Cassettes & Chocolate Milk

It was fitting that I was in a vintage clothes shop when the thought crossed my mind. It was a wry thought, an admittedly sarcastic thought about old things: If only people were slightly more sentimental, every home would be a vintage clothes shop. All this naff peculiar stuff wouldn't be so strange and expensive. It would be stockpiled in your cupboard, waiting, free, along with all your other weird miscellaneous tat. Only then the vintage clothes shops of this town wouldn't have a monopoly upon your thoroughly unique postmodern aesthetic.

Anyone coming to our house for the first time would be overwhelmed by the amount of "stuff" we have. Shelves and shelves of books and records, VHS tapes and DVDs, computers and antiquated appliances. Our interests vary from opera scores to Amigas, guitars to Petit Tom books, violins to cassettes, girls annuals and blazers. We collect, compare, research and rejoice whenever one of us would make a stifling discovery. But, whatever the artifact, no matter how precious, it always seems to be relegated to our pile of "stuff".

There is a tremendous desire to store and access the past. Our love of memory tends to manifest itself in different ways. Andrew likes to organise his photos on Picasa while I record every passing thought and memory in any number of half-empty notebooks. There is a kind of grim sentimentality attached to such behaviour, a kind of sickly unease that we don't tend to share. Perhaps I am the only one who feels it, that no one can ever really value the past, at least, not as it ought to be valued.


Picpus est inquiet
There have been times where I have seen a duplicate object, often in passing in a vintage emporium on Smith St or else a science museum in Oxford: It's our bread bin! It's our slide rule! But even behind glass, it all seems so worthless when stripped from its context. If you could even call context "a drawer full of crap". Yet it is that decontextualisation which makes these objects so romantic to others. It is weird and unique and consequently, obscenely expensive. I feel uncomfortable with the newfound value of these objects, my objects, any objects. No one should unduly profiteer from our attachment to "stuff". It is a cruel thing to prey upon, our desire to share, laugh and collect the things we love. What makes it even more cruel is that all stuff is really quite useless. We really don't need anything at all.

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Electro Podcast #29
Keane - Spiralling
Annuals - LOXTEP
Reverend & The Makers - Sundown on the Empire
Music for Animals - If Looks Could Kill
The Virgins - Teen Lovers
Games - Strawberry Skies (feat. Lauren Halo)
Howard Jones - Like to Get to Know You Well
The Human League - Sound of the Crowd

Download (45MB)