I've been in France for eight months now, and from rummaging through the community garage sales, (or boot sales, as you like, depending on your continent and tastes), I've re-discovered the music cassette. I grew up in the eighties, and remember well cassettes--my first tape was Rapp-Traxx Four, and the first cassette I bought was Wayne's World (I saw it three times in the movie theatre, but haven't seen it in decades now). I also remember the beauty of home-made tapes--the ones you would make for yourself or your friends, a sixty- or ninety-minute DJ, most often played in the car, at least in my experience.

I've been living with families, mostly, in France, and I also discovered that most people still have their tape collections, even if they don't listen to them anymore. While working just a little ways outside Toulouse, putting labels on pots of organic pate, we even threw some tapes into the cassette player--the clunk of the mechanism falling into motion, the whir of the start up, the sound test bit at the end--all of it reminded me of being a kid. Some had been well worn, and the sound was warping as the stretched tape ran through whatever magic genie pulls the sound out of the filament.

My intention with this blog? I haven't figured it out yet. I was considering reviewing music on cassettes (I'm currently listening to a pirated copy of The Damned, and just finished another of The Dead Kennedys), but I'm not much of a music reviewer. Perhaps this will become another place of eighties nostalgia, especially since all the kids these days are wearing my memories. There's something hollow about wearing tight jeans and oversized shirts and not knowing what a pinchroll is or being able to reminisce about cassettes.