It Will Messup Your Back

In Seoul I would periodically run into sprawling, crazy cheap vinyl record sales. I might be out with Marijn to get his camera fixed or to Sinchon to eat carcenogens and there they’d be– Korean pompadours from the 70s, Teresa Teng, the Beach Boys, Morrissey and even records to revive Dutch grandfathers. Musty and a tad folorn but sorted with OCD, they were surprisingly pristine. They nearly made me part with the money I’d carefully stowed away for pantyhose and other female nonsense. I was stopped only by the impossible task of getting them home unsullied (my luggage, I had to stomp on it for it to close).

 

Still for days I pondered. The extra pocket money I might have gleaned from the eclectic loot! The joy in my household! The excuses to visit Seoul! I pictured spreading a polka dot mat in a flea market or couching the records in a car boot sale, not to mention the hipster boys (um, hipster uncles maybe) who’d stop by, be stupefied and bury me in their money.

 

[I realise that money features too prominently in this blog. Perhaps if I were a business major this would be not a problem. But I am not. I fear my future children will catch pneumonia in their paper clothes. Potato chip bag shoes. In relation to the present, I wonder if they sell hotdogs in halves for people like me who spend lunch money on Holgas. I bought a Holga 120N.]

 

But I didn’t picture other, utterly sinister possibilities from a burgeoning habit in vinyl collection. My good fortune to have tripped over the genius of Stefan Glerum on crate digging. I am relieved and gasping with gratitude for I never knew what a drop it could have been. And I adore the fluidity of his pencil work!

 

Why am I writing on a silly flake of not-real-space? Why am I making presentation slides? Draw draw draw like there’s no tomorrow! Or at least make clothes. Menswear. Make men swear.