el is for leica.

So here she is, properly christened: Eleanor, my sweet little Leica. 

Over brunch at Maialino on Saturday, Mark suggested Eleanor as a potential name for the new camera.  And not only did it seem like a good fit, but we realized that it had the added, built-in bonus of having El as a nickname.  As in, Oh, I’m taking The El with me today.   L El is for Leica, indeed!

When I told my friend Dan that the Leica finally had a name, he wrote to inform me that Eleanor was the name Nicholas Cage gave to the one car he couldn’t steal in The Fast and the Furious Gone in 60 Seconds.  (Dan, by the way, is a film scholar who specializes in things pretty far removed from TFATF GI60S, so I’m not sure in what context he found himself watching that movie.  Ahem.)  Upon hearing this, Mark pointed out: That makes it even better! You have what Nicholas Cage never could.  Heh.  Super bonus!

It’s a shame, though, that Eleanor’s christening was marred by weird film issues.  I don’t know if it was the Kodak Elitechrome 200 being wonky, or the metering being off as a result of the slide film, or if it’s my increasingly questionable negative scanner, but this roll came out with crazy purple tones, and with everything — minus the Maialino pics — underexposed and slightly unfocused.  The focusing could’ve been me, I know, but the shots had a more overall fuzziness to it.  Will try another round, this time with my usual Ektar, to make sure that there’s nothing funny going on with the lens or camera. 

Two additional thoughts without a good place to put them:

In writing this post, I only just now realized that last weekend was the closing weekend for the Tara Donovan show at Pace Gallery, which we managed to catch, and which was pretty great and trippy, with hundreds of thousands of nickel-plated steel pins coming together to create shimmery abstract drawings of sorts. 

Also, Mark says that the ricotta pancakes he had at Maialino on Saturday are possibly the best he’s ever had.  He’s from the Midwest, so the boy knows from pancakes.   The glass of Rosso Piceno I had with my bombolotti all’amatriciana was also pretty spectacular (as was my dish).  Maialino is back on its game.