if the gramophone could play

Nikon D80 | 1/500 seconds | f 5.0 | ISO 100 | 50 mm
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Nikon D80 | 1/500 seconds | f 3.5 | ISO 100 | 18 mm
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Martin Bormann said that films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his death, whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view. For those who don’t know who he was I’ll just say that he was a notorious Nazi of his time and private secretary to Adolf Hitler. But this isn’t the point. I thought that if he could only see today how wrong it was in his view – politically and artistically. The times when things stayed for ever are long gone. Even the classics – literature, music, painting – are a click away. We are all part of the great cultural industry and popular culture.

Instead we can keep the memories, the afterglow – the feelings after reading, listening, watching. The only memories I still have with the gramophone is when I listened to records in my childhood. Oh, what happiness when listening the favorite stories.

Like it or not, the so called consumerism drives our life. Shall not drive our passions too.

Note:

Gramophone, originally known as the phonograph, electromechanical instrument for reproducing sound from a record. A record is a vinyl disc that has a spiral groove with tiny bumps on the walls of the groove; the bumps encode a musical or other type of recording. The gramophone has four principal components: the turntable, the tonearm, the stylus, and the amplifier, although an amplifier was not always incorporated into the instrument. More modern examples came to be called record players.