When Underground Culture Was Hard(er) To Find

Filmmaker Danny Plotnick’s “Out of Print” is an absolutely brilliant and simple but effective short film about the somewhat lost pleasures of hunting down underground media, from cult films and bands, to underground literature and zines. By his own description, it’s “an ode to the counterculture of the 80s and 90s when unearthing quality culture was a real treasure hunt.”

I have fond memories of seeking out and encountering this stuff in the backs of magazines and zines, in the racks of independent book stores and at hole-in-the-wall record stores. It’s easy to romanticize those times when there was no such thing as a Google search, and it might take years to get your hands on a particularly rare piece of culture. It’s also easy to overestimate the availability of stuff nowadays. Still too many truly valuable cultural relics remain out of print, never having been transferred to digital, and possibly lost to all but a lucky few. Furthermore, just because an MP3 or video has been released onto the web now doesn’t mean that someone will necessarily take the time and effort to archive it for the future.

Nevertheless, times have changed, and a little nostalgia never hurt anyone. (via Stinkfight)

Making the Most of Limitation

One of the most continuously engaging and inspiring elements of DIY culture is the limitation. Of course, lots of creators would love to have millions of dollars to blow on equipment and 80 hours a week to dedicate to a project. But that’s not a reality for most people, and I think too much energy and time go into thinking, “Oh, I’ll finally be able to do this project when I have this thing and oodles of time to use it.” This isn’t to say that there aren’t projects and techniques that demand some baseline of investment, but in our money and productivity obsessed culture it’s far more prominent that these material concerns get in the way.

Lately I’ve really been enjoying the blog at OnSuper8.org, which is dedicated to filmmaking on small-format film, like 8mm and super8. Like a lot of media that people think is dead, 8mm film is still alive, and you can still get fresh new stock for it, too. OnSuper8 posts a lot of videos of films produced on 8 and I find them consistently more creative and engaging than 90% of what’s on the web. What I appreciate most is how the filmmakers make the most of the limitations of the format: it’s small physical size and limited resolution, the short length of reels and frequent lack of live sync-sound.

Right now OnSuper8 is posting a series of the best films from the Straight8 Festival, which features films that are shot on just one cartridge of super8 films, without any post-production edits. Any editing is done “in camera,” meaning that any switch between scenes occur because you stopped the camera and then restarted it. The resulting films are all three minutes long, because that’s how much film fits in a cartridge. The challenge is to use those three minutes wisely and not shoot tons of footage because you “can fix it in post.”

I’m really impressed by Nick Scott’s “The Other Half,” where Scott devised a custom matte box in order to block out half of the frame, leaving one half unexposed, and then running the film through the camera again to expose the other half. Since the super8 cartridge is only intended to be used once it took a little creativity and trial-and-error to pull it off. It’s like a lo-fi version of Timecode.

Scott also documented the formation of the technique and filming “The Other Half,” resulting in an exceptionally interesting “behind the scenes” video.

It’s true that these retro-tech movements can succumb to being more about fetish than utility and aesthetics. But anyone who’s ever read a digital audio, photo or video message board knows full well how much wankery is devoted to fetishizing multi-thousand dollar cameras, microphones and other gear that rarely get put into service to produce a damn thing.

Films like what OnSuper8.org is featuring more than make up for the other hipster-retro dreck.

Minidisc in Bizzarro World, or, It’s a Wonderful Format

CNET.uk has a feature on “Format wars: the tech that should have won,” sizing up some media and computer systems that lost out in the marketplace, despite their technical advantages. The article imagines a world where technologies like the 8-track and Betamax predominated, instead of cassettes and VHS. Two of my favorites–that I still use–are included, minidisc and laserdisc:

Laserdisc was light years ahead of its time, pre-dating even compact disc…. The picture quality was amazing for the time, offering 440 lines of picture information in PAL and 425 lines for NTSC. That made for a picture that was twice as good as VHS, and very nearly as good as DVD….

MiniDisc was fantastically versatile. You could buy pre-recorded music on the format or simply use your hi-fi to copy a CD to a blank disc. MiniDisc’s hard outer case meant the surface of the disc was far less likely to become scratched and damaged over time.

Aside from the obvious problem of having media and devices that aren’t supported anymore, sometimes locking away precious content forever, there’s a real unnecessary waste behind format wars, as landfills bulge with discarded tapes and computers. It’s good that there are some unique, resourceful souls who go out of their way to collect and preserve this lost tech, helping us both hold on to cultural legacies, but also keep useful items out of the waste stream.

Can Data Storage Media Ever Be Retro-Cool?

It must be retro-goodness week. While I’m musing about cassettes, Aj files a Requiem for the Floppy.

I actually backed up all my old 3.5″ PC floppies onto CD-R (two copies each, of course) this past spring. Less than 10% of them were bad, but because I’m kind of obsessive about backing up, it seemed than any file I might still want was living on more than one disc. However, because I’m just barely crafty, I didn’t even think to save any of them for making cool projects with — they all got chucked into the garbage (oh, how ungreen).

However, I do have a big box full of 5.25″ floppies for the Commodore 64 and TI-99 that my parents had me relieve them of when I visited last Thanksgiving. Even after 20 years in a NJ attic, I was surprised to find that many of the C64 floppies still work (several don’t). I know that it is possible to get your C64 connected up to a modern PC to back up all that old data, though I’ll have to figure out how (as if I need another project).

Then maybe I can do something more creative with the dead ones.

Tags: floppy disc, floppies, c64, commodore, ti-99, retro

Next Big Retro Thing: The Cassette Revival

I’m not known for my trend-watching skills. I won’t be selling my consulting services to corporate America in order to peek into the mind of youth culture or what’s hot with generation Z. But occasionally my antennae are sensitive enough to pick up a low-level lame-geek trend.

It occurred to me today that there has been a resurgent interest in mix tapes and cassettes recently. Not a big surge, just a slow simmer on the geekier side of the internets. Aj at Syndicate Product pointed me to this musing on compiling a mix tape from the UK Guardian. There’s also the recent book by Rob Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape (which I haven’t yet read), and Thurston Moore’s book on cassette culture, Mix Tape. There’s thousands of cassette pictures at Flickr, and just do a quick blog search on “mix tape” and you turn up a heck of a lot.

Now this isn’t some big T Trend. No. This shit’s still l33t. How do I know? History, my friend… and navel gazing.

Think back about 15 years to 1992. That’s when Gen X was hitting its stride, and snotty college radio DJ boys like me were amassing large CD collections. We CD collectors thought we were ahead of the game (with a lot of free promos) while our friends and aquaintences were still rocking old tapes. And, then I noticed that CDs were really overtaking LPs in the “new” rack at the station–vinyl having been a radio station mainstay up to that time. I would go to the record store and CDs were taking over there, shoving the vinyl into smaller bins, which were becoming increasingly discounted.

Oh, and at the independent record store, the used LPs were getting cheaper, and cheaper. The dollar bins were exploding with great finds, as collectors and yuppie audiophiles dumped their record collections in order to “upgrade” to CD.

Man, I cleaned up. And most of my friends thought I was nuts to be blowing all this money on obsolete vinyl records. And I picked up great used turntables for five and ten bucks to hook up in my dorm room.

Then a funny thing happened. Grunge busted out, Nirvana broke into the mainstream, and in that great generational search for something “authentic” vinyl became cool again. Just two years later, all that great used vinyl wasn’t such a bargain anymore. A lot of independent labels never stopped releasing LPs, but then major label acts like Pearl Jam started releasing limited edition vinyl in order to court that indie cred.

Even a decade later vinyl is still enjoying that resurgence, with used prices stabilized (but not quite bargain-basement, unless it’s a Billy Joel record), and electronics companies stumbling all over themselves to offer up retro-styled all-in-one stereos with built-in record players — even some that will record your vinyl to CD-R.

But the cassette is still the lowly underdog… or is it?

I think it’s time for a revival. First, the simple fact is cassette quality is not as bad as the consensus history would have it. With a decent cassette deck and a little bit of care (not to mention hooking it up to a decent amp and speakers), you can have yourself a damn high-quality listening experience.

Moreover, I see that the market for cassettes, cassette players and related stuffs has hit rock bottom.

Two years ago I went to the local public radio station’s annual record sale, Vintage Vinyl, and found the LP pickins to be damn slim. But the cassette inventory was out of sight, and cheaper than the LPs! I picked up some great 80s underground tunes for 50 cents a pop, most in playable or better shape — stuff the record geeks would have gotten into a hair-pulling fight over if it were on vinyl.

That discovery re-ignited my cassette listening. And then I started finding abandoned cases of new or slightly-used cassettes at record stores, full of great, obscure titles, again for just a fraction of the price of the same thing on vinyl.

For me the apex was reached this month, when I decided to bust out a closet full of cassettes and drag my cassette deck out to my main listening stereo. I realized I had tons of great music sitting unused in boxes that deserved to be heard. Going back to these cassettes was like the early days of Napster, when you could actually find good music and get it downloaded quickly, without a thousand teenie-boppers clogging your bandwidth searching for Britney Spears.

Digging out these great old tapes was also a genius money-saving move. My memory is so bad, that it’s like I just got a load of new music…. for free!

Then, on a lark, I decided to check out cassette decks on eBay. Holy shit! It’s a buyers market. Great quality decks from all the major brands are selling for $10, $15, maybe $25. These things cost hundreds new, and would have even been close to $100 used a couple of years ago. Only the highest-end Nakamichi decks are going for the big bucks (and still less than they did 5 years ago).

Just like vinyl in 1992, 2007 shows all the right signs for cassettes to be the next big retro thing. Today’s indie college kids who grew up with CDs, computers and file-traded MP3s throughout high school are searching for their “authentic” experience. They caught the tail end of mix CDs, but mostly only know iTunes playlists. They’ve heard about mix tapes, and maybe were subjected to cassettes by their parents, or used them as little kids. Cassettes will be their retro thing.

Then that will spark nostalgic cassette revival for us 30-somethings, who still have boxes of cassettes that we’ve either forgotten about, or neglected for lack of a good player.

And, yeah, just like vinyl, cassettes are much less convenient than an archive of MP3s playing on endless random for hours. But it’s the effort, time and consideration that a lot of us miss. Not to mention the analog sound… and noise.

So right now I’m sitting in my living room listening to some old cassettes, and I’m impressed about how good they sound. Sure, I can hear the hiss in between songs. But, you know, I can also hear the bad high-end distortion and sibilence in poorly encoded MP3s. I’ll take a little analog hiss over a crap-ass MP3 any day.

Maybe you’re feeling a little nostalgic twinge yourself. If so, my advice is: don’t wait around. If you need a cassette deck, get it now! Get down to the thrift store, pawn shop, garage sale or eBay now and pick up a deck before those young hipsters start driving up the prices.

When you hear that first bit of quiet, low-level hiss you’ll thank me.

Tags: cassette, retro, mix tape, analog