Paula's Media Pet

Audio Cassettes

It's unbelievable how much time of my teenage years I spent gathering music on tapes. I recorded music from the radio onto cassettes and decorated these tapes with images I cut out of magazines. writing each song on the inside of the cover I had designed. I would go to the library and rent out tapes in order to copy them. I was so happy I had a double cassette player with a recording function so I could copy one tape to another. And that's what I did. It was the ultimate proof of friendship, if not of love, to compile a mix tape with all your favorite songs for your friend. It took an entire afternoon to do that. I loved it.

Family Photo Album

The family photo album is something I vividly remember. A heavy red or black thick and big leather book with stiff black pages. Inside black and white photos with white deckle edges, showing major life events from the first baby steps to the first day at school, the first bike ride, holidays, birthdays, weekend trips and family members in all different combinations, adolescence, early adulthood and until the next generation enters the picture. Further back in the album the images became colorful though only magenta seemed to be the color most resistent to fading. Each page had a handwritten note with key information on them: place, date and name. Between each thick black page was a sheet of transparent waxed paper with an imprinted pattern that reminded of a spider web. How funny that actually is. As if the dust of time had already settled on those old-fashioned albums while there were still in use...