Yesterday, May 7, 2013, Ian MacKaye spoke at the Library of Congress on personal digital archiving and the need to educate creators and users in ways to steward our digital cultural heritage. The 90-minute talk was billed as a lecture regarding “personal digital archiving and the need to educate creators and users in ways to steward our digital cultural heritage,” but MacKaye spoke on a range of subjects. SPIN has done an excellent job collecting 13 highlight quotes, including his family’s history of archiving recorded material:
“I think it may be a blood theme here. My grandmother, Dorothy MacKaye, under the name Dorothy Disney, wrote a column for the Ladies’ Home Journal called ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ It was essentially a column where she would interview a man and a woman who were having difficulty in their marriage and then a counselor who would weigh in on their problems. At some point, when cassette tapes came into use, she used to use those to record the conversations. I don’t think used them to listen to — she relied mostly on her shorthand — but she kept the tapes. And I keep coming across boxes of tapes of these people in 1969 and 1970 talking about all the hassles they’re having; how their husbands are balling someone. At some point my grandma made a very strange decision, that she wasn’t just going to tape these interviews with these people, she was just going to tape everything. So I have all these tapes of my grandmother. In one instance it’s of her in the back of a taxi cab, lost, in Los Angeles, screaming at the taxi driver. At one point the driver says: ‘You sound like my father!’ and my grandmother screams back: ‘Well, your father must be very disappointed in you!’ There’s a series of tapes called “Dorothy Works The Phones.” She would tape her phone calls. And I have tapes of my grandmother calling me, when I was 12, driving me crazy! And then our mother also started running tapes. She’d just start running tapes in the house. Like of her playing cards or whatever. There was just something about the documentation of these moments that were really nice, really interesting things. I’m working on digitizing all of these tapes as well.”
To read 13 quotes from the event, visit SPIN.