Al Green curry

This is not about Thai food, about which I know nothing, but a song of love to the long gone and much missed mix tape.
Don´t get me wrong, I´m not a machine smasher. I´m very glad to have Mp3s, and technical advances, and how much awsome music is only a click away. But in the flurry of new things, the ability to choose went away, I think. Mix tapes had twenty songs, and those twenty were chosen with care. Now that you can have everything, 20Mb in your phone, even, why choose?
Playlists just aren´t the same. They´re ok, they´re great, but they don´t have the love that used to go into a tape.
Yesterday I dug out an Al Green tape I´d made long ago. Ten songs, one side, was all it took me to make a beautiful chicken curry for tonight´s dinner.
The tape had been well made, and went from slow tracks that helped along meditative and tearful onion chopping, to more sprightly ones that allowed for some wooden spoon flourishing and mike-miming. It was fun.
By the time the first side rolled to its clunky end, the onions had softened, the spices had been added, the chicken more or less browned (de-pinked would be more precise) and the coconut milk and tomato sauce poured in. It just needed to simmer very very slowly for another half hour. Instead of setting a timer, I just turned the tape. See? Easy.
iPods are great, like a big pot of stock, but a mix tape is like a well-reduced, long-simmered sauce.