Tag: television

Posted on

Tumblrs of the Everyday

I collaborate with Flourish Klink on two very specific Tumblr blogs, which are both open for submissons.

street_crts

streetcrts.tumblr.com features photos of CRT televisions (or monitors) that have been placed on the street to allow others to take them away, or to allow them to be removed as trash.

xp_in_the_roost

xavierpauchard.tumblr.com chronicles, in photos, the legacy of industrial/furniture designer Xavier Pauchard, who, without formal training, designed steel furniture early in the 20th century that seems to be in about 1/5 of all New York restaurants, bars, and coffeehouses, and in many, many other places worldwide. Pauchard does not, as of this writing, even have an English-language Wikipedia entry.

If you spot street CRTs, or the furniture of Pauchard, please submit photos to these two sites.

Posted on

Put Another Token in the Jukebox, Baby

“D.P.O.” is a pretty amazing X-Files episode, featuring not only an arcade, which is central to the episode, but also a Lenscrafters cameo, glimpses of a Jerry-Springer-like show and a music video, a reference to the land art piece Lightning Field, a rural boy pranking cows, Jack Black, and a Playboy centerfold with at least a passing resemblance to Sarah Michelle Gellar.

I particularly like how Mulder picks out the suspect by locating his initials on the high score screen of a Virtua Fighter machine. One thing I’m wondering about the arcade in this episode, though: It has a jukebox, which is rather instrumental (no pun intended) to the way the episode … plays out.

Was it really common for arcades to have jukeboxes? In my recollection, which may be rusty, arcades were noisy enough thanks to the games themselves. I suppose one could have turned the games’ volumes down to let other music be heard, but there weren’t jukeboxes in the arcades I remember, from, say, The Gold Mine up through Le Fun. Did your arcades have other soundtracks, beyond those coming from the cabinets?