Cabel Sasser runs a studio called Panic, which makes excellent software for the Mac, has dabbled in video game production, and recently designed and shipped their own handheld video game console. Yesterday on his weblog he posted a number of scans of a series of catalogs produced in the 1980’s which featured gadgets of all kinds. The DAK catalogs had everything from breadmakers to radar detectors to audio equipment, and they used to come to our house addressed to the previous owners. As a young impressionable middle-school student I read the description for one of their products, a graphic equalizer, and obsessed over it for months. I recall asking for it for Christmas, my Dad turning me down, and me being a dick about it, which still haunts me.
Eventually I earned enough money to buy it, and I hooked it up to the huge Fisher audio system I’d bought the previous summer with money from painting the house. As I recall it didn’t amplify anything (the ad copy claimed my stereo would “literally explode with life”) but made the mix a lot muddier, no matter how much I fooled with the channels. I messed with it for months but eventually disconnected it, having learned an expensive lesson about believing ad copy without reading any reviews.
Thanks Cabel, that totally took me back. Read his post—it’s a fun look into the wild and crazy days of direct mail in the 80’s.
Steve Albini has an outsized voice in the music industry of my generation; he engineered some of the seminal albums of the 80’s and 90’s. He was/is also a notorious curmudgeon, with an almost pathological need to offend and anger anyone and everyone. He’s slowly changed a lot of his attitudes about music, people, and his place in the discourse, and most importantly, has owned up to his responsibility in all of it.
As the years wore on, his perspective started to shift. “I can’t defend any of it,” he told me. “It was all coming from a privileged position of someone who would never have to suffer any of the hatred that’s embodied in any of that language.”
It’s fascinating to read about someone who unabashedly, unashamedly owns up to his faults without the aid (or hindrance) of an army of PR flacks and crisis managers.
Finn has been without her iPhone for a month or so now, on account of 9th grade being a degree of difficulty harder than 8th grade was. We’ve got an agreement that she needs to keep her grades above a certain level to have access to her phone, and currently that threshold has not been met. (It’s also much harder to get grades back up quickly in 9th grade than it was last year). Without entertainment, her life has been dull. She was given money for her birthday present this year and wisely picked out an inexpensive knockoff iPod Fun Time! Music MP3 All Day Player Box from Amazon. When it arrived I intercepted it and loaded a bunch of music on a sidecar MiniSD card, as it wouldn’t mount to any of our Macs. I’m giving it some grief because clearly it’s a very basic knockoff of an iPod, but for $40, it’s a color touchscreen music player/radio/video player with 64GB of space; this same thing would have been worth ten times this amount five years ago. Anyway, I stuffed it with music and gave it to her over breakfast the next morning.
I tried to find the sweet spot between loading music I know she likes and stuff I think she might like based on previous conversations. The biggest problem is that I haven’t bought new music in years. We used to get CD’s from the library down the street but they’ve been closed for renovations since January (opening Spring 2024!) so everything I have on the server is at least a year old or more. That being said, she’s now got the classics she enjoys with Mom: Erasure, Duran Duran, the Cure, George Michael, Prince, etc. From my side I put some assorted stuff on there: Silversun Pickups, M83, Beck, and The White Stripes, as well as classic albums from Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, the Clash, and others.
We drove out to the Lowe’s to pick up some wood this evening and I asked her what she listened to. She said she made a playlist with a couple of Silversun Pickups songs, a few Beach House tunes, and one from Cut Copy that she really liked. I did my best not to be Ken from the scene in Barbie where he starts lecturing about what made Pavement so important and stuck to asking her what she liked and didn’t like so I can find her more music. We had a good conversation about it, and she seems real happy. We were able to hook it up to the deck in the Scout and rock out, and it put a smile on her face, which is all I’m asking for these days.
An old favorite, but for some reason the beat from Inertia Creeps is stuck in my head:
This album will never not be good; it’s high on my top 10 desert island list.
This week’s earworm: My People, by The Beaches. They’re actually getting more play right now from a song called Blame Brett, which is also very good, but this one got stuck in my head. They sound like an incredibly tight live band; I’d go see them if buying tickets wasn’t such a fucking nightmare. This live mix is great other than the snare drum, which is tuned like a 5-gallon bucket.
Slowdive, a shoegaze band from Back In The Day, broke up after releasing a clasic album in the mid 90’s and reformed themselves about ten years ago. They’ve just released some singles off a forthcoming album, called Everything Is Alive, and I really dig a couple of them. They’re both similar to and different that what came before—alife has all the sonic chemistry that drew me to the band.
And I really like the groove of a tune called the slab, which sounds nothing like their previous work.
Since last week I’ve had most of Van Halen’s Fair Warning stuck in my head. In high school during marching band trips, one of the drumline captains had a mixtape of the best VH songs that he’d play en route to competitions, and Dirty Movies! was a standout. Having fallen down the rabbit hole, I found an isolated guitar track which showcases how technical and complex Eddie’s songwriting was—the secret ingredient that stood him far above his peers at the time, beyond the complex solos. Now I’ve got One Foot Out The Door stuck on repeat.
I just became aware of this part of the Internet Archive: the Great 78 project is an effort to digitize old shellac records that are long out of print. And, of course, a bunch of record labels have decided to file a copyright lawsuit for damages on recordings they most likely don’t even oversee, against profits they haven’t collected, for recordings they haven’t digitized. I’m not a lawyer so I have no idea if this argument holds water, but fuck those guys.
Meanwhile, I love me some big band and early jazz; I’m going to be collecting some new music from here for sure.
(Via PixelEnvy)
RIP, Mr. Reubens. I leave you with the best all-time cover of the Pee-Wee Herman theme, by the Scofflaws:
This tune has been going through my head since the trip back from Rhode Island this weekend. It’s a lesser-known song from one of Coldplay’s later albums but I really dig the beat and the tone.