Sunday, April 17, 2011

Fifteen years of accumulated spring cleaning


click for bigger psycho-mnemonic cartography


In sight of a theoretical moving out, I've finally started making practical steps. I've wanted to let go of the plastic for a while now, so that's what's left. If you were ever in doubt on my commitment to essentiality, here you go.

I felt remarkably little remorse throwing out the CDs themselves. CDs aren't beautiful. I kept my meager vinyl because it is. I plan, in my new place, to create a wall-of-art with the more striking of the cd booklets, but then again, I might not do that at all. I've lived a long time in this house/room and it had been overcompressed with little trinkets, toys and memorabilia for the larger part of that duration. When I get a new place I intend for very spartan interior design, at least for a couple of years.



Goodbye to plastic. That which was worthy has long since been digitized.



Here's a few interesting thoughts that came with taking out the trash:

1. Curiously, some of my CDs have been breeding in the piles. I apparently have two "Lost Paradise" CDs by Paradise Lost, two "Invictus" copies by Virgin Steele and two of "Red" by King Crimson. Also three different print copies of Psychotic Waltz's "A Social Grace", but at least I remember how that happened. Not the rest.

2. Fuck, I bought a lot of trash when I was younger. I have Exxplorer's "coldblackugly" in here somewhere (and Symphonies of Steel, thankfully, but still). Probably the most putrid thing in here was however, and somehow twice, Jag Panzer's "Dissident Alliance". I do not remember having bought either of them.

3. I had a *lot* of cover compilations from various magazines. Turns out I remember most of the songs on them extremely well. I must have listened to them nearly as much if not more than I did real records. I'd never do that nowadays.

4. Melissa is still the best heavy metal cover.

5. I have absolutely none of the collector genes my brother and father seem to have in spades. For this I am thankful for a couple of reasons. One is that I do not enjoy the feeling of nostalgia, generally. In an indirect way this is also connected with how I'm trying to take positive steps forward in my life (the moving out is just part of that mindset) and being tied down with fifteen years of CD weight is something to be liberated of, definitely.

6. Once I got through the CD piles, I started tearing down posters and removing small items of no consequence that had accumulated through decades of teenage entropy. I threw away bad comics, I gave bad books to my dad (as he cannot bear the thought of throwing away books), I seriously didn't stop until I ran out of garbage bags. I wish I had more of them, actually. It's a good feeling. I'll finish up this project in the coming week. I intend to leave this room as bare as I arrived in it.


And in a neat little pile, as these things go.

14 comments:

  1. The horror, the horror...

    As a person that has the collector's genes, seeing all this mass of garbage bags, is a bit striking, to say the least. I have also done this in the past, when I left my last childhood toys, along with a perfectly working AMIGA 500, to the garbage, because I was also moving, and I no longer needed them.

    However, I have to ask. Why did you decide to throw away the CDs, instead of selling them?

    As for Jag Panzer's "Dissident Alliance", I have your answer: Greek Metal Hammer.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hah, you're right on Dissident Alliance!

    I don't want to sell CDs, not sure why. I can't explain it, at all!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jean Michel Jarre, Equinoxe. Lots of psychoactive drugs used with that one and Oxygene and Zoolook. I'm not ashamed.

    ReplyDelete
  4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJBZluOfFy0

    ReplyDelete
  5. This was a brave move but i can't see myself doing it. To be honest, i've done a little bit of ''cleaning'' myself a year back and gave a friend of mine about 200 cds for free since they were of no apparent use to me. An interesting thing though is that there are some genres of music (especially indie/alternative stuff from the early '90s) that had records released on cd only format back in the day and it's a bit pretentious seeing them reissued on vinyl (just an observation). Keeping the cds has nostalgic value for me (even though this feeling is a bit made up since i was a little boy in the early '90s) because that's the format i associate them with.

    On the other hand i see myself regularly deleting my mp3s without thinking twice about it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. That's the spirit in which I cleaned out too: I've digitized that which has worth, and I've bought and perused the CDs of that which I found worthy in digital. So why fret over nostalgia?

    Also, I have a challenge. Who can name the most records just from that blurry picture?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anathema - Serenades
    Black Sabbath - Vol 4
    Captain Beyond - Captain Beyond
    Dark Angel - Darkness Descends
    Faith No More - The Real Thing (Yuk!)
    Fates Warning - No Exit
    In the Woods... - Omnio
    Jean Michel Jarre - Equinoxe
    King Crimson - Starless and Bible Black
    King Diamond - Them
    Mayfair - Behind
    Mekong Delta - Kaleidoscope
    Metallica - Master of Puppets
    Moahni Moahna - Why
    Motörhead - Bomber
    Othyrworld - Beyond into the Night of Day
    Paradise Lost - Lost Paradise
    Psychotic Waltz - A Social Grace
    Queensrÿche - Promised Land
    Queensrÿche - S/T
    Rainbow - Rainbow Rising
    Sacred Blade - Of the Sun + Moon
    Saviour Machine - Saviour Machine I
    Shadow Gallery - Carved in Stone
    Solitude Aeturnus - Into the Depths of Sorrow
    The Gathering - Nighttime Birds
    Veni Domine - Spiritual Wasteland
    Voivod - Nothingface

    The brownish one under Rainbow Rising and the one with lots of white stuff on it over Moahni Moahna album and next to Sabbath and Gathering look very familiar too but nothing comes to my mind..

    ReplyDelete
  8. Errr! Motörhead's Overkill of course, not Bomber.

    ReplyDelete
  9. brownish is Tiamat - Astral Sleep and whiteish is Yes - Relayer. You did amazingly good, it's kind of scary.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Ah I am familiar with both albums after all. Actually I kind of surprised even myself on this. Though some luck was involved too! I looked up that Moahni Moahna album on Metal-Archives just a week ago or so and would've never known it otherwise.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anathema - Serenades
    Black Sabbath - Vol 4
    Fates Warning - No Exit
    King Diamond - Them
    Metallica - Master of Puppets
    Motörhead - Overkill
    Paradise Lost - Lost Paradise
    Rainbow - Rainbow Rising
    Voivod - Nothingface
    Tiamat - Astral Sleep

    Considering I managed to spot all the albums I was familiar with, I would say I did pretty good.

    ReplyDelete
  12. I was browsing through your old posts and came over this again. This time, almost 3 years later I could spot over thirty albums. How times change, I even own a few of these myself now (although only from the ones I initially could guess, slow n' steady. I'll leave it to you to guess which ones!). I still don't know what all of these are though, even some the one's that are in plain sight! Maybe I'll check back in another 3 years to see if there has been any improvements!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This was an impressive post. I respect the purge documentation. I like the six thoughts, also. I did a similar purge when I was 19 yrs old, leaving to go on "mission" for the Mormon church. I partly wanted to go on an epic (2 year) spiritual adventure and took to heart a scripture:

      1 Corinthians 13:11
      When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

      So, couple arm fulls of vinyl into the trash. I was becoming a man, right? "Childish" things behind. (Eyes buldging towards your Mayfair album)

      Fast forward from my 1989 departure, the church sent me to the land of Satanic mills... a.k.a. Royal Tunbridge Wells, to today, 2015 where I'm still not sure what all of those records are. So be it. I measure a few are meaningful to me, or at least they buzz attractively after reading about them. Since I'm walking around Montreal, today, I'm hoping some metal heads have grown weary of Nothingface and shucked a pearl back into the small sea of records at Phonopolis, a nearby record store located next to Drawn and Quarterly, a comic publisher I've read about.

      Anyway, it's to late to pray(Tyrant). More life experiences have expanded what is "manly" which I perfer to say, "meaningful." Words by authoritarians should be challenged and wrestled and distilled into one's own wisdom, then acted upon, imo. If the desire to hold a physical LP in my hands, lyric sheet, artwork, credit info ( I don't have a record player) so be it. I'm still learning about my own psychology. I know I like the hunt, for one thing. Man, if I can find anything by Secrecy or Building Rome by Mercury Rising or Social Grace by Psychotic Waltz, whoa... those will all be meaningful.

      Delete
    2. Stumbled upon this by mistake, and by chance it has indeed been 3 more years. There's only 3-4 I cannot pick out now and those are the ones that are the most obscured.

      Delete