Are you secretly sick to death of hearing about the information highway, on-line this, interactive that? Have you asked yourself: “Do we really need virtual reality? Isn’t real reality sufficient?”
There is a technology backlash afoot. I can sense it. It’s terribly uncool and blasphemous to speak of it, so most people don’t. But I’ve noticed signs of quiet rebellion. One friend refuses to get an answering machine for her phone. Another cancels his cable-TV service. I start playing records again.
Welcome to the rebellion, my neo-Luddite friends.
Luddites were rogue bands of English craftsmen who rioted in the early 1800s for the destruction of the textile machinery that was displacing them. Their leader, real or imagined, was known as Ned Ludd or King Ludd.
Friends have jokingly called me a Luddite because of my continual problems with various expensive gizmos and my thinly veiled hostility toward them. I already own more complicated personal technology than I want to deal with.
A certain rule of inevitability governs my household: If it has complex moving parts and I own it, chances are it doesn’t work. Some of us just have Bad Technology Karma.
Microchip, wooden nickel
I finally knuckled under and bought my first home computer. I set it up and got as far as programming the printer into the system’s list of accepted printers. But the printer diskette wouldn’t come out of the disk drive when I was done. The eject button was busted. Only hours out of the shipping boxes, everything had to be packed up and returned.
CDs and CD players were supposed to be superior to vinyl records and turntables in part because CDs don’t skip. Well, mine do. With a vinyl record, at least you can nudge the tone arm if it’s skipping. How can you nudge a laser? I’d like to “nudge” the CD player right out the second-story window.
On the day I fired up my computer for the first time I also discovered Benny Goodman and rediscovered the turntable. Obviously, this was a Statement, a warning to the computer: “Listen, you little bucket of microchips, you can be replaced with a piece of low technology at any time. Just ask the CD player.”
I hadn’t used my turntable in years because I had few albums worth listening to. But last month my grandmother asked me to help clean out her basement and go through some old records. I wound up bringing home a box packed full of dusty 78s and 33 1/3s from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s that had belonged to my grandfather. He died when I was about 12 years old.
Fine vinyl
Grandpa’s albums feature old songs by Louis Armstrong, Jo Stafford, Sarah Vaughan, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Grandpa loved Benny Goodman. There are several 78s and albums by him, including a great live recording made at the Brussels World Fair in 1958, the year I was born.
The records made me sneeze when I pulled them from their sleeves. The sound came out of only one speaker. Some records were scratchy. I love them-especially the scratchy ones, because those must have been Grandpa’s favorites.
The liner notes provide hilarious commentary on the era: “Khrushchev would give three Sputniks for a Russian Benny Goodman!” This music “will be around long after rock ‘n’ roll has been laid to an uneasy rest.” And, in boxed print at the bottom of one record jacket: “This monophonic microgroove recording . . . cannot become obsolete.”
Oh, I’ll learn to live with the computer, because a writer has no suitable alternative. I’ll tolerate the CD player, with its inexplicable electronic quirks. But at least I’ve started down that long, tortuous road toward neo-Luddite simplicity. And I know I’m not alone. An army of silent rebels is marching with me.
It begins with small acts of rebellion, such as junking the electric can-opener in favor of a manual one. It ends with a trip to the antiques mall in search of the perfect gramophone for playing old 78s.
Long live Benny Goodman. Long live King Ludd.
