100 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Superior Take the test!

Right now: while at work, I'm exercising my attention span by reading a 10,000 word debate on which Destroyer album is better, "Streethawk: A Seduction" or "This Night"? This is recommended.

Last night: Liser and her friend Jevva and I went to see Amy Goodman speak. Amy Goodman is my hero, and it was awesome.

In the future: We are having a BBQ on the 17th. That's this coming Saturday. We will be grilling fruit; peaches, if I can find them. You are invited.

Current Location: Star Tickets Plus
Current Music: Destroyer- Students Carve Hearts Out of Stone

Well, my records lady dropped off the face of the earth. After she postponed our planned interview, she gave me some times she was available to reschedule, and said that once I responded with my availability, her next e-mail would include a final date for our conference call. I responded promptly, but didn't hear back from her. A couple of the possible dates she gave me passed by, still without a response, so I e-mailed her again. She still hasn't responded to either e-mail.
I can think of two possible explanations. One, she googled me and came upon my blog entry about the recordings and found it offensive, or two, she's dead. Or otherwise incapacitated. The first time she postponed the interview, it was because of a medical situation. Maybe I should keep e-mailing her, but I think I'll just keep hoping she'll get in touch with me if she can/wants to.

Also sucky: I just found out we didn't get the Antiques Roadshow tickets we applied for.

I don't think I've mentioned yet in this journal that my sister Aileen moved out and our friend Jon Clay replaced her as our roommate. Aileen is trying to move to Las Vegas, for some reason I won't try to comprehend. Apologies if any of you are from Las Vegas, but I can't imagine a more objectionable place to live. I will miss her, and her pesky dog too.

And now, because it deserves to be recorded, here will be where I tell the story of Aileen's (and her dog's) adventures in inexplicable coincidence:
Aileen got her Basenji Tapanga over a year ago. They aren't a terribly common dog, and I guess there was only one breeder in the region, so when her boyfriend at the time saw another Basenji puppy in a Meijer parking lot, he correctly assumed it was one of his dog's litter-mates, and struck up conversation with the owner. They set up a doggie play date for their dogs, which Aileen attended. Tapanga didn't end up enjoying her reunion with her sister that much, but Aileen hit it off with the dog's owners just fine. They had a lot in common with Aileen and her boyfriend. Both couples consisted of a white girl in her early twenties with long blonde hair, and a black guy four years her senior. They had a lot of common interests, and both couples had been together for a little over three years. It came up in conversation that the other couple was in the process of moving, and when Aileen asked to where, she was surprised to find that it was the same obscure, over-priced apartment complex, out in the middle of nowhere, where she and her boyfriend lived. She asked her which building, and was surprised to find that it was the same building where she lived. She asked her which floor, and not only found that it was the same floor where she lived, but right across the hall from her apartment.
So, for several months, these doppelganger couples and their twin dogs lived across the hall from eachother, until Aileen finally ended her troubled relationship with her boyfriend and she and Tapanga moved temporarily into our mom's house (this was right before she moved in with me). When she called to inform her neighbors/friends/doppelgangers/fellow basenji owners of the situation, they ended up informing her right back that they were breaking up too, and the girl was also moving out with the dog to her mom's house.
I think that was the end of the coincidences, but that's quite enough, right? I mean what are the odds? I thought it was a pretty big coincidence that Tapanga and her sister ended up living right across the hall from eachother, but the fact that both the couples who owned these dogs ended their respective four year relationships at the exact same time made it really seem like this was some kind of elaborate copycat situation.
An elaborate coincidence is slightly more likely though, right?

My old record lady had to reschedule our interview because she was having some sort of medical issue. She said she could do it Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday of this week, and I told her Tuesday or Thursday would work for me. Tuesday came and went, an she still hasn't gotten back to me, so I assume (hope) it will happen tomorrow. I hope I didn't scare her off with my request to record the call.

Also tomorrow, I have to get up horribly early to go to a jury selection at the courthouse, and that is hella teh suck, because I'm working late tonight.
Did I tell you about my new job? It's at Star Tickets Plus, where thefiske used to work. I credit his good reputation for getting me the job. Nepotism was determined to be my only hope after about five months (minus the three week GlamourShots episode) of job hunting, intense job hunting--hundreds of jobs applied to/resumes sent out--with no luck at all.

This job is alright. I get to sit on the internet, as you can see, and I am occasionally entertained by the similarities this office bears to The Office. For instance, the person training the new-hires, in a very Micheal Scott fashion, insists on saying the names of the two Latino new-hires in a bad accent. I swear, every time he does it, the person he's addressing deadpans an invisible camera.

The only problem with the job is, I'm not getting quite enough hours. I need money. My bank account is actually overdrawn at the moment, so among other negatives, I haven't been able to buy our Breeder's tickets yet. I have to remind Kyle to do it. That actually relates to another cool thing about my job: I get to work with Michael Cunningham now, which is fun. And he, with The Montana Boys, is opening for the Breeders on this tour, which is HOLY CRAP AWESOMETIMES! [What if he can get us back stage?!]

Back to the scrilla: at least jury duty will pay. $35 dollars, I think. So I hope I get selected. I'm also excited to see if I can use jury nullification of law.

My glasses somehow managed to break themselves into two pieces. I glued them back together with super glue. I'm not sure how noticeable it is.

Tomorrow at 6:00PM, I interview the lady from my old records. It's going to be a phone interview, as she lives in Arizona now.
It was her mother's family who made the records. Her mother is still alive, and she's going to conference her into the call! I wonder if she is Lottie, or Jean, or the woman who joked with the old man about her girdle size...
YOU GUYS: I am totally going to talk to Lottie, or Jean, or the woman who joked with the old man about her girdle size!

I want to do the call on speakerphone, so that I'll be able to record the interview with a tape recorder, and also so that I'll be able to play the records for the old lady, because she's super old and I don't count on her having the wherewithal to listen to them on the internet.

In trying to be thorough and prepared for the conversation, I'm writing down some questions I want to ask. I still haven't formulated a way to present my curiosity about their apparent intoxication, though.
I want this to go smoothly and not be awkward. I imagine that it is a little awkward for this lady to have had her potentially embarrassing home recordings listened to by a whole bunch of strangers. I'm wondering how to adequately express my sympathy for that fact. I'm not good at interpersonal things, so right now I'm just hoping I, uh, don't blow it somehow.

Exciting news: I actually managed to track down one of the people who's voices appear on my found recordings!
I'd googled some of the names from the records (in conjunction with the places mentioned, looking for obituaries or genealogies with matching dates) before to no avail, but after I posted that blog, I decided to give it another try. I didn't have much luck with the main characters in the recordings, probably because I didn't know their last names for sure, but on one of the recordings of small children, the mother gives the date and the full names of the kids. I found one of those names in a Classmates.com profile of someone who graduated from Battle Creek High School in the 1960s. I e-mailed her, thinking it was a total long shot. Well, she replied saying that she was, in fact, recorded as a small child, and she thinks her voice is among those on the records!
She wants to call me to discuss it further and answer my questions. I definitely want to interview her. It'll be like an episode of This American Life! But, I'm also nervous, because I'm not sure what to say or to ask, or how to delicately pry into her family's business (any suggestions?). I'm just a little unprepared because I didn't actually expect to find a real live person. I wonder if she'll want me to give her the records. I'd oblige, but I would be sad to give them up.

Do any of you have anything in particular you think I should ask her?

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So, a few years ago, Kyle and I came across some old (1940s and 50s) home recordings on acetate aluminum(?) disks at a Salvation Army store. There was a whole stack of them, but not knowing what they were (They were mostly unmarked or hand labeled with fading pencil, and I, at the time, didn't even know that old timey home recording was even a thing), we just grabbed one of them out of curiosity.

When we brought it home and listened to it on our record player we were surprised by the haunting, creepy sound of a child singing "Mairzy Doats" through heavy record noise. When we flipped it over and listened to what was on the other side, we knew we'd found a fabulous treasure. It was a string of outrageous babblings of a seemingly drunk old man in the company of, presumably, some family members. His voice is crazy, and more than a little bit horrifying. The recording starts out with a short discussion between a woman and the old man about what he's "beeping" about and whether or not he, in fact, beeps at all (what?). The old man gets increasingly incoherent as the recording goes on. Stand out phrases are "this is my pauly" (sounds like "party" and is ripe for sampling), "go to school and learn a loooot" and "she's little and tiny. She's got two more years left to go, heh heh." (the creepiest laugh you've probably ever heard). He then launches into a racy discussion with the woman about the size of her girdle which culminates in the slanted refrain from the beginning, "I never peek!" I guess it's possible they were saying "peek" all along, but it really sounds like "beep" at the beginning. We supposed that "beeping" was some kind of euphemism for getting drunk. If this man wasn't drunk, I can't imagine what was wrong with him.
Needless to say, we went directly back to that Salvation Army and bought the rest of the home-made records.

Here is what they look like:



They span over more than a decade, and have recurring characters (the old man, Doug, Lottie, Jean, Mac (Lottie's beloved), some children). References to places like Muskegon, Kalamazoo and Battle Creek indicate that the family who made these recordings was from the West Michigan area. A few of the recordings, which seem to have been made in Battle Creek, are of brief interviews with World War 2 soldiers. Some of the recordings are of people singing or playing the piano. A couple are recordings of a radio broadcast. Everyone seems to have an accent, not of a region, but of a time period. The old-time radio era cadence. It is fascinating!

We converted some of the recordings into MP3s to preserve them, and to share them. Sharing them over the interwebs, though, would require me to know how to host sound files, which I don't. So, I forgot about it until today, when I was making a muxtape, and it occurred to me that I could host my found sounds on muxtape.com. You can find a selection of them here!

I highly recommend listening to the second track, which is the one with the dirty old man--the most bizarre one. Another favorite is the third one, in which Lottie and Jean, also possibly drunk, demonstrate that people in the 1940s didn't have a very evolved sense of humor (their most outstanding jokes involve tapping on a table and repeating a funny word they heard on the radio). Also interesting: tracks 6 and 7, which are recordings of a radio broadcast--the final broadcast, in fact, of a Mrs. Miles' write-in advice show, in which Mrs. Miles advises that if a man's wife doesn't dress temptingly enough, he should lay out her clothes for her the night before, and if she still wears her bathrobe to breakfast, then he should refuse to eat with her because she is not interested in his interest in her. AND: do you have a problem choosing between two boys because they're both equally wealthy, come from t