Had dinner with Trixie & the Villain last night and they told us about Record Store Day, which is today. Ed also mentions it. I was unaware of this, so I figured I’d spread the word. Participating record stores are going to have free swag and various in-store events. We’re going to Portsmouth (and so will probably hit Bull Moose Music), but if we were going to be in town, I’d be stopping by the Harvard Square Newbury Comics to check out the Dresden Dolls who are going to be “working”.

It’s hard to overemphasize how important record shops were to me in high school. (In college, too, but they were harder to get to in Crawfordsville). A typical “date” with a high school girlfriend would consist of spending a Saturday driving into Pittsburgh, and making the record shop following circuit: Eides in the strip district, Jerry’s (which was either in Oakland or Bloomfield, it’s sort of fuzzy to me now!), and then into Oakland for a cluster near the Pitt campus, my favorite of which was The Collector’s 12″. I wasn’t a huge collector, and my tastes weren’t that esoteric. But the options were to either listen to the radio and get whatever National Record Mart sold at the mall, or go that extra mile to get something a little weirder and off the beaten.

I’m not totally unhappy with the new world order, but I’m still a little attached to the physical record stores, and sorry to see them go. Where will all the music snobs work when all the record stores are gone?

I’ve created a new blog category for this kind of thing: “nostalgia for pre-dis-intermediation”.

I picked this up at a bookshop in Berlin for reading material, since I was sort of out of reading material, and it seemed like a good read. It was pretty entertaining. It was supposed to be an autobiography, though the final 50% or so was finished by his wife after Peel’s death in 2005.

I won’t bother going into who he was, that is what wikipedia is for.

What I came away feeling was that there’s just not a place in the current media universe for someone like that. Despite how little choice we get from the tepid, bland mediocrity of coast-to-coast ClearChannel and Infinity stations, despite how much infinite and overwhelming variety we get from the internet, there’s nobody out there who has a pulpit, and an audience big enough to make the pulpit credible, where they can challenge people to listen to things they might not otherwise have listened to. You can get more of what you already know, you can spend all your time trying to find new things on your own, or you can listen to the same 10 songs everybody else is listening to.

Also, he was an extremely clever writer; was not surprised to hear him say that he admired Wodehouse.