Sunday 9 June 2013

1970s gadgets

I remember those Panasonic radios with those funny shapes. I bought one and gave it to my sister Sandra when I traveled back to South America. Actually, I was only paying her back - an AM/FM little transistor she had lent me when I left home. I remember leaving Sandra's tiny battery radio on while I was in bed trying to sleep. I had been told recently that the human mind can keep learning a language if listening to a radio while asleep. Of course it is a dumb ideia. I guess when you 'turn off' to sleep you really turn off point blank.

Anyway I had so many funny ideas then. I thought I would be 'better' if I slept in a very hard mattress and that's what I did.

I was a little taken aback when I realized I did not understand English the way I thought I would. I started becoming desperate when I realized I could not follow the plot of a movie I was watching in those 42nd Street cinemas. I used to go to them cinemas on 42nd almost every week-end and watch whatever was on. I remember watching Woody Allen films. Even if I didn't get the plot I used to like them, especially Diane Keaton and I remember 'Bananas' so well.

So I had a good relationship with the transistor FM-radio I took to the USA with me. Actually, I remember listening to Paul McCartney's 'Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey' looking at the mirror in the toiled of a house I lived in Newark, N.J. That must have been the 1st week I was there. It was such a marvelous experience living in a foreign country and be about to experience seeing snow for the 1st time in one's life. When one is 22 years old already.

I used to have one of these Panasonic funny radios. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzUkykfCMUQ - listen to a Chrysler's 1971 radio ad that was very popular then.

I used to shop at Korvettes on 34th Street and bought some of their brand-name cassette tapes.


26 July 1970 - this is probably the first cassette-recorder released in Brazil. I only bought my first radio-cassette-recorder in October 1972...

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