Michael R. Barrick

So a couple people who were famous decades ago died today. Neither one had done any new work in more than a decade - even the tabloids hadn't bothered with them for ages. Everything they did that people knew them for was recoded and will remain available ad nauseam. I've seen dozens of people tweeting, making Facebook status updates and blogging about how they will "miss" these people they only know through their recorded works. Nothing has changed. The ditzy nurse on my Logan's Run DVD is still there. Frighteningly tacky "Charlie's Angels" reruns have not vanished. The cassettes and vinyl left over from the 80's are still collecting dust. Nothing has changed. Please STFU now about "missing" these people.

Last night I finally dug into a long overdue task: clearing out several banker's boxes of material retained from my university days. When I was in university the commercialization of the Internet was in its infancy, and the web was only just invented. State of the art when I graduated was at 14.4 modem and Netscape 1.1. The idea of conveniently calling up "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" or ""The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in a fraction of a second when ever one desired was unthinkable. So I kept everything for reference. I had boxes full of photocopied articles of inscrutably dense Modernist and Postmodernist theory that I was sure I would want to reference along with my own painfully sophomoric hand-written essays that I was certain were of lasting brilliance. I also squirrelled away some delightfully bizarre bits of pop-culture and souvenirs like old rave flyers and tickets, the 'zine I put out in the 80's and whatnot. Most of it has now been relegated to the garbage, but some of was too kitschy to pitch. As time permits I will have to share some of best/worst of it here.