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01-26-12 - CASSETTE: A DOCUMENTARY FILM

Someday in the distant future somebody’s going to make a documentary about the downfall of American society. It’s going to be a bummer, and an ancient John Malkovich is going to narrate it.

“Modern social scientists,” he’ll say, “trace the decline of the American empire to a singular moment: the production of the very first CD.” Cut to shots of thousands upon thousands of mirror-surfaced perfect circles — thereby inferring a correlation to colonial-era witch hunt criteria — followed by shots of the yuppies in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. “In a single decade,” Malkovich will intone, “a cultural shift of epic proportions, from the post-war ethics of quality, function and thrift… the gramophone, the vinyl record, the cassette tape… to the consumption of cheap, flashy consumer goods. Together, we worshiped the compact disc in all its fragility, and together we ensured our demise.”

Ok, so that will most likely never happen, but cassettes were pretty cool, and I’m glad we’re starting to come together on the consensus that cd’s sucked. Personally, back in high school I had a shoe box full of halfway worn out cassettes in the giant Buick station wagon I drove. For some reason, at some point I switched over to a discman with one of those ridiculous cassette adapters, and my life really never was the same thereafter.

A tape, you could pop in, pop out and then chuck back into the box without a care in the world. It played once and it would play again, for the most part. With cds you had to flip gingerly through some plastic-and-gauze book (that was going to scratch the things to high hell eventually anyway), delicately select a disc, handle it like an original copy of the Constitution, and then essentially play ring toss, aiming for the spindle on the player, all while driving.

I guess my point is that tapes were like America itself; tough but full of sentiment, maybe kind of imperfect but simple, functional and kind of beautiful sometimes. Don’t even get me started on mix tapes vs. iTunes playlists — I mourn for kids today. That’s why I was pretty excited to learn that a new friend is making a documentary on the history and re-emergence of the cassette tape.

Seth Smoot is a talented guy (one half of the amazing Seth-Kendra husband-wife photographer-stylist team Jenny and I had to opportunity to work with last weekend) and this doc is going to be tops. You should help fund it on Kickstarter — I did. Given the buzz on Hypebeast and a “Best of Kickstarter” nod from Sundance, this film is going to be big, and in the internet age docs like this shouldn’t have to go on anyone’s credit card.

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