So I'm in North Carolina, at my mother's house, where my belongings were
already, for the most part, stacked and boxed; my stuff has been
warehoused here, much of it since the 70's, and now I'm trying to corral
everything into some sort of form for a moving company to take them to
Brooklyn. After decades as a professional student and slacker, I have
my first "real job", and the chance to live in the same location as my
possessions, and with no roommates or housemates. As I collected more books,
records, amps, synths, and cheesy sport coats (not quite as loud as the ones
The Replacements took to wearing, circa 1987), most of my things would end
up sitting here, even when I was elsewhere. Now I'm wondering if it will all
fit into a small one-bedroom apartment.
I got here at 5:30 AM Saturday, after my flight, scheduled
to leave LaGuardia at 9 PM Friday, suffered all sorts of
delays (and one brief cancellation) before getting there after 2 AM. The man at
the gate managed to scrounge up some airline snax and bottled water for our
long wait; his day was even longer than ours, plus he had to be back at
LaGuardia at 5:15 AM.
I slept for most of Saturday, got up, and started packing; I quickly ran out
of
moveworthy boxes -- I'd kept a lot of books and
odds-and-ends in tomato
crates over the years, but deemed such boxes inappropriate. Half of my
synthesizers still had the boxes they came in, so it was short work for
those; the same goes for my PC monitor, while the case part still awaits a
big-enough box. The computer will be the last thing packed, being haphazardly
set up for scavenging purposes -- old e-mail, JPEGs, an old utility for the
Akai S950 sampler, my
Slashdot password, and other things which can be
evacuated onto floppies before I wipe the drives clean back in
NYC; I don't
trust the moving process enough to let the evacuation wait -- my
video card
already goes nuts whenever I open up the case, so a long trip in a moving van
can only bring new wonders of malfunctionry to the various creaky parts of
Frankenputer.
Saturday evening, I went to
CompUSA, the only place I knew of that sold
iMacs, to get my mother's
Christmas present -- the base-model iMac, minus
the digital-video goodies. I told my mother for months that I'd get her one,
either for Christmas or for her birthday in January. The
salesperson,
apparently a new hire for the holidays, with braces, an accent that was from
an English-speaking land (not this one), and a throes-of-
puberty
almost-moustache, quietly walked over to me and asked if he could help. I took
charge and barked out my order -- the cheapo iMac, a longer phone cord than
the one that comes with it, and a floppy drive. We went around the
Mac quadrant, in search of the latter two (I'd already been
standing by the iMacs to begin with, so no
search party was needed for that);
he eventually found the cord, while I, a few minutes later, found the
USB
floppy drives. I also chose an extra 64 MB of memory. After paying, while
waiting for the memory install, I wandered the store, trying to avoid
impulse
buying; I bought headphones, since my ten-year-old
Walkman headphones are a
pain to wear at work.
I presented my mother with her new computer that night, and she gave me some
"but I thought you were just joking" protests. Nope. Teaching her how to use a
computer is like teaching someone to drive who has never seen an automobile.
Mum only needs to do three things --
e-mail, web surfing, and word
processing. Fancier things can wait until these things are mastered. At this
point, even using a mouse is perplexing for her, and the dark keys of the
keyboard make it hard to see what's what. I've already downloaded (against my
better judgment)
Netscape 6, and configured bookmarks, the ISP account, a
desktop folder for documents, etc. I'm trying to make this beyond
user-friendly, as much as I can -- click the "Browse the
Internet" icon,
click a link, and the OS will do the dial-up for you. I'll be lucky if she can
grasp the concept of e-mail by the time I leave; if she can do that, then I can
continue helping from a distance. All that's down-pat right now is "don't just
hit the on/off button when you're done with the
computer".
During this packing, I'm seeing things I haven't seen in years -- a
1985
receipt from an
A&P in
Chapel Hill (was it on Airport Road? I can't
remember), two old computer magazines from the 70's (given to me by someone in
the
Computer Science department at
N.C. State, when I'd begun to show an
interest in programming), old
LPs that I'd forgotten were stashed here, like
Yes'
Relayer,
Funkadelic's
Hardcore Jollies, two of the
first three
Patti Smith albums, and
Todd Rundgren's
Something/Anything, the last unplayed since a
roommate gave it to me
before running off to
Jamaica. Who knows if any of these are even playable?
I'm dragging three mothballed turntables with me, and once I install new
styli, I'll begin to see which of these hundreds (thousands?) of vinyl
artifacts will be keepers, envisioning filling a giant hard drive with a
meticulously digitized-and-compressed library of everything from
Peter
Kowald to
Joni Mitchell to
King Crimson to
The Smiths. Yes, I'm too
cheep to replace any of them with CDs.
Other signs of penny-pinching: I'm taking a 15-year-old
television to get
fixed tomorrow, since the on/off knob isn't on-ing; you can't even buy
TVs with knobs these days, I'll bet. I'll be taking some ancient guitar-synth
pickups to get fixed back in New York, if anyone can fix them, that is. There
are many better guitar synthesizers around these days, but none has the
feature that mine has --
IT'S PAID FOR. The same goes for
various other odds and ends; some, like my old
Portastudio and various pieces
of stereo equipment, will just end up in the
landfill, paid-for or not.
Victor Borge died late last week. It was
pledge week on a lot of
PBS stations, and in New York, you get a double-barreled dose, via two large
entities, WNET and WNYC. On one of the last nights of the "festival", the
first half was to be devoted to Mr. Borge, with a VHS set of his being one of
the premiums given for a healthy pledge, with a program called
British
Invasion, presumably with a similar
VHS "gift", taking up the other half
of the evening. Mr. Borge was even there in the WNYC studios, having, I
suppose, come down from his home in
Connecticut to help out with the
festivities; he didn't look like a man with days left to live -- in fact, the
news reports of his death mentioned that he had concerts booked for some time
to come.
Now Mr. Borge, 91 years young, and a national treasure on two different
continents, is a charming man and a great
entertainer, but I was actually
waiting to see the Brits;
knifegirl had even humored me by letting me stay up
and watch, in lieu of our usual activity of
wild sex on the
coffee table
while discussing
Soren Kierkegaard's influence on the life and works of
Lester Young. I'd surf over to WNYC every once in a while, and still see the
visage of Victor, either live or from some concert tape or decades-old
TV
appearance. I'd fume a bit, wondering when the rawk would start, and resume
channel surfing.
I hadn't really intended to watch British Invasion, I just wanted to
catch the first few minutes -- the Times TV listings only
mentioned the title, nothing about who was on. I imagined it would be some
sort of oldies concert, with performances from the likes of Gerry Marsden or Freddie Garrity, both
now of grandfatherly age, or the last surviving members of The Merseybeats,
or always-ready-for-the-cameras Eric Burdon. I had a morbid curiosity in
seeing these old people, just for a minute, and maybe a desire to cringe at Freddie
huffing and puffing, in an attempt to do his famed dance steps. (Mr. Borge
had the right idea, perhaps, developing an act early on that would gracefully
grow old with him.)
I couldn't imagine sitting through two hours of such a show, with
between-segments visits, no doubt, from local DJ Cousin Brucie Morrow,
reminiscing about his days at WABC and WNBC, spinnin' the trax-of-wax.
It's those trax, plus the archive footage from the TV appearances and the films
some of the bands made (hoping to ape the successes of A Hard Day's
Night and Help!) that interest me today far more than whether or
not a 60-year-old man can Do The Freddie onstage without scaring the medics.
Of course, it may well have been that British Invasion was a
documentary, and not some concert -- I'll have to investigate this further.
As it turns out, the Brits never surfaced; at 11 PM, WNYC resumed its normal
programming, an hour of news from BBC World. Wrong Brits.
There was something about the poppier, less musicianly/
R&B-purist of the
beat groups -- the sound of a bunch of lads goofing off, with the resultant
noise being played, several times a day, on
hi-fis and radios from
Bristol
to
Brampton to the
Bronx. This kind of stuff is lost forever, relegated to
the ghettoes of
college radio.
You damn kids don't understand what's been
lost with the hyper-corporatizing and hyper-careerism of
pop music that took
off in the early 70's (led by
CBS, bought out years later by
Sony, and by
the company now known as
AOL Time Warner, who now own the rights to the
60's films of
Herman's Hermits and the
Dave Clark Five), after the
successful
proof-of-concepts called
Monterey and
Woodstock (and you thought it was about "
peace and love"
, man --
fools!). Nowadays, everything is painstakingly polished, produced, and
marketed like some new
SUV or
blockbuster cineplex fodder -- a goof-off's
giddy
innocence can now only come from the IS-
404G Giddy Innocence
Simulator, which costs as much as a fancy condo, far out of the price range of
the average
garage band.
Today, I will somehow pack, without boxes until
Boxing Day;
Sunday being both a Sunday and
Christmas Eve, my last-minute search for
boxes proved fruitless (but I bought an
O'Reilly Python book, right before
the bookstore closed at 6 PM -- my gift to me). Somewhere in this house is a
copy of the Dave Clark Five's greatest hits, if I haven't given or traded it
away at some point; if found, I'll put it on my mother's
Victrola, and
pogo to "Glad All Over" or something while I work.