Memorial Day in Ohio. Clear skies, highs near 90, and the sun went down at 8:54pm. The moon is brand new, and my computer gave me an eye exam. I stood ten feet away from my screen, read aloud the five letters that appeared, and a robot renewed my prescription. It felt very futuristic and a little sad.

Maybe I don’t want to deal with the future. My two favorite television shows right now are amplified and campy depictions of events that took place fifty years ago: Gaslit and The Offer, which reanimate the shenanigans behind Watergate and the making of The Godfather. In both shows, the 1970s are drenched in booze, cigarette smoke, and garish colors. Everyone must have been walking around back then with a splitting headache.

There’s this track that’s been rattling around my mp3 library for nearly twenty years, and I can no longer tell if it’s fantastic or terrible. It starts with a canned dance beat and a vampy keyboard, neither of which have aged well. (And it’s interesting, the subtle texture, the sonic patina that renders something dated rather than timeless.) Then Johnny Cash begins to growl his funereal cover of Will Oldham’s “I See a Darkness” across 140 beats per minute. Susan Sontag once said that camp puts everything in quotation marks. Pairing acid techno with Johnny Cash seems like it automatically belongs in extra-bold 100pt quote marks. Yet somehow, this mash-up feels oddly earnest, and I always catch a guilty rush around the 3:50 mark when the synthesizers start grinding away while Cash sings about how he hopes someone can save him from this darkness.

Acid Pauli – I See a Dark(er)ness

The Munich Mash-Up Issue | White label, 2004 | More

In a similar yet far more calculated but no less bizarre vein, there’s that Teddybears track from 2006 with Iggy Pop, “Punkrocker”. I have no idea how they landed Iggy Pop, but his line about being “sincere” in an elegy for punk rock set to disposable electronica that became a car commercial could probably launch a thousand annoying dissertations in cultural studies and media theory.

Another frigid and atmospherically pointless day without any snow. The sun goes down at 5:27pm.

My brand new cassette tape arrived. It cost me seventeen dollars, but it was worth the money just to hold it. I haven’t held a cassette in years, and I found myself unwrapping it slowly, ritualistically, like a pack of cigarettes. As I peeled back the shrink-wrap, the effect was anticipatory, almost like returning to smoking: the familiar weight in the palm, the hum of possibility, of returning to better days.

It’s just a piece of plastic with a spool of magnetic tape, but it contains entire worlds. I remember solitary high school nights spent crouched over a Panasonic boombox in a metro Detroit apartment near Interstate 75, traffic hissing through the walls while my finger waited to release the pause button the moment the Electrifying Mojo played Kraftwerk or Cybotron again. You had to release that button just right for a clean segue between songs without any ugly clicks.

The reassuring kerchunk of buttons. The hum of machinery you could see. Punching out the plastic tabs on the top of the cassette if the recording was good. Or plugging them with paper if the tape was needed again. This was the tactile world of limitations, the parameters of a physical thing rather than a never-ending stream. Was my creative life any better then? Or is this just the nostalgia of a man settling into middle age?

I’m recording my little loops to cassettes because I crave the constraints of linear time. Maybe I simply want to return to a known way of being. There’s a fork in the road when it comes to reckoning with the 21st century: walk away from our increasingly humiliating and disorienting technologies, or make a cognitive leap and embrace the mess. But this is nothing new. In 1895, William Morris said, “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” Then came the Futurists and Constructivists and the rest of the Modernists. So much for that.

Cybotron – Clear

Enter | Fantasy, 1983 | More

This is a requiem for the late nights we spent rewinding, replaying, and studying a VHS copy of The City of Lost Children until the image began to fall apart. Tonight I’m craving the kerchunk of a rewind button and the ritual of scotch-taping the edge of a cassette so I could record layer after layer until the music began to bleed together like the sound of memory. There’s something profound about playing a song or an image until it erodes.

I miss the days of finite collections with borders. I remember buying records that I hated when I brought them home, but I played them anyway because they were all I had. I’d listen until I understood the album on its terms, rather than mindlessly playing whatever suits my current mood. The endless churn of the digital jukebox brings to mind Adorno and Horkheimer’s prophecy from 1944: “the freedom to choose what is always the same.”

Strange how the digital world demands and destroys our attention at the same time. Maybe there’s no turning back. The value of any collection is not the record sleeve, book, or commemorative spoon, but the memories these things conjure. Given enough time, all objects shift from nostalgic landmarks into memento mori.

Oliver Blank – Echopraxia

Fin | 2020 | Bandcamp

A remarkable new album of orchestral drift from my friend Oliver Blank that sounds like an elegy for all kinds of things.

This morning I came across this stray photograph from my mother’s things, and it looks like a scene from a dream. The echoed gesture of hand to forehead, the young girl watching—the accidental heat and motion of a family frozen in time. I think that’s my grandmother in the background, maybe one of my mom’s older sisters returning from a wedding. That might be my mom in the foreground, watching.

The overheated colors and pebbled texture of the photo paper leave me romanticizing the aesthetics of the past. Even life’s incidental moments looked better before screens. A tactile world of cigarettes, record players, and radios like furniture, rather than all of us sitting with scrunched-up faces, tapping at pieces of glass. And one day that will look like the days of the hand-cranked Victrola or the first Model T.

Why are so many visions of the future cast in cool tones? We watch science fiction movies and look at renderings tinted in blues and greys, whites and silvers. We do not imagine tomorrow in shades of yellow or red, olive or tan. Perhaps this reflects a desire for cleanliness and order, but it also points to something darker: a fusion with the machine.

Walking through the city, I try to remember how the world looked when we held books, newspapers, and maps rather than gazing into glowing screens. How quickly we’ve traded aesthetics for convenience. But nostalgia is a fool’s game. What will nostalgia look like thirty or forty years from now? I try to imagine myself as an old man, telling the kids about the good old days when every inch of public space was branded with a logo, when every street corner had a Chase bank and a Walgreens.

Matrix – Blue Film #2

From Various Films | Chain Reaction, 2000 | More