A true story. Featured in my letter, “One thing after another.”
Melted 45s
On her morning walk yesterday Meg found a melted stack of 45RPM singles left on the curb. I couldn’t stand to leave them there, so I walked a couple of tote bags over and carried the stack home.
I didn’t know what the heck I was going to do with them until I decided to just go through the stack as I found it and add the songs to a Spotify playlist in order (and then go back through and add the other sides):
Unbelievably, some of the records survived, and I had fun posting some of the survivors to Instagram. Most exciting to me was a decent copy of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”/ “Wind Cries Mary”:
I’ve heard “Purple Haze” a million times, but it sounded new to me on this 45 — I don’t think I’ve ever actually listened to it on vinyl, and the echo on Jimi’s voice sounded like it was coming out of a large tin can. Pretty excellent.
There were many, many casualties. The Beatles and Beach Boys must’ve lived at the top of the heap, so to speak, because they were all warped beyond play. Two of the saddest casualties for me were Otis Redding and the Electric Prunes.
But there were some other survivors! Roy Orbison, Barry White, Sinatra, Stones — I was most excited about “Little Girl” from Syndicate of Sound and Shadows of Knight’s “Gloria” cover. (It was right on the edge, but I love that Dunwich label, so I kept it.)
I don’t know how often I’ll listen to them, but I have enjoyed the Spotify playlist.
I was tempted to knock on the door and talk to the people in the house, but in some ways, I’d rather them be a mystery and think about who they are or might’ve been…
Update: I’ve been going back to some 45s I overlooked and keep finding some playable ones, like this wild Pete Drake track, “Forever” — the single version on the 45 actually isn’t streaming. It’s great!
Fossil records and paper trails
We took the kids to the Houston Museum of Natural Science this weekend, and afterwards, I tweeted this thread:
The more I’ve gone over it in my mind, the more absurd and funnier it gets. Here is an institution dedicated to what we can learn from seeing physical objects in the fossil record in person… and they’ve gone “paperless” — no paper trail! (I should note, however, that they do print admission tickets so you can prove that you’ve paid to get in.)
I have also been meditating on my own absurdities concerning my life in paper. For example, my diaries are an attempt to make my own paper trail in an increasingly paperless world. My own “paper of the past.” My own fossil record.
But these archives are mostly for the short term, the short past: they’re to trace my own patterns, remember what I did last week, last month, last year, last decade. I am under no delusions that they will last, although they’ll probably last a lot longer than the hard drive I bought last month.
Meanwhile, I’ve stopped carrying a pocket notebook because I am in love with Apple Notes — the simple “notebook” on my phone that syncs across all my devices. I have files going for the newsletter, new books, shopping lists, etc. I am aware that these artifacts will mostly be lost, probably in the close future. They are the equivalent of “scratch” paper that will be tossed in the recycling later.
One final reach: The big news yesterday was that the FBI had searched the former president’s house to retrieve records he’d illegally removed from The White House. (Previously, he’d flushed paper down the toilet.) To a paper junkie like me, it is thrilling that paper can still, potentially, bring you down.
Like a good American, I have my pet conspiracy theories, and I wonder if the move to “paperless” is an attempt to rob us of our paper trails, the proof that things really happened the way we remember them happening.
So, I keep my paper trails going.