Entry tags:
On finding things
Uho~ found volumes 6, 7, 8, and 9 of Love Mode in 50% Off bin at bookstore today. Brought home and devoured. After discussion with brother over multiple tajines, also got Rapidshare account and immediately downloaded a dozen albums from various blogspot sites.
It's easy to find stuff on the internet. I don't have to go to record shops anymore and rifle through their stacks and racks, taken by this or that album cover or promise of bonus tracks. All albums are reduced to identical accessibility and viability (nobody posts albums that they dislike after all.)
Is it or is it not silly to be nostalgic for browsing for stuff in shops. After all, browsing is all that one does on these blogs - but there's no sense of place, no romance of context. One does not try to impress the blogholder by downloading the "right" things any more than one steels one's self, as I did today, to hand four volumes of geicomi to a Japanese cashier a foot shorter than me who got nearly as red-faced about it as I did.
The retail experience is not lovable, neither for the tasteful nor the tasteless. Palatable only to the ignorant. And yet it is an experience that one does not control, and so it informs in a way that all this ready music and website surfing does not.
The heft of real life and the intrusion of other people's rules, etiquette, aesthetics, interests.
To have to get along and to deal with that perpetual tension of social interaction.
No, it is not pleasant. But I think when it is removed, an enormous segment of culture stops making sense. Not just shop scenes in movies, but the minds and motivations of people in movies who have, inevitably, been in shops: a tissue-fine analog veil, wood-grained, draped over one's character. To make yourself more palatable to others for that purchasing instant, since money is on the line, and to have borne those decisions and stresses, to interact with those clerks, to find the thing one is looking for in a small collection of available objects.
A new anxiety rises up to take its place: being lost in superabundance, having to build a line of interests and sorting systems that enable browsing on increasingly vast scales. And every purchasing system on the internet makes recommendations to you, as if that's any sort of a favor...
It's easy to find stuff on the internet. I don't have to go to record shops anymore and rifle through their stacks and racks, taken by this or that album cover or promise of bonus tracks. All albums are reduced to identical accessibility and viability (nobody posts albums that they dislike after all.)
Is it or is it not silly to be nostalgic for browsing for stuff in shops. After all, browsing is all that one does on these blogs - but there's no sense of place, no romance of context. One does not try to impress the blogholder by downloading the "right" things any more than one steels one's self, as I did today, to hand four volumes of geicomi to a Japanese cashier a foot shorter than me who got nearly as red-faced about it as I did.
The retail experience is not lovable, neither for the tasteful nor the tasteless. Palatable only to the ignorant. And yet it is an experience that one does not control, and so it informs in a way that all this ready music and website surfing does not.
The heft of real life and the intrusion of other people's rules, etiquette, aesthetics, interests.
To have to get along and to deal with that perpetual tension of social interaction.
No, it is not pleasant. But I think when it is removed, an enormous segment of culture stops making sense. Not just shop scenes in movies, but the minds and motivations of people in movies who have, inevitably, been in shops: a tissue-fine analog veil, wood-grained, draped over one's character. To make yourself more palatable to others for that purchasing instant, since money is on the line, and to have borne those decisions and stresses, to interact with those clerks, to find the thing one is looking for in a small collection of available objects.
A new anxiety rises up to take its place: being lost in superabundance, having to build a line of interests and sorting systems that enable browsing on increasingly vast scales. And every purchasing system on the internet makes recommendations to you, as if that's any sort of a favor...