Terraplane Blues part 5

 Another day, time to work.  I decided to try something different today and bring cassette tapes.  One day last week we took a trip to my storage unit, threw away my old recliner/rocker (very dirty, but it seemed like it was caused by the storage unit), and brought some stuff home.  At my mother's request, the bigger boxes didn't even come in the house, but I just unloaded them and brought the contents (mostly art books) inside a few at a time. (those old boxes were recycled)  Also got my print group folios, some art materials, postcards and other art promotional material, and those tapes. Back in the old days, before there were compact discs, cassettes were the easiest thing to listen to, and I bought some music that way.  I also put some record albums on tape, listenable anywhere, such as my car, or boom boxes here and there.  I kept an old boom box in my studio in Carbondale, but a more modern one with a CD player in my apartment.  The cassette player in my car stopped working as I drove to Illinois to start classes, and cassettes were replaced with discs in music stores, so I started buying discs or vinyl.  Now there are no record stores, and music sections of department stores are now gone, so I don't buy anything.  Most of my cassette collection of music is still in storage (I could see it, but not reach it that day), so what I brought home was the lesser things, but it was new things to have at home or in my current studio, so I was glad to have it.  Plus I knew that the new boom box I got for the Studio has a cassette player as part of it.  Never used it, but I knew it was there.

Another thing I brought with me today was several dozen of those postcards, all things with images of my art.  (I had organized them at home over the weekend)  I figure to have some available at the Open Studio for people who want such things, and this seemed as good a day as any to bring some there.  Of course my real reason for going was related to current art, so I had brought with me the latest block, and my tools and a sharpening stone.  The tools were to take the image down to the borders, and removed the margin veneer.  Before this, I sharpened some of them.  I also checked the status of the print I pulled the last time I was there.  The ink seemed pretty dry, but I have no place to put it anyway, so I left it in the drying rack for now.  I was able to remove quite a bit of wood from the block, done now rather than when I have an audience.  This included the area between the bottom border and the top of the text.

I didn't touch anything I had drawn on the block, as I am saving all that for the Open Studio.  I ended up cutting the first word in the top line, which made me decide to go ahead and re-letter all of it. So I ended my cutting there today.  Below is how it looks now:

As for my cassette experiment- mixed results.  I had brought with me two label recorded tapes (both Atlantic), The Blues Brothers original soundtrack recording, and Led Zeppelin II, their second album, and the only one of theirs that I only have on tape.  Both are excellent albums, but were probably relegated to this box because I had other stuff on disc from each band, and just didn't listen to them as much.  One thing I realized about the soundtrack album was that some of songs were different versions than appear in the movie.  These were songs that the band performed live in the film, while the ones on the tape were recorded in a studio.  Maybe it had to be that way.  The Led Zeppelin album was their second, and was a road album, meaning it was recorded in various studios as the band was busy touring and promoting their first album, but the quality is good nonetheless.  (this may have had as much to do with becoming better songwriters and players, plus familiarity playing with each other)  One thing odd about this is that the song order is much different than any other version of the album, probably the necessity of making both sides come out even, not an issue on disc or vinyl.  So the music was good, but playing them was a problem.  First of all, I had a hard time figuring out the tape buttons on my boombox, marked but not clearly.  Second, I couldn't get the second side of either tape to play.  I'll have to figure out that later.  So I switched to a home recorded tape, which had a copy of a vinyl album on the A side- David Bowie's ChangesOne Bowie.  This was the first volume of a two record greatest hits collection, with ChangesTwo Bowie having later songs.  I believe these two albums were later combined on the Changes Bowie disc, which I later burned onto disc, which is why this tape was in the secondary box.  And when it ended I was able to flip the cassette and play some from side B, so this tape worked at least.  By the way, all of this can be found on the internet if I need to listen to it near a computer.