Muggy today and when I finally stepped outside, I was sure it was going to rain, I felt some drops, but it didn’t happen. I looked down at the pavement and it was full of cigarette butts, so I went and got the brush. The butts get stuck in the cracks and because it’s this street, there’s a lot of people hanging around, smoking, and watching. I’m tidying up outside before I get inside to do the same thing, gotta start somewhere.
The dehumidifiers are thirsty and I’m not able to tell the difference between a thirsty day and a non-thirsty day. It doesn’t seem to matter if it is hot, cold, rainy, sunny, cloudy or somewhere in between, I’m emptying the dehumidifier in the front twice a day. In the back, it’s bigger and older, but that one seems to fill up quickly too. The Archive needs to have some kind of temperature control, it can’t be damp or sweltering and it’s neither at the moment but in the winter the rain comes down and last year we had a problem in the L’office with water under the floor when we weren’t here, it might be three times a day by Christmas. Curating a collection is a 24/7 job, not just buying the records to preserve the music for posterity, for the love of it and for the quality of sound and the work, the aesthetic, but we have to physically protect it in its location. I’ve already had damage in the move. Now we have to protect it, from water, fire, lack of funds or on a mainstream level, lack of interest.
If it can survive for another lifespan, let’s say till Olivia is 80, then it will be more than us music nerds who will be grateful. Everything in the museum was once an everyday thing, it might have been rich people’s everyday with a beautiful marble statue or an exquisite piece of jewellery, but a Viking tool is fascinating too. If a trowel can survive for thousands of years and be an exciting find, imagine what the people of the year 3001 are going to think when they dig up Highway 61 Revisited, haha – and don’t say, if we make it that far. I wonder if Cervantes thought someone like me, someone he likely could not even imagine, would read Don Quixote hundreds of years later – somewhere probably in a Spanish museum is an original copy of the book, and how wonderful is that.
On the subject of Martin Phillipps, I read that he was awaiting a liver transplant. In the restaurant next door but one, Narciso has a son, Diogo, who had a liver transplant last week, he waited six years. It made Olivia and I wonder about being organ donors, saving a life after your death, you don’t need those bits anymore.
Music today has been alt-J – The Dream (2022). I’ve been wanting to investigate this band and really liked this record. I wasn’t quite sure what kind of music it was and they have a tendency to do remixes that are more dance beat orientated or with rappers, that might be for someone (Relaxer vs Reduxer, 2017/2018) but I like them in their initial form.