Monday, July 13, 2009
Keepin’ It Real: Old School Sounds and a Face Full of Fun
It’s about time for something easy and fun, dontcha think? I mean, if the internurt can be used for such purposes. Rumor has it such things are possible, so I’m gonna test it out by posting a little fistful of details and you’re gonna have a damn fine time coming along for the ride.
Item the First:
We’ve been doing more driving lately than I have done for a while. Parties up in Marin, out in Oakland, down in Pacifica, trips to shoppes and stores hither and yon… Kel is used to all the driving but it’s been something of a change for me - or maybe more like a throwback, since I’ve only had the pleasure of a bus commute for less than a decade and before that it was hours every day behind the wheel. When I started my bus commute, I didn’t have an iPod yet; it’s been only about five years that I’ve had electronic access to my tunes while I’m being ferried around. We can plug it in in the car as well, but I guess I sort of associate in-car entertainment with the technologies I relied on back when I was an auto-driving man - mostly, cassettes. I know it’s archaic but it’s what I had way back when, and it did the trick. And the funny thing is, now that the new Jetta has the old technology built right into the dashboard, I exhumed the sack of preserved cassettes and would you believe it, I’m enjoying the hell out of them again. It took a lot of work to make those mixes, and I am re-reaping the rewards now regularly. Yes, the old cassettes are making a big fat comeback, and to be more specific, here’s what I get to listen to now:
MIX TAPES THAT ARE BACK IN THE MIX
Big Dance Faves ‘84
Blues Mix 1984 (backed with Duke Williams’ A Monkey In A Silk Suit is Still...)
Aztec Toaster Dance Mix ‘85
Perky Little Tunes 1985
Another Rockin’ Mix - 1986?
Funksgiving - Thanksgiving ‘91
Chipotle Stuffing - Thanksgiving ‘94
Heal This Chicken - Thanksgiving ‘96
Gallinaceous Boogie - Thanksgiving ‘97
Legend of the Flaming Yam - Thanksgiving ‘98
All the Fixins - Thanksgiving ‘99
Bake Till Hot - Thanksgiving ‘00
Hungry Music Mix and Tunes of Satiation - Thanksgiving ‘01
Fattening - Thanksgiving ‘02
Plus, From Simon:
Kaballah Beatbox Mix/Mix-vah Mix
I Have Been Here Before/That’s The Way We Flow Mix
Red Beans French Fries Cumbia/Fish Fry Mix
Selected Goodies (b/w Booker T and the MGs - Soul Limbo)
Plus, from Glen:
Slide and Glide Mix
Reggae Got Soul Mix
I tell you good bloggy people, I’ve been cranking the volume to 11 on these suckers and they really hold up. A lot of this stuff I don’t have access to anymore, and wouldn’t even know how to find it. The Feelies? The Bonedaddies? The Skatalites? These tunes aren’t just floating around out there anymore. It took a long time ago to pull them together, and I intend to enjoy them for so long as I can. In fact, special credit goes out to Andrew C, who digitized my Duke Williams/Blues Mix cassette for me. Now I can even listen to that stuff on the bus again, but without having to fumble with those plastic cassettes spooled up with magnetic tape. Not that that’s such a bad thing, I am coming to remember....
And as part of that recollection: ITEM THE SECOND:
Kelly just gave me an AWESOME gift - a nice, well-built, stylishly-manufactured t-shirt. My white T’s were looking pretty shoddy - most of them were old enough to pre-date cell phones. But my new gifty T isn’t just cleaner and fresher-looking than the old ones, it’s demonstrably cooler - it’s the Upper Playground CASSETTE T! I don’t care if the kids don’t know what the hell they are, they look fantastic. The designer even took the effort to replicate actual classic cassettes that I knew really well - the Maxells and Denons and TDKs of my mis-spent youth. Good going, Kel! I’ll say thanks once but you can hit auto-rewind and hear it on an infinite loop!
Which brings us to item the THIRD:
I was so psyched about the t-shirt that I wanted to do something nice in exchange. I’d seen a book at a friends’ house that I thought Kel would enjoy but had no idea how to find it, but as fate has it, it was for sale (and ON sale!) at Green Apple just right here in my ‘hood, where I went to get the presents for the b-day parties the boys took me to last weekend. I picked it up today and when I presented it upon my return home after work, Kel was so excited that she made me hold Jesse away so she could play with it, because J was pretty damn excited too and kicked me in the nugatories twice in his eagerness to lay his chubby muffincrushers on the new volume. Zach was almost screaming with excitement and impatience to play with it. Yes, it’s the Cornell Ornithology Push-n-Listen Bird Song Book, with hundreds of gorgeously rendered drawings of loudmouth featherfreaks together with digital recordings of songs for each of them. From ravens to spoonbills and quail to eagles, it’s a very cool compendium of color and sound. We are enjoying it with great enthusiasm.
And finally, item the fourth:
This one ties in to the “enjoying with great enthusiasm” theme. It’s from a party a few weeks ago and features J-Dogg and his old man taking a relaxing dip in the Pool of Luxury. This photo just makes me feel good when I look at it, so I’m putting it here for my own gratification. However, if it tickles your fancy as well you can just consider yourself a third-party beneficiary and no one needs to get supersoaked:
That ought to be enough for now. I am still waiting for a little confirmatory research to come through on the au pair issue, but don’t fret, I won’t leave you hanging much longer. Which reminds me that I think I heard someone seriously mention a while ago that he was going to make things easy for himself by “plucking my low-hanging flute.” Now if you’ll excuse me I need to ream my spitvalves.