Dec. 14th, 2005
(no subject)
Dec. 14th, 2005 03:25 pmMy record collection was lost in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina. I haven't written about it before because it seemed like a pathetic kind of thing to whine about, what with all of the horrible things that people went through after the hurricane, and after that it hasn't lingered in my consciousness long enough for me to write about it.
When i moved to Boston from New Orleans last year, i moved by mail. That is, i mailed what i could afford to mail, and gave away or threw away most of the rest. My album collection, about 300 LPs, were left -- safely, i thought -- in my friend JJ's closet, because i didn't have the money to mail them (or any idea how to actually mail that many LPs). Since we'd been planning to go to Mardi Gras in 2006, i figured i'd bring along some extra money to take care of that then.
JJ's house took on three feet of water in the flooding after the hurricane. I haven't actually conversed with her regarding my albums -- she has enough to worry about. But i've written them off.
Most of the music was replaceable. It was a great collection of music -- 70's metal (Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, etc.), a lot of punk and avant-garde, quite a bit of new wave, and jangly mellow stuff from the 70's which i went through a phase of listening to. When i was an angsty teen, music was hugely important to me, and every record in that collection was agonized over and carefully hand-picked.
I haven't actually had a working turntable in years, so i'd spent my adult life schlepping them around from place to place, with the intent of setting up a turntable so i could perhaps digitize or at least copy to cassette my favorite records.
Some of it is irreplacable: a copy of Psychic TV's Album 10, for example, one or two Joy Division bootlegs, an early pressing of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, Current 93's In Menstrual Night, various extremely-hard-to-find avant-garde industrial records, things like that.
But at the top of the list of irreplaceable items is a copy of the record i made in 1987 in Charlotte, NC, with my band, Waffles Can Kill. (That was the best name we could come up with, i swear it.) We recorded a few songs in a studio and then paid a vanity record publisher to print 200 copies of it. There was some problem with the records and we sent them back, and never followed up on it, and then we disbanded and i went back to Austin to go to college, so it seemed pointless to pursue the matter further.
Before we sent the records back my bandmate Brent and i took one copy each of the records for ourselves. They were flawed, but it was our record.
All things must pass, indeed. I just wish they had passed after i had digitally copied some of it.
When i moved to Boston from New Orleans last year, i moved by mail. That is, i mailed what i could afford to mail, and gave away or threw away most of the rest. My album collection, about 300 LPs, were left -- safely, i thought -- in my friend JJ's closet, because i didn't have the money to mail them (or any idea how to actually mail that many LPs). Since we'd been planning to go to Mardi Gras in 2006, i figured i'd bring along some extra money to take care of that then.
JJ's house took on three feet of water in the flooding after the hurricane. I haven't actually conversed with her regarding my albums -- she has enough to worry about. But i've written them off.
Most of the music was replaceable. It was a great collection of music -- 70's metal (Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, etc.), a lot of punk and avant-garde, quite a bit of new wave, and jangly mellow stuff from the 70's which i went through a phase of listening to. When i was an angsty teen, music was hugely important to me, and every record in that collection was agonized over and carefully hand-picked.
I haven't actually had a working turntable in years, so i'd spent my adult life schlepping them around from place to place, with the intent of setting up a turntable so i could perhaps digitize or at least copy to cassette my favorite records.
Some of it is irreplacable: a copy of Psychic TV's Album 10, for example, one or two Joy Division bootlegs, an early pressing of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, Current 93's In Menstrual Night, various extremely-hard-to-find avant-garde industrial records, things like that.
But at the top of the list of irreplaceable items is a copy of the record i made in 1987 in Charlotte, NC, with my band, Waffles Can Kill. (That was the best name we could come up with, i swear it.) We recorded a few songs in a studio and then paid a vanity record publisher to print 200 copies of it. There was some problem with the records and we sent them back, and never followed up on it, and then we disbanded and i went back to Austin to go to college, so it seemed pointless to pursue the matter further.
Before we sent the records back my bandmate Brent and i took one copy each of the records for ourselves. They were flawed, but it was our record.
All things must pass, indeed. I just wish they had passed after i had digitally copied some of it.