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COWABUNGA NEW ARRIVALS (VHS) – June 4th, 2024

It’s Tuesday! You know what that means, tapeheads? Well, today at least, it means New Arrivals! Check the video bellow to see a sample of today’s new arrivals:

We put out a huge collection of more than 50 VHS tapes, including perennial classics like the original Star Wars trilogy, as well as some lesser known films. And starting today, for the first time, we’re selling vintage VHS tapes on our website too.

All tapes are sold As Is, and they have not been playtested. We do a quick visual inspection for any obvious damage, and remove anything we notice from circulation before it makes it to the website.

Here are some highlights from today’s new arrivals:

But really, that’s just the tip of the iceburg. Keep in mind we do Flat Rate shipping in the US. We’ll be putting up more vintage tapes every few days, so be sure to check back often to Browse our full selection of Vintage VHS tapes:

But, tapeheads, that’s not all! We also carry a bunch of NEW VHS tapes:

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Record Spotlight – May 30th 2024 – The Kills

Featured image By Aurelien Guichard - Flickr: The Kills, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

The Kills might be my favorite rock band. They’re a two piece that plays loud, glitchy, jangly rock over drum loops, while trading vocal barbs about life, death, love, and hate. Vocalist Allison Mosshart is also the lead vocalist in The Dead Weather, a band which formed in Atlanta several years ago while The Kills were opening for The Raconteurs.

We have some of The Kills LPS for sale (and also some of The Raconteurs while you’re at it.)

The Kills also put on a killer live show. This live set from The Basement in 2008 stands out as an excellent example of the particular way this duo can captivate.

and this live set on KEXP from Feb of 24 proves that they’ve still got it, and that they can somehow even make an acoustic set work.

If you’re not already a fan, take this opportunity to improve yourself. If you are already a fan, take this opportunity to fill in the gaps in your collection while supporting our shop, or just enjoy the live sets, or ignore me entirely.

Featured image By Aurelien Guichard – Flickr: The Kills, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

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Summer Artists Market

Starting July 13!

The art markets will occur every 2nd Saturday of July – October.

Join us at Hemlock Bazaar, in beautiful downtown Ellijay, and kick off our Summer Art Market season!

🛍️ 5+ Vendors 🛍️
🎵 Live Music 🎵
👪 All Ages Welcome 👪
🐶 Pups Welcome Outside 🐶
✨ FREE TO ATTEND✨

RAIN OR SHINE!

This is a market for artisans and their handmade/local goods. All artists and makers are encouraged to apply.

Vendors Apply Today

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COWABUNGA VIDEO PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT – GALAXY WARRIORS

We recently started carrying a whole mess of VHS tapes of newly released movies from Lunchmeat VHS. One of these is an 80s scifi throwback called Galaxy Warriors. I took the time to watch it today, and I wanted to share some thoughts.

Galaxy Warriors looks, at first glance, like it’s going to be a Roger Corman-y sleaze fest. It’s a movie about a group of lady bounty hunters who end up on a prison planet where they’re forced to fight the other female prisoners to the death. It sounds like it should be an uncomfortably sleazy affair. Instead, it’s no more risque than an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess (and about as well produced.)

The official trailer. You see what I mean?

The film is full of costumes of varying quality, and sets of varying quality, and special effects that would have elevated a bunch of the kinds of movies this is seeking to emulate. (Seriously, the practical effects for the spaceships and the stop motion monsters would have improved most direct to video scifi.)

As I said, I watched the movie on VHS. I specifically watched it on the 28″ Sylvania CRT TV we recently installed in the Cowabunga Video display at Hemlock Bazaar. A VHS on a large CRT TV is 100% the way I would recommend watching this film.

It’s a 16:10 presentation (SD TVs were 4:3 or 16:12. Modern TVs are 16:9. a film in 16:10 gets minor letter-boxing at the top on bottom on SD TVs and minor pillar-boxing on the left and right (or minor cropping on the top and bottom) on modern widescreen TVs. It’s a compromise in both cases, but it looks pretty good in both cases.

If VHS tapes aren’t your thing, the movie is also occasionally available on various streaming services.

The movie was a delight, I really loved it, and I think you will too. And to really drive home that old school charm, Lunchmeat has even released an official novelization of the film!

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Happy Birthday Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett, author of such classics as The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and The Glass Key and countless short stories, was born this day 130 years ago. Let’s remember and celebrate his legacy.

Of course, the real legacy of Hammet is on the screen, where his novels inspired some of the most important works of 20th century cinema. One often overlooked piece from that era is the Television Adaptation of The Glass Key, which is currently streaming on New Ellijay Television.

The Glass Key, of course, would go on to inspire Yojimbo, which would in turn inspire A Fistful of Dollars (which then went on to inspire the David Carradine vehicle The Warrior and the Sorceress, among many others.) The seeds of these other films are present in the novel, and some of the more recognizable of these themes are present in this television adaptation.

So, happy birthday Mr. Hammett, and thank you for bringing us the stuff dreams are made of and inspiring a whole slew of mystery and adventure stories. Without you, we wouldn’t have ever gotten these:

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Product Spotlight – May 26th, 2024 – A. Lee Martinez

Author A. Lee Martinez write fantasy and science fiction novels unlike basically anyone else. Early in his career, he was compared to Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett and … I mean, they all write in vaguely the same comic milieu, but it’s unfair to really compare them. Martinez does something entirely unique in writing lighthearted adventure novels that never veer in to parody territory, while treading the line between Emotionally Devastating and wickedly funny.

He’s a prolific writer. Many of his books are currently out of print, and some of them are getting hard to find. My favorite from the out of print collection include The Automatic Detective, a crime noir novel about a robotic detective, and Divine Misfortune, a novel about warring Gods. Both are incredible, and both are undeservedly out of print.

But don’t despair! Many of Martinez’s novels are still widely available, and lots of them are available from us specifically. I highly recommend In The Company of Ogres and Gil’s All Fright Diner, but as far as I can tell everything he’s written is wonderful.

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Product Spotlight – May 25 2024 – The Spider!

Pulp magazines were cheaply produced fiction magazines, most popular in the first half of the 20th century. Lots of well respected authors wrote for the pulps, but the magazines themselves had a lurid, sleazy reputation. Many of these pulps are very hard to find today!

I love pulp fiction. Heroes like Doc Savage, The Shadow, and countless others thrilled readers every week in these cheaply made novels. Some of them were really wonderful. Some of them were pretty bad. One of my favorite heroes from this period is The Spider, and never is The Spider better than in the Black Police trilogy: “The City that Paid to Die”, “The Spider at bay”, and “The Scourge of the Black Legions”.

This trilogy of pulp novels published in the earliest days of the second world war imagines a homegrown fascist uprising in New York City, and pits The Spider and a band of New York citizens against this corruption. It’s thrilling, and an excellent introduction to the pulps of the 30s.

If you like that, you may also enjoy some of these other pulp titles:

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Product Spotlight – May 23, 2024 – Getting Started in Jazz

Our shop has a pretty extensive selection of Vinyl, Cassettes, and CDs curated by local Ellijay record label Analog Revolution. Among that collection is a frankly staggering variety of Jazz records, from Albert Ayler to Kamasi Washington. Here’s a sample of the Jazz we have in stock, or you can browse our whole collection of Jazz and Jazz related records.

Getting it to Jazz can be pretty overwhelming, though, and I’ve seen many a person bounce of the genre as a whole after starting with a more challenging piece without the proper context.

Now, there are a billion ways to get started listening to Jazz, but I think it helps to pick a couple of artists and a year, and work forwards (and occasionally backwards) in time.

See, Jazz doesn’t exist in a vacuum. No matter how well any given album stands on its own, it was created in dialog with the music that came before it and the music that was happening around it. Much like in classical music, the history of Jazz is about innovation, and placing an album in the proper context does wonders to maximize your enjoyment of it.

But what album to pick? What year?

There are a bunch of great places but, for my money at least, it’s got to be something from 1959. 1959 was a watershed year in Jazz, and it produced a number of landmark albums. You could grab Kind of Blue from Miles Davis, Mingus Ah Um or Mingus Dynasty by Charles Mingus, 5 by Monk by 5 (by Thelonious Monk), or Portrait in Jazz by Bill Evans, and those would all be fine choices. I’m sure there are many others that I’m forgetting, ’59 was a big year for Jazz!

Lots of Jazz Fans swear Kind of Blue is the best introduction, and they might be right. It’s Wonderful, and Miles Davis was one of greatest to ever do it.

You could start with any of those or a number of others, listen to a couple featuring the same artists from years prior and a couple from subsequent years and you’d start to get a feel for Jazz in general, and what you like specifically. If you pay attention to who’s playing on what, and read some liner notes, you might find yourself a lifelong Jazz fan.

For me, though, when I’m playing Jazz for a new Jazz fan, I almost always reach for Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet (Ft. Paul Desmond). By the time Time Out was released, Brubeck was already a well respected name in Jazz circles, but that album turned Dave and his band in to superstars.

This is not to say that Time Out is better than any of the other albums that came out in 59, but I’ve found it to be among the most approachable, and tracing Brubeck’s career back from there really reveals some of the ways that Jazz developed in the 1950s.

If Time Out doesn’t grab you, pick a different album from the list above, or pretty much any other late 50s album from Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Paul Bley, Sun Ra, etc. I guarantee one of them will get your attention.

(And, to be clear, it’s not that Jazz after the late 50s is bad or even unapproachable! There’s just more variety, and a greater need for context.)

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Product Spotlight – May 22nd 2024 – Nameless – Dominique Fils-Aimé

Today, I just want to highlight a single product. Nameless is a 2018 album released by Dominique Fils-Aimé, and it’s Beautiful. The album is meant to be an exploration of blues music, and it contains several absolutely astounding original tracks, including Birds (embedded bellow) and smouldering covers of Strange Fruit and Stand By Me. It’s a Powerful debut release.

Dominique Fils-Aimé has released two albums since, one exploring Jazz, and the other exploring Soul. While we have them in stock, they’ll be listed under this paragraph. We try to keep all three in stock, but they sell out pretty quickly when we get them in.

If you haven’t explored Nameless yet, do yourself the favor. Find a secluded spot, a cup of hot coffee, and a good sound system, and just let it wash over you.

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VHS IS THE FUTURE – Product Spotlight – May 18, 2024

If you haven’t been paying attention to modern technology trends, you may have missed the news, but VHS is the future of home entertainment. This revolutionary format brings analog video in to your home, but in a convenient cassette based format. What’s more, VHS is a read/write format. That means that anyone can make their own tapes. Truly a modern miracle.

And since we’re living in the future, you can order your VHS Tapes with a computer! I know, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true! Check out some of the VHS Tapes we have for sale:

Specifically, we’ve just added a HUGE selection of titles from Lunchmeat, a new VHS manufacturer. They partner with indie filmmakers to release genre films that just feel right on VHS. You can browse the whole collection, but I wanted to highlight a couple of specific titles and share some trailers.

Lunchmeat VHS

Trailers:

In all seriousness, physical media is neat. VHS tapes don’t look especially good compared to bluray or streaming or even a DVD, and a lot of people don’t even have a VCR anymore, but this lo-fi way to connect audiences with films has a kind of charm that extends well beyond it’s fuzzy scanlines.

Some films feel very different when they’re watched like this. If you still have a VCR kicking around, give it a shot. (And if you don’t, come check our shop. We usually have one or two on the floor in Ellijay, they’re just too heavy to justify shipping.)