My neighborhood has a wealth of record stores. There’s one around the corner on 40th, and a half dozen more within walking distance.
They’re not just stores that happen to carry vinyl records in addition to some other music-related items like CDs or instruments. They specialize in records, mostly the LP albums that were the in-thing when I was coming of age. (The previous generation did more with the 45s that had one song on each side.)
I used to have a lot of records, but I got rid of them when I was moving cross country back in early 2008. I’d ditched my record player years earlier. I was fond of them, but they were heavy and took up space and I no longer listened to them.
I probably should have held onto them a little bit longer, though since I wasn’t a purist or a collector, I didn’t take extra care of them. I doubt any of them were especially valuable. And I probably wouldn’t want to set up an old-fashioned Hi-Fi system to listen to them anyway.
But people are back into records these days, enough of them to support a lot of indie record shops.
Typewriters are also making a comeback. The New York Times had a lovely piece a week or so ago on a man who took over a typewriter repair business from a man who started it in Bremerton, Washington, in 1947. The middle-aged guy who took it over – after spending a lot of time with the previous owner learning how to work on typewriters – did it more or less on a gut feeling that it was a good choice for his life.
But there’s a lot of work for people who know how to fix typewriters, both the manual and electric kind. Some people are into typewriters in the digital age.
I learned to type in high school back when there was a course called “typing” that was mostly aimed at people who wanted to do secretarial work. We learned on electric ones with no letters on the keyboard – memorizing the keyboard layout was part of the skill.
My parents had manual typewriters at home, and once I learned to type I wrote all my papers for school on them. I took one with me to college, but they took it back when they started a newspaper.
In those pre-computer days I lusted for an IBM correcting Selectric, but I never could come up with enough money. By the time I was making enough money to pay for something like that, the personal computer was a thing and I got that instead.
Cameras, too. Film cameras, not just digital ones, and not just fancy ones, but ones intended for the kind of snapshot at which the mobile phone camera has become king. At our coffee shop the baristas take Polaroids of patrons’ dogs and post them in the shop.
A friend was discussing some of his photography projects on social media the other day and it made me tempted to dig out my old Yashica-Mat twin-lens reflex camera. It was my high school graduation present. I do still have it (it’s a lot smaller than a record collection or a typewriter).
I mentioned this to the friend, musing about where I’d get film, and it turns out he has some. Maybe I’ll get back into black and white photography.
The funny thing is I take a lot of photos on my phone, snapshots mostly. No worry about wasting film. But back in the day I didn’t take a lot of pictures. Film was pricey and had to be developed, and the 120 film a twin-lens reflex uses only has 12 shots per roll.
But you get these great 2.25 inch square negatives and you can do wonders with them in a darkroom. Turns out here’s one at the rec center nearby – art photography is still a thing just as records are, at least in my neighborhood.
I used to love playing in the darkroom.
Notebooks and fountain pens have a following as well, though that might be something I see a lot because I know a lot of writers and all of us, even folks like me who do serious writing on keyboards and have horrible handwriting, love notebooks and nice pens.
I have a lot of notebooks myself, but I’ve lost all my old fountain pens. They were real fountain pens, the kind you filled from the ink bottle. They’re messy – I always had ink on my fingers back in high school – and there are some other kinds that are easier to use and a pleasure to work with.
I have some of those, but I might spring for a fountain pen and some good ink one of these days, just for the joy of it.
A lot of this is what you might call being “old school.” That’s a phrase that originated in the Black community, but like so many other things Black people did first, got picked up elsewhere.
It’s a useful phrase. I find myself using it a lot.
The interesting thing about all these old school habits is that, for the most part, they are ties to things that while they’re older than any of us (even us old folks), they aren’t all that old.
LP records started in 1948. Typewriters were first made in 1874. Cameras came along a bit earlier in the 19th century.
Pens that hold their own ink are older than I thought. A little bit of scrolling through Wikipedia informs me that an Egyptian caliph demanded such a thing in the 900s, and got it. Leonardo da Vinci apparently invented and used one as well. They started being made available in Europe in the 17th century.
In our time, that’s pretty damn old school, though the written word is quite a bit older.
But I think there’s another old school habit that should become popular again: cash.
Nowadays a lot of people pay with phones. Me, I don’t like putting all that financial stuff on the phone, so I stick with cards, which is probably fast becoming old school itself.
But there are a lot of people who would really appreciate it if you paid in cash. Small cafes. Vendors at the farmers and flea markets. Homeless folks.
I generally carry cash and I ask in shops if people prefer it. Big operations don’t; they’ve built the fees into prices and it’s easier bookkeeping. And some shops are worried about robberies and prefer to avoid dealing in cash at all.
But a lot of small shops are hurt by the fees charged by the card companies and appreciate cash.
Now I realize the broligarchs think crypto is the future of money, but given the kind of crap those people are pushing these days, I think there’s a lot to be said for ignoring that hype and sticking with cash.
Ignoring hype is about as old school as you can get.