parotechnics

Look carefully now for country of origin. Spotted on Commercial street, Provincetown.

This shop of scraptures has been in Provincetown since 1946. Lots of houses there have them- they're all made of metal scrap and fall into some odd middle ground of art and garden ornament. The grandson of the founder is in the air force. He started working in the shop from the time he was 8 and the day we went in he had just come home from duty for the weekend and was busy in the workshop. The scraptures have a zany, assertive beauty. And they aren't cheap either!

Living in a city is like taking an international flight, in which you have your own personal TV monitor - other people's windows. My interest isn't prurient. Something about the way a window frames a person creates automatic poraiture. In Bombay people maximise space and put things on their windows and it seems like an intimacy one can have, a tenderness one asks from the world, to reveal a bit of the self like that. My first film began with a sequence of chawl windows in central Bombay. While shooting a woman combing her hair, Manoj Nair, the cameraman, said "man, this is like Rear Window, except here the woman's husband will see us shoot and come and clobber me one." While he was saying this, the woman took the loose hair out of her comb, threw it onto the street and retreated into the unknowable dark of her one room house. If we wanted to know more, we would have had to wait till evening, when Bombay windows, tube-lit, reveal the second halves of days to the wo