tif 2 – old enough to remember?

It is fun how my first tif piece is about remembering old times, and this one has to be.

I know I don’t need to, but I don’t have problems telling – I’m 35, and slowly realizing I’m no longer young. So what do I remember? There are of course the big things – The Chernobyl desaster, and all the angst it caused even in western Europe. I was a kid then. I dimly remember some treatise between America and Russia about atom bombs when I was in third or fourth class. I was really, really afraid of an atomic war then, I even dreamt about it. A visit to Berlin in my mid teens when the wall was still in place. A stroll through communistic eastern Berlin on the same occasion. Perestroika at Russia, wich really sparked silly hopes for a better world back then. The fall of the Berlin wall, and the first golf war. The golf war drove everybody crazy, the days it began the teachers amost stopped teaching at school, the radio was on in class all day, featuring BBC or some German news channel, and we kept discussing. The German Reunification, which was good news in the end, although I doubted that back then and still doubt it was done in the right way. The war in former Yougoslavia, which toughed me on a personal level because I have been on vacation there many times and had penpals I met there (everybody I knew personally got through it fine).

And all the technical advances. I remember black and white TV, we got the first colour one when I was 5 or 6. And there were no privately owned TV stations back then, only three German programs, 2 Austrian ones and a Swiss one, but that was hard to understand. The year my school got a coin-operated copier for the students – it was in fact the first such machine in our small town and a big sensation. We spent many a lunch break copying various body parts and other silly stuff just for the heck of it. I remember when computers became affordable – I was 14 when my dad brought home a C64 and I started programming on it. That darn thing had no hard drive, and after a few hours of use it became hot and had to sleep for a while. I remember a youth without cell phones. I remember how vinyl records were replaced by CDs to the dismay of many. I didn’t care that much because most of the time I couldn’t afford either, so I bought tapes. When I started university in 1995 and discovered the inet it was still something not everybody could afford. DSL and even ISDN were not jet in existance and local phone calls (to reach an inet provider for dial in) were expensive in Germany back then. There were no USB sticks, even CD burners were not jet common, so I took home the stuff I downloaded on lots of disks. It was such a relief when we finally got a cd burner at uni. And of course, I remember the advent of inline skates, and all the funny devices kids used earlier.

An no that music has been brought up – As a young kid, I heard the Trentino Mountaineers Choir in our town hall, before they became too old and famous for such gigs. I was thirteen when Modern Talking were new, and actually scraped together the money for two albums of them before realizing how all their songs sounded the same. I remember loving Bon Jovi before they turned from metal to mainstream. I remember the Heyday of the German Gothic scene – although I was flirting with it I never bcame a full-time goth. I remember listening to “Die toten Hosen” und “Die Ärzte” before they became mainstream. I remember the Dire Straits, although I never got why everybody was crazy about them. Oh, there was a time when an album (from a now obscure German Band- erste allgemeine Verunsicherung) was not sold to minors just because it had a song about a prostitute in it – I had to send my mum to get the tape for me. I remember a time when there were 3 or 4 discos in town – only the inofficial one is left now. I remember the time when Thomas Gottschalk (today a famous TV personality) moderated on bavarian radio, I used to listen to his show while doing homework.

I’m probably not remembering that much compared with the other stitchers. I realize I’m probably one of the younger ones of the crowd, and look forward to reading all your stories. And I don’t have any idea how to put something of all this into pictures. It is certainly not a topic for a “quick and easy piece” as I hoped the next one would be.

Meh, I am ranting again. This challenge makes me tell more about myself than I ever wanted to online. To add a bit of an eye catcher, I am adding two pics I did today playing with acrylic colours. All I see in that colour scheme are shades of indigo and ocre. I used Schmincke Indigo and light ocre. The ocre jturned out somewhat too yellow in the scans. So I played with these two colours. It doesn’t feel as strange as the last one, but I’m not sure I can do something with such a limited scheme.