"I Will Not Tolerate Infestation!"

I was driving feverishly yesterday to get to Porters before they closed at 5 only to discover they close at 6. Anyhow, I was stocking up on the K64 before it’s all discontinued. I chatted with the girl behind the counter who actually spoke the arcane language of film-based photography and she clued me in on my suspicions that Kodachrome 200 was NLA. The sole roll I’ve ever shot of this is half-exposed in my camera, loaded months ago (but shot as recently as last week). I also asked about the Polaroid stock (I didn’t see any in their fridge). She said they had the Fuji replacements for the pack film I was looking for, but it was in enough demand they may not have had any on hand at that moment. Nice to know.

 

All of this reminded me of something taken for granted now. When people my age claim they’re a child of the 80’s a whole lot of bystanders like to cop a sneer. No, we’re not the “Fast Times” generation, but we weren’t completely immune to Debbie Gibson’s-conversion van-slap-bracelet-Bill Cosby-Reebok-pump-wearing-pudding-pops phenomenon. The first thing that occurred to me this morning as I pondered yesterday’s realization was that 1) When I was young phones were still attached by wires. We had two in the old house, a green wall-mount rotary Trimline in the kitchen (with extra-long handset cord) and a blue table-top rotary Trimline that could be unplugged from upstairs and taken out to the patio out back where there was a jack to _plug it back in_. Even in the late 80’s cell phones were still considered high-buck gadgets. The first time I ever used such a thing was calling from my 6^th grade teacher’s bag phone in her Lincoln. By then, of course, “portable phones” (later to be called cordless I guess) were becoming ubiquitous. I’d say we were one of the first to have such a thing in the mid-80’s; it was a pricey “Cobra” that was all-analog with pulse dialing, a metal telescoping antenna, and absolutely no smarts about it at all. To change “channels” as they say, involved a screwdriver and popping hidden covers on the base and receiver. It went belly-up of natural causes, as did a whole-lotta portable phones in our house. They’d all develop some sort of ailment and become throw-aways (though we actually took the Cobra to be serviced given the price of those things at the time; to sum that one up the guy did not actually repair it). Friends also had the popular AT&T grayish models that were out in the early 90’s with the squared edge look, metal antenna and rubber keypad that eventually went bad on ALL OF THEM. We went through our fair share, too.

 

The original realization from yesterday was how frickin’ expensive good film really is. My first “real” camera was a Kodak 35mm affair that would allow you to see, and take, pictures with the sliding cover in place over the shutter. On the upside it had a built-in flash! That sounds strange to say now but you couldn’t walk into a grocery store without being inundated with camera flashcubes and bars and bulbs at the checkout lanes (of HyVee or Foods4Less). Anyhow, film was expensive, and being a grade-schooler, you made due with what you could get. (As long as it wasn’t that oddball Seattle Filmworks stuff that looked like a great deal until the scam with sending it off to be specially processed. You know what I’m talkin’ about) Anyway, you tried to make every shot count because there were only so many of the 24 left and each one cost money. Even in high school, I can remember the bills I’d rack up on film, paper and chemicals while still doing it “on the cheap”. Digital cams have completely spoiled us in that respect. You can fire off an almost limitless number of shots without a dollar sign appearing in front of you (Advantix anyone?) and you know instantly if you got the pic.

 

Maybe I’m just rummaging through fodder to make me feel old, but it is weird to look at what we had in elementary school and the technologies that were coming of age when we graduated. Both our elementary school music teacher and gym teacher had record players that they actually used. The former even had Infinity speakers if I recall. If you can remember dads at school sporting events with big RCA VHS video cameras perched on shoulders then you know what I’m driving at. Hello Bob Sagget!