old friends

a little souvenir, of a colorful year, which makes me smile inside

A funny thing about using older technology is that you can overestimate how much people in the past were willing to tolerate inconvenience. You may not even realize that they too experienced an inconvenience as such. You start playing records and you find yourself a little irked at flipping over or changing discs¹ and you think “ah, in this feverish contemporary society, we can’t even stop to turn a record over.” Then by chance you run across an ad for record players that play both sides of the record without you needing to turn it over.² How common such players were I could not say but sometimes inconveniences were solved problems that no longer made sense to solve when something like a record player goes from the default way people listen to music to a hobby for audiophiles.³

So I had an idea that I would spend January limiting myself to physical music with a few exceptions. This idea was mostly an excuse to buy records and indeed I bought… well, many… records. Anyway, I succeeded at my experiment, and was really enjoying it, until a couple days after my dog Buster died. Then I could sense that the record shopping in the process of shifting from “buying beloved albums I will listen to often” to “adding stuff to cart because I’m sad who cares credit card not real.”

now in my defense i do like this album but

When I had my idea, I did not realize that “analog” was a “trend.” When I’m off researching stuff I find having to rely on streaming and ebooks depressing and really want forms of music in particular that I can hold with my hands and feels rooted in the actual physical place I happen to be. Even local radio ends up being played through my computer or my phone. Of course, it’s not all bad, or even mostly bad; the ebooks in particular are great and I’m profoundly grateful not to be lugging more books than I have to across the country. But even if you mostly stream music, there’s something nice about having the physical thing there, it gives the music a reality, the same way that being in a space without a lot of physical books slowly puts me on edge no matter how many ePubs I possess.

One of the albums I bought well before the great depression, however, was the Beths album Expert in a Dying Field (2022), an album that has a lot of sentimental value for me because I associate it with my early months out of the hospital.⁴ The other record that I associate with that time in 2022 is Sabrina Carpenter’s emails i can’t send, which I also own as a record.⁵ In both of these cases, I didn’t really know who these artists were when I listened.⁶ The titles were just interesting to me and they were on the front page of my Spotify, so I clicked on them.⁷ I’m really a sucker for titles. That’s why I read Helen of Nowhere, too. I was looking up a different book entirely to see if it was available for preorder and happened to see it. Anyway.

It’s an odd thing but if I associate art with a terrible time in my life, that tends to make it something comforting for me. The stuff that gets tainted is stuff associated with good times because then I go “I was happy :)” to “but now I’m sad ):” to “I will never be happy ): ): ):” and so on. When I put on a song I remember from being sick though, it’s like “this song is my friend :)” and “I lived bitch :)” and I end up sort of swaddled in a good feeling. Not everything that gets associated with staying in the hospital gets the warm glow, but art and certain physical things do.⁸ People warn you with perfumes that it is very possible to ruin scents through association but I sometimes wonder if trying to avoid that outcome leads me to deprive myself of both immediate pleasure in the moment and later kind associations.

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The other way to give music a physical reality is of course to generate it yourself. One thing I did find interesting were the songs that I found myself humming or getting stuck in my head without any kind of external prompting. Like “Here’s Where The Story Ends.” It really got stuck in my head but like… out of nowhere. (I did end up buying the album it’s on.)

I can’t really play any instruments, though—I played the violin for a while but the violin is an instrument you can truly forget how to play. Also, despite playing it for years, I never learned how to read music and I still can’t read music. But even if I could play the piano they aren’t exactly packing little backyard rental units with pianos.…

Just a note about scheduling: Patlabor is definitely going to be a bit later than planned. We at BDM Industries appreciate your patience.… ⚙️

1. As is well known, I love TTPD, but eight sides of record… it’s a lot of record.

2. I have not found these ads in the science fiction magazines—not to stereotype, but a deluxe record player might have been a little out of market for that audience. But I found one in this book showcasing the work of Barbara Shermund, a old New Yorker cartoonist. (They also got a mention in this newsletter I read around the same time.)

3. I also feel this way about the level of hatred “suitcase players” get online. But “I don’t hate suitcase players” is one of those opinions that is contextually unpopular but obviously popular in the real world where your local record store is selling a bunch of them.

4. For anybody new here, I had necrotizing pancreatitis and spent a month in the hospital and so on and so on.

5. Still her best album.

6. I did have a vague sense that Sabrina Carpenter was the blonde foil to Olivia Rodrigo in “driver’s license.”

7. The third piece of music I associate with this time is “Free,” by Florence + The Machine, which I remember listening to on loop in the hospital. Not Dance Fever, the album on which “Free” is found. Just “Free.”

8. The thought of wearing a face mask for a long period of time, on the other hand, puts me right into fight or flight mode. But I want to go to Readercon at some point, so I gotta get over that.