{"id":137,"date":"2004-06-24T08:14:39","date_gmt":"2004-06-24T16:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=137"},"modified":"2004-06-24T08:14:39","modified_gmt":"2004-06-24T16:14:39","slug":"135-french-road-sign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/?p=137","title":{"rendered":"#135 :: French road sign"},"content":{"rendered":"

seek<\/a> look<\/a> ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”><\/a>About 35 years ago, a student of my father’s pulled a slick slab of leather and chrome from his overcoat pocket and performed an act of origami sorcery I’ll never forget. Polaroid<\/a> had given the guy one of the first SX-70 instant cameras, a few bricks of film, and marching orders to test it wherever and whenever he could. He pinched, and lifted and the slab unfolded in a slow, balletic explosion of inclined planes, black bellows and pivoting glass. I was completely mesmerized. He aimed, focused, and snapped, and the thing extruded a squarish rectangle that went from a white mist to a full-color photo of my little brother and me. Then with a pop and shuffle, he collapsed the camera into a slab again and slipped it back into his pocket with the slyest grin a recent college graduate could muster. I was used to Flash-Cubed Instamatics that teased and tortured, making me wait for weeks to see my photos until my Dad<\/a> retrieved them from the drugstore. This – this was miraculous. I got a non-folding SX-70 for high school graduation years later, and spent the better part of my time in photo classes<\/a> blowing through packs of film, gouging and abusing freshly-shot emulsion in a juvenile attempt to imitate Lucas Samaras<\/a> and Les Krims<\/a>. I found this top-of-the-line model in an antique store in Ventura a few years back – to replace an earlier folding model I owned. You can still buy the film – mostly at professional photo stores, though occasionally you’ll run across it at drug stores. You can use the crazy-fast 600 film if you don’t mind stopping everything way down and just dealing with the overexposure – I had a nice portfolio of stuff I shot at Joshua Tree not long back on the black-and-white stock. The cameras can be had on eBay for a song<\/a>, and if you’re a true ‘Roid geek, you’ll enjoy the Hacker’s Guide to the SX-70.”
\nbuy<\/a> ‘popup’, health<\/a> ‘width=500, information pills<\/a> height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”><\/a>A souvenir from a European road trip, a call to action, a study in French traffic control<\/a>. Printed black on yellow and stuck to a little plastic road sign, the message is clear, yet vague if you feign ignorance as to its purpose: 500 meters to an exit? 500 million possible variations ahead? An arrow that got lost en route to a Volvo logo<\/a>? A mutant stick figure 500 meters high? This is a silly game I’m playing, as befits a silly little sign. But it’s compelling …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A souvenir from a European road trip, a call to action, a study in French traffic control. Printed black on yellow and stuck to a little plastic road sign, the message is clear, yet vague if you feign ignorance as to its purpose: 500 meters to an exit? 500 million possible variations ahead? An arrow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-symbol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}