Entertainment For Lively Minds
What to do with Cassettes?
The time has come to get rid of all the cassettes. Lots of them. The majority home recorded but a few hundred pre recorded. As it's a free listings day I'm sticking a few on E Bay to see if they find a home, 50p + p&p. Not really worth the time and effort but if someone wants them then why not? Any not sold will go to the Charity Shop and probably be there forever. But what about the home recorded ones? No monetary value. I shall try Freecycle and if someone takes them good and well. If not can they be recycled? Anything to avoid further landfill considered.
115.899 cassettes listed on E Bay at present.2 bids take Nirvana's Come As You Are cassingle to 3.20 while nobody has bid for John Lennon Live Peace In Toronto a snip at 1.64. Can't see the Sonic Youth Live tape reaching that 624.42 asking price though. I'd forgotten how strange E Bay is.
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You could go retro
and pull the tape out, draping it over some trees or bushes next to a footpath so walkers could coninue their journies wondering what exactly was on the tape strewn through the shrubbery.
Me and some mates. We did that once with a video.
Found it draped over a load of bushes. We carefully rewound it, dreaming that it might be a load of red-hot pornographic filth.
It wasn't.
Whoops!
had to rely on the old imagination then, Lenny!
Had you explored the bushes further
you may well have "come across" (sorry) a crumpled up torn out page from a gentleman's magazine shoved further in the bushes. Someone found one in some foliage at the back of school once. It was shown around, but don't remember the exact details. Thinking about it now, it's a bit like the tapes in the bushes - what was someone doing tearing out pages from a magazine and shoving them in a hedge? It's not a logical thing to do.
porn in bushes
Back in the day, there was no way of getting rid of porn. you couldn't put it in the bin, in case your Mum found it. So periodically you took a plastic bagfull down the woods and left it there for the benefit of schoolboys.
play them
i did recently and was surprised how good ( some of them ) sounded
but then again I'm an analog kinda guy
Turn them into an art installation
Find an old toilet bowl and polish it up until it gleams. Cram all the tapes into it. Write "Music?" on the lip of the bowl in marker pen. Wee on it and then place a fresh dog turd on top.
Put it on Ebay for ten thousand pounds.
Bin...
'em.
No nostalgia value for tapes
Like VHS tapes, too - most charity shops won't even take them nowadays, though I still trawl for the odd music or comedy VHS tape that never made it to DVD. I'll be impressed if you sell any of your tapes unless there are any exclusive tracks hidden on them, but good luck with it!
Though I never listen to them, I love my box of home-recorded cassettes - I'm sure for most of us they would have been our first way into actively expressing our love of music, making mixtapes, designing the sleeves, taking them to parties, all of that Proustian stuff. Sigh.
Thanks
Thanks for all your comments including the more radical suggestions. Out of the last 50 completed sales on E Bay only 14 sold so I'm not being unduly optimistic. A Milli Vanilli cassingle sold and Van Morrison's Poetic Champions Compose didn't, E Bay's a strange place. It simply takes too much time and effort to list the things so I don't think I shall be doing much more of that.
As for the home recorded things ideally I'd like to hand them over to someone with the musical curiosity to see what they might find.Failing that someone who will tape over them and at least make use of them. Freecycle will hopefully come up with someone.
Can the things be recycled if need be and how do I go about doing so?
I may just put them into the packaging recycling container and hope for the best.
The main issue is I will not live long enough to ever play all the music I've acquired again and something simply has to go.I did listen to a few of them yesterday and had fun but they're still going to go.
my local tip
which is probably called something grander - and indeed more accurate is excellent - they have a team on hand who direct you to one of about a dozen skips or other containers depending on what it is you're 'tipping'. Apparently they managed to recycle over 60% last year's waste.
Talkng Books
I gave a lot of home-recorded cassettes to the RNIB a few years ago. They used them to produce talking books. Don't know if they still do this, though.
I still have a few hundred that I will eventually decide I'm never going to get round to listen to.
Thanks for that
I'll check it out.If they want them I'll be delighted to pass them on.
There's always recycling
see http://myzerowaste.com/2010/02/how-to-recycle-audio-cassette-tapes/ for useful info