How a Resurrection Really Feels

"In its simplest form, memory refers to the continued process of information retention over time."

The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning - "How Memory Works"

"I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged -- the same house, the same people -- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence."

Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory

"I d- / I d- / I d- / -ing, it's your move"

Macintosh Plus, "リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー"

I had hoped that I would experience true obsession during lockdown, jumping from one attempted hobby to another, reading the eighty-second page of every book in my apartment, laying out all my clothing in prismatic order, naming all my pint glasses ("the Dutchess," "Arthur 'The Shoppe' Schopenhauer"). Alas, it was not to be. I didn't take up baking because my oven was broken, and I didn't learn Norwegian or how to play a Mountain Goats song on the guitar because those things were hard. I didn't even watch Tiger King, because come on, really?

I pushed aside the crummy little speakers connected to my crummy little record player so I could set up my "home office" in that space, and sat there for years, doing more or less what I'd been doing before, only in a t-shirt. I listened to a lot of podcasts.

I also, in the very last days of working from home, starting listening seriously to a record that had been floating around for awhile by then, 2011's Floral Shoppe, by Macintosh Plus. This was, we're told, the record that kicked off vaporwave: a genre, a meme, an overly expensive collection of fashion lines that I now get regular emails and Instagram ads for...

Here is the secret I would tell the youth, the secret they would certainly ignore due to its essential uselessness to them: it is good to not be on cutting edge. It is good to wait. You get to pick up most of the video games you want on sale, and the great sluice box of other people's taste will pick out and polish many works of art for you. I only got to the The Sopranos in 2021. Turns out it's great, thanks cultural consensus. So is vaporwave the aesthetic still fashionable? Certainly it can't be cutting edge. I do not know the answers to these questions, and that brings me joy.

Floral Shoppe is a record built out of chopped up samples, decoupled from their source and recontextualized: Diana Ross, Sade, the obscure-to-me soft rock band Pages, and others. What does it sound like? I dunno; like slowly sliding through the hallways of an empty mall in day-glo pink socks, perhaps; or like trying to remember what was playing on the radio between Sacramento and Los Angeles on a car ride you took when you were eight. One could uncharitably but not entirely unusefully characterize vaporwave in general as a bunch of '80s references, and through the haze and glitchy aesthetic of Floral Shoppe I do feel what sense receptors formed in that decade tingle and hum.

At my most basic, what first drew me in was the way it literally surprised me. A sampled lyric cuts off midsentence and then loops around, mantra like but forever unfinished. Tempos change unexpectedly, human voices warp and distort, which is when the songs are at their strongest.