Me an' my toys - Minolta XG-M camera

1981 - Minolta XG-M 35 mm camera

During the summer of 1981 I started to get a yearning to express my creative side by undertaking photography as a hobby, but I had no camera. This was prompted by those visits to Willoughby's when I owned my projector and would drift into the camera department. Talking to a friend of mine at school who had an Olympus 35mm camera and let me borrow it for a few days, I decided to get one. I picked up a few photography magazines, and an ad just hit me for... the Minolta XG-M camera!

It was a brand new model that Minolta was bringing out that year and it looked to have all the features I wanted. I also bought a Minolta book that was a guide to 35 mm photography (I still have it!) and it opened my mind up to the possibilities. I kept reading about the camera and photography in general until I got back to school in September 1981, where I hooked up with my friend with the Olympus again. He was taking a photography class at Hunter, and I would tag along to see what they were learning. I even learned how to print negatives in the school's photography lab which really made me appreciate the entire process.

October 30th was the day I went to Willoughby's and bought the camera - finally I could take all the shots I wanted and create my own album of photos. My initial focus was on my friends at school and my neighborhood, along with shots at home. It wasn't until I started to travel that my eye for "postcard shots" began to develop. The following pictures were taken in Antigua (1983), Bermuda (1987), and Curacao (1992).

I used this camera for over 18 years and I feel that I have taken some amazing pictures over that time with it. It's retired now that I'm using a Canon PowerShot S2 IS digital camera now, but I wouldn't be able to take the great shots I can if not for my first SLR.

Me an' my toys - JVC RC-M70 boom box

1980 - JVC RC M70 boom box

My love of music goes back as far as when I was born - I can still remember when Respect, Tighten Up, and I Heard It Through The Grapevine were brand new. I started to buy LPs in 1977, and after a while I had a decent collection. I also made cassette tapes from the radio and our stereo in the living room - either straight or by putting the recorder right up to the speaker! Radio started to move away from AM and over to stereo FM - I was listening to WBLS and WKTU (when it was known as "Disco 92" in 1979 - remember Paco the DJ?) heavily then, especially in the late 70s when Disco was king! The only problem with that scenario is that I couldn't listen to my stuff when I wanted to!

That was when a little visit to Crazy Eddies (yeah, I went there a lot - they were Best Buy's equivalent way back then!) changed all that. They let me check out JVC's monster "boom box" (although we just called it a "box" in my neighborhood) for 1980, the RC-M70! This thing had everything - AM, FM, and short wave, a cassette player/recorder with a music search feature (it would look for gaps between songs greater that 4 seconds, and it worked!), and inputs for an auxiliary source and a turntable! One little problem - this thing cost $300, and in 1980 dollars, that was a lot of dough!

The summer of 1980 was probably the worst I've ever had in life and 1980 in general was not good for me. I started to exhibit a stiff neck in March and it didn't get better. After many trips to the HIP clinic in Washington Heights, and no conclusive diagnosis, I had a biopsy done at Mt. Sinai hospital, and we found out what was wrong... I had cancer, and it was malignant. This meant chemo over the next two years and a major life hurdle that fortunately I was able to surmount, and to this day I am cancer free! I wanted to mention that my doctor, Michael Harris, told me something on that day (June 6th) that meant so much to me and drove me forward: "I want to be invited to your wedding." Almost 20 years later I was able to grant his wish!!

OK, back to the story at hand...

Layaway is your best friend if you want something, have no credit, and can drop a few dollars here and there on the item until you can buy it. I got a lot of sympathy that year from folks, and some monetary gifts, enough so that in December of 1980 I was able to buy the RC-M70 from Crazy Eddies in the Bronx (yep, same store!) for Christmas that year! This time, I didn't feel like going through the hassle I did with the Atari, so I had two friends come with me and help me home with it - needless to say we made it!

Heading into 1981 (a great year, BTW) I actually purchased a carry bag for that 20 pound monster that ate 10 D-cell batteries and used to take it around the neighborhood and to school (always on the bus!) to blast tunes. In March of 1981 I finally bought a Technics turntable that I hooked up to it so I could finally make better mixtapes of my LPs through a direct hookup. I used my JVC up until summer of 1983, when I took it to Antigua on vacation (a friend of mine had a cousin that lived there, and we stayed for three weeks!) and my friend plugged it in and turned it on BEFORE I could change the voltage setting on it! It blew the right speaker and rendered it practically unusable after that.