Tape Land 75 – The Jeep Obliviana Recordings (July 2001)
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1:31:22 – Welcome to Tape Land! On each episode, I’ll present the audio of a cassette tape from my collection. It’s a way to help motivate me to digitize more of my archives.
In July 2001 I was struggling to implement a new phase of my overly ambitious creative project “Obliviana†– and I recorded my thoughts about it in my Jeep while waiting for the bus over the course of several days, and also while walking around NYC.
One location I recorded in twice on the tape is the plaza between the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center. Little did I know that less than two months later, 9/11 would happen.
There’s a double sense of impending disaster on the tape – the approach of 9/11, and the inevitable failure of Obliviana.
Once I finally gave up on Obliviana in 2003, it led to the start of The Overnightscape, which has been a much better creative project for me.
Notes: (7/9/01) ambient sounds of the subway, (7/10/01) smoking a cigar in my Jeep, job stuff, Obliviana, Dashic Deeds, (7/11/01) Big Brother 2, financial difficulties, Frank in the future, (7/12/01) missed the bus, Fonosta Device, a flaw in Obliviana Phase 2, (7/13/01) more thoughts on Obliviana, cigar, (7/16/01) walking in World Trade Center plaza, Obliviana Day, singing beggar, taxi protest, (7/17/01) more thoughts on Obliviana, Bluffcosm CD idea, (7/19/01) Â World Trade Center plaza, more Obliviana plans, introducing 209 to the world, keystone idea.
License for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). Attribution: by Frank Edward Nora – more info at onsug.com
Loved this episode – listened early one morning. Identified strongly with the bankrupt a few years after marriage thing. My wife and I did several credit cards & lines of credit in early years, tried credit counselling, eventually declared bankruptcy. It was a relief. Haven’t gotten in that big a hole since then – though credit card use has increased since mortgage. Fun to hear you talk about the unique physical media of a book – have added Ancient Lights to my cart, hadn’t heard of Davis Grubb – though he was from WV (born 7-23, died 7-24) https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/84.
Comment by Meanderer — January 7, 2019 @ 9:18 am
After this episode I searched for “Lord of Obliviana” & ended up sending several pdfs to kindle. Maybe it’s coincidence but after reading parts of several fascinating documents, my Kindle now refuses to access any pdf, even those added after that. The curse of 209?
For the benefit of others reading this, repeating something I tweeted about: took a deep delve into the @FrankNora archive and found that he basically described Siri & Alexa in 2001: “there is microphone and speaker, and it’s on the network, and all you have to do is talk out loud to interface with the computer.” (from The Bluffcosm Report 5/1/2001) – http://franknora.com/stash/Last_Obliviana_Site/content/obliviana/bluffcosm/ow_bc/ow_bc.htm
Comment by Meanderer — January 8, 2019 @ 6:28 am