a550, minolta buddha
got a new camera in the pipeline of delivery. my first ever dslr! it’s a sony. a piece of shit sony, no? no, it’s all good. s., my most recent physical connection to keri advocat, sent me k’s minolta film slr this summer, along with the requisite lenses to crown that lovely creature. minolta went out of business, and sony inherited the assets. by my estimate sony took those assets and piled on top of them its electronic feature screenful-morass-of-bewildering-instructions expertise, for better or worse i don’t yet know, but the minolta lenses are all good, and the connection to k’s work is all better. i would have sent s. a genuinely heartfelt happy birthday this week, except i don’t have a heart. crap! so i just said happy birthday. i love the sizzle of film photography. and the importance. by sizzle i mean the sound of the machinery making modern music, and the honesty. Yeah! the honesty! i can only get spine-tingly when i think about this Minolta’s path from New York to Rochester to Australia to here, and the path takes a new turn next week, or whenever I get the bleepin’ a550 in the mail. I thought of this Minolta last week when, under a bridge in a sketchy asshole part of Queens I picked up a payphone and, under the dial tone, i heard music from a radio station. how does that happen? the sound was erotic and the setting was vintage pre-Bloomberg, pre-money, pre-shamelessness-and-victory-of-wealth.
