The Last Waltz

I learned long ago that my capacity for nostalgia extends well beyond the limits of my own lived experiences. I have records originally owned by my dad’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. I have love letters written neither to me or by me. I have fliers my friend plastered around our college campus twenty years ago. I spent a month repatriating the contents of a box belonging to an old woman I never met, after it sat in my parents’ closet for twenty years, and several weeks cold-calling strangers to secure rights clearance for a book of condolence letters penned to Jackie Kennedy in 1963. The past clutches at me.

I used to feel bad about this: why couldn’t I live in the present? Why couldn’t I focus on the future instead of the past? Is it just another sign of creeping mental illness, avoidance, anxiety?

Lately I’ve come to realize the past is a tool for understanding the present, connecting with it, celebrating it. Second-hand nostalgia is just another term for history.

So with that in mind, I made a little miniature of the final days of the old Sucher family compound at 712 Avenue P, in deep Brooklyn. My uncle and my dad grew up here, and lived here until their late teens / early twenties, when my great-grandparents sold it. I’ve heard a lot of family lore centered around this house, though I was never there, and I’m not even sure I’ve ever even driven past it.

712 Avenue P was one half of two adjoining row houses. The two Sucher brothers, my great-grandfather and his brother, each owned one of the adjoining houses, which meant they were able to join their backyards into a palatial shared expanse (in cramped Brooklyn terms). It was the center of gravity for the extended family. Lots of living and loss happened here.

Having never laid eyes upon the place (and limited to the lovely but black-and-white 35mm photos my uncle shot back in the day), my miniature is pretty abstract. It features a passel of in-jokes and hyperspecific references (as usual). In the front is the old beater Dodge van my dad drove in his mid-20s, until he loaned it to my uncle to drive to my cousin’s bar mitzvah, and it caught fire on the LIE. As the story goes, my parents were driving down the highway and saw a van on fire, and then realized my (thankfully unharmed) uncle and grandfather were standing next to it on the side of the road.

This Dodge van has a hole drilled in the bottom of it for a 5v LGB smoke generator, which I bought from our local model train shop. It’s got a Neopixel hiding in there too, so it can smolder and smoke accordingly. (The peaches strewn around the van are a separate reference, both to the house’s backyard peach tree and to a stop-motion short 16mm film my uncle later made that featured a plot-critical van cameo, entitled “Attack of the Cling Peaches.”)

I spent a lot of time testing different approaches for generating smoke. Tiny ultrasonic misters – essentially little piezo speakers sitting in water – were super tempting, but the water was messier to deal with than the mineral oil used in the model railroad smoke fluid. Also, even when I tried using distilled water the tiny holes in my various 3D printed containers would quickly get clogged up with minerals, and then there’s just the fact that water vapor doesn’t look quite like smoke. It settles and creeps in this very different horror-movie manner.

The house itself is really just one room, featuring a 16mm projector and a screen. The screen cycles through old family photos I had lying around. (Some of them I had scanned for a separate digitizing project ~25 years ago and then promptly misplaced the originals. It’s always haunted me that those photos only exist at 150×150 resolution — but for this project, they’re perfectly-scaled!) The projector has a little flickering Neopixel hiding behind it. The screen is a 1.3″ Pi TFT, running off a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 connected to a Pirate Audio DAC hat. (To get framebuffer-level control over the screen, I’m using the fbcp-ili9341 library. mplayer plays videos, while fim runs the slideshow. The best guidance I found for getting the tft working properly – no small feat! – is here.)

(The projector sits atop a cute little button I found while spelunking at M&J Trimming, which is soon to close forever. I’m broken-hearted, but that’s another post.)

The living room ceiling has a ceiling fan made from a mini brushless DC cooler fan coated in gold model paint, speed-controlled via software PWM, as well as another Neopixel. Against the side wall is a mantel with one object on it, a promotional bottle of Jim Beam from the ’64-’65 World’s Fair, which my uncle once offhandedly told me was one of the only specific artifacts he remembered from the home.

Then there’s the backyard.

The backyard of 712 Avenue P is where my dad threw his big party when he learned that his grandparents were selling the compound after fifty years. My mom attended, on a date with another nameless man who I’m sure is the protagonist of his own nostalgic story. As far as my story is concerned, it’s where my parents met.

The backyard has a record player made from another mini brushless DC cooler fan, this one with its blades snipped off (atop some mini LPs curated from the collection I stole from my dad’s dusty collection when I went off to college). At some point after it was all assembled i realized it spins backwards, but c’est la vie. Maybe it’s playing “PAUL IS DEAD.”

The backyard also has a standard little 3w, 8ohm speaker that just needed a little faux-wood vinyl siding attached to it. There are some LEDs arranged into a cute little rope light, and a table with some joints on it arranged around an ashtray. (The ashtray is actually a second smoke generator, throttled via PWM using a separate transistor at a slightly lower duty cycle for wispier smoke. At full power, these smoke generators really want to puff perfect smoke circles that look great on a train but really weird coming out of a joint!)

When the rotary encoder button on the front of the box is pushed, we switch into party mode. A script on the Pi selects a random song from one of three videos: selections from The Band’s Last Waltz in ’76, an Allman Brothers concert from Macon, GA from ’73 taped around the time of their performance at The Summer Jam at Watkins Glen (the “bigger than Woodstock” festival my dad attended to make up for the fact that he was just a couple of years too young to join his cousin at actual-Woodstock four years earlier), and a live ’73 Dead set with some liquid visuals I found on YouTube. These play on the projector screen in the living room, while smoke wafts in the back and the record player spins.

The attic hides the Raspberry Pi and the Pirate Audio DAC hat. A multitude of cables run up the side of the house via some white heat-shrink tubing that hopefully looks a little bit like a gutter downspout, while the tft’s 24-pin ffc ribbon is hidden under the living room wallpaper. In the base of the miniature live some 5v/GND junctions, as well as a 5v>6v boost converter that I needed in order to get those smoke generators to properly puff.

And that’s about it! Lots of firsts in this project: playing with the framebuffer, creating switching circuits for the smoke generators with some 2n2222 transistors, improving my 3D-printing technique with a 0.2mm nozzle, and using chalk wax for a slightly dingier, worn, textured appearance. I’m really happy with how it all turned out. Getting all the various PCM and PWM devices playing nicely together was arduous. I wanted to use pigpiod for hardware-level PWM support across various GPIO pins, but it kept messing up the Neopixels. And if I tweaked the settings, it conflicted with the DAC hat instead. In the end, I mostly made do with software PWM, which actually works just fine for my little motors and smoke generators, and almost-fine for the tiny SMD LED rope lights. The janky script that runs it all can be explored here (with thanks to gpt4o and claude for some very useful pair programming).

I showed it to my dad last night, and at first he was pretty caught up in the historical inaccuracies. But before too long, it was jogging a lot of memories and stories I’d never heard. Little things, like climbing out his bedroom window and perching atop the awning over the front door, or burying a time capsule filled with his childhood toys under a freshly-paved concrete path to the backyard.

And in that moment of reminiscing, we had a connection firmly grounded in today.