I dedicate this shot to my great niece, Gwen, who refers to Black&White videos as "Grey"

So I saw on the internet that there was now a Steadicam for the iPhone…and I immediately coveted it. The past few months I have been gathering up a motley collection of iPhone Video apps but I haven’t actually been able to do anything with them.  Well, at least I had convinced myself of that.  I am not sure why today struck me as the time to start to fiddle with them, although I think the tapioca of my brain colliding with a stack of late arriving work that has to get turned into a magazine had something to do with it.  The human mind is such that we will do anything possible to distract ourselves from work.

Still…when the afternoon rolls around and you need a cup of coffee what better time to dive into the world of iPhone cinema verte? All I did was turn on an app I found that turns the iPhone into a grainy old 8mm camera and crawled into Testy the WESTY and set off on my caffeinated adventure! The look of the film made me think of all those wonderful French films I loved so much when I was studying film so it only was natural that I used Charles Trenet, along with David Bowie and Dick Dale, as background.

From a social standpoint I was amused by the fact that the people in our local Starbucks did not even blink as I wandered through with my iPhone held up like a Geiger counter.  Society as a whole has become inured to what earlier cultures would either find an invasion of privacy or an opportunity to scream either greetings to their Mother or obscenities at the camera.

When I got back to the house I loaded the video into an editing package on the iPhone, added music and uploaded it to YOUTUBE.  Is it art?  I dunno, a lot of things are called art these days that are not much more than vacuous fatuous steaming piles of fresh hot groat clusters, and those are just the ones on reality shows.  What is though is a start. I am facinated with the camera on the iPhone four, amongst other things, and how I can use it in my work as an artist and a journalist.  If you working within the limitations of the device, and in fact  learn those and turn them to your artistic benefit, then a whole new world of guerrilla art opens up for you.  You become Edison Carter without being burdened with the enormous camera…although you do wind up needing a really good coat.

So present for your preusal and edification, a man, a phone and a WESTFALIA.  What begins as a quest for liquid stimulants leads to an off Ramp to the iPhone Zone.