Not long gone

Grades are due in a week and I'm struggling to get out of bed on any given morning, so what better time to start scanning some old old old scrapbook material? Exactly.

I found the image below in a folder of pages torn out from magazines in the early 1980s — magazines like 16 and Tiger Beat and People. This particular page is from Creem — remember that? Well.

I was trying to imagine where a page like this would be published in 2020. Surely we live in a kinder, less sexist time now. (Seriously! Read those image captions.) But B says no.

Anyway. Whether we're more enlightened or not now, this is an interesting artifact. Maybe I'll post some others. What's turned out to be most amusing about this project is not the pages I saved but their versos — all the ads from the 80s, prices, products, images, styles ... So. Much. Visual. Culture. And I have the soundtrack to support it.

Laters!

No fooling

Good morning!

The sun is rising gloriously despite an air temperature of minus twenty, so the world does in fact continue to turn. We will get through this together — although it is a kind of togetherness apart.

Anyway. You might have been waiting breathlessly to know how my music library was faring at the end of the first quarter of this bizarre year. Well, the bizarreness of the year has played to my advantage: I have listened to nearly half the tracks in my iTunes library so far. At midnight on 31 March, 9,861 tracks were unplayed (of 17,465). Listening to music for twelve hours a day means we go through a lot of tracks quickly.

Of course, some of those tracks have been played repeatedly, too, and the music in my Top 25 would surprise no one who has been paying attention over the years. Though maybe the lack of bus commuting and bicycling will eventually change that, too.

Back to your daily day now. And as John Irving urges us, keep passing the open windows.