Time

6-26-08 Time

Oh, I’ve been having a lot of fun writing about hypothetical amount of time it would take to listen to everything. I remember that The Firesign Theatre put on their LP “I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus” something to the effect of “This record will take 38:49 out of your future”. Once upon a time, I used to track how long my CD’s were in a database – I never did this with LP’s, but I did used to time my LP’s (with a stop-watch). Can’t account for variants – pitch / speed of turntable etc. So, I relied on CD lengths as being accurate – but we all know that sometimes, when the time is counting down on a CD, it goes to zero before reaching zero. Not a problem with the Mini Disc format – it’s timings do not lie!

As my pre-recorded Mini Disc collection is relatively small (109 titles?), it was easy to rank things by length…shortest single disc pre-recorded MD I own is George Jones “Super Hits” (Epic US EM 40776) at 28:20 (10 tracks). The longest single disc pre-recorded MD I own is Genesis “Turn It On Again…The Hits” (Virgin UK GENMD 8) at 78:58 (18 tracks).

I’ve got a couple of over 80 minute (factory made) CD’s – one of them is by Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, on Rykodisc, I believe. I have some Japanese compilation CD’s in the “Café Apres Midi” series that clock in at 79:59 – and my CD burner won’t copy ‘em! No, I’ve never adjusted my CD burning capacity to “over-burning” – I always figured that compatibility would be an issue (as in, I bet not all CD machines would play ‘em).

I remember an LP album side that was 36 minutes – by Ariel Kalma. I also recall a 7” single that had a mere 15 seconds on one side (by Fred Dagg, NZ comedian John Clarke). I bet there are plenty of 8 or 9 track country & western ‘best of’ LP’s that clock in at only a little bit over 20 minutes – for the entire album!

All this music and record collecting is up to a matter of how we choose to spend our time. Time, the eternal master. More time! Time, gentlemen, please! There used to be a groovy record shop in Takadanobaba in Tokyo called “Time” – but it went out of business last year. I’d been taking my time to go there since 1994.

And thanks for taking your time to read my writing. I appreciate it. I appreciate your time (and the time it took me to write it). Time, time, time. I always thought a good way to drive someone nuts would be to set all the clocks in his / her life at different times – so you never knew what time it was. Remember that bit by Ken Nordine, “What time is it?”…time…down the drain…

How do I want to spend my time? Healthy. Being with my girlfriend. Listening to music. Taking photographs of birds. Being in Japan.

I do not get to take photographs of bird as often as I would like; and I only get to see my girlfriend for maybe 48 hours per week. And I’ve only spent a little over 100 days being in Japan, since 1994. But I get to spend my time listening to music. A lot.