The Walrus - Music With Big Fuckin' Teeth!

05/23/2008

VISUAL NOTES: An Elegy for The Paper Record

The paper Flexi-Record enjoyed a short, albeit popular life before I was even born. Oh Flexi-Record, how I would have loved to witness the advent of your existence! I would have marveled at your grooves, pressed into hot acetate film by original Heidelberg printing presses in New York City print shops. You were cleverly adhered to a cardboard backing. How the children enjoyed your scratchy recordings of well-loved cartoon songs!

Flexi-Record, you have lived a long life. Your myriad uses, beginning in the 1960s, included various promotions and communication campaigns. In Poland, you were printed as postcards of Frank Zappa tracks with images that advertised books, museums, and travel locations. Your cereal box form was most popular in The States, and birthed a generation of whimsical package design aimed at children.

Eventually you became obsolete. The vinyl record was more durable! The cassette tape more cutting-edge! Oh, woeful day!

As you breathed your last breaths in the 80's, California's Hot Fudge Productions kept you alive by manufacturing picture records for politicians, poets, and an entire roster of weirdos. Topping this list of nuts was Juris G. Laimons, an activist who fused contemporary rock rhythms with Latvian freedom poetry.

In tribute and mourning, I present two short tracks from the Hot Fudge Productions paper record for Juris G. Laimons (aka Mr. G).

VISUAL NOTES is brought to you by Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - a clothing company that hires innovative, contemporary artists to design exceptional and wearable pieces that combat the troubling possibility of artwork losing its presence and power in our image-saturated society.