today had all the characteristics of failure, but i choose to take it for what it was. i shot a roll of film with the old minolta slr, thinking that the film was color, but in fact it was black and white. motherf0ck. what comes out will be loverly, i suppose, but the shot si looked for were specifically meant for fat color film. it is in the spirit of things, i guess, since the woman who used to own my camera would do stuff like that. she would shoot photos of bright red and yellow neon signs, in black and white. and somehow you knew you were looking at a bright red or yellow neon sign, even without the color. a couple of cool shots of the qboro bridge, too, or maybe just one shot. so when i got home i took the film and 2 other rolls of film to the nearest dude who does all my film, and he says he doesn‘t do black and white any more. “no one does it“ he said. that‘s a lie. i asked him where i should take the film, then, and he just shrugged and said that no one develops that kind of film any more that is fucking annoying, when someone lies to you. a similar thing happened ayear or so back when i needed a key made. i went to the nearest place, which is a department store and 99cent junk shop that has a keymaking corner. they said they could not make my key because they did not have the right size slug for it. no big deal, i thought, so i asked them who else in the area made keys. they just blinked, grinned, shrugged, and said that no one else in queens makes keys. i had a similar wtf moment with time warner cable, when their internet access failed me, and they could not send someone out for 3 weeks to fix it. i asked (somewhat rhetorically) if they knew how i could get internet access in new york city, and the guy on the phone just said no, no other internet in new york save for time warner. that was actually a really bad spell, when time warner couldn‘t fix my internet for 2 or 3 weeks, whilst my livelihood flailed in the lurch. i forget what happened next but i must have tried to leech wifi off of neighbors (illegal as well as futile) at the advice of time warner cable.
this off-on-a-tangent screed brought to you courtesy of film photography, and the failure of local shops to develop black and white, and my pre-emptive failure of thinking i was shooting color all the while.
i guess i have to ship film off to the hinterlands of middle america, whence i understand they still develop film via mail order. the dude at the shop i used to use wouldn‘t tell me who does it locally (and why wouldn‘t he since it is a non-competitive thing?)
blahblahblah.
there was more failure in my day… now i can‘t remember it all.
oh, right, goal #1 today was to find the magic radio payphone under the Pulaski Bridge and get a recording of the way in which the dial tone intertwines with the sound o WPLJ radio, that radio station some how and some way leaking in to the payphone and, last i heard it, rising louder and more more confidently than the storied dial tone itself.
that was a failed endeavor. i reached the ghetto blight payphone and picked it up, expecting to hear WPLJ loud and clear over the dial tone, but the technicians beat me to it. bastards. someone phixed the phone. i could barely barely hear the radio deep beneath the dial tone, so i know it is still there, but my planned use of the fancypants field recorder to document this amazing sliver of aural detritus was a dismal failure.
dismal.
since yesterday when i railed on about the elderly women intermingling with phreakers i have been remembering that incident, and i find that a mystery of 25 years vintage is solved. i never understood why the elderly women talked and talked and talked whilst these torpedoes of phreakers blasted in, looking to share VMB info and other illegalities. the elderly women, obviously, knew nothing of the phreakers crackling above, below, and within them.
and now i know why. because the bridge was beneath the elderly women. or above it. wherever it was, it was on a different line. it was the supervisory line, the moderator line, hijacked either knowingly or clandestinely by the phreaks, and i guess they heard the activity on the line as well but dismissed it as superfluous backwash on their quest to find more VMBs and hijackable bridges.
what a strange way to live.
