John Pinto
Thunderstorm in the morning for like twenty minutes. First thing of importance I see is a photo of Chet Holmgren wearing jorts. I don’t watch a lot of basketball, but I find Chet fascinating because he looks frightening and brittle the way horses do. Should Chet ever wish to continue the proud tradition of NBA guys becoming actors, he could play Shane MacGowan.
The work outfit today includes a green Phillies dad hat that I bought at the Bank a few City Connect nights ago. It’s a nice hat, more Master’s 18th green than St. Patty’s. I had financial stress dreams the night I bought it.
I eat a Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwich and finally advance my office calendar to May.
My girlfriend Maly and I work two blocks from each other, so we head in together. We cross through a National Park and see a dog that looks like a fox, and then our bus has a nice crowd of talkative older folks. A lady on her phone ends a call with, “Jesus! Well, I’ll see you in a few blocks! So exciting!” My friend and co-worker James sends me an excellent text: he found a copy of Dune: Messiah lying on the sidewalk. I understand this is the first book featuring a character who will one day be half-human, half-giant worm.
I get to work and check in the film orders left overnight in our mailbox. Right now we’re riding out our busy season. Philadelphia has 1.5 million people, and every May they all graduate and get married at the same time. But intake for today isn’t too heavy, and I’ve got an early Phillies day game on the radio to look forward to. James arrives with his new copy of Dune: Messiah and we head upstairs to the lab.
I set up our color processing machine: kill power, hose down the racks that sit inside the bleach and fix vats, restart power, initiate start-up checks, insert turn guide 1 dry, hose down and insert turn guides 2 through 7, soak, hose down, and insert/screw in squeegee rack, close top cover and line up the film receiver on top of the machine, initiate water refill, turn on drive switch (now say it back).
We load an empty leader card to ensure the path through the machine is uninterrupted, and then we run a control strip. These tests take about ten minutes each, time I spend either preparing film for development or fucking around on the computer. Text running along the bottom of the computer screen reads, “TEMPS WILL PLUMMET.” Beside this warning, there’s a cute graphic of a donkey in a field.
After the control strip, I process film while James scans the already-developed rolls. Our machine—a Noritsu QSF-V50—has a ceiling of about fifty rolls an hour. It’s a spectacularly dumb piece of late 90s/early 2000s technology that, thanks to market forces, will never be improved upon. It’s a lighttight and temp-controlled box filled with 7 vats of chemicals, but it has the profile of a copy machine. It cuts rolls of film free from their canisters using a razor-sharp reverse guillotine that sits an inch below the only place you ever put your hands, and those blades fire using the same trigger system you would find on a mousetrap. I love this dumb machine.
We listen to .NMAD, which is DAMN. with the tracklist reversed, and suffer a Dodge ad that shows a little boy swearing while driving. I didn’t know auto advertisers were allowed to show things like that in this country. We play the entire reversed album and get the naughty little boy in a fast car ad three or four times and then we play one (1) SZA song and immediately get an ad, I do not joke, for tampons.
The machine chirps at me: I’m prompted to do a 10L stabilizer replenishment. Stabilizer is 91% water, essentially detergent. If my friend and co-worker Covey were in today processing black and white film by hand, we’d have to arrange some sort of deft sink ballet to make sure we both had the water we needed. But Covey is out today so he can serve as the mystery guest judge for a high school art show, and I have the sink to myself. I pour 5L of water into the color processor, then 4L of water, then a tiny graduated cylinder of stabilzer concentrate, and then a little more water for good measure. We continue on. Audioslave’s Like A Stone plays, a side effect of us getting really into the Alex G song Blessing recently. I love and envy that Alex can listen to Like A Stone and hear Blessing. I hear Like A Stone and hear Smooth ft. Rob Thomas (Sullen Mix). The real issue, I guess, is that I’m not big on Chris Cornell when he doesn’t have big ol’ Soundgarden guitars flanking him. Chris Cornell is not a true shutdown corner, an island. He is not a viable CB1. This is all that concerns me until about 12:30, when James goes to lunch and I cover him on the scanner. I do a roll or two, check my phone, and see the news about Steve Albini.
It’s Atomizer on our little computer speakers, immediately and then for most of the rest of the day. I slump over a little at the scanner and feel real numb. Jordan, Minnesota goes into Passing Complexion and I maybe do cry for a second and slide into something like anti-reality. James comes back. I process twenty rolls of a film format that hasn’t been widely manufactured 2009. I go to lunch and eat a startlingly adequate Trader Joe’s burrito. I shut down the color processor: initiate close-down checks, turn off drive switch, remove film receiver and open the top cover, remove and hose down turn guides 1 through 7 and the squeegee, clean the upper rollers of each rack inside the machine, close the top cover and initiate final water refill before the machine goes into its timed rest mode (now say it back). We listen to the last three innings of that Phillies game and hear them snap a 7 game-win streak. People leave work one by one until it’s just me in the lab, cutting and sleeving the last of the day’s film, and then I lock up and go home. Maly and I make chipotle pasta, play checkers, and go to sleep. Steve Albini, the Chicago audio engineer? No. Ha ha! Sorry, nice try! He is too well defined—Songs About Fucking, the drums on Glenn, every Jesus Lizard thing, doing that Songs: Ohia album in one big room, the poker, the writing that seemed like the least important artistic pursuit to him even though he may have been better at it than music, the inexhaustible supply of opinions, “for less than the price of a Big Mac,” his Breeders t-shirt that stole the Raiders logo—to suddenly stop existing. Nothing about it makes any fucking sense.
I do not have one single dream.
John Pinto is a writer and film lab tech living in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Rejection Letters, HAD, Back Patio Press, and the Second Bullshit Anthology. Find him online at pintopintopinto.com.
