I saw two items yesterday which, in a not-so-distant previous life, would have made my eyes and mouth water. One was a folder containg hundreds, possibly 1,000 35mm slides. They were Kodachrome but not the red frame. In fact, for Kodachrome slides they looked pretty washed out and faded. All the ones I checked for had dates from the mid-1970s. In years past I would have snapped this item up no matter the cost (within reason, of course). The idea of scanning and digitizing all these slides would have been a no-brainer. I’d have been at work within the hour.
I didn’t do it. I left it there, on the shelf. A hand-written note on the folder indicated that the slides were entirely photos of flowers, or “beautiful flowers” as the note said. I held a few pages of slides up to the light and confirmed that the content of these slides appeared to be 100% flowers. The subject matter interests me not at all but that’s not what had me leave the slides behind. I no longer have easy use of the batch slide scanner that in the past allowed me to set and forget tray after tray of slides to be scanned automatically. I still possess the machine but I don’t have the spirit in me anymore to haul it from the closet and remember how to get that monster working again.
And of course there is the time commitment. Even as it was set-and-forget (up to a point) the set part of the pursuit was exacting and time-consuming. Further to all this, the quality of the slides looked pretty bad, like they’d been laid out in the sun for too long. They looked more like 1970s Ektachrome than Kodachrome.
Another item left to the hands of another buyer was a set of drawers filled with cassette tapes. The drawers were custom made to hold cassette cases, and each drawer was filled with mostly commerical tapes but also a tantalizing quantity of hand-made custom mix tapes of songs recorded possibly off the radio. The songs did no interest os much as the hand-written listings of what the tapes contained. The earnestness and industriousness that went into cataloging one’s music collection is one of the many activities into which I dispensed tremendous amount of energy, time, and industry. To think of what other pursuits that energy could have directed itself to…
I did not buy any of the cassettes, even though I am in a somewhat better position to digitize those over the 35mm slides. I have a phat Kenwood cassette deck that works great, but the content of these tapes would make the hours digitizing them feel futiles. There was nothing unique, no answering machine messages or tapes from choir rehearsals. Nothing like that. Just pop songs and some classical. Actually it was a good percentage of classical stuff, which would not be too unusual if this collection was from the generation prior to mine.
I once took to purchasing old Panasonic answering machines off eBay not for the machines but for the cassette tapes contained within. I don’t know where those tapes are now but I remember it being kind of grim, or depressing. Tons of messages being left for someone who had died, the messages left by people unawares. That’s what turns up on eBay and at thrift shops. Those places are treadmills for possessions of the dead.
Even though I would not have made the purchases of the slides and cassettes I nevertheless did feel that spark of discovery, the thrill of the find. Collections of slides do not often turn up in NYC thrift shops or second hand shops, at least not in my explorations. Cassettes are not uncommon but they are usually scommercial tapes and not so much hand-made mixed tapes.
I worked on a musical once with a kid who simply could not sing. It was horrible to be around but oh, how he tried. He worked and practiced the songs (which he never sang on satge) for hours some days, making cassettes of himself sining unaccompanied. I heard a few seconds from one of those tapes and all did everything I could to stop myself from asking if I could have the fucking thing. This was early 1990s, before I would even have known or had means to digitize or publicly share the recordings, but somehow I knew I would one day be able to. I had a background in radio, after all, so my instincts were reasonably well-informed. I wanted all the world to hear the awful, metallic, throaty, talentless work of a vocalist hack. This was not for any form of ridicule or anything of that kind. It was a metaphor for the fruitless, misguided and meaningless work so many of us put into frameworks and places we have no reason to be in.
In other news I had a disconcerting eperience at the shitter yesterday. Most of the bathrooms here are reasonably spacious, a comment I would not make if not for the presence of one particularly claustrophobic bathroom with tiny stalls and little room to get around should even one other person be present.
So it was after I propelled a surprisingly massive and nasty-smelling dump yesterday that I emerged from the stall to wash my hands just as two other individuals entered the room. One of the men had a deadly serious look about him that made me ask if he was there to discipline me for shitting such a monstrosity. Was I getting fired for this?
Of course not, but this person’s seriousness could not have prepared him for the whirlwind of stink that must have made his eyes water when he sat down right on the spot where a monster load had just escaped from my anus. It seemed like he was just stomping on in to the scene of a crime. I felt like my personal space was being violated, as if there should be a period of time after I shit during which the space is still reserved to me. In the moments of aftershit this dude barging in on what still fetl like my private, intimate space was violating, but I felt some empathy for him in suddenly and probably unexpectadly being engulfed in the swirl of my aftershit.
