A Small Piece Of The Universe Observing Itself

Dark Lens

Livable

These things (tapes!) were such a huge, HUGE part of my childhood, on both functional and aesthetic levels. One of the first Really Significant Presents I got as a toddler was a tan Fisher-Price tape player/recorder. I would alternate between listening to tapes (Peanuts, Disney, Star Wars stories, show tunes) and recording my own random babble. 

But the tapes themselves had an appeal that went beyond the utilitarian. They were more than just a means of storing sound-sequences -- they were Things Unto Themselves, and moreover, they fit into a particular category of things that I've always been drawn to, wherein you have a bunch of objects built on the same basic template but that vary in color, etc. 

I remember rooting through my parents' cassette library in search of tapes that were, for instance, translucent green, or blue, or that had less familiar-looking labels (I had a lot of opaque red tapes from my Disney story cache, and a bunch of opaque red ones, and some generic black ones in "my" collection, which made it a rare treat to find a perfectly clear cassette or a bicolor one or one that had a different sort of logo on the sides).

I remember laying them out on the floor, arranging them according to color and texture. I remember the process of figuring out how to lightly lift a loop of ribbony brown tape-material above the little foamy square tape head(?) thing so I could gently push it up and down and feel it subtly sproing back up. Eventually I got curious enough about what was going on inside cassettes that I began pilfering tiny screwdrivers from the garage and performing "exploratory surgery" on them, which ultimately progressed to "transplanting" the innards of one favorite tape into a different, cooler-looking shell. 

The Last Known …