Eli | Mike | Mary - click for individual bio

October 7, 2003

Yes, it’s the eve of the Arnold election. I still have a vague hope, probably misplaced, that the recall will be voted down. I certainly will be at my polling place after work this afternoon, eagerly jabbing away on our county’s obsolete punchcard voting machines. I believe that this was the substance of the recent ACLU lawsuit to delay the election, wasn’t it? That certain counties would be under-represented because their voting equipment was unreliable? Well that’s ME that they’re talking about! Yes! I am being discriminated against! Me, me me me me me meee! Look at my big, crying eyes and velvety lashes. But, seriously, I will be majorly pissed if my vote against Mr. Stick-My-Tongue-Down-Your-Throat gets invalidated because we got stuck with the Yugo of voting machines, y’know?

Actually, what I really miss were the things we had back in Michigan, which were these enormous grey metal boxes with all sorts of switches and levers on them. Does anyone still use those? They made a really nice, satisfying “thwunk” sound when you pushed or pulled anything. That felt like actually voting, not this touchscreen crap or whatever! Who knows if they were any more reliable than the punchcards? Who cares! I‘m sure that when I tried to vote for Clinton in ’92 I probably got the candidate for Jews for Hitler instead. But it was fun! Thwunk! Wheeeee!

Anyway.

I’ve drifted a bit from the subject I originally planned for this week’s entry, which was: obsessions. I thought of this because I was looking at the web site for Sparks (the band, not the team: http://www.allsparks.com) and in it Ron Mael devotes a couple of pages to his collections of celebrity moustache pictures (fantastic) and Nike Air Jordans (lame). So I thought of my own obsessions, most of which are pretty lame themselves, and mostly fall into the obscure-pop-culture-phenomenon category.

Back in Ann Arbor when I was in college, of course, lacking a girlfriend or any kind of social life I ended up becoming a record collector like everyone else, and bought maybe five million billion scratchy, mildew-y vinyl LPs with titles like “The Exotic Sounds of Arthur Schnertzstein’s Kneecap Ensemble” and “Music To Wet Your Pants By,” almost none of which were actually endurable as music. I found myself every Saturday at the Ann Arbor Public Library book and record sale, waiting in line with COMPLETE BOZO DORKS who would show up three hours early so they could be at the head of the line and then RUN (literally) to the record bins as soon as the little old lady librarians would open the doors. I found myself falling into conversations that went like this: “well, you really haven’t heard “Sgt. Pepper” until you hear the ‘mono’ version, because John Lennon personally supervised the mixing and the guitar solos are a little different!” I had no friends, obviously, and found myself crying a lot at night. I am not exaggerating, very much.

Part of the problem was that I frequently bought records based on their cover designs alone. Anything with a 1950’s-era girl with funny hair and a flaming drink in a coconut shell on it, I bought. There was one I especially remember that had a guy in a leopard-skin toga and a viking helmet holding a prone young maiden in a transparent mumu above his head, like a dumbell. The actual music on most of these records was what’s come to be known as “exotica,” which is a kind of light jazz with odd chord changes and jungle bird calls thrown in on top. It’s supposed to make you think of mysterious tropical pagan rites, and the best of it (like “Quiet Village” by Martin Denny) manages to be campy, soothing, and vaguely ominous at the same time. But a lot--I’d say, like 95%, and here I’m sure I’m going to offend a bunch of collector types--is really nothing more than easy-listening jazz standards with maybe someone playing along on the bongos. Lots of it sounds pretty much the same to me, and as soon as I started actually listening to my purchases I started glazing over pretty fast. The only one that really stayed with me was Yma Sumac’s “Legend of the Sun Virgin,” which basically sounds like the soundtrack of a Amazonian malaria film with someone screeching and chanting along in an apparently made-up language (like: “Woooooaaaaaaaahh Oooo Oooooaaaa Wwwaaaaahhhhh Weeee Ooooooooooo! Aie Aie Aie Aieeeeeeeeeeee!” It’s pretty good).

Anway, I think of all of the thousands of records that I bought during my four years of hard-core, poverty-inducing record scrounging I still own and play maybe five or six. I’m not really sure what happened to the other eight trillion; some of them just disappeared, a lot of them are still stacked up in my parents’ house (ha ha, sorry guys!), some of them I think were shipped to Uzbekistan as part of a misguided government cultural exchange program. Tough luck, Ex-Soviet Bloc suckers!

Don’t get me wrong, I still buy lots of records, but I’m no longer a collector of, say, this guy’s caliber (http://www.john-book.com/thrift/index.htm). No, I have a much better grip on my finances and priorities, and I’m much much healthier for it, both mentally and socially. So I don’t do that any more. Now I collect 8-track tapes! Dude! Duuuuuuuude!

Perhaps you have an obsession yourself that you’d like to share? Drop us an e-mail and we’d love to hear about it. Really, we would! Unless it has something to do with monkies. I hate monkies.

Eli