Happy New Year, 1961 (and Other Recent Finds)

Howdy!

I hope everyone reading this has had a happy whatever you had, or are having, or didn't have but enjoyed anyway. 

By chance, this week, I came across a recording of a group of family and friends in a brief recording as they celebrate the new year. Whether this is from late on December 31st, or during the day of January 1st is unclear to me, but it doesn't really matter. What is clear - and this is only clear from an extremely brief mention of having discussed John Kennedy's selections for his cabinet, is that this is from 1960 into 1961. 

The tape runs a bit over twenty minutes. The first third is some fairly random conversation. The second third, starting around the eight minute mark, features what I'm guessing is a young person, perhaps early teens, who has done fairly well with lessons thus far - he or she starts with a simple piece but then goes into some more challenging material. The final third (or so) features a more adept pianist (akin to what my friend Andy used to call me, "an impromptu pianist"), one able to provide an improvised accompaniment on command, to a series of traditional American songs, which is how the rest of the tape proceeds. 

I just eat this sort of thing up. I hope you enjoy it as well. 

Download: Friends and Family Gathering for New Year's, 1961, with Conversation and Music

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I decided to fill up the rest of this post (except for the "very short reel") with things I have only recently discovered on reels in my possession. Note that this does not mean I just acquired these reels, only that I have just heard them for the first time. 

And that includes the following relatively short Audio Letter. I find this to be a fairly fascinating artifact. It appears to be from a man in the military (I haven't heard anything to discern which branch), talking about some of his activities while perhaps on leave or otherwise with some free time in Japan. This is actually the last part of what must have been at least two tapes sent at once - the opening moments indicate that he is picking up were the previous recording left off. As far as I can tell, I do not own part one. 

Anyway, there are some interesting stories and observations here, and it's a good little listen. 

Download: Unknown - Audio Letter from Japan (Part Two)

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From the sublime to the ridiculous... here's a short tape of someone making a pass at doing a "funny" newscast. Much of it is presumably original, and all of it is aggressively unfunny. A few bits are lifted, with a few minor changes, from George Carlin routines, but carried off here without any sense of what made the Carlin material "work" for Carlin. I come across stuff like this every now and then, and thought I would share it with all of you. Ecch. 

Download: Unknown - A Painfully Bad "Funny" News Report

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And now, from the ridiculous to the horrid. Four and a half years ago, I featured a short tape I labeled "Badgering a Toddler", in which a man tried, with increasingly abusive tone, to get a very small child to speak into the tape recorder. 

Today I have a sequel, not featuring the same person, but similar behavior - actually quite a bit worse, in my opinion. 

This comes from a much longer segment (over a half hour) in which the child you will hear - clearly an early learner still getting the hang of reading - reads a book, haltingly, with a lot of errors and requests to know what certain letters spell. Near the end of that segment, which overall is quite tedious, an adult, most likely his father, joins him, and the abusive treatment you will hear below follows. The kid doesn't even react - I am of course speculating, but my guess would be he was used to treatment like this from daddy.

Thankfully for this child, a woman (again, presumably his mother) enters the room, and, perhaps having heard what was going on, suggests that the child read to himself in his head, and she shuts off the machine. 

This tape, by the way, was almost disintegrating before my eyes. Much of the sound of the reading segment was audible only in small segments, with silence or tiny sounds in between, although this segment played well. Anyway, the tape was quite damaged, and appeared more damaged after it ran across the heads, as if the recording tape itself was disgusted with what it contained. I ended up throwing it out after making the sound file. Which is where behavior like this belongs. 

Download: Unknown - Badgering a Child Who is Learning to Read

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And now it's time for our "Very Short Reel". This one is a little longer than most, and is another "announcer demo reel", of the sort that would be sent out by aspiring (or established) voice-over men and women (and/or by their agencies) to any and all prospective clients. In this case, it's the wonderfully named Bucky Kozlow, who did a less than professional job in creating this tape - it really does start the way you'll hear now, with a bit of garbled conversation leading into the sales pitch, which seems to begin mid sentence. I also enjoy the fact that he leads off by referring to the recipient of the tape as "an old friend", but almost immediately afterwards, introduces himself as one would to a stranger. Otherwise, it's pretty much standard issue for this sort of thing. 

Download: Bucky Kozlow - Voice Over Narration Demo

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Finally, as I did on my song-poem blog, I am sharing my family's Christmas card for this year. For most of the past decade - with a few exceptions - we have tried to create something interesting and different each year, and most of my late-December posts in recent years have featured a sharing of the latest card - you can click around in those old posts if you're interested. 

Anyway, here is this year's card. The concept was mine, but my older child Sage had the wherewithal to make it work via computer wizardry and such.