1984 - I thought I was only dreaming
Dec. 27th, 2014 02:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melliciousAside: I threatened on Twitter to "rickroll" the last day of Music Advent, since I was on 1987 on Christmas Day and that turns out to be when "Never Gonna Give You Up" was released. (1987, I mean, not Christmas. And I do remember Rick Astley from back in the 80s, but he was never one of my particular favorites, as I remember it.) I don't think you can really do a rickroll in the old sense, now that most places you post videos give you a preview of the video, can you? Of course I still could have picked "Never Gonna Give You Up" as my 1987 song, anyway, but I didn't do that either. You'll have to wait and see - or go over to #musicadvent on Twitter, if you're really dying to know what I did pick. (Apparently rickrolling as a meme interests me more than the song does. But I'm very interested to see that the VEVO version of "Never Gonna Give You Up" has nearly 100 million views. I can't think of anything else I've ever looked at that had near that many. -- I don't guess there's any way to know how many views that song has gotten altogether since it was all over the place back in the heyday of the rickroll. It'd be an interesting thing to know!) (added: Wikipedia does say, though, that 18 million people are estimated to have been rickrolled, and that the original video has been taken down. For what that's worth.)
OK, so, 1984. Well, here's my official Music Advent song, first of all:
As I said when I posted it on Twitter, this is not by any means my favorite song of the year - although it's a good song! better than I remembered, actually - but those outfits and that hair are so evocative of that time, to me. (Love the pink lighting, too!)
A band all my friends seemed to have simultaneously discovered in 1984 was Simple Minds. This is probably my favorite song of theirs, and I'm not sure if I ever saw this video back then. (You didn't get any choice in what was on MTV, after all, and Simple Minds didn't get a lot of MTV play until "The Breakfast Club" which didn't come out until early '85.)
I talked a couple of entries back about going to see Echo and the Bunnymen, and that's the only concert I have been able to confirm that I went to in 1984. Apparently I went to even more concerts in 1985 than I realized, because everything I've thought was in 84, other than that one, turned out to be 85. (So, next entry!)
1984 was the year I worked at the main circulation desk of the main library at UT (the PCL, that is) for a good part of the year. That was an interesting job. I can't remember which part of this came first, but for most of the second half of the year, I worked at the PCL in the mornings, went home for lunch, and went to the PMA library in the afternoons. (PMA is Physics-Math-Astronomy, and I have read lately this was the same timeframe when Neil deGrasse Tyson was at in grad school at UT. It's entirely possible that I came into contact with him there but if so I have no memory of it. Darn.) The circ-desk job was considered so stressful that you were only supposed to stay at the desk for two hours at a time, although this was pretty regularly broken. There was always a line of people checking out books. They had the titles mostly computerized by that time, and what the clerks did was scan them. But there were lots of glitches. The gigantic physical card catalog also still existed in 1984 - it filled a whole large area of the lobby - and I remember short stints of filing cards in that. (Very boring, as you might imagine.) The PMA job was working with the serials - meaning the scientific magazines - and that was also pretty boring, a lot of the time. I checked in new ones, and I tried to find whole runs of different publications for a given time-period so I could send them off to be bound, which I remember as being tremendously frustrating because there was almost always something missing. You either had to wait for it to show up, or you could declare it lost and try to order another copy, which meant waiting around for ages - months, usually - to get it. Serials was really very frustrating generally in those days, and that was what I mostly worked on in my short library career. (Maybe that's largely why it was so short!)
OK, so, 1984. Well, here's my official Music Advent song, first of all:
As I said when I posted it on Twitter, this is not by any means my favorite song of the year - although it's a good song! better than I remembered, actually - but those outfits and that hair are so evocative of that time, to me. (Love the pink lighting, too!)
A band all my friends seemed to have simultaneously discovered in 1984 was Simple Minds. This is probably my favorite song of theirs, and I'm not sure if I ever saw this video back then. (You didn't get any choice in what was on MTV, after all, and Simple Minds didn't get a lot of MTV play until "The Breakfast Club" which didn't come out until early '85.)
I talked a couple of entries back about going to see Echo and the Bunnymen, and that's the only concert I have been able to confirm that I went to in 1984. Apparently I went to even more concerts in 1985 than I realized, because everything I've thought was in 84, other than that one, turned out to be 85. (So, next entry!)
1984 was the year I worked at the main circulation desk of the main library at UT (the PCL, that is) for a good part of the year. That was an interesting job. I can't remember which part of this came first, but for most of the second half of the year, I worked at the PCL in the mornings, went home for lunch, and went to the PMA library in the afternoons. (PMA is Physics-Math-Astronomy, and I have read lately this was the same timeframe when Neil deGrasse Tyson was at in grad school at UT. It's entirely possible that I came into contact with him there but if so I have no memory of it. Darn.) The circ-desk job was considered so stressful that you were only supposed to stay at the desk for two hours at a time, although this was pretty regularly broken. There was always a line of people checking out books. They had the titles mostly computerized by that time, and what the clerks did was scan them. But there were lots of glitches. The gigantic physical card catalog also still existed in 1984 - it filled a whole large area of the lobby - and I remember short stints of filing cards in that. (Very boring, as you might imagine.) The PMA job was working with the serials - meaning the scientific magazines - and that was also pretty boring, a lot of the time. I checked in new ones, and I tried to find whole runs of different publications for a given time-period so I could send them off to be bound, which I remember as being tremendously frustrating because there was almost always something missing. You either had to wait for it to show up, or you could declare it lost and try to order another copy, which meant waiting around for ages - months, usually - to get it. Serials was really very frustrating generally in those days, and that was what I mostly worked on in my short library career. (Maybe that's largely why it was so short!)
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