Frozen rain is falling in the Middle West, and I’m writing to you through a haze of fever and sniffles and nostalgia. This morning I came across a photograph of my mother that has the atmosphere of a dream. There's the incidental heat of a family in motion, the twinned gesture of a hand to the forehead. My mother is returning from an event, and my grandmother follows in the background. An unknown girl stands in the foreground, watching.
The overheated colors and pebbled texture of this picture left me romanticizing the aesthetics of the past: a tactile world of cigarettes, record players, snow on the television, and radios that filled the room like furniture. Might as well have been another planet compared to how I sit with a scrunched face and white plastic in my ears, tapping at a piece of glass. And soon this will look like the days of the hand-cranked Victrola or the first Model T.
It’s a strange sensation, living a life divided between today’s liquid crystal and a youth defined by magnetic tape. Audio and VHS cassettes contained my first impressions of the world. Each unit of entertainment was bound in plastic that occupied space and respected the logic of time, its information deteriorating each time it was played until it dissolved into garbled images and hiss. Now the whole world feels like static. No orientation. No sense of time. Perhaps my generation is uniquely positioned to be disappointed by the humiliations of clicking and scrolling. After all, I still remember the optimism of world wide web and information superhighway.
I miss the reassuring kerchunk of buttons and punching out the plastic tabs on a cassette if the recording was good. Or taping them up again when better music came along. It was a tactile world of messing with limitations, a sensibility defined by the boundaries of the physical rather than a never-ending feed coming from god only knows. Was life better in the Era of Magnetic Tape, or am I suffering from the nostalgia of a man settling into middle age?
Either way, this calls for a trip to the Death Prom, where I can hide beneath the crashing waves of an old Ronettes single: big heartbeat drums and an even bigger voice, Ronnie Spector and her beehive carryied the fever dream of American history when she sang “Keep on Dancing” back in ’64, a song so perfect that her husband refused to release it because he was a psychopath. In my notebook, I jotted down a quote from her that reads like a poem: “Everything was quiet, then all of a sudden I heard a low rumble, like there was thunder coming from every corner of the room.”
- Jeanette - Oí Tu Voz
Hispavox, 1967 - Jessica Pratt - Life Is
Here in the Pitch | Mexican Summer, 2024 | Bandcamp - Hasnah Haron - Hanya Padamu
Malaysia, 1970 - Dirty Beaches - True Blue + The Ronettes - Keep on Dancin’
Zoo Music, 2010 + Philles Records, recorded 1964, released 1978 - Connie Francis - Siboney
MGM, 1960
And god, how Connie Francis holds those final notes. This mixtape also includes shards of Johnny Mathis, Bobby Vinton, Patsy Cline, and some ominous basslines. Listen below, or here’s an mp3 so dusty you can almost touch it.
The next few episodes of Midnight Radio will be broadcast from Taipei and Tokyo because C. was awarded a generous research grant and I got lucky and married above my station, so I get to tag along. (She also made this delightful collage of me walking down the street.)
Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.
