I snap

[imomus]

Last week I needed a new digital camera and saw a neat one -- something called an I Snap Camcorder AV-60, made by "Camson Japan" -- in the window of an electronics store on 5th Avenue. It was pretty hard to convince the burly men in the store -- I think they were Mexicans -- to part with the camera. It was the last of its kind, they said, and they weren't sure where its box and power supply were. They showed me lots of other cameras, but something about the Camson intrigued me. It had very tiny dimensions, recorded sound separately from video (good for podcasts and interviews) and had a flat base and swivel screen (both essential for tripod-free portraits). I haggled the Mexicans "down" to $120.



This camera has turned out to be mysterious, terrible, and great. I can't find a single reference to it, or its allegedly Japanese (but probably Chinese) maker, anywhere on the internet. Nobody on Flickr, for instance, uses a Camson. What's more, the pictures it takes are pretty awful: there's a blue cast on everything, the flash is pathetically inadequate, it's terrible in low light. As a result, I tend to take the kind of pictures I took in the early days of digital photography: full-on, broad daylight images of flat, graphic-designlike subjects. When I do take indoor shots, I'll often have a thumb in the region of the lens and have to boost the contrast (and therefore the grain) enormously in Photoshop, as in the shot above, taken at Jan's udon party on Sunday night.

The great part is that bad cameras sometimes take much more interesting images than good cameras. I suppose it's an extension of the lo-fi aesthetic -- why would someone choose 8-bit sounds, for instance, when they could have "sophisticated" digital synthtones capable of burbling across the sound spectrum in quad? Well, as the newly-released Germlin THRASHR album demonstrates (and Germlin is Joe Howe, also seen in the picture above, and of course responsible for the sound of the Joemus album), there's a ton of character in cheap and cheerful low resolution sounds.



Joe and his girlfriend Emma are Berlin residents now, and today they're biking down to Oderbergerstrasse to visit Bonanza Coffee Heroes. I'd join them, but Hisae and I have to head back to Jan's apartment: we're covering it for the next edition of Apartamento, the "everyday life interiors magazine" which applies lo-fi -- or perhaps "slow-fi" -- principles in its approach to design. Hisae is taking the pictures. Not with my new Camson, but her old analog Nikon. When it comes to capturing funky ambience, you don't want too funky a camera.

Joe and Momus play together at West Germany on June 24th.

Comments

Re: cawfee tawk in WC1

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

The coffee in Berlin wasn't brilliant last time I went there. Also, if you ask for a macchiato, they give you a latte. (You have to ask for an "espresso macchiato", as I learned.) Still, it was better than London, where every place has an espresso machine but next to no-one knows how to operate one. (Except for places run by Australians and New Zealanders, it seems.)

One place I didn't expect to find good coffee but did: Reykjavík. Te Og Kaffi on Laugavegur has the best coffee blends I've had so far this side of Melbourne.

Re: cawfee tawk in WC1

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm obviously a Berliner -- when I ask for a macchiato somewhere like New York, I'm given this horrible bitter black thing rather than the milky confection I expect!

Re: cawfee tawk in WC1

[(Anonymous)]

Nick, the shot of espresso with a bit of milk foam in it is the real macchiato, not some vv milky coffee! That's an aberration with its genesis in Starbucks. I know this because in FL in an espresso bar, I asked for a macchiato and the woman prefaced the exchange with 'it's not that milky thing at Starbucks they call a macchiato'. I just looked at her and said 'if I wanted one of those I'd go to Starbucks and ask for it'. I've never had a Starbucks coffee.

Re: cawfee tawk in WC1

[subalpine.livejournal.com]

Macchiato means 'marked'; usually either something like a caffe macchiato (espresso marked with fleck of milk foam) or a latte macchiato (sort of the other way around). The interpretation of which 'macchiato' refers to on its own varies from place to place.

I guess in the u.s. it generally referred to caffe macchiato until Starbucks introduced their caramel macchiato, which led to a lot of confused expectations in cafes (as your Floridian barista showed). My sister worked at a cafe and was always talking about people coming in expecting the "real" macchiato there to be sweet and milky. But macchiato can just as easily refer to latte macchiato without Starbucks' influence, as it does in Berlin.

Re: cawfee tawk in WC1

[dzima.livejournal.com]

I don't mean to be harsh, but when are people from Melbourne going to learn that no one outside of Australia cares about Melbourne? I say this with an emoticon on the side ;)

Pelle in Tokyo is a bit sad.

http://www.dfv.jp/pelleng.html

There's plenty of good coffee to be had around the world. New York is a bit hit and miss as well.

Re: cawfee tawk in WC1

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

I mention Melbourne because the standard of coffee there is exceptionally high, and this has been widely recognised.

There is indeed plenty of other good coffee in the world, but good luck finding it in, say, Great Britain. There are a few places, and I've seen at least two advertising that they are staffed by "Australian-trained baristas", but even the good coffee in London is not quite up to the same standard as in Melbourne.

Re: cawfee tawk in WC1

[(Anonymous)]

I read Halldór Laxness, Independent people.

Coffee seemed to be mighty important.