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10 Wax Cylinder Recording About Yuppies & Hipsters
Jed Davis records his song on old fashioned wax cylinders.
Liking this ditty called Yuppie Exodus From Dumbo. Listen to it on his site.
Some of the lyrics:
Behold the bitter exodus
From down beneath the bridge
As the yuppies and the hipsters
Quit their lofts and move away
Snap an auto-focused black-and-white
Of this heartbreaking scene
A heartbreaking scene of staggering genius -
If I may.
And they sing:
Nevermore shall a bridge darken my door
We’re on craigslist searching for
Someplace new to gentrify
Till then, we can only hope
They’ve still got room down in the Slope
For the strollers we’ll be pushing by and by
Now my girlfriend’s typed her last
Paragraph for Conde Nast.
Who will pay her by the word
To holiday in Mexico?
And my next door neighbor cried
On the night his hedge fund died.
Anybody want a Ridgeback
Or a share in J Condo?
Thanks to Jon Bender for passing along this Roundup of Master Blasters from Wired.com.
Alas, none of these models actually can play a tape or a CD.
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Martin Rundkvist of Aardvarchaelology:
- These are my obsolete portable music players. A post-1985 cassette player, a 2000 minidisc player and a 2002 iPod whose sole means of communication with the outside world is a firewire socket. In the 90s I didn’t listen much to music while on the move. Since 2006 I use a smartphone as my mp3 player.
(via Aardvarchaeology)
5 Have tapes? Make a lamp!
The “Cassette’s Not Dead” lamp by Vanessa Moreno, ($35 – $317). “Moreno accepts tape donations, which go towards her dream of building an entire furniture line from the dated media.” The design of the lamp allows you to swap in your own tapes. [designcrave.com via Inhabitat]
The iPod of its day
This summer marks the 30th anniversary of the invention of the Sony Walkman. Happy birthday, friend! Sony publicists are milking this moment for all its worth. I imagine this is because they’re gambling that no one will remember the Walkman at all when its next big birthday rolls around. Good press is one way to move stock: The Sony SRF-59 Radio Walkman is currently the 183rd most popular electronics product on Amazon, ranking it well above both the Roomba and the Hitachi Magic Wand vibraror. Or so I’ve been told.
The BBC News Magazine honored this great occasion with an essay by an eloquent thirteen-year-old (a clever ploy for publications that can’t afford to pay adult journalists…and don’t have access to monkeys). It took young Scott Campbell three days to figure out that the tape he was given had two sides. This wasn’t the only thing that confused him. “I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette,” he writes. “I’m relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born.” Indeed. Had he been born in 1859, he’d now be dead. (These are the thoughts that pro journalists are paid to think.)
The BBC News Magazine also offers up an article on sturdy household objects that were made long before “planned obsolescence” was a familiar term. But really, the focus of the piece is Joan Archer, a 66-year-old from Pembrokeshire who has bravely used the the same Kenwood Chef food mixer since 1964. Long live print media.
