Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Close Focus and Fine Tuning

I’ve been thinking about the past.  I’ve been thinking I’ll keep it around a while longer.

I guess it all started in 1980 when I proudly wore the brown and beige of an Arby’s beef-boy.  I got to spend my paychecks as I wished, and my wish was for a decent camera.  I researched my options as best I could without the internet to back me up, and hoarded a few months of minimum wages until I could go get me a Yashica FX-3.  Fairly compact and densely constructed, it was a simple, all-manual field camera, capable of withstanding the bumps and jostles an immature and overenthusiastic photog like me would hand it. 

And lord love me, I used it - thoroughly and well.  I built skills, invented tricks, made mistakes and learned from some of them, and wound up with boxes and boxes of stiff shiny images through which I could rifle at my leisure.  Which is to say, not often.  And that’s where they are now, 10,000 mistakes and 500 successes, hopelesly intermingled and disordered in a mismatched collection of unmarked cardboard boxes.  Truly an inspiration to my creative drive. 

The old Yashica comes to mind as an example of outmoded technology, and how my relationship to that world is shifting, bounded on one side, these days, by the new camera, and, on the other, by the old radio.

The new camera: My Rebel 300 is hardly the cutting edge of technology.  It’s already going on two years old and was not even the latest and greatest when I got it. But it is new tech, agile and powerful and capable of making a photo that I can easily have printed out to poster size, or - and here’s the cool part - slap down on this here website, or share instantly with my family across the country, or make part of my desktop decor at work.  And it’s physically light - short lens, low-density plastic body… it’s actually a bigger handful, but a lighter load.  When I accidentally picked up the wrong camera bag a few weeks ago, it felt like someone had stuck a brick in it, heavy and crude.  It was just the old steel Yashica, ready for me whenever I’m ready for it. 

I’m not even considering getting rid of it - I still like having that phat analog capacity.  But it has been relegated to the top closet shelf and I have no present plans to pull it down.  I can take more pictures, faster, and do more with them for less money, with the digital.  New technology is where I’m at. 

But, then, the radio: Two years after I got the camera, I was accepted to the college of my choice, though I can’t say I can draw a direct causal connection between the two events.  At any rate, I needed a few key dorm room suppplies, but the only one I really actively cared about was a boom box.  That’s right homes, it was 1982 and a big box was key equipment.  People didn’t play real music on tiny little boxes - those tinny transistor radios were old skool to the old skool. I needed a big wide sound, and a chassis to match. 

I borrowed my mom’s hatchback and drove to a stereo clearance outlet that only the cool geeks new about.  I took my time browsing, and eventually I found a box that suited my needs, style, and budget at once - two feet from side to side and commensurately thick, with speakers seven inches in diameter ringed in shiny silver that set off nicely against a matte grey body - all plastic, of course.  It gave me am, fm, cassettes, shortwave for some mad reason, and line in-out jacks.  Features included a treble-bass dial, a balance dial, and a choice between mono, stereo, and “biphonic” - a playback option that made sounds artificially rich.  The antennum was a yard long when fully extended, and the handle was sturdy enough to carry it anywhere.  Not unlike myself. 

I used that box heavily all through college, and brought it back home with me after graduation and eventually up here to Frisco.  It lived in the bathroom, then the kitchen, then back, and back again.  For years now it’s sat on the counter between the kitchen and dining room, and from its now scuffed-and-worn speakers I imbibe my daily dose of NPR with my morning yoga and tea.  It’s a reliable friend and always ready to help out with a tune or the news.  And lately it’s even gotten cozy with my ‘pod, thanks to the line-in jack that lets me listen to my whole music library in the kitchen with that thick funky biphonic sound. 

Back in the old days when the box was new, music was already starting to get smaller.  CDs had come out a few years before, and I still clearly remember my first walkman experience sophomore year, cranking up the King Crimson till my very soul shuddered as I strolled around the suddenly-transformed campus.  I could sense that the big boom box was hurtling toward obsolescence, even before I schlepped it back to California.

Regardless, I clove to it, and it has rewarded me with sturdy, steady service - for twenty-five goddamn years, now.  From goofy pop to darkest Tull, through ELP and the Dead and the blues, into jazz and boogaloo and acid bluegrass and international eclectic, that big old boom box perseveres.  I’d kind of like to replace it, with someting smaller and cleaner, with better sound and reception and a pod port that doesn’t demand a firewire and a separate power plug.  But then again, I don’t know.  I get a creeping sense of abandonment guilt when I see the old Yashica mouldering on its shelf.  There may be something to be said for honoring this relationship a little longer. I may not be getting any new cassette tapes to play on it and the radio may old, but the broadcasts it picks up are consistently fresh every day.  And I never really did check out that shortwave feature, anyway.