New Fangled Old Stuff with Grandpa Lou: Ancient Technophiles

Great Grandpa Lou, my dear old pappy, used to work for Motorola. This was in the days of cellular telephones the size of a 2002 Nissan Maxima and computers that suffered literal bugs, mostly fireflies casting wayward glances at transistors on hot summer nights. You would command these computers thustly:

C:\> <[pants]@'

>>SELECT * FROM PANTS_STORE

>> WHERE The_Internetz

And it would print out a pair of pants from an old timey printer. Sadly, the pants would have a strip of holes on either side of them which the printer needed to guide your pants out, if they even printed out at all. Also they were made of perforated paper. What I’m saying is, we were poor and thought pants were made out of printer paper that my dad stole from work. His dad, Great Great Grandpa Lou (for you amateur genealogists out there) worked for a brief time in a coal mine, where pants were a commodity for rich people and those deemed worthy (read: people without tuberculosis). There he toiled, pantsless and hungry at the age of four, cutting into the earth for money to feed his wife and children (the average lifespan for a Latino male at that point was eleven, so I’m sure you can imagine why my people, even to the modern age, have babies at such a young age).

We can all agree that we’ve come along way since both of these ancient eras, as I can now literally pull out my phone, press on the Amazon Store app and purchase any number of clothing items including Spanx for Men to hide my lumpy spots, or say, whatever the hell this is. It’s truly an age of wonder that we live in now, where the average lifespan has increased to nearly 80 for whites and 84 for Latin men (and we smother lard on toast! TOAST!). The wonders that I’ve already seen in my life range from computers the size of a pop tart to unmanned planes that can kill you from space. Did I ever tell you about my first cell phone? It was a Kyocera with a black & green screen that featured both screeching monophonic MIDI ring tones AND had a battery life of between 15 and 37 minutes depending on whether or not you were roaming (note: you were always roaming back then). That was only a dozen years ago and now look at us with our Angry Birds and our Beatmaker 2s. So imagine my surprise, dear Grandpa Lou connoisseur, when I read this article in the Chicago Tribune concerning fucking hipsters and their love of all things retro. I understand pulling out one’s Droid and snapping a shot with Hipstamatic (how else will everyone enjoy sepia-toned photos of your cat, right?), but carrying around seven cameras on your trip seems like overkill Jaley c’mon now. My homeboy spotted a hipster in his natural habitat recently (read: a coffeeshop) with a typewriter. DO YOU KNOW WHAT A TYPEWRITER WEIGHS?! How far retro is too far retro exactly? I’d say most would draw the line at hearing clicka-clicka-clackkclakclackaclack DING! SCROGGLE SCROGGLE, but not me. No. If you want to annoy planet earth with your awfulness you awful fucking hipster scumbags, that’s fine, but now I’m hearing that some indie record labels are putting music on old mediums. I don’t actually mind this at all if it’s being released on say, vinyl, as I still have a record player and some really nice speakers handed down from when Great Grandpa Lou was a swingin’ bachelor and used to bring the ladies by to check out his quadraphonics (if you know what I mean). The analog sound is rich and full and frankly, if we get away from the compressed audio found on MP3 to a second era of music with a dynamic range and bad ass cover art, I don’t have many complaints except for the inconvenience of its portability, but as far as I know, vinyl releases are coming with download codes so you can listen to your songs on your mp3 device instead of ever having to listen to the radio, so it’s win-win.

No friends, I don’t mind vinyl at all, but the article cited above is saying that some new releases are coming out on tape. fucking TAPE. Hissy, garbly, melt-in-your-car, unspooling ass TAPE. How did we get to the point where this backlash exists? In an era when many modern conveniences have made our time here on earth indistinguishable from magic, why would anyone want to go back to a point where our audio needs to be rewound with a #2 pencil? Where the trick to taking a quick snapshot with friends involves spools of petroleum and animal bones, knowledge of depth of field & shutter speed? Did we lose a war to morons?

It’s just too much for your dear old Grandpa to handle today you guys. Welp, looks like my pants are done printing out. Catch you on the flip side dudemeisters.