Flipping through the crates in old record stores. Browsing a tiny (or huge) local bookstore. Chatting up film geeks behind the counter at the video rental shop. These are a few of my favorite things. Are these experiences relegated to the cultural dustbin of history? Over at Huffington Post, Marc Ruxin has some thoughts on “The Death of Touch and the Lost Joy of the Unexpected” (image from wrestlingentropy‘s Flickr stream):
I spent much of my youth, from the moment I could drive, rifling through the musty bins of the used record stores on Coventry Road in Cleveland looking for hidden gems (where I first heard Yo La Tengo playing while I shopped). After college, in NYC, I spent even more hours on St. Mark’s rifling through even bigger bins at five or six stores along one small block – they are all gone now. After moving to San Francisco, just over a decade ago, I was introduced to Amoeba Records, a massive former bowling alley on Haight Street still filled with literally millions of pieces of music. Although it still survives, I haven’t been in years. I have probably spent a few thousand hours of my life collecting music, flipping through vinyl, inspecting the grooves, breathing in the unique smells of the stores, chatting with the overeducated clerks and peering over the shoulders of the surrounding hipsters looking for tips. Back then I was never looking for the obvious, but hoping to hit pay dirt by unearthing some hidden gem, overlooked by the rest of the world, sitting idle and marked down in the clearance bin. Hours would fly by, and when I was finished, I would dash back to enjoy the fruits of the joyful harvest. I still remember the ritual of inspecting the album art, scanning the lyrics printed on the vinyl sleeve, reading the liner notes. I now barely even remember the names of songs. Of course, without the immediacy and completeness of store inventories, you really needed to “look” hard. Now of course, almost everything you can imagine and much you could not is available instantly, no work required. This is good and bad.
“The Death of Touch and the Lost Joy of the Unexpected”