I went into Yakima, the local "big city" or first approximation thereof, to look for a job and see if I could find a reasonably priced copy of No!. For the former, I visited the recently remodeled headquarters of the Yakima Herald-Republic, the local newspaper, whose website is, at this moment, broken and thus not worth my time to link to or your time to waste staring at the slowly progressing status bar only to be greeted by an impetous "Cannot find server," as if there was anything there you wanted to see in the first place.
The job, such as it is, or might be, involves the following: Putting ads (the printed kind, no fancy "computer" skills needed for me, thank you very much) into papers, putting papers into bundles, putting bundles into vehicles, and driving vehicles to some number of mysterious locations. From midnight to fourish. Lovely.
The album, of course, is worth any amount of money and you should run, RUN, to go pick it up. Though I haven't, yet.
While in the area, I walked over to the non-remodeled headquarters of the regional library. Then I got a library card. I haven't had one in years. Lots of years. I don't really know why. Perhaps the collegelibraries I've had access to have been just that much more convenient. But they aren't full of fiction, and I like fiction. So I got a library card, and was rather embarassed by the whole thing, feeling as I did like all the people there went from thinking I looked like a bookish weirdo to a just newly literate weirdo, which is like eleven times worse.
Listmaking test! Books I checked out:
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace
Amnesia Moon, by Jonathan Lethem
White Noise, by Don Delillo
Anyway, after doing this, and after having second thoughts about whether I want to spend my summer awake all night, laboring under large machines, my hands dirty with newsprint, manuvering large trucks around the quiet streets, I went to Borders. Borders! Now consider: for nearly 22 years, the only bookstores in the entire county that weren't inhabited by scary people overly fond of large cats were a B. Dalton and a Waldenbooks, both mall bookstores, with all the shortcomings thereof.
But now, a Borders. Which is big, much bigger than I thought, and we're talking pure square-footage here. It's also a little disappointing.
Don't get me wrong, I like bookstores, I've even come to love the scary cat ones and the used ones and the rack of books at the rear of Value Village, those that aren't stained with vomit or blood or worse. Books are a Good Thing. And so a big bookstore, even a chain store, should be good, yes? Well, mostly. Like almost every store devoted to a product I enjoy, I was at turns baffled by what wasn't there and shocked by what was. Of course, Borders sells music and movies and food, too. (Mostly music and movies and food, almost, it seems.) There too, I found a copy of Telephone Free Landslide Victory, by Camper Van Beethoven, a find which made me dizzy, but couldn't find anything by the Young Fresh Fellows or The Minus 5.
Anyway, my point, if I can be said to have one, which I can't, is this: I bought the Everything Is EP by Neutral Milk Hotel. A reissue of their very first release. So where do I put it in my CD tower?
The tower is organized alphabetically by band, with individual albums going chronologically within each band. But chronologically by the date the album was released, or the date the CD was released? I hadn't given this any thought, though there were a few whisperings earlier. For instance, I own the first three TMBG albums in Then form. But Then is a double album, and thus is separated from its singular brothers and relegated to the double album ghetto, coinhabited currently by the white album and a two disk Beatles anthology thingy (not THE anthology) that is one of the first CDs I bought. And then there is Singles and Beyond, by the Olivia Tremor Control, which was recorded over a long period of time, but all before Black Foliage, which is sadly the only OTC album I own. So does it go before Black Foliage, thus showing the evolution of the music, or after, reflecting when the songs were compiled and the album released?
In the OTC case, I put the disc after. I'm pretty sure I'm going to put Everything Is before the two proper albums Neutral Milk Hotel released. Just because.
The moral: Don't think like this. For pete's sake, just stick your CDs where ever you want to put them and go have an ice cream cone or something.
Also, list experiment two is a number of things I saw and wanted today, included because of the time of year it almost is:
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstader
Anything by Philip Dick, with the exception of the novels VALIS, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said; and The Man In The High Castle. As for Dick's short work, I'd rather have the complete five volume set, rather than the themed collections (for instance, Minority Report) that come out from time to time.
The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
Anything by Bruce Sterling other than Zeitgeist
Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson
Some Umberto Eco nonfiction. Any would do, I suppose. His collection of essays about aesthetics and Kant looks interesting.
Deltron 3030, by, I suppose, Deltron and friends. Great album.
Those neat XTC reissues with the paper sleeves and most of the text in Japanese. What's with that, anyway? Still, remastered albums plus bonus tracks=yes!
De Stijl, by The White Stripes
Posted by Dat (Member # 302) on :
I say screw with the tower. Go with a big CaseLogic storage case/wallet. And I don't mean those small 12 or 24 disc cases. I mean those big 200, 208, or 256 disc cases. Stick all your discs in there and carry it around anywhere (you'll have your entire collection ready should you need it). Stick all those jewel cases in a box and store them elsewhere (you'll want to keep them in case you need to go look up something in the liner notes or you want to re-sell the disc(s) on ebay or to some independent record store)
Posted by thoughtychops (Member # 480) on :
Those wallets scratch up your discs, unless you get one that has teflon coatings in the sleeves. If I didn't have access to a cd polisher at work the wallet storage method could have been disasterous for me.
Posted by Dat (Member # 302) on :
Gee, how often do you need to take your discs out and put them back in later?
Posted by Shik (Member # 343) on :
If you're like me, more than you could possibly imagine.
I carry 5 cases in the trunk of my car at all times.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
No, no, no, no, no... You put copies of the CDs in the case. As mentioned, those things scratch up the discs. Also, if anyone ever steals it, you just lost your entire CD collection. Buy a stack (or two, or three, or whatever) of blank CD-R's, and copy all your discs. Then carry those around, while keeping the originals tucked safely away in their jewel cases in your home.
Having to buy a new spindle of CD-R's is quite a bit less expecnsive than having to rebuy fifty CDs.
As for arranging the CDs, Simon, I use the same method you do: artists alphabetized, albums chronotized (sounds like something a time machine would have to do to you before you could travel...). I go by the original album release date. In the case of a compilation album like Then, I would go by its release date. After all, Then is a separate album from the Pink Album, Lincoln, and Miscellaneous T. However, the vinyl record of the Pink Album and the CD of the Pink Album are still the same album. (Granted, some CDs differ from their original vinyl releases. But worrying about that is just being anal. :-) )
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Why must the Forums mock me..?
[ June 14, 2002, 01:13: Message edited by: TSN ]
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
The thing is, I find it hard to separate the sensual physicality of the disc from the merely aural, as it were. I like spinning through the cases, sliding out the one I want, teasing open the cover. Almost everyone I know and like, upon purchasing a CD, yanks the disc out of its natural environment, grabs the cover, and tosses the case into the trash. And I'm left with the horrible realization that I am plain old fashioned.
I put far too much weight in generational categories. "Are we generation X, or Y, or what?" I ask my friends, who by and large all stare at me oddly, having no time for such concerns. But despite my (in retrospect) desperate attempt to grab onto some group identity, I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that generational differences were blown out of proportion, sensationalized, etc. What was Rock & Roll doing that Jazz hadn't, and so on and so on, back to some freshly upright ancestor telling dirty jokes around the fire? But when I finally went away to college (as opposed to staying in one place and letting college come to me) I found myself living with 18 year olds. Big deal, I thought. I was just a few months past 21 at the time. Maybe it was just geographical, but I kept being struck by the differences. My first roommate did not know that there was a He-Man movie. He certainly didn't know that Courtney Cox was in it. I suppose I can forgive him for not identifying the future Mr. Paris. One night there was some reference to Challenger on television, and I discovered he had no first hand memories of it. Now, I can claim no deep understanding here, I mean, I was six, even if I did have more than my share of space ship toys and watched daily reruns of Star Trek and Buck Rogers. But the event, or rather the reaction of adults, who did have some deeper understanding, and thus informed my own reactions almost completely, was seared into my tender six year old brain.
I was in college, having lunch in the smokey Burger Ranch that sat on campus the day I first heard about this program called "Napster." He was just starting his second year of high school. We don't need to be so purile as to measure it, but my entire MP3 collection would have fit in one of his (usually grossly mis-categorized) folders. I blame it on broadband, but I digress.
To sum up: I like CD cases. My "problem" with organizing them isn't really a problem at all, just an opening to discuss order in general, and perhaps my metaproblem of an excessive need for it (coupled with a lack of initiative that garuantees I'm going to spend my life deeply frustrated). I feel old. One of my roommates did not give much thought as to what separated a "rock" song from an "alternative" song from a "punk" song from a (I'm not making this up) "rock & roll" song.
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Do you stack your socks by color, too?
quote:One of my roommates did not give much thought as to what separated a "rock" song from an "alternative" song from a "punk" song from a (I'm not making this up) "rock & roll" song.
And why should he?
Categorising everything inevitably turns into an obsession. One that generally has a negative impact on your mental health.
Why bother? What's the point? The music won't sound any different...
[ June 14, 2002, 10:41: Message edited by: Cartman ]
Posted by Dat (Member # 302) on :
I will usually sort by artists name (last name first in case of individual people), then by album title. In the case of soundtracks and "various artists" collections, I just stick it in according to just album name. Though in some cases where a soundtrack or "various artists" album fits more with a certain artist, I'll stick it under that artist. I know it sounds confusing if you're just reading it, but it works for me in my case.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sol System: To sum up...
About fucking time.
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
*smirk*
Oh, and I believe I can confirm that according to the uptight assholes who take courses on modern music history there is, officially anyway, a difference between "rock" (which is an umbrella turn that can theoretically be applied to nearly anything) and "rock and roll" (which refers only to the early Buddy Holly-type stuff that is a subset of the more generic "rock").
This is why I don't take those kinds of courses.
Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :
Yes, there is. However, I'll be damned if I'm going to go through the agony of recalling my stint as a music education major to remember. Bah!
As for my CD's, they're just in a random stack on a wire shelf under the pillow that my cat is now sleeping on.
Posted by DT (Member # 80) on :
No, the real problem is your taste in music SUCKS! If you liked good music, you'd only have to deal with a few easily stacked records. But no, you like SUCKY music! I've been telling you for four years now Simon that your taste in music SUCKS so get new taste!
And anyone who feels they have to subclassify rock into these infentesimal categories is a waner plus the k. There's only two types of rock: Good music and stuff Sol likes. It's that simple!
Posted by Ultra Magnus (Member # 239) on :
Holy shit.
Posted by Charles Capps (Member # 9) on :
*twitch*
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Hooray!
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
*pretending the preceding few posts didn't happen...*
So, if we figure out what that old fifties rock had that the later stuff didn't, we can finally figure out what, exactly, "roll" music is?
Posted by Vogon Poet (Member # 393) on :
(quite right. Nothing to see here, move along)
You wish. Many have tried, all have failed.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Although I believe that "pop" can also be used as an umbrella term for almost anything, as well as it's own unique smaller catagory. In the same way that "classical" can mean almost all music with an orchestra, and the more specific Mozart period from (I think) 1650-1750, so too can pop mean peppy upbeat simple stuff, and any form of "popular" music, including Rock, Garage, Indie, R&B, country, and so on.
Oh, and I see UM's "holy shit" and raise him an "Oh my god!"
Posted by thoughtychops (Member # 480) on :
You want answers?
Heavy Metal refers to any kind of music that has a definite emphasis on the distorted guitar work. It was first used in Rolling Stone to describe Jimmi Hendrix: It was like a heavy metal falling from the sky.
Rock and Roll, meanwhile, is music governed by the beat of the drums more than anything else. To qualify as Rock and Roll the guitar can't be overly distorted, and the song structure only allows one lead part. Rock and Roll songs are almost always under four minutes long.
Heavy Rock is the combining of the two previous catagories in that the guitar is heavily distorted, but the song structure is still similar to Rock and Roll, with only one lead, and under four minutes in length. The drums are still the guide to the song, too.
Seriously, weird people have thought about this, and these are some of the criteria used by the Rock and Roll hall of fame. Van Halen is classified as Heavy Rock, Buddy Holly is Rock and Roll, Jimmi Hendrix is Heavy Metal.
Pop music is usually very transient, being massively popular for no more than three or four years. N'sync and Britney fall into this category. It's considered a modern truism that as soon as pop stars start appearing in commercials, their 15 minutes are almost up. See: MC Hammer for the best example of this.
These categories exist in order to market music, and for no other reason.
End boring explanations.
Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :
and I just store my 40 or so CDs in an old milk crate... when I want to listen to some music I shuffle through them till I find something interesting....