ID on the $30 camera??
Sick '90s point & shoots for the low, our favorite new sletter, a BBSP "We Told You So" & more Slapper Clairvoyance
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.
Our 2024 Slappy Awards — celebrating last year’s best designers, pants, music, movies and more — are here.
Our new Home Goods Report, bursting with things to enliven the place you live, is here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
Erin kicked off last Sunday’s Concorde, about very dope art & design books, with a celebration of “Earth’s most based member’s-only club” — the public library.
Reading these blessed ruminations, my mind drifted to the unique pleasure of returning something borrowed: I’d never thought of this before, but I realized I get a kick not just from coming home with a library book, but from dropping it back off when I’m done, so that it can make its way back to the shelves, ready for the next big-brained borrower.
It’s got to do with squaring the Circle of Obligation… Honoring the Contract… Doing one’s small but crucial part to keep the ecosystem Humming & Harmonious??
I bounced this off Erin, and her mind drifted from books to clothes. She’s felt a similar pleasure, she told me, after borrowing a garment from a friend, then washing it, ironing it, folding it up nicely, and giving it back. (You can and should do exactly this after you temporarily trade clothes with a friend in the technique of Slapper Enthusiasm-Renewal we wrote about here.)
I sat there contemplatively, and before long my thoughts drifted yet again, this time nestling pleasantly — as they so often do — in the profound particulars of James Cameron’s 2009 masterpiece Avatar. Specifically, the part at the end about the “network of energy that flows through all living things” and how “all energy is only borrowed, and one day you have to give it back.”
What is a Life Force, when you get right down to it, if not a book on loan from Gaia’s Library, written by some Cosmic Author, which we borrow at Birth and return upon Death so that others can read it?
Wow —
A good friend of ours with great taste just got back from an enviable solo trip to Japan, during which he popped into Tokyo en route to the main event: hiking through ancient temperate rainforest trails on the island of Yakushima, off the mainland’s southwestern shore.
Upon return, he had a few exposures remaining in his last roll of Gold 200. To burn through them in a spirit of fraternity and panache, he flicked me up trying on a coat (top left below), then got his film developed & sent me an assortment of shots he took during the trip.
They looked great, aglow with vibes. And get this: King shot them on a sick ‘90s-era 35mm Japanese automatic point-and-shoot camera, which tends to sell secondhand for ~$30!

He kindly gave me the ID on the ~$30 camera in question and gave us permission to blow up the spot on this slept-on magicmaker for you, the Classified Recon Tier members of Spy Nation: