Culture can Kill You
Roger (Ebert) and Me, I'm not
I have decided after much soul searching, and some great-movie-viewing-via-Netflix-rental recently, that I will in fact be posting some sort of movie reviews or analyses or at least some generally inane comments from time to time. If you're me, you will certainly notice the occasional sly cultural references embedded in my seemingly benign commentary. But most of you, I should add, are not me. And yes, I know that less than 2 months ago I posted exactly why I might never actually review a film online, right about here.
But just ignore me. I certainly do.
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My self-absorbed little corner of the Music World
Kim, who I don't know but whose blog I check in on occasionally, posted once about New Order's mythic single Blue Monday from 1983. Turns out I have that 12" vinyl collector's item. It' s probably not that hard to find, actually, if you just run down to a few of the holdout vinyl fiends in your area. Find guys that look like Steve Buschemi in Ghost World.
I also have the full album Power, Corruption and Lies which was, I think, released shortly after the Blue Monday single. It has the same diecut sleeve design as the single, but strangely, doesn't even contain the song.
It's funny what collector fiends will do, for "fun". Back at the time of Blue Monday's release, my friend and I were on a mission, musically. A mission from God.
We would go, just about every hour of every day, to little shops all over San Diego digging up original imports and short run prints of whichever fifty or so bands we had discovered that particular month. We worked as DJ's at student-run radio stations in college not so much to further a particular career goal, but rather to drop the stylus into every newly released track on earth in order to determine which albums to buy. These days there's this thing called the internet where you can do much the same thing from the comfort of your own laptop, and skip ruining your Physics career with On-Air shifts of 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday on Cable Radio.
My obsession waned a few years later, to the great relief of many of my favorite internal organs.
But this friend of mine went full blown audiophile. No, the above does not already constitute "full-blown". Trust me. In the subsequent few years he amassed a collection of something around 10,000 vinyl albums and about the same number of CD's. Without even cracking a sweat. Ever see a studio apartment looking like a record store? He's still going strong. Minus, perhaps his liver and spleen, and his career.
I have decided after much soul searching, and some great-movie-viewing-via-Netflix-rental recently, that I will in fact be posting some sort of movie reviews or analyses or at least some generally inane comments from time to time. If you're me, you will certainly notice the occasional sly cultural references embedded in my seemingly benign commentary. But most of you, I should add, are not me. And yes, I know that less than 2 months ago I posted exactly why I might never actually review a film online, right about here.
But just ignore me. I certainly do.
____________
My self-absorbed little corner of the Music World
Kim, who I don't know but whose blog I check in on occasionally, posted once about New Order's mythic single Blue Monday from 1983. Turns out I have that 12" vinyl collector's item. It' s probably not that hard to find, actually, if you just run down to a few of the holdout vinyl fiends in your area. Find guys that look like Steve Buschemi in Ghost World.
I also have the full album Power, Corruption and Lies which was, I think, released shortly after the Blue Monday single. It has the same diecut sleeve design as the single, but strangely, doesn't even contain the song.
It's funny what collector fiends will do, for "fun". Back at the time of Blue Monday's release, my friend and I were on a mission, musically. A mission from God.
We would go, just about every hour of every day, to little shops all over San Diego digging up original imports and short run prints of whichever fifty or so bands we had discovered that particular month. We worked as DJ's at student-run radio stations in college not so much to further a particular career goal, but rather to drop the stylus into every newly released track on earth in order to determine which albums to buy. These days there's this thing called the internet where you can do much the same thing from the comfort of your own laptop, and skip ruining your Physics career with On-Air shifts of 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday on Cable Radio.
My obsession waned a few years later, to the great relief of many of my favorite internal organs.
But this friend of mine went full blown audiophile. No, the above does not already constitute "full-blown". Trust me. In the subsequent few years he amassed a collection of something around 10,000 vinyl albums and about the same number of CD's. Without even cracking a sweat. Ever see a studio apartment looking like a record store? He's still going strong. Minus, perhaps his liver and spleen, and his career.
posted by Don Sheffler @ 5:05 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Looks like? Sounds like your friend is Steve Buscemi in Ghost World. Anyway, it sounds like your college DJ-dom was quite a bit more devoted than mine. Have you seen High Fidelity? The stacks of records in John Cusack's apartment are exactly what I hope digital music will help me avoid. Though, it is kind of cool. I suppose instead I'll have big, towering piles of hard drives. That wouldn't be very cool at all.
--Mike Sheffler
... turning to the 3-D map, we see an unmistakable cone of ignorance
That's funny: Just today, I was envisioning when we reach the utopia of a "paperless" society, and all of our personal spaces will instead be cluttered with towers of storage media, much heavier and expensive than paper.
I came around to the thought, oddly, because I was reading about the biggest bridge ever, that is opening in France... fast forward to comparison with height of Eiffel Tower ... to height of World Trade Center ... to destruction of same ... to all the mountains of paper floating through the air ...
I'm odd. I know. And I'll be posting about this gargantuan bridge soon too. It's astounding.
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