House of Swank

The Agony of Defeat

I'm admitting defeat on the current version of the cassette tape knitting experiment.  Tape is weird.  For the most part it's pretty strong, but sometimes it just randomly breaks.  And when it randomly breaks your only fix is to tie the two ends together.  Which is a real pain when you don't have any ends to use for tying. 

Sometimes it breaks right after you've finished a stitch, so you can make an end with the loose tape, but sometimes it breaks a row or so later.  And then you're just trying to patch it together so the piece isn't ruined.

Well, the piece broke a few too many times for my liking, so I'm scrapping it and starting over.  I'd like to thank the following tapes that gave their lives to the project thus far, and will never be part of the glory of a finished bag:

• Camper Van Beethoven, II and III
• Frente!, Marvin the Album
• New Model Army, Thunder and Consolation
• Dynamite Hack, Superfast

I'm going to try again, this time double-stranding, which I'm hoping will add enough strength that the breakage won't be an issue anymore.  I may consider twisting the strands together as I go. 

But first I'm going to take a bit of a break from this project.  I've got some cotton left over from the baby hats, and I'm going to make a dishrag or two.  Because there's not much more that I can do with what's left over, without buying more.

Then I may do something else, or may jump back into the tape project.  It's only temporary defeat, I shall return.

Dear Billy Bragg

I wish that rather than partnering with Wilco, you had partnered with John Wesley Harding.  And instead of recording Woody Guthrie's songs you two had written a bunch of songs together.  Because man would that be some kick-ass folk music.

And if you happen to stumble across this blog, and as a result of it call up Mr. Harding and form a duo with him, I'll gladly become your tour manager even though I have no experience in the arena.

Same to you John Wesley,  but Billy Bragg was a larger part of the collection back in the days of cassette tapes (two tapes to one song), so he gets top billing, at least for now.

The Lighter Side of Teen Angst

It's amazing the insight you can get on your life when you are listening to the music that shaped your life over 15 years ago. 

The summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college I lost a friend to a freakish and completely unnecessary accident.  Making the transition from high school to college is difficult enough.  Especially when you're moving 2,000 miles away from home.  Doing so while contemplating a world in which really random shit can kill you is just mind boggling.

The day after the funeral I bought Yaz's Upstairs at Eric's, specifically for the song In My Room, which is one of the most depressing songs ever to come out of the Depeche Mode family*.  Oh, how I listened to the tape over and over and over again just contemplating the world as only a teenager can do.

But in going back and listening to the tape today, I discovered something I never realized before.  A lot of the songs are very happy, poppy songs.  Or completely random sampling.  Stuff that might actually cheer you up.  Give you a glimpse of sun behind the clouds.  Perhaps help lead you to a cheery day.  And thank god for that!

* Vince Clark was an original member of Depeche Mode, who left to form Yaz and later on Erasure, so in the family tree of 1980's new wave, these all fall under the Depeche Mode family.  A fairly easy family to follow,  as contrasted to the Bauhaus family, which we do not have enough space to get into here.

Frente! Marvin the Album

I now submit to you Exhibit  A in both "tapes Swankette purchased because she was totally hooked by one song" AND "tapes Swankette purchased because of a kick-ass cover tune."

The cover - Bizarre Love Triangle (as originally done by New Order) by an Australian group that mellows it out with a lead singer that sounds a fair amount like Bjork.

I purchased this CD at the music chain store in the Albany mall my senior year of college.  The locale is important, as it was where I went to purchase obscure music that year.  Was it to the record store in the college town I lived in?  No.  It was in the very red town 20 minutes away.  Why would a college town's music store stock progressive music that was heard on the college radio station?  Or Sid Vicious?  Or other freaky-ass music that appeals to the late teen/early twenty year old?  They've got no need for that!

Yet every time I bothered to drive into Albany I could find whatever the latest obsession du jour was.  And for a while it was Frente!  I was especially enchanted not only by their lovely cover, but by a wonderful sample of Can't Get Enough of Your Love Baby at the end of Lonely.

Putting It All Together

You're about to learn things about how my mind works that you'd rather not know.

This evening I was sitting in traffic on my way home, pondering the new project of converting all the audio cassettes to digital files.  The thought pattern went something like this:

• Hey, I'll finish recording Camper van Beethoven tonight, so I'll be able to throw that tape away.
• One down, 200 + to go
• That's going to be strange, throwing all the tapes away one at a time.
• Wouldn't it be cool if I could do some sort of artwork out of all those tapes?

VOILA!

If you can't tell, that's the first bit of the tape from Camper van sitting on my knitting needles.

The tape itself knits fairly well.  The end bits, where there is no music, doesn't, but that's only a couple of inches that's easily removed.  It's a lot easier to purl than to knit, so I think that rather than starting with a knit row, I should start with a purl row.  Definitely need the metal needles, and I think a much smaller gauge would be better (those are size 7s), but it knits, and seems to be fairly strong.  It stretches fairly easily, and doesn't really regain it's shape completely, but I think by moving onto smaller needles that will tighten it all up and help it out.

So now the question is:  what to knit?  I've got a LOT of "yarn" available, and it's pretty easy to work with, as it just sits on the tape until you need it.  It's got to be a pretty easy pattern, as it's not as easy to work with as regular yarn in terms of manipulating it.  I think I can do simple increases and decreases.  Pattern will be difficult to see, so probably need to keep that simple.

Any ideas?  Recommendations?  Requests?  I'm thinking a tote bag - or CD case - as it's not something you want to wear when all is said and done, but I'm open to other ideas.

Camper van Beethoven II & III

When I moved in with Sweetie a 16 months ago I came to the realization that I could not hold onto all of my cassette tapes any longer.  They took up over 2 U-Haul boxes, and in my previous apartments I had a special chest of drawers to house them, which I no longer had the space for.  I started to go through one of the boxes and actually threw out some of the tapes, holding onto a select few that I couldn't dare part with.

I can't recall what tapes I tossed, but I believe they were either mix tapes that I had created myself (and thus had all the songs for elsewhere), stuff I had on CD now, either by benefit of purchasing it myself or moving in with Sweetie, or stuff I didn't really give a crap about.

The tapes that I held onto out of that first batch went into a drawer in my nightstand, which has since been overtaken by knitting, so those are the tapes I am beginning with, if only to get them out of the way.

Camper van Beethoven II & III happened to be on top of the stack, so it's the first tape in the project.

I had heard of, and heard, Camper van whilst in high school, but I was formally introduced to them and became a fan my freshman year of college.  A couple of different friends were big fans, and once I really got exposed to their work I became a big fan as well.  I bought this tape because it has my two favorite songs on it - Sad Lovers Waltz and (Don't You Go To) Goleta.

As I'm playing the tape I can still sing along to both songs word-for-word, and can hum along to most of the other songs.  Lot's of instrumentals on this tape, good stuff.  And nice, peppy car-trippin' music. 

What a happy way to start the project!

The Great Conversion

Before the days of digital music I amassed a LOT of cassette tapes.  Somewhere around 200-300.  And a fair amount of vinyl.  Which is all well and good, but vinyl doesn't work so well in the car, and those cassette tapes take up a LOT of space.

Which is why I am undertaking converting it all to digital files, thanks to some nifty hardware introduced to me over on Jack Bog's blog. (I actually have this, but learned such hardware existed thanks to Jack's post).

I got the hardware for Christmas, got the computer that will house the music moved next to the stereo last weekend, in preparation for the fantasy baseball draft, and tonight got it all put together.

So now begins my project to transfer all of my cassettes and albums to digital files.  It's going to take a while.  And I think I may blog my way through it.  So come, let's take a glimpse into my past.  You can see what my teen angst really looked like.

Quandry

I'm almost set to start the great conversion project - getting all of my music which exists on tape and album into an electronic format that takes less space and is more flexible than the original media.

I have:

• obtained the necessary hardware to connect the computer to the stereo
• moved the computer that will house the music into the living room, next to the stereo
• deposited the money to purchase the i-pod on which to play the music into my account (and will likely wait until my next trip to PDX to purchase said i-pod so that I can do so sales tax free)

So really, all that's left is to connect the hardware and get to it.

But last night I discovered that I will face a challenge as I delve deeper into this project.

Presumably, I will be storing the music as songs, so that I can hit shuffle play on the i-pod and see what sort of whacked out shit spews forth.  So I will have all these files and will want to label them appropriately - an artist, a song name, perhaps an album.

And herein lies the problem.

Because once upon a time my brother copied a Recoil album for me and gave me a tape.  Except I'm not really sure what album it is, and couldn't tell you in a million years who or what is on the flip side of the cassette.  But it's cool stuff that I want to hold onto.

And then a buddy once made me a tape that included, among other things, Welcome to Paradise by Front 242.  Now maybe I have all of Front by Front, or maybe I just have a compilation of various industrial music.

And let's not even get into the rap version of Every Breath You Take that a former student made for me, with other rap music, that I couldn't even tell you who the artist was.  And the other tapes that are sitting in those two big boxes that are equally unlabeled.

How the heck do I handle this?

With cassettes it was good enough to know that the song you wanted came before that one song and after that other song, without knowing names, because you'd be listening to it.  And on one tape (I think it's the one I have with Front 242) I have a mix of Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails, where I used to be able to just look at how much of the tape was sitting on each side of the reels and get really close to the right spot on the tape.  This is where digital storage and mp3 players fail miserably.

And now that I'm typing this out, another problem has come to the surface.  How do I handle all the remixes?  I spent my teen years following depress mode, but rather than investing in the actual 12"s I just got buddies to tape them for me.  So I can pick out "Are People People" and "The Slave Whip Mix," but couldn't even tell you the names of the other mixes, much less which is what.

Now, I suppose I could spend the rest of my life researching such things on the internets, but I don't want to do that.  As it stands, I've got somehwere around 3,000+ songs to get transferred to computer, so what to do?

Seriously, any ideas?