Records & Feelings.

This weekend, we took a load of books to Half Price Books, where they offer you a cash amount for all the books, music, and movies you bring in. One thing I love about them is they take them all off your hands, instead of sending you back with half a box full.

Didn't Buy
I had a Waylon Jennings record in my hand. It was in excellent shape and had a couple of songs I knew on it. It was a good era of Waylon's music. Plus I believe we only have Waylon on CD, and I love his voice. It was only $1.98, and I had cash back from our trade. But I put it back. Because my life is no longer about collecting and consumerism.

Did Buy
I did buy a Betty Davis CD because Kaden and I have intended to get that CD for several years, and it was $5.98; you couldn't even buy the MP3s cheaper than that. It's good, but not quite the "deep funk" we have been interested in recently. I have not completely released my music collecting tendencies, but I thought long and hard and decided it will bring a positive contribution to our quality of life.

I did buy We Owe You Nothing, Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews, because it is great to have short articles to read. That was $2.00. And it also makes a positive contribution to our quality of life. There are interviews from Kathleen Hanna, Jody Bleyle, and Sleater-Kinney. I've only read the Jody Bleyle interview so far; it made me heavily nostalgic for a time I wasn't present during. I went back to the moaning & groaning, whyyyyyyyyy weren't we born 10 or 15 years earlier. That is always a danger, for me, in buying a book about the 90s. But it makes me feel good, that twinge of knowing it happened and it was big and it was powerful, and at least I can know about it even if I wasn't there.

Feelings
So I don't know, how do you write about that feeling? Anyone with feelings knows about it (I firmly believe that some people don't have/can't idenitfy feelings; that's OK). That feeling is kind of the crux of how I identify myself. Some of the things I love, I was there for, but more of them, I wasn't. And by things, 90% of the time I mean music. I mean music scenes and when my favorite bands were playing live, from 1926 to the present. It's the knowing it existed, and the recording still exists, and I collect the recordings to experience them as closely as I can. It makes my heart feel big. It makes my nerve receptors tingle. Even just thinking about it.

Records
Kaden's dad gave us a magnificent record player, on loan. It's a Kenwood and it sounds so much better than the Marantz we used to have. Dad is fixing the Marantz, but we secretly hope he lets us keep the Kenwood! We listened to most of Have One On Me, and the depth of sound available on the record (vs the digital files) is AMAZING, to say the least. Even J. Newsom's voice has a vastly greater range audible on the vinyl. We decided never to buy another CD; we have plenty of CDs. We are only going to buy records from now on; almost everything you could want is available on 180 gram vinyl nowadays.

When I was a kid, my parents thought it was hilarious that I preferred the sound of records to CDs. They couldn't hear a difference. They were telling this to their friend who was (still is!) a techie, and he launched into a long explanation of why this could be so. I didn't get the details at the time (I was 12 or 13), but since then, I've learned that digital reproductions of recordings reduce the range of sound available to the listener. What a fucking shame!

If you care about music, do yourself a favor and listen to records! Now that we finally have an operational record player (it has been over 6 months), I am soooooooo excited to listen to The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Zelia Barbosa, and this one song from the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack!!!!!!

Good Choices!
Back to consumerism and the simple life, we decided not to see Black Angels on the day before my birthday. We are planning a big-for-us vacation next month, for my birthday. We had planned to see Black Angels at the Showbox in Seattle on a Tuesday night, then take the rest of the week off work and go to Canada. Through something I said in anger (I don't even care about seeing Black Angels!), we found out that neither of us really wanted to go! With this change in plans, we'll only take Thursday and Friday off work, and I'll get to go to my favorite yoga class in Bellingham on our way up to Canada! Furthermore, we decided to NEVER go to the Showbox again, because parking and location is soooooooo bad. We're really happy with this decision!