nah pop, no style

Friday is the Torley St. Mixtape Potluck, a yearly tradition I helped found which carries on even as I have passed on into the next world borough. Basically, it’s a regular potluck except the added feature is that if you bring a mixtape (or CD), you can enter it in the random exchange and leave at the end of the night with someone else’s mix. Sometimes you end up with a totally precious, sweet mix; sometimes you end up with something somewhat careless. It’s not about receiving, though, it’s about pushing your own superior musical tastes on others! That’s what the holidays are all about, of course.

The Torleys, in fact, are garnering something of a reputation for mixtape escapades, having gotten a mixtape-related autograph message from none other than local celeb documentarian (and rumored occasional Pub Quiz attender) Rick Sebak! (Crazy autograph, Rick — does SEBAK stand for something? “Superbly Educated Bearer of All Knowledge?”)

Anyway, I finished my mix last night, and NO I won’t tell you what’s on it, fool, but I will tell you that it is something of an impressionistic portrait of a winter day spent on one’s own? And it’s on tape, of course, despite the fact that taping is becoming more and more difficult, with tape decks falling into disrepair and new recorders hard to come by. I stand by the structural details that surround the cassette as mixing medium: the four points of tension (beginning, end of side 1, beginning of side 2, end), the time constraints, the equality of time spans between the sides. I don’t mean to sound like a romantic luddite; I honestly see structural advantages to the medium.