Music, Movies, and Machines
Thursday, December 25, 2008 - Monday, August 20, 2012
Synopsis
The name of Music, Movies, and Machines comes from a very simple fact: during this era, I began to discover music separately from what I was directly exposed to by parental guidance, watch films that contained music I had never heard before, and I had computers and game consoles enter my life that reshaped my daily habits.
Segmenting Riding In The Back was difficult as my lifestyle generally remained unchanged throughout that entire period, but that is not true for Music, Movies, and Machines, which has two distinct periods.
Movies
Labyrinth
Dirty Dancing
My grandmother will often watch movies in the master bedroom whenever my grandfather and father are watching something she finds uninteresting in the living room. At this era, I generally stayed in the living room, but I would occasionally go back and join her to watch something. One day in the summer of 2009, I walked back there, and joined her watching the last few scenes of Dirty Dancing. She would watch the movie rather often, but I'd never catch anything but the ending scenes. I'd had some moderate exposure to the music of the late '50s and early '60s, but the soundtrack for the movie contained several songs which became favorites of mine later on.
Machines
eMachines W2047
As a child, I would go through phases where I all I wanted to do. The last major independent phase I had before all my interests began to converge was that of my Windows XP phase in late 2011. I had remembered the existence of an old PC tower in the shed, and asked my father to bring it in. The assumption was that the system no longer worked due to power issues, but it turned out that the system was just temperamental to turn on: once it was up and running, it was completely fine.
Notable Tracks
Like A Virgin - Madonna - 1984
My parents had made the decision to drop the satellite at the end of 2011. We'd all started using YouTube a lot more regularly, and with the addition of a Roku and a Sony Media Player to the house, all three of us started watching YouTube in the living room. After discovering the presence of music videos on the website, I encountered them watching Madonna's Like A Virgin, and I was quite enamoured with the song. My mother had a CD of her Immaculate Collection album, so I scanned it into the eMachine.
As 2012 coincided with the beginning of the windowsxprules1 YouTube Channel, I used the song as the background for one of the channel's earliest videos.
Sad Sweet Dreamer - Sweet Sensation - 1974
One of my grand aunts was a concert pianist for years, and now, she spends her retirement traveling around the world. When she returned from Scotland in 2012, she brought back something for me: a copy of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster by Richard Brassey, a kids' book about the famed cryptid. In those days, I would often have the eMachine play music in the background while I was doing something else, including reading. I was playing Rock On: 1975 in the background, and as I began to read it, this song began to play. To this day, Sad Sweet Dreamer is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear about the Loch Ness Monster in any capacity.