I miss

I miss the sound of telephones actually ringing, and having the
receiver feel heavy in your hand...
I miss 78 speed records which were ridiculously fragile,
but all the more likeable because when you handled the records more
carefully it seemed they were so much more dignified and then it seemed you
listened more carefully and treasured them more. I miss the funny (strange)
photographs on the "33" speed record albums. I miss "liner notes." I miss
"45's." I miss those little machines you played them on, making a stack and
then listening to the whole stack over and over....

Nick Piombino Fait Accompli
 


To those of us who remember with clarity, a world without zip codes, telegrams delivered by jockey-sized youths on motorbikes & black Bakelite telephones with bells, the computer must retain an element of the alien

Dick Jones In the Days of the Underwood Noiseless at the Virtual Occoquan

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Comments: I miss

It all still happens round this neck of the woods.

I'd like to expand on the topic but there are stoves to be blacked, metal tips on shoes to be tacked (if I can find the shoe last), eggs to be Keep-Egged and butter to be churned.
Posted by Sedgwick at August 19, 2004 03:51 PM

It's all pretty bakelite round here, too.

But alas, a laminex table now costs $1000 according to yesterday's paper.
I bought mine for a lounge-era song
Posted by boynton at August 19, 2004 03:56 PM

I miss things that are off. I miss the black dark and the quiet, ungadgeted night. In the eternal always-on, machine-leeches suckle and glow.
Posted by eeksypeeksy at August 19, 2004 07:39 PM

"the eternal always-on" is exactly right.
Everything on stand-by mode is quite unsettling.
Luckily where I am is fairly dark
after years of never dark - with strong street lights and street noise
(But then not rural dark, which like a night sky full of stars, is always a reality check)
In the meantime, this is a fairly no glow zone.
No digital clock, no PC flickering, only the odd power point here and there.
Posted by boynton at August 19, 2004 11:57 PM

Dudes. I got a hotmail acct on Dec. 31 1999, at an internet cafe in the town I went to for supplies.
I was living in a one-room shack 5 miles down a dirt road, with only cold running water and paraffin lamps and a wood stove for heat. Cooking was propane unless the little tank ran out, then it was fried potatoes on the wood stove. Two years later I got a generator and a second-hand pc.
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Sitting on the porch sometimes, when one of the neighbors drove by, because there were so few cars passing, maybe in the middle of the day one every couple of hours, you could smell the exhaust, even though the road was a few hundred yards away. Noticeably smell it.
What I realized was, when I went to town I couldn't smell the cars, even standing on a busy corner, with two four lane streets intersecting. Something evident in its absence.
Like silence, or as e.p. said, the black dark.
Think of how many thousands of years the night belonged to itself.
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We didn't get a TV until I was 7. I'm relatively mature now, it was rare but not uncommon for families not to have gotten one yet in those days. I remember some kids' show where you sent them money and they sent you a plastic sheet that fit the TV, and some colored pens to dreaw on it, a little square of some film you could stick on the screen and draw on it along with the guy on the show. And the pictures (black and white) would show through only they'd be colored.
I'm old enough that until I left home at 18 we hadn't had a color set. I always wanted something like that draw-on-it thing.
Now I have one.
But I miss the stars and quiet; and I'll trade back without a second thought, when the time comes.
Posted by vernaculo at August 20, 2004 12:16 PM

"Something evident in its absence"
Exhausted in the city.

I'd trade it too, I think.

I love the plastic sheet to colour-in the TV.
Sounds very post-modern, and if it was on sale again now, I'd buy it.
I might make the colour go B&W though
Or change the picture entirely.
Posted by boynton at August 20, 2004 01:40 PM