Meme Spirited

Although I didn't get my first compact disc UNTIL 1990, this timeline is perfect. Every time I see some kid on one of my Blondie message boards showing off their latest purchases, it's all I can do not to respond: "Great finds. Looks just like the stack I left in the Dumpster before moving to New York City 25 years ago!" 

Read HERE.

Compact Diss

Joe Queenan's Moving Targets column in The Wall Street Journal sure struck a chord. Wonder why?

Nothing gives some people more pleasure than ridiculing other people’s sad, antiquated technology. At a party two weeks ago, I gave an old friend a compact disc containing Mozart’s clarinet concerto.

“Who listens to CDs anymore?” sneered one of the guests. I do. I own 3,000 of them. I listen to them in my car, my office, my house, everywhere. My friend, defending me, said that he often played CDs on his portable music system. So it wasn’t like I’d given him a handful of vintage cartridges for his breech-loading musket, not realizing that he’d already sold it on eBay.

Nonetheless, people were eyeing me with pity, as the latest incarnation of Rip Van Winkle. As if I had given my friend a dot-matrix printer. Or a Nehru jacket.

I know that the CD has had it as a viable technology. Other ways of listening to music have superseded it, just as vinyl was tossed on the junk heap a generation ago. But there is always a possibility that a purged technology can climb back out of the crypt. In recent years, vinyl has made a remarkable comeback, in part because LPs sound better than compact discs or streaming music, and in part because vinyl aficionados love to be annoying. I myself own 1,000 LPs. And yes, I am annoying.

Why is it OK to continue to use some objects that have been around forever but moronic to use others?

Keep reading HERE.

I Think I'm Turning Japanese ...

CD-Loving Japan Resists Move to Online Music 

Loved this article in today's New York Times about the Japanese loving their CDs. (So do I, they were always so much nicer than other countries'!) I've had several newish friends stop by my apartment recently and give me this look of pure pity when they see my hundreds of compact discs in three different towers. "This reminds me of college," one younger friend said with a wistful nostalgia in his eyes. Another even offered to "help" me get rid of them, as if they were only there because I didn't have the strength to extricate myself of them. Call me Japanese, but I'm a collector and music is one of my favorite things to collect. What's more, it's nice to have backups of the music I have in my iTunes. As much as I know I should be backing everything up to an external hard drive, I often do not -- and with these dust collectors on hand, I don't really need to!

Disc Man

   I'm willing to admit that I'm as responsible for the death of record stores as anyone. Who can resist the convenience of shopping from stores around from the privacy of your own home? But that doesn't mean I don't have the utmost respect for those who strive to keep them alive, like the Birdman, whose shop off St. Marks Place in the East Village is a hoarder's paradise. A teaser from the recent acclaimed short film about Rainbow Music is below, and you can read a Q&A between EV Grieve and curmudgeonly owner Bill HERE.

The Compact Disc Turns 30

As we mark the 30th birthday of the seemingly irreplaceable compact disc, thought I would ask everyone what their first CD purchase was. As I noted in this July 2008 blog post, my first were Blondie's "AutoAmerican" and Thomas Newman's soundtrack to "Desperately Seeking Susan"/"Making Mr. Right." Although I have slowly been going digital in the last year or so, I still pick up discs by my top tier acts  ...  although I'm beginning to wonder why.

Please put your first CD in the comments (you don't even have to enter one of those annoying CAPTCHA codes!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 09, 2008

Music Box: The Last Days of Vinyl

A week or two ago I ran into Andy Towle on Seventh Avenue around the corner from my apartment. He was on his afternoon gym break and I was heading home from lunch with Michael and a quick trip to Best Buy where I'd just picked up the new Aimee Mann CD. I was almost embarrassed to be holding it -- Andy went all-digital a few years ago when he moved back to New York, selling his entire CD collection in an all-or-nothing eBay auction in Los Angeles -- yet I still couldn't even fathom giving up my hard copies. As many of you know, I don't do well with change. Any change. The whole iTunes revolution has me reliving the nightmare of the last time something like this happened -- when they first tried to take away my precious record collection. I think some of the music shops where I grew up were selling compact discs by the early '80s, but the selection was always minimal and every time I'd walk past the section I'd giggle and think about how foolish people were going to feel someday for making the "switch," just like the Laserdisc crowd eventually did. (I'm so glad I never bought that "Eat to the Beat" laser disc, you know, "just in case"!) And even though CDs were clearly the way the industry was going by the mid-'80s, I can still remember being in denial well into 1988 when I bought what turned out to be my last two albums: Everything But the Girl's "Idlewild" and Jane Wiedlin's "Fur." I spent 1989 in mourning (how can I have music in different formats by my favorite groups????) then reached a compromise with myself by buying cassettes into the beginning of the new decade (at least I can play them in my car, I reasoned). And then shortly before moving to Southern California in May 1990, I finally cracked and bought my first CD, which I can still remember like it was yesterday.

I was at the Tower Records in the Poca Fiesta Shopping Center in my hometown of Mesa, Arizona, and I only had enough money to buy two (I think they were like $16.99 back then too, another reason I was beside myself!). When you're replacing hundreds of albums, how on earth do you pick just two? (It was very Sophia's Choice.) After giving it much thought -- and carrying Debbie Harry's "Def, Dumb and Blonde" all the way to the register twice, I finally bought Blondie's "AutoAmerican" (my not-so-secret favorite album of theirs) and the (hitherto unavailable) "Desperately Seeking Susan" instrumental soundtrack (I'm a huge Thomas Newman fan). A classic and something new seemed like a good beginning. And from there I never looked back, re-buying my entire 500-album collection and adding new stuff year and year. (I lugged my album collection from coast to coast until I finally got rid of the bulk of it before moving to New York in 1998. I held onto my LPs that never made it into the digital age and in the past couple of years I worked with a DJ friend to convert those albums into CDs, including Slow Children, Jimmy Destri, the Vels, Marilyn, Buckingham Nicks, Haircut 100, Annabella Lwin, some Waitresses, some Romeo Void. )

No sooner did I feel like my CD collection was finally "complete" and now here we go again. (OK, maybe there was a good 18 years building up to this point, but like I said about change -- can't stand it!) These days, I do use iTunes and Amazon's MP3 store from time to time. But it's kind of replaced my need for buying singles. Whether or not I ever make the official leap into the 21st century remains a mystery to me, but given the fact that you can do everything digital with the CD you bought -- plus you get to touch it and read it and love it -- I somehow doubt it. Now whatever you do, don't get me started on this vinyl resurgence ...