What's in the Bag? Part 3

(Figure One: STILL The Bag)

"Alright let's wrap this turkey up before I puke."
Bob Ezrin, on producing Lou Reed's Berlin album

Well, this is the final series in a post where we exhumed the musty old bag full of not-so- much that I dug out of the garage (further context and pictures can be found HERE and HERE) for whomever is still following this little digression (bless you!)

(Figure Ten: The Coins)

Pounds, Pences, Francs and Centimes whose source has been lost to the ravaages of time.

(Figure Eleven: The Medal)

Help Spanish-speaking readers: Despite being able to grasp that its for humanitarian volunteers, I have little idea of the significance of this item (never mind how I got it!)

(Figure Twelve: The Pointies)

The pen is a gift from my father circa the eight grade, the letter opener is, I believe, from a Nepal-based missionary and the pseudo-switchblade knife is part of a reward I got for helping to clean out the basement of an Army Surplus store in in 1983. (Sad to say I lost the WWI looking helmet!)

(Figure Thirteen: The Berlin Wall)

My brother visited Germany in the late eighties and, as many did, he chipped off some bits of this notorious landmark for his historically-minded sibling. (Of course, I've never considered the authenticity of these bits, so I'm braced for any skepticism from my German readers).

(Figure Fourteen: The Insert)

Yeah, I was a Billy Bragg fanatic and so I kept this insert from Don't Try This At Home (which I bought together with the VHS of Mr. Bragg Goes to Washington.)

(Figure Fifteen: The Book)

Admit it, back in the day you had a little red (or black) book with all those numbers, half of which you duly copied down knowing you'd never use them. Of course you may have had better taste than to decorate yours with a "Nice Price" from your CD of The Clash's Cut The Crap, A Didjits sticker, A Mag Wheels Records sticker (I think...) and the explanatory sticker from Billy Bragg's The Internationale mini-LP.


As for a soundtrack to this excavaction, I can offer you examples of the two genres that dominated my listening in the mid-to-late nineties; pop-punk and country & western:









Thanks for all your COMMENTS, and for indulging me, If you have any strange excavations of your own - let me know!

What's in the Bag? Part 2

(Figure One: The Bag - still)

So I'm talking about a musty old bag full of not-so- much that I dug out of the garage (further context and pictures can be found HERE) to whomever is still following this little digression (bless you!)

(Figure Five: The 8-Track)

A commenter asked about the presence of any cassette tapes in the bag and, shockingly, there wasn't a single one. There was, however, this vintage 8-Tracks (ask your grandparents!) of Winnipeg's legendary band, The Guess Who and their album "So Long Banatyne" (named after a famous city street). I bought it for .50 from a junk store because I wanted to stage a re-creation of the cover with this guy who looked EXACTLY like Randy Bachman (who isn't even on this album) for a Guess Who fanatic I knew in Vancouver... (Ah failed ideas I have known so many of you).

Figure Six: The Exes

The items are above are fragments of early relationships. I'm not exactly a pack rat but I do save odd things and then have difficulty throwing them away once they hit a certain level of resonance. The plastic bracket and the plastic vampire teeth on the top are from an early and awkward and intense dalliance (there's an old photo that I've grayed out simply because no matter how hard the photo was to zoom in, it felt weird). The ring box in the middle, is from more complex relationship partner, and has heart-shaped post-it notes and still smells of that perfume twenty years on and goes to show that I have had a few different types in my life. The fork on the bottom was a 'gift' (she stole it from a restaurant called the Four Seasons ) my first (and ne'er to be forgotten) girlfriend. End sappy part.

(Figure Seven: The Stickers)

Yes there were no actual cassette tapes herein but over a dozen different types of blank cassette stickers - man did I kill a lot of music via home-taping back in the day (And no I have no idea why this one image will not fucking turn sideways!)

(Figure Eight: The Needle)

A record needle because while we've got 8-tracks and cassette labels we need some more dated technology - there's gotta be an Edison Cylinder in here somewhere *digs*).

(Figure Nine: Nic-A-Brac)

I have a friend named Nic who travels the world (I've never left the North American continent) and two of these are gifts from those trips (both may be from India) but the third item is a one of those little emblems you could punch out messages on at airports back in the day. The message on this one really says that Nic "does Bob Dylan voices". This was a metallic lie. Nic refused to do Bob Dylan voices so I created an impersonation of "Nic Doing Bob Dylan" which devolved into further ridiculousness like "Nic doing Bob Dylan Doing Iron Maiden" ad nauseum. High school: Your excuse for everything.

Part 3 will come after a slight detour into Mega City Four

Feel free to give us your reasonably kind take on my little Heinrich Schliemann-meets-Marcel-Proust project in the COMMENTS section and, worry not, there's no way with my shutter skills that this blog is gonna decamp over to Flickr.

What`s in the Bag? Part 1

I found the bag last week in my parent's garage. The sun-bleached canvas bag itself is of a mid-nineties vintage, as the band patches of bands sorta popular at the time indicates. As for the contents, it was a mish-mash of not so much keepsakes as little stowaways on my life's journey. These were items of my youth that, when I moved away from Winnipeg in the late nineties, I couldn't bring myself to either throw-out or burden myself with. While pawing through these items of slight significance, I was seized upon by the idea that a record (in the form of shoddily-lit, ill-composed photographs of the items discovered) should be blogged. So for those of you old enough (and perhaps North American enough) to remember the crushing disappointment that was Geraldo Rivera's on-air opening of Al Capone's vault, here's my brief foray into a sort of narcissistic archeology:

(Figure Two: The Stuff)

Here's an aerial view of the shoe box that lay inside the mystery bag.

(Figure Three: The Wires)

The first thing we found is a batch of orphan wires and plugs, not thrilling in anyway but a reminder of the connections we abandon along the way.

(Figure Four: The ID)

Next, I collected a set of items, name-tags, membership cards etc., which once gave proof of my identity to the skeptical ("Do you work here?", "Can I see your card?") On a really sad note the Jumbo Video membership is not in my name, I worked there, but for one 'Billy Bragg' - oh the things we did with the laminator to while away the midnight hours.

On that Bragg-related note (and believe me there are more of those embarrassing fan-boy moments to come), we'll leave off for now. Things can only get more exciting as we delive further into the bag...

Feel free to give us your reasonably kind take on this little excavation work in the COMMENTS section and, worry not, there's no way with my shutter skills that this blog is gonna decamp over to Flickr.