The Seductive Allure of Outdated Technology
I am sometimes overwhelmed with nostalgia towards the technology of my childhood, no matter how primitive or shitty. For example, every once in a while my inner child will take over and attempt to convince me that I should get really into cassette tapes.
He’ll try to convince me that if I were to buy a Walkman and some tapes to go with it upon pressing play I would be instantly and powerfully transported back to one of the few non-traumatic aspects of my childhood, when I could crank up A Tribe Called Quest or Talking Heads or The Beatles on my portable cassette player and block out the overbearing crappiness of the outside world.
In an invariably unsuccessful spiel, my inner child will attempt to assure me that a walkman would be no mere primitive, outmoded device to play music but rather a magical memory machine that would bring the past back to me in an idealized, adorably primitive form.
As you get older it’s important to cultivate eccentricities so that people think you’re colorful and not just sad and old and mentally ill. Maybe my big eccentricity would involve being the cassette guy, the dude with an overflowing, carefully preserved tape collection and assemblage of vintage Walkman!
Then I will come to my senses and realize that I stopped listening to cassettes because it was a terrible, rigid, incredibly limited format that has been improved upon repeatedly, and lacks the aesthetic qualities that make similarly nostalgic souls revere vinyl.
I similarly sometimes find myself day-dreaming about getting back into video games after a brief twenty-six year hiatus. In my mind, this never takes the form of buying the latest Playstation but rather buying a Super Nintendo or Nintendo off of Ebay. If someone tried to convince me that better video game systems exist, I would answer, “I know. I just prefer to live in the past because it seems infinitely safer and more knowable than the terrifying present.”
I suppose it’s not surprising that the exceedingly stupid thought, “Man, it would so cool to watch some movies on video tape, particularly if you were to rent them from the last Blockbuster store in existence” also sometimes rattles around my nostalgia-hazed, stubbornly impractical brain.
Yet when I realized that I would need to buy a VCR in order to complete my patron-funded journey through the films of Rebecca Gayheart and Tawny Kitaen, my knee-jerk response was a grouchy, “I have to buy a freaking VCR in order to watch these ridiculous movies? That seems a bit much.”
I dragged my feet on buying the outdated technology I needed to see Kitaen and Gayheart movies unavailable in any format but eventually purchased a ten inch TV/VCR combo for about fifty dollars on Ebay.
Oh but it is a thing of intensely shitty non-beauty! It doesn’t even have a pause button and as a writer I am constantly pausing movies so that I can write down notes and capture particularly terrible dialogue for posterity.
Since I can’t pause my VCR and stopping and restarting movies is a pain in the ass it more or less forces me to watch movies from start to finish in one stretch. I’ve only used my VCR to watch Kitaen and Gayheart movies that are so terrible and obscure that they never made the leap to DVD and no one has put them on YouTube or on illegal downloading sites as public service.
So the movies I’ve watched on my VCR have been VERY bad but I’ve had no choice but to experience them in one sitting. There’s something to be said for that. It goes against the way that we currently consume media as something with a seemingly endless list of options that we can process in bite-sized pieces if so inclined.
There’s something weirdly hypnotic about watching an obscure exploitation movie on a VCR. The fuzziness of the images and the smallness of the screen add to the old school analog crappiness of the grand gestalt, the sense that you’re watching something no one else in is watching, something crazy and random that belongs to another era altogether.
Watching the Robby Benson/Tawny Kitaen crack exploitation movie White Hot on VCR added immeasurably to my enjoyment. It is a movie that should only be watched on video, that has no place migrating to DVD and Blu-Ray and streaming.
I’m looking forward to not having to watch movies on videocassette in the not too distant future but I’ll probably be weirdly nostalgic for the time when I HAD to use a VCR for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 all the same.
When we’re nostalgic for the technology of our youth what we’re really nostalgic for is the period in our lives when they seemed magical, portals to exciting new worlds. We’re nostalgic for the past no matter how painful it might have been, just as we’re forever mildly irritated with the technology of the present, no matter how miraculous and legitimately life-changing.
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Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang!
Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here