Chad Taylor

Lens

Earlier this week I reactivated two of my 35mm compact cameras, the Rollei 35 T and the Olympus XA. Surprisingly, finding film and replacement batteries has gotten easier since the last time I looked. Both cameras appear to be in good working order. The meters function and the lenses aren't fogged. The proof will be running a film through them. The reasonably priced choice at the local photography outlet was Kodak 400ASA. I would have preferred a 100 colour or black-and-white.

The machines still feel great in the hand. I miss that mechanical click. (I recently updated to an Apple Magic Keyboard and am back to pounding it like a typewriter.) It took me a minute to remember how to remove the metal film back on the Rollei. Although I was anxious not to break the Olympus's moulded construction, the plastics have not corroded. You can use a pocket knife, a coin or even your thumbnail to unscrew the battery covers – how's that for right to repair? It took me a moment to recall how film is threaded on the take-up reel. Using the meter to bracket for depth of field came back to me straight away. I can recite Kodak's exposure tables, which is good because they're no longer printed on the back of the film box.

I was thinking about the cameras because film photography is central to a short story I'm working on – 'Osome', first published 2003, which I'm revising and formatting for a new ebook edition.

Printing a proof of the story was as arcane an exercise as refitting the 40-year-old cameras. After hauling the Canon out of cupboard storage (my writing office is space-poor) and locating and plugging in the awkwardly stiff leads, I updated the software (for a new OS) and installed a new ink cartridge (more expensive than a 35mm film roll, less reliable, and stocked by as few stores). Once the device was nursed through its start-up, including unnecessary print head align tests and one paper feed jam, the pages printed on the second attempt.

I bought the Rollei and the Olympus about 10 years ago for almost nothing, from camera stores in London. Both were cheap because the technology was on the way out but they've held up a lot better than my 24-month-old printer, not to mention all those old digital devices bumping around in the drawers.

Here comes the quiet life again

Enjoyed Wim Wenders' new movie Perfect Days. Shot on video in Tokyo in a little over two weeks, it shares many elements with Paris, Texas: a broken family, confined spaces, a silent man, the resonance of daily rituals.

The director acknowledges the film's minimalist vibe is not only about the fictional character:

"There's too much of anything [now] and you cannot handle it. All the books I buy, all the colours and paints I buy… because I always wanted to paint a little bit again… I can open a paint store! And I have too much of everything in my own life – like everybody else I know – and not enough time. And Hirayama was the man I have inside me who has enough of everything and he doesn't need more. He never has the feeling he misses anything."

I'm also enjoying Tarjei Vesaas' novel The Birds which I picked up at random in a book store in Singapore. The author's brightly painted study with its combination writing desk and bed can be admired here.

Recently played: Stars

  1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - 'Lovebomb'
  2. David Byrne and Brian Eno - 'Help Me Somebody'
  3. Kreidler - 'Hopscotch'
  4. Martina Topley Bird - 'Lying'
  5. Studio - 'Life's A Beach' (Todd Terje Mix)
  6. Soshi Takeda - 'Water Reverberation'

Moving image

Writing and reading. Not watching movies so much. Not watching TV, at least very little TV produced in English, and I find myself unable to sit through new movies because they all seem so old. I'm sick of foreshadowing. I am sick of arcs, beats, character development, protagonists, antagonists, tropes, genre, needle drops, backstory, prequels, secondary characters, breaking the fourth wall, critics that use the word 'titular', press junkets, stans, TikTok, artificial intelligence, people that talk about Chekhov's gun but have never read or seen Chekhov, fight sequences, CGI, actors looking into the camera, actors who can't smoke, $200 million movies showing how tough life is, product placement, cameos, callbacks, retrocons, reboots, fan service, autoplay, subscriptions, upselling, apps, battery life, notifications, viral campaigns, hot takes.

Bedside reading

If there was a snap test on Elon Musk I would probably do alright at it. The man is a subject of so many articles and podcasts that stepping in stories about him is unavoidable. Nevertheless, I was pleased to add to my knowledge Zoë Schiffer's comprehensive account of Musk's Twitter purchase, Extremely Hardcore (Portfolio / Penguin), a crisp timeline of short chapters not entirely unlike the articles Schiffer has written for The Verge and others.

Even more forensic detail would have been welcome -- we would kill to know what Apple CEO Tim Cook said in his November 2022 meeting with Musk that calmed him down after their "misunderstanding" -- and only so much logic can be applied to people who are not operating on much. It's a slow-motion car crash told very fast, and the car is driving itself.

I also recommend Kyle Chayka's Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened The Internet (Heligo Books) which tallies strongly with my opinions of the internet in 2024. The author makes sharp observations about the statistics about book publishing and music in our decade, and our learned dependency as consumers on what is served up to us by menus on retail sites like Netflix and Amazon.

'The need to corral an audience in advance by succeeding on social media can be explained by the useful phrase "content capital". Established by the scholar Kate Eichhorn in her 2022 monograph Content, it describes the Internet-era state in which "one's ability to engage in work as an artist or as a writer is increasingly contingent on one's content capital; that is, one's ability to produce content not about one's work but about one's status as an artist, writer, or performer." In other words, the emphasis is not on the thing itself but the aura that surrounds it ... If Roland Barthes's 1967 essay predicted "the death of the author," the author's personal brand is now all that matters; it's the work itself that is dead.'

Shout-out to Jaron Lanier who is one of the blurbs on Filterworld and not online so will never read this. Lanier wrote the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts, and all 10 were solid, but Chayka's unpicking of the banality of our reliance on numeric expressions of corporate policy is somehow more motivating. Chayka quotes scholar and critic Gayatri Spivak: "Globalisation takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control."

(For short-form news about oncoming internet shittiness, see Gita Jackson's article 'AI Video is a scam'.)

Also read / reading: Nevada, by Imogen Binnie (Picador); Maria Golia's biography Ornette Coleman: The Territory And The Adventure (Reaktion); Pascal Garnier.

Employee responsibilities

Watching Claude Chabrol movies. As a student in the 1950s Chabrol worked in public relations for 20th Century Fox France who described him as the worst press officer they'd ever seen. The studio fired Chabrol and replaced him with Jean-Luc Godard, who they said was even worse.

Keyboardist Zia McCabe describes what went wrong with The Dandy Warhols' job after their Capitol Records deal:

'That's a part of success especially as artists that you kind of have to face: that it doesn't last forever. And so I was trying to steer, this, you know, manage this phase of our career in a way that we weren't caught by surprise... because we had been so mismanaged by our accountants at the time; we weren't in front of it at all. Our taxes hadn't been paid in four years – that's the worst example. We owed money everywhere and I'm looking at this going, "Oh my god, we're such a cliché – our accountants spent / mismanaged our money and we're in debt all over the place as this is what I've been trying to avoid our whole careers, not be the cliché and the pitfalls of these other bands". And I think really truly had we not been on salary we would have known sooner that that wasn't right. And so if there's any advice moments in this interview, I would say: don't get on a salary.'

The full interview by Tanya Pearson for the Women of Rock Oral History Project is online here. (The above excerpt is around 35:24.)

Now playing: Wood dragon

  1. Rozi Plain – 'Agreeing For Two' (Sir Was Remix)
  2. Maraschino – 'Angelface'
  3. Orion Sun – 'Concrete'
  4. Kilig – 'Taking Hold' feat. Wildes
  5. Kilig – 'How You Holding Up'