70s Baby.

Time to get random (c) Lady Sovereign.

Okay well this list is seriously gonna date me but dammit I'm in a nostalgic mood for older technology. I kinda miss:

• listening to the tape at high speed and on reverse on your Walkman to find the beginning of the song.
  
• music sounding dark and slow since the batteries are dying -- keep listening anyway.
  
• rewinding the cassette tape with a pencil.
  
• changing the film in a camera.
  
• dialing a rotary phone.
• ejecting a cassette tape from a Walkman.
• having to find a pay phone.
• the sound a dial-up modem would make when trying to connect.
• the microwave oven being nearly as big as the damn fridge.
• having to rewind VHS tapes before returning them to the video rental place.
• getting a VHS tape stuck, resulting in the tape geting all fucked up. You'd have to spin the little wheel to get it to reel back up, but the quality of the video was never the same again. Sometimes, it wouldn't even go back in right.
• listening to the radio, waiting for that popular song and having the tape recorder on standby.
• using a cheap boombox and getting my cassette "eaten." Ah, the agony.
• freaking out to the original V television series.
• my Commodore 128. Yeah, I'm a nerd.
• video cameras being so big they came in freaking suitcases.
• the feeling of putting a tape in the VCR -- the moment where the mechanism catches and pulls the tape cartridge away from your fingertips was bliss.
• how different our lives were in regard to communication. If i needed to talk to someone they'd better be at home when I called. Likewise, expecting a call meant sitting in your house and not leaving.

Technology has made things almost infinitely easier. Maybe I'm just pining for my childhood, but a certain charm has been lost.

The Experimental Soundtrack Of My Childhood.

I remember messing around on my parents' Yamaha organ waaay back in the day, playing the preset percussion rhythms (tango, rumba, etc.) and creating random chord arrangements from the synthesized instruments (harpsichord, flute, etc.) when I got bored with actual practice. I'd tap out simple melodies and harmonies for an hour or so, trying to coordinate those with booming bassline accompaniment on the pedals below.

More often than not, the resulting "music" sounded like the dissonant experimental soundtrack for some avant-garde abstract art exhibit, but sometimes it actually sounded kinda good (to my 7-year-old ears, anyway). I wish I'd had some convenient way to record my compositions, but if I concentrate hard enough on a quiet afternoon, I can still hear snippets of my childhood spontaneity coursing through my memory.

[via]

Nowadays you can have your own home studio in the bedroom for just a small pile of cash. I've been thinking about doing this for some years now; I'd love to create some funky spacey electronic stuff and unleash it to the Internet like a thousand music blog geeks before me. However, current finances are being directed to other, more important places at the moment. This I don't mind at all, but every now and then I still cue up YouTube videos of people just making beats/music on their own home equipment -- and I damn near salivate. Like the name of this blog, there are always melodies and rhythms percolating in my head. I want to be able to record them for posterity, and perhaps even let you listen to them someday.

This post is dedicated to my old childhood Yamaha organ. Hope you're still making music, wherever you are :D

We go way back

Cosmic Cat.

Busy Tuesday, so nothing new today other than this image, which randomly reminds me of the 80s for some reason.

[via]

This weekend I seriously want to buy a big box of Cap'n Crunch or Lucky Charms and watch old Saturday morning cartoons and TV shows on YouTube. Something classic. Something like this!

Kidding about the "classic" part. Kinda.

Hmmm. I'll have to develop an entire post about my favorite 80s television shows. That would mean boxes and boxes of cereal! Aaaaand I'm okay with that. Stay tuned.

See you tomorrow!

Videogame Nostalgia, Real & Imagined.

[My recent post on Paul Robertson's work serves as partial inspiration for the following.]

I kind of miss playing videogames.

If you're a 70s baby like me, memories of your childhood are most likely punctuated by colorful visions of videogames played on consoles beginning with the Atari 2600 (yes, even square-ass bootleg Pac-Man) and the occasional epic excursion to the almighty video arcade¹. Over time, console technology progressively advanced and games became better in every conceivable way -- as did my gaming experiences themselves. I acutely remember:

• playing Donkey Kong, wide-eyed, for the first time on the 2600;
• the incredible rush of beating Contra on the NES;
• attempting to play MarioKart 64, out of control and happily drunk as hell on cheap vodka²;
• the awe at seeing Gran Turismo racers hug corners on the PlayStation;
• being enthralled by the painstakingly-crafted Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PS2;
• the intense satisfaction of stomping alien ass in Gears Of War on the XBox 360 ...

... among numerous other fun memories. However, as much as I like watching and playing videogames, I don't think I've ever considered myself a "gamer." The last console I actually owned was a PS2, and even that was given to me as an awesome gift -- I don't think I would've bought it for myself otherwise. And currently, there's not a videogame system to be found in my apartment.

So I guess the thing I miss the most about videogames is the social aspect of playing, whether it's trying to blast each other's goofy pixelated tank in Combat, shredding axes with family members in Guitar Hero or running around on Mongooses³ with three friends in the Halo universe. Playing these games, competitively or cooperatively, with other people is the biggest reason I was drawn to them in the first place. Even if I did have my old PS2 here, I really don't think I would play. There's no one to share the experience with.

Switching gears: Videogame box art, like the playing experience, has definitely improved over the years and deserves its own genre (peep some classic artwork and some awesome fan-made pieces). But what would the artwork look like if videogames had been around back in the 1950s-1960s? Every week, Something Awful holds Photoshop Phridays, where people create images based on a certain theme. Recently the concept was "Classy Games" where artists were challenged to come up with retro-inspired artwork to grace a videogame box. Browse the submissions here [Part 1, Part 2, Bonus Images], but owing to my love of minimalist, clean design, here are the ones that caught my eye:

Some of these are dope enough to frame. Enjoy.

¹Speaking of arcades, reading this thread made me strangely sad and nostalgic. Biggie, you were right -- things done changed.
²We were ultimately unsuccessful at "racing" and predictably, motion sickness and vomiting ensued. I do not recommend this. Actually wait, I do. You only live once, you know.
³Mongeese?