Date of publication: January 1o, 1999
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Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
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Comments on the site (especially interested in opinions on PayPal, the Amazon tip jar, and Microsoft Reader e-books.)
Comments on this column:
Stumbled onto your website column while scanning search engine
results
for Neil Young. I will be turning 48 in four months so I guess I've been
wandering around Geezerville for quite sometime now and can certainly
relate to your ideas. One thing though, the lyric "Old man take a look at
my life, I'm a lot like you" is from "Old Man" which appeared on Harvest,
the album following After The Gold Rush. But then, it has been a while,
hasn't it?
J.M.
AM
Certainly it is poignant--and terrifying--to think about the time when all our own memories will be gone. (Unless they survive in eternal life? Some days I believe that, some days I don't.)
I was also thinking about two-year-old Daniele as captured on a tape. I've been thinking a lot lately about Maggie, my three-year-old niece-by-choice. I have some memories of her that are so sweet. But when I'm gone, and everyone else who holds those memories is gone, will the three-year-old Maggie be gone, even if a 40-year-old Maggie is still alive?
What is left of three-year-old Maureen and three-year-old Mike? People remember us (my mother, my aunts and uncle), but in how much detail?
One version of eternal life is that we are remembered in the mind of God. I said that wasn't enough for me--I want my own consciousness to continue--but I guess it's more than nothing. And whatever we get is what we get, no matter what we wish.
MS
I have a great collection of memories on vinyl. Most are from my college years - and before! The Four Tops, Aretha, Otis, etc. One that I truly treasure is my 195? Elvis' Gold. I refuse to lend it out, but happily invite friends for Elvis and a beer on Saturday night.
I recently promised one neighbor to tape the record for her. Not only did I have trouble finding a blank tape, I couldn't remember how to transfer the contents of the vinyl record to the cheap mylar.
I miss records just as I miss drama on radio and nice, heavy cars with chrome on the side. Oh, what I would give to have my old '56 Chevy back.
Shame on you for selling those records. But, you are just enough younger than I am that you wouldn't have known better.
Nancy
Guess what. CD-R media decays, too, if you leave it exposed to sunlight.
But files on the Internet *are* as close to immortal as counts, I've found. (It's amazing how some overheated opinion that you posted on FIDOnet in 1985 can continue to come back and bite you on the ass, seemingly forever.) So I think the trick here is to convert the audio to .MP3 files, claim they're copyrighted and that we're vigorously prosecuting infringers --- and THAT should guarantee that the files get traded around and backed up forever!
BB
Hope you have a happy new year... and as part of my resolution I have decided to stop spending so much time on the computer at home, so I can spend that time with family that won't always be with me...and then I can spend quality time with my computer, once they are gone to seek their fortune. So please remove my name from your list!
MKing
I absolutely loved this one! And Neil Young is one of my favorites too.
Boy, that struck a chord. Okay, not as deep a chord as the one that's reverbing because my youngest leaves for college tomorrow, but a chord, all the same.
Your column struck a neatly resonant note, in that I've been spending my spare moments in the last month going through my archives of reel-to-reel tapes. Seems that even Scotch audiotape disintegrates with time, and all my concert performances from 20 years ago are slowly becoming flakes of oxide in the bottoms of blue-and-white boxes. Music is *supposed* to be ephermeral, I guess, and any honest appraisal would say that most of these moments are deservedly lost. But there are times and places that will never be again enshrined there, and the voices and talents of people now dead, so I can't let them fade away while preservation is possible. Ergo, I've been digitizing the music into .wav files and burning them on CD.
![[IMAGE]](finley.gif)
I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.What's remarkable is that this collection of manifestos about the new age a'dawning contains proclamations by Tony Blair, Al Gore, Charles Handy, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler ... and me.
So I'm up north at a cabin with the family, and as I always do, I have brought along a box of old cassette tapes, on which I copied, many years ago, my record collection, plus records I borrowed from friends.
This particular time I choose an old favorite I haven't heard in years, Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush," with Buffalo Springfield's first album on the other side.
It's a very short, eerie record, with hallucinogenic lyrics and a fractured-hippie persona. But I don't get to hear much of it because midway into the first song, the machine stops. I run to the eject button, but too late. The tape is snarled and twisted along the capstan. Once the tape in a cassette flips over, it is certifiably toast.
I sigh a medium sigh, because so many tapes, over our many years together, have met with this end. You halfway expect a tape made in 1976 to self-destruct by 1999. And though it has taken me some time, I have learned I can live without having every Neil Young record. Although, as I say, this was a good one.
This particular cassette was a bargain-basement Scotch 90 minute low-bias tape. I used to buy them in ten-packs at Target for $7.95. I paid the lowest possible price for them, and then I recorded invaluable records onto them, and then I sold the records for $1.25 each to the Wax Museum on lake Street -- many of them records that are so out of print now that they fetch prices of $100 and more.
It was an outlandish, idiotic act of faith on my part. At least a vinyl record was substantive. The grooves were reliable, molded plastic. It might scratch, or melt, but it wouldn't turn itself inside out, like tapes do.
What is a cassette tape, especially a 90-center, but a 100-yard stream of quarter-inch mylar, embedded some kind of plasticized rust? You could never keep one from exploding without the cassette. What kept it from snarling in the cassette? Angels.
My predicament is Janus-faced. Looking back, my treasure of tapes is rapidly disintegrating. At 48 years of age, I have outlived them.
But looking forward, the new technologies, including recordable CDs, DAT tapes, and other digital formats, will surely outlive me.
Whether looking forward or backward, you must admit this is at least somewhat poignant. You hate to lose what you have, but what's much worse is that eventually you yourself will be lost, as your mylar comes off the capstan, and all your information scrozzles.
And it's not just music. I have recordings of my kids' first conversations. Sometimes they are sandwiched at the end of music tapes. I'll be listening to Steve Miller, and all of a sudden my daughter will be 2 years old again, and calling me "da-ey," her version of daddy.
And it's not just recording tape. Degradation occurs to color photos, too. Pictures supposed to make our Kodak moments immortal are turning bluer every year, and our memories fade into blue in our hands.
It is the foreshadowing of your own death, when your memory is suddenly erased, and anything you ever wanted people to know had better already be communicated. Because that toothpaste is gone.
So I'm sitting at my laptop, in the cabin, with my son Jon, and it's late at night, and the snow is flying furiously outside, in those big chunky flakes that, if you tried catching one on your tongue, might knock you over.
We have no Internet connection up here, so we're trading sentences with each other, just to keep from being bored. Thinking of the music I just lost, I type "Old man, take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you."
It's a lyric from "After the Gold Rush."
And Jon, who types faster than I can, blazes off an entire stream-of-conscious, misspelt paragraph. It is pure 10-year old madness:
"Hi, im joN fiNLEY AND IM COOL BECAUSAE COOL IS RESALLLY NICE oop I preswsed capsloclk and im really typing messely and this is neat but itsw eird and its weird cant figur4e out aanything to typr amnd its really coolanadd the is is really coiool asnd fun and Daddy I love yoyu very m7ch."
And I'm thinking, old Neil is still out there, stomping around, bending that guitar over his knee. If he thought I was going gooey about an old record, he'd remind me that rust, even plasticized rust, never sleeps.
And I'm thinking, I've got to save this message to disk. The disk will die, and the bits comprising these sweet young words will go skittering into oblivion.
But until such time, I'm keeping it.
For more thoughts on music, check out my completely capricious list of ten favorite records -- sure to ignite a riot.
Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
Get your signed copy of
The NEW Why Teams Don't Work
by Mike & Harvey Robbins
from Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Just click on the book cover!
A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic
by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley
Paperback
Table of contents and sample chapters of this book...
Just click on the book cover to order your signed copy for only $12.95.
Table of contents and sample chapters of this book...
Why Change Doesn't Work:
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Harvey Robbins, Michael Finley
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