Mike Dressel

What’s wrong with this picture? There is nothing wrong with this picture.  Carry on about your business.  (via)

The MODniks, everybody! Oh boy. (via)

Growing up in Florida in the 90s the listening choices, where radio was concerned, were bleak.  But nestled near the top of the FM dial was Real Radio 104.1, a talk station that was an alternative to the preponderance of country music and top forty pablum.

It was entertaining talk, not dominated by partisan screamers nor too terribly shock jock-y, less annoying and shouty than those morning zoo crew shows (the Platypus and the Wino!  Or Aardvark John and the Molester!), mostly just goofy stunts and call-in segments, on-air games and chatting with guests.  (Though Larry the Cable Guy frequently appeared on one show early on in his career.  SORRY about giving THAT GUY a platform and audience!)

Later on the station, for my friend Jules and me, became a beacon of sorts.  When returning from up north to Florida by car, it was a relief to be able to be close enough to Orlando to pick up the signal for 104.1, it meant we could stop shuffling through stations, trying to avoid rabid preachers and too-slick country songs, it meant we were almost home.

ANYWAY!  The format switched from talk to music on the weekends, and Erik Dennison’s Sunday Night Vinyl was the perfect soundtrack for those teenage years, when everyday IS like Sunday, and love —whatever vague notion you have of the meaning of that word, when really it is all just hormones—will tear you apart again, and again and again, your life ruled by the dual urges of apathy and inertia. The playlist was like the perfect mix tape passed on to you by a hip, trusted mentor.  The songs slotted perfectly with whatever was your mood that night: laying in your bedroom despairing music, driving aimlessly in your car around familiar streets that felt too confining, maybe desiring someone you know can’t love you back and stopping for a slurpee at 7-11 and dreading Monday mornings music, sneaking out of your house to go downtown to see a rock show at the Edge that you didn’t quite make it to so you just kicked around and maybe smoked pot out of an improvised apparatus, an apple or a toilet paper roll or a coke can, music.  Whatever you were doing or inclined to do, but please don’t change the station.

Later, in college, it was getting ready to go out music, when Monday mornings no longer held their terrible power over you and the clubs beckoned.  Waiting while M. put on her eyeliner music, “should I wear these vinyl pants or my bowling shirt?” music, windows rolled down speeding on the highway music.

Tired of iTunes shuffling through my music collection and feeling nostalgic the other night, I searched for a Sunday Night Vinyl podcast to no avail.  Though, out of a sense of nostalgia, or some sort of musical solidarity, I did become a fan of the show on Facebook.

Color-coordinated Living

This image is from Lewis’s Fifth Floor: A Department Story, where Stephen King (no, not THAT one, the photographer) documented the “lost” fifth floor of UK department store Lewis’s, closed to the public since the ’80s.  These pictures are so immaculately retro; I sort of want to curl up in them.  (via)

Here is New York | E.B. White