The fate of an archive

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

My mom brought me boxes of my old cassette tapes. The tapes range from 1996-2003, recorded from the ages 13-20. An archive from another lifetime, when I wanted to be a famous musician. My six-year-old has been sticking random tapes into the four-track, listening for drums and other stuff he could sample for his own songs.

I doubt he finds anything worthy.

I used to look at all those tapes and see a waste of time — what good was all that to a writer! — but now I see years spent dedicated to a creative task, learning what it’s like to practice and study and steal and share and try to express yourself and bring something new into the world. That time is never lost.

Plus, it was something to do.

Meanwhile, my stack of diaries fell over yesterday, like a cheap metaphor:

3 stories about the fates of musical archives posted in the past 2 days:

1) The 2008 Universal fire turned out to be “the biggest disaster of the music business,” destroying masters by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, John Coltrane, and on and on and on.

2) Bob Dylan’s team can’t track down historic footage of his Rolling Thunder shows, not because they’ve been destroyed, but because of a filing error:

“The negative was lost,” says a source close to the Dylan Camp. “Which [was] really horrifying. Part of the problem with corporations the days is all the consolidation. And in the consolidation of our storage system, somehow the numbering system fell off. There was just no way to find the negative — and we looked. Man, did we look. Now everything is in Iron Mountain. We went there and just couldn’t find it. It’s really sad. My worst fear is it’ll turn up tomorrow. For all we know, its sitting in some collector’s basement.”

3) Thom Yorke’s minidisc archive from the OK Computer era (1995-1998) was hacked, so instead of paying the hacker’s ransom, Radiohead released 18 hours of the recordings on Bandcamp.

It pleases me to look at Yorke’s minidiscs, and then look at my cassettes, and think how one archive contains treasure and the other trash. (“it’s not v interesting / there’s a lot of it,” wrote Yorke. “Yeah, right,” thought I.)

But, despite their wildly different results, both archives were made with essentially the same effort: We hit RECORD and tried to make a noise that pleased us.

Now my six-year-old presses RECORD and tries the same.

Another archive begins.

The Medium is the Massage

Monday, June 10, 2019

Designer Scott Boms recently donated designer Quentin Fiore’s hand-annotated mechanical (in publishing, a mechanical is like a prototype for the book) of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage to Letterform Archive in San Francisco and let us all have a look:

I acquired this after the passing of Marshall’s wife Corinne as we were cleaning out the McLuhan home in Wychwood Park in Toronto. It was stuffed in a cardboard box in the basement and long forgotten…. The story goes that Marshall made barely any edits to Fiore and Agel‘a proposal, including the typo in the name of the book itself, though there are a handful of written annotations through this mechanical.

Designer Kelli Anderson posted a video on her Instagram stories of Boms flipping through:

Kelli added a bit more background to the famous story about the title (from the McLuhan estate’s website):

“Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? The title is a mistake. After the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover ‘Massage’. The title was supposed to read The Medium is the Message, but the typesetter made an error. After McLuhan saw the typo, he exclaimed, ‘Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!’ Thus, there are four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age.”

(As the Oblique Strategies tell us: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”)

Then again, here’s Quentin Fiore being interviewed by Steven Heller in 1988 (from this supplement to The Electronic Information Age Book):

SH Where did the title come from?

QF From McLuhan. What McLuhan intended by “massage” is that technology takes over us completely. To some people this seemed demeaning: to think that a piece of junk like a television or computer can change their lives. I mean, they couldn’t understand how man fashioned the shovel, and then the shovel proceeded to fashion man. Many people can’t stomach this.

Frogs and toads in full blast

Sunday, June 9, 2019

Lots of over-the-shoulder art direction from my kindergartener on this one.

It’s funny, when you’re reading Thoreau’s summer journal, how often he tries to capture the sound of the toads and the frogs. They “stutter,” “croak,” “purr,” “peep,” “pipe,” “snore,” “trill,” and even “trump.”

The sound of frogs represented to Thoreau the “mid-summer’s dream.”

May 25, 1851: “I hear the dreaming of the frogs. So it seems to me, and so significantly passes my life away. It is like the dreaming of frogs on a summer evening.”

May 3, 1852: “The dream of the frog sounds best at a distance — most dreamy.”

May 7, 1852: He wonders if uncovering the scientific truth of something takes away its poetry:

I fear the dream of the toads will not sound so musical now that I know whence it proceeds. But I will not fear to know. They will awaken new and more glorious music for me as I advance, still farther in the horizon, not to be traced to toads and frogs in slimy pools.

He writes that perhaps the different seasons are best represented by “the notes of reptiles,” who express “the very feelings of the earth.”

People made fun of him for how much he listened to the frogs and toads.

On March 28, 1853, he writes of overhearing his Aunt Maria complaining about him not taking time to read a book she recommended to him: “Think of it! He stood half an hour to-day to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn’t read the life of Chalmers.”

In a 1928 book, Memories of a Sculptor’s Wife, a Concord farmer is quoted laughing about “David Henry” (his actual name — he switched the order), “That darned fool had been standin’— the livelong day — a-studyin’ —the habits—of the bull-frog!” (Reminds me of Abraham Lincoln’s cousin, who was quoted as saying, “Lincoln was lazy — a very lazy man. He was always reading — scribbling — writing — ciphering — writing poetry…”)

No matter to David Henry. June 7th, 1858, he goes down to the river just to listen:

There is art left to be made in this world

Saturday, June 8, 2019

Anthony Bourdain died one year ago today, when I was in the middle of making Keep Going. I gave him the last spread in the book.

My mom came to visit today. We were looking out on the lake and talking about the kids and their (seemingly) limitless curiosity. We were wondering (debating?) whether some people just come pre-wired with curiosity, or if it’s something that everybody has, like a muscle or an organ that you use or lose.

I was reminded of another similar conversation near the water: the one between Bourdain and Iggy Pop on S5E2 of Parts Unknown:

Iggy Pop: You seem like a curious person.

Anthony Bourdain: It’s my only virtue.

Iggy Pop: Curious is a good thing to be. It seems to pay some unexpected dividends.

Bourdain was a great, curious elder. I’m sorry he didn’t get to hang in with us longer, but I’m grateful for the fruits of his curiosity that he left behind.

For the rest of us, we have to stick around. Stay curious. Ask for help when we need it. There’s art left to make.