About that time I accidentally spent all my money on lenses. And gizmos. And prints.
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 2
Well, I've got to run to keep from hiding
And I'm bound to keep on riding
And I've got one more silver dollar
But I'm not gonna let 'em catch me, no
Not gonnna let 'em catch the midnight rider
The Sunday Reader, April 14, 2024
Journalists are famously so bad at even basic arithmetic that Steve Ross says their stories should have red stickers labeled WARNING: JOURNALIST ATTEMPTING TO DO MATH!
And gambling is a tax on people who are bad at math. So the one-armed bandits at the New Sano Hotel in Tokyo grew fat as hungry, hungry hippos on the salaries of the Pacific Stars & Stripes journalists.
The slot machines held no attraction for me. This is no claim of virtue; avoiding slot machines for me is like avoiding Brussel sprouts. But I got talked into it one time by my enthusiastic boss. He was such a good guy and so enthusiastic I couldn’t bear to disappoint him. So I stuck a quarter in the machine and went to pull the handle, but he stopped me.
That only gives you one chance to win on the middle row. If you put a quarter here you can win on the top row; if you put one here you can win on the bottom row; if you put one here you can win on this diagonal...
Five dollars later every slot was filled, and I pulled the handle. The bandit beeped and bopped and stopped. Now what? I asked him. Now you do it again!
Are you insane? I have to pay to stand here and pay to pull the handle on this machine at $5 a pop? No thanks!
Now five dollars might not be much in 2024, but it was a fast-food dinner with change back in 1985. And I was only making about $700 a month, which was already a squeeze in Tokyo. Though it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, since the Army also threw in a free apartment in downtown Roppongi.
The Pacific Stars & Stripes staff lived in Hardy Barracks in Roppongi. We were in downtown Tokyo amongst every kind of food, art and entertainment. All of which was hideously expensive; eating out could run through your monthly salary Week One.
The New Sano was walking distance from Hardy Barracks and offered military base pricing for Americans stationed in Tokyo. That meant you could eat at the Sano’s restaurants and drink in the bar for a month for less money than you’d go through in a week on the streets of Tokyo.
So the Stripes staff was always at the Sano saving money. Which they promptly put into the slot machines.
You learn to love ramen. And curried rice. Lots of ramen and curried rice.
Like the rest of the Stripers, and indeed soldiers everywhere, I was always broke. No, the one-armed bandits never got me.
Pentax did.
The future is always unevenly distributed, and in the 1980s there was no higher concentration of the future than in the winding streets of Tokyo. Akihabara Electric Town not only had multi-level stores filled with the latest and greatest from Sony and Panasonic and Toshiba, it had narrow alleys jammed with stalls selling weird one-offs, failed pilot projects and home-brew electronics. For a young nerd like me, it was getting to live in Willy Wonka’s Electronics Factory, and I spent every other weekend and half my money wandering Akihabara, leaving every time with an empty wallet and boxes of gizmos.
I didn’t spend all my free time and money in Akihabara because I spent the other half of my weekends and money prowling around back alleys looking for the tiny camera shops scattered around Tokyo in an attempt to buy everything Pentax made.
That sounds like hyperbole, but consider: I arrived in Tokyo on New Year’s Day 1985 with an ME Super, an MX and maybe four Pentax lenses.
I left Japan in 1987 with the ME Super, the MX with a motor drive, two LXs with drives, a complete Auto 110 Super system with the camera, all four prime lenses, the flash and the motor drive, a separate bag filled with enough Vivitar interchangeable flash modules to outfit the MX and both LXs, and lenses.
Bags and bags of lenses.
I bought new. I bought the legendary 135mm F1.8 A* when it came out; it cost me almost a month’s salary.
I bought used. I found a used SMC 50mm F1.2, the fastest lens Pentax ever made. Still have it; these days I’m enjoying using it on the Pentax K-3 III Monochrome.
I wandered those Tokyo alleyways, and bought lenses large and small. I bought kewl glass of favorite focal lengths like the 135. I bought lenses to try that I’ve never really gotten the hang of, like the 300mm F4 A*. I still have trouble hand-holding that thing. So of course I bought the 2X teleconverter, which pretty much makes hand-holding a complete non-starter. For me, anyway.
I’ve been a Pentax guy from Day 1, but I’ve wandered in and out of other systems over the years following one photographic whim or another. I’ve always loved ultrawide lenses, so when Voigtlander released a 12mm, which at the time was the widest rectilinear lens ever made for 35mm, I bought it and a matching Bessa R rangefinder camera that fit the lens.
And then of course I bought more lenses for that Bessa.
Nowadays you can fit pretty much any lens on mirrorless cameras, so I bought adaptors for the 12mm, and packed up the rest of the Voigtlander system to sell off.
Here’s how many lenses I bought on those wanderings through Tokyo’s back streets: I found a brand new SMC Pentax-M 35mm F2 lens. That I never used, and don’t remember buying.
Even weirder, I don’t like and won’t use 35mm lenses. They just don’t fit my eye.
So how did I end up with a lens I would never use that I don’t remember buying? I must have bought it on my wanders when I already had one of every other lens.
The Akihabara Electric Town gizmos are all long dead and gone. The glass is not only still good, it’s still in heavy rotation; I generally have one or more of those lenses in my daily carry bag with the Monochrome.
In those days my job was my only responsibility, and it just seemed a shame to have money in my pocket when there were still gizmos and glass to be bought.
And woodblock prints.
I didn’t hunt prints the way I hunted gizmos and glass, but there were tiny little stalls here and there. When I stumbled across one, my money stayed there and prints came home with me. I still have those, too; enough that there are too many to have on the walls at once, so I have to rotate them. Though my kids have helped by making off with their favorites.
So I was just as loose with my money as any other soldier, but I have no regrets. Things had a way of working themselves out. One time the Army sent me for temporary duty in Korea. When I was done with my photography assignment, I was rushed to the airport and dumped there. For a flight the next day. It’s the signature Army move: Hurry up and wait.
It was early afternoon, so I went wandering the backstreets and alleyways, and found a stall selling Korean woodblock prints. I did not know that there was such a thing.
I had enough money for dinner and a hotel for the night…or one Korean woodblock print. Spent the night hanging out in the airport USO watching Clockwork Orange for the first time and eating USO popcorn. Still have the print. Here ‘tis. Enjoy! Â
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Tuesday April 16th - The PE Digest: The Week in Review and Easter Egg roundup
Thursday April 18th - The PE Vlog: We’re starting a new series on building Large Language Models — AIs — for our own applications. Welcome to Virtual Grad Student! We’re going to set up a Large Language Model to run locally, feed it a clean set of data, then make it available to authors as a virtual writer’s assistant. For example, to pull together a few paragraphs of background on Roman aqueduct architecture. This week we’re taking a look into installing and setting up the h2oGPT Large Language Model.
Friday April 19th - Foto.Feola.Friday
Sunday April 21st — There will be no 2nd Civil War The US Civil War was the first great conflict of the Industrial Age, won in large part by the manufacturing might of the Union. Such wars have faded away along with the Industrial Age. Today’s conflicts are being fought with cheap homemade drones and cyberattacks and electronic trade. If there’s a Third Battle of Bull Run, only electrons will see it.