Archive for the ‘Nostalgia’ Category
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27
May
2008
Grandma Called To Say Hi
Okay, anyone who knows me fairly well will be sufficiently puzzled by that one.
You see, to cast that same mystery for you all, both of my grandmothers have passed on, the last one over 5 years ago now. It doesn’t seem like that much time has passed, but in the interim, I’ve been to the UK four times, Mexico twice, and rounded it out with single trips to Italy and Egypt. So, I guess some water has flowed under that bridge.
By comparison, my maternal grandmother has been gone since I was in second grade. So much water under the bridge…
Anyway, to explain this rambling. I went downstairs this afternoon and the office phone rang. I’ve stuck to that # only being something I can answer at the desk. And I didn’t make it upstairs in time to answer it. When I did get back upstairs, I had a message from “Grandma” to call her back when I got back. Someone named “Nina” was visiting and we were going to have pizza tonight.
It’s silly. I listened to the whole message, and it was prototypically meandering as any grandmotherly message I ever had. And although she sounded nothing like my grandmother otherwise, you don’t realize until you won’t get those messages anymore how much you’ll miss them.
Lest you think I’m wallowing in misery, I’m not. It’s a happy nostalgia. It stirred up fond memories tinged with only a small dose of sadness that they will only recede into the past now.
22
Mar
2008
INXS – More Of The Rose Colored Glasses
I’ve documented elsewhere that I recently went all digital. All my music is now in the form of ephemeral bits and bytes on my hard drive (and backed up elsewhere). And my three shelves of CDs have been compressed down to a couple of binders.
Although a freeing experience, I’m still dealing with the effects to some degree. I ended up choosing J River’s Media Center to handle my virtual library of music, and have been steadily working my way through the catalog to rate all these years of music on a 5 point scale. Feels like both an un-ending process as well as a trip down memory lane. The point of rating them, of course, is so that I can build play lists of my fav stuff. My 5 point scale is 3 – okay, not a super fav but a song I don’t mind hearing; 4 – wow – great song; and 5 – ohmigod, I could listen to this over and over.
This also lead to my semi-regular rediscovery of the awesomeness that was INXS. They were one of my fav bands in the day. Although I had a few of their later releases on CD, for the most part it, was cassette, and I thought that I probably had the best of the best on Shine Like It Does, the box set
Now, I had copied a fair chunk of my cassettes to mp3 last year, and the INXS stuff I included in my library (unlike most of the rest) despite it’s dubious quality. I’m so glad I did. I started working my way through it last week. And although I haven’t yet finished, I already re-purchased two of the albums in digital format. Go Amazon, you’re lucky I’m on memory lane this week!
My introduction to INXS was probably when most of the rest of the US caught on to them, with the release of Kick.
I also waded through Listen Like Thieves
The re-purchased albums so far are Kick
I’ve listened to these two over and over the last few days, and I just fall in love again to the sound of this band and feel much sadness that I never saw them live (and the bands I make the effort to see live are not a huge number). And I feel sorrow again that Hutchence is gone (a decade later this year). Maybe his best work was already behind him, or maybe we missed out on the genius that was yet to come. We’ll never know.
I know technically INXS is still out there making music, but I loathe reality TV and the stunt with picking the new lead singer soured me such that I never have listened to any thing post-Hutchence.
It’s interesting to re-tread these steps again. I’m not prone to doing it. Although I often obsess over past decisions, second-guess myself, etc., music has always been one space in which I moved forward. I hardly have any greatest hits collections. Even moving into the world of CD’s, I purchased maybe 4 or 5 CDs that I had previously owned as cassettes. I sometimes forced myself to stick a few older CDs in my car changer just so I didn’t lose sight of a band that no longer was or wasn’t producing anything I enjoyed anymore. I have never been a fan of radio stations that only play music from certain decades And I’m always shocked and dismayed when I hear someone say they don’t make good music anymore. The music a decade or two decades ago or what have you was so much better. Statements like these just floor me. I wonder if they really listen anymore.
Anyway, that said, I’m going to go listen to Kick Again…
19
Mar
2008
Travel In The Land Memories Built
Despite the tons of pictures I still have to go through from the Egypt trip, the weekend found me continuing my spring cleaning. I had a closet with two stacks of comics to file. I won’t say how long I had put this task off but it’s not a short time.
I began sorting everything and hauled out all the boxes and rapidly figured out that I was surpassing the volume of boxes I had… The first answer wasn’t buy boxes. The first answer was time to thin the herd, which I do pretty much every time I have to go through this practice – which may surprise many.
What surprises me this time was what I started to put on the chopping block, my very oldest, most war torn comics. My earliest comics are heavy in the lands of Harvey Comics and Archie. I haven’t opened any of them in… wow… I can’t imagine how long. And as I had long ago decided they weren’t worthy, most of them weren’t even stored properly, just slapped in boxes. So, it seemed a natural thought, toss them. I got as far as un-boxing them. I was right there, and then I caved… wow… it seems so silly to say that I couldn’t do it. In the end, they’re just material things, not my memories, not my childhood in physical form, but now wasn’t the time.
I’ve got about 1/3 of them stored in bags on boards now. Waiting for more to come along with the boxes. I spent the past few nights hunched over them with the bags. My back is going to spasm soon!
Even without reading them, which I’d like to do but I sure don’t know when I’ll have time, they sure sparked a lot of memories. I was surprised I could look at the covers for many of those early now-painfully-un-cool comics and remember when/where I got them. They are attached on some cellular levels in my memory to so much of childhood.
They are also just plain eerie to look at. As I bagged old Archie comics, I watched the fashions change, but the stories never did. Even in my childhood, Archie seemed strangely out of place, dressing in the present but living in a very 1950’s sort of perfect Beaver Cleaver America. Truly strange. I took a peak at the Archie website today, and you can read some comics online, looks pretty much the same. Archie still seems at first blush to live and behave like he’s in 1950’s middle America but is dressed up to reflect the first decade of the 21st century…
Anyway, if you need me, I’m in a dusty corner remembering my childhood through older eyes…
13
Sep
2007
The Past Is Always Gold
I’m not sure what today got me into this journey down memory lane.
But it began with hunting down this old commercial…
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qayjR8Qbyfc[/YOUTUBE]
And the memories came rushing back.. I moved from commercial to commercial and the odd cartoon of those days such as
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3n22GQMgcU[/YOUTUBE]
But in the end I came to a skittering halt here…
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNgtdALywyc[/YOUTUBE]
The first thought out of my head was maudlin… It worries me that people so often believe their childhoods, their past, was the best, that the future is darker… Does anyone talk to their elders and notice the pattern, that so often we look back with rose colored glasses and see it as a simpler and happier time.
I remember the past fondly, but the thing that bothers me about getting older isn’t the changing world, it’s that I have less time left to enjoy it…
26
Jul
2007
Soundtrack To Life
So, I’m in another one of my now infamous purge modes.
For the uninitiated, I have a tendency to be somewhat of a pack rat, but off and on through my life, as far back as I can remember, I will occasionally just go down the path of tossing junk out, and that’s what it is.
For some of us, we pick up items from our past, and the memories associated come flowing back and we attach that memory to the object, as if the memory will never come back again without that little gem. And the longer you live, the more these objects and the memory connections grow.
Luckily, as I said, I tend to go through purge moods. It’s been about a year and a half since the last one when I threw out some stuff I never thought would go. This time, yet more has gone. Right now, I’m working on a box, I kid you not, from my high school years. There are some video tapes that I need to burn to DVD, but I need to either get a DVD recorder or something to connect up to my laptop. I haven’t explored either device much yet. The stack of tapes is relatively small.
The bigger part of the box is… sigh… cassettes… for the really young of you out there, they came after the late cretaceous period between 8 track and CD’s and well before MP3 was even dreamed.
So, for a week, I’ve had little mini-marathons of listening to a few tapes while burning them to MP3 on my laptop. The tapes will go bye bye and who knows when I’ll listen to half of these songs again. My tastes have definitely changed and evolved since High School, from which the bulk of these came.
It’s really amazing how much music can form the soundtrack of our lives. At least for some of us. I don’t remember at time in my life without music, from listening to whatever my parents listened to (Dad – country, Mom classic rock and classical) to starting to make my own conscious decisions of what I liked. I’m not sure High school even counted in that camp. So much of this is what was either popular then or my friends liked, etc. There are basically two bands I followed past that period of my life, INXS and Crowded House (albeit to a lesser degree but Recurring Dream, their greatest hits album was the first such compilation I ever bought). I don’t tend to repurchase music, but I wanted those songs on CD.
College heralded alternative, modern rock, and some borderline punk stuff and the CD player and I pretty much abandoned all these cassettes and artists way back then. It’s a definitive time capsule. Some are in remarkably good shape and sound pretty good as MP3’s. Some… well.. the memories are still there and they won’t take up room so much in MP3 form.
Does this mean in 10 years I’ll start having virtual purges?
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRHLkLFJxaw[/YOUTUBE]
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju4Y-J_8zEY[/YOUTUBE]
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO-V6BUoxe8[/YOUTUBE]
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VArQABogDL4[/YOUTUBE]
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luobOzreRq4[/YOUTUBE]
