Old Acquaintance Not Forgot

Old Acquaintance Not Forgot

I guess it’s time for me to throw out all of my books and free up several walls, but I’m already way behind my purging the walls from CDs and LPs I allegedly should have emptied in previous resolution cycles.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

Well, it’s now a brand new year, but some things never change. As always, the arrival of a new year serves as a catalyst for people everywhere to change their ways: lose a few pounds, take that French conversation class, wake up earlier, add your favorite resolution here. What should I resolve to do in 2007?

I just read about a new device soon to hit the market called an Espresso that is able to electronically store 2.5 million books and to print and bind any of them in less than seven minutes. According to a feature on the device in the Observer that was appropriately published on New Year’s Eve (just in time for the still exorbitant machine to factor into a few people’s fantasy-land resolutions), the Espresso should be able to reproduce every book ever published within the next five years.

So I guess it’s time for me to throw out my entire library and free up several walls. However, I’m already way behind purging the walls of other things I should have emptied in previous resolution cycles. I still haven’t thrown away my CD collection which the pundits told me last year was worthless. They remain faced off against an even larger wall of, egads, LPs, objects which those same pundits hope you no longer remember. The latest New York Times trend piece about the death of albums began with the following sentence: “WHEN was the last time you listened to an album without interruption and from beginning to end?” In my case it was actually about 14 hours ago.

It’s hard for me to imagine treating the things that mean the most to me so ephemerally as to not be able to focus on them for extended periods of time or, even worse, to shuffle them randomly at will. But that’s merely an aesthetic argument; there’s an important access issue as well. I learned a valuable lesson in technology over the weekend: the entire memory of my PalmPilot got erased—all my addresses, appointments, information lists, drafts of writings, etc. Luckily all the data was backed up on my office computer and now everything seems to be back to normal.

I’ve spent more than a quarter-century amassing books and recordings in my home, which is a much longer input time than the shelf-life of most current technologies. So, the books and recordings stay; in fact, I think I’ll head over to a record store right now. But now I plan to back up my PalmPilot data on a daily basis to more than one computer.