I’m becoming more familiar with the backdrops of famous parking lots. R-Compound, Battlecraft Parts, Narita Dogfight, and Joey Lee’s Chronicles all share space in a nondescript, industrial-strip mall, the type of place you’d drive by four-hundred times before catching an NSX pull in one day. Like knowing where a movie was filmed , finally getting to check out spaces that you’ve spied on from the background of YouTube videos or from product promo shoots always carries with it a heightened sense of reverence. The stucco you run your hand over is rougher than it looks on camera, and that matters for some reason.
Having been fortunate enough to be invited to check out each of these shops before, I wasn’t surprised by the landscaping, or the surprisingly large hump you have to drive over to get past the gate. What did surprise me from the Chronicles Fall Gathering, however, was a complete lack of desire to even unpack my digital camera.
Staring down the roof-scoop of an NSX-R GT tribute delivered on a flatbed for a “chill Sunday afternoon hang” with the founders of No Good Racing and Exceed Japan strolling by nonchalantly, I knew immediately that spending hours in the heat trying to capture every car meaningfully wasn’t going to be possible. Recognizing builds which were behind velvet stanchions at SEMA two weeks before, I opted for film instead, a more meaningful medium which I couldn’t rush home to edit and post.
Outside of point-and-shoot beach trips or house parties caught on CVS disposables, I hesitated to do a lot with film despite having a few rolls in my refrigerator for the past half-year. Sometimes, the immediacy or convenience of my photos was a genuine factor in leaving my film camera at home. Other times, however, I hesitated with film, questioning whether an angle of a car was worth remembering with the kind of importance that requires a lab to preserve it.
Like I discussed in my November post, however, this blog and the work I do for it needs to be self serving, and that day in a famous parking lot, for whatever reason, I knew that I needed to get over myself.
Since then, I’ve done my best to keep at least a point in shoot in my pocket at events, remembering to always save a memory or two that I could rediscover with less urgency and fresh excitement. In that spirit, here’s a mix of what has turned out over the past odd months, a handful of moments and memories on the beautifully golden and widely loved Kodak Portra 400.
More than likely, this will be my last post of the year. Through Test Fits, sliding into the new year with so many great people in Houston, Summer Recap posts, jumping in traffic for better angles at Bowls, and perhaps most spectacularly, hosting Lexus and Lattes with so many talented people in Irvine, I hope that Racing Couture has been able to bring you closer to the very best of car culture, just as it has brought me endlessly closer to an incredible number of you across the country. On that note, I wish you all a very happy holiday season, lots of new parts to unwrap this month, and to keep doing cool shit in cars! I’ll be back in LA for the new year, and I can’t wait to see you all then. ///RC
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