On a good day, you look at yourself like, I’m preserving American history: I’m an archeologist. But the bottom line is that there’s seriously something wrong… I think it’s funny that you even call it art… I think it’s more of a disease. There has to be something really wrong with you to want to possess these objects in the first place. You have to have them, and it’s never enough, and you get that strange, tingly feeling when you get one. Anyone who collects anything is obsessive-compulsive and neurotic. The need to put things in order, to file by number, to alphabetize and label, to be constantly reassessing how you’ve ordered things-that’s neurotic behavior… I’ve never met [another 78 collector] who wasn’t like, ‘This is sick, we’re all sick’… When I finally gave in and started buying 78s, it was a conscious decision to embrace my sickness… there has to be something in your mind that says, ‘I give up.’
Any of the better anthologies of 78s – Revenant’s “American Primitive” volumes, Old Hat Records’ “Down in the Basement,” anything produced, compiled, or contributed to by Christopher King – serve as a stunning refutation of homogenized mass culture. “Authenticity” is the word that usually gets tossed around by everyone from casual fan to connoisseur, but in this case it’s true, and it is rare to find anyone not shaken by hearing recorded music free of technological manipulations and mass-market compromises. These are transmissions from a lost world, and the boundless range of idiosyncratic regional voices, heard through decades of accumulated crackle and hiss, often sounds like messages from American’s collective unconscious. Add to that the pathos of the records having barely survived a largely indifferent populace, poor storage and the savagery of worn Victrola needles…
After initially breaking my ssh-agent because I copy/pasted commands that I didn’t really understand, I found the following apt quote:
“A good rule for rocket experimenters to follow is this: always assume that it will explode” – Astronautics, issue 38, October 1937
“One thing I came to realize after college was that the search for purpose is really a search for a place, not an idea,’’ Gawande told the crowd of approximately 33,000 graduates, family and friends. “It is a search for a location in the world where you want to be part of making things better for others in our own small way.
“…If you find yourself in a place where you stop caring — where your greatest concern becomes only you — get out of there. You want to put yourself in a place that suits who you are, links you to others and gives you a purpose larger than yourself in some way.”
It is still the place where risks can be taken. When on Earth did the West End ever do a new play which hadn’t been developed somewhere else – usually at the National or the Royal Court or the regions? Commercial managements just don’t take that sort of risk. My West End producer used to say to me, ‘We’re in the giggle business, darling.’ And I’d sort of agree with him, but while I’m all for giggles, I’d also hope that some of what we do would be remembered for a little bit more than just that.
