Dec 13, 2012
The best thing about Slaughterhouse-Five...
...is this passage right here: "They were without food or maps. Avoiding Germans, they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow."
Oct 1, 2012
There are moths all over the walls of my living room.
It's been almost exactly five years since I've devoted any sustained thought to John Irving or any of his novels, but I can't seem to get him off my mind these last few days.
A little short of five years ago, a colleague of mine with whom I had become rather close friends moved away from Pullman after completing her graduate program. I, of course, stayed in Pullman because that's how all of my stories end, it seems (I'm not really complaining). I can't remember now if it was when she left town or when I drove to visit her later that summer that she gave me a stack of John Irving novels. There were three, I think, and I'll probably ruin my last chance to inject this story with any pathos by admitting that at the moment I can't even remember the titles, though I remember a decent amount of the content of each.
Anyway, I was eventually compelled to express interest in a romantic relationship, a proposal which she thankfully had the good sense to gently reject. Though this development was really the complete opposite of unexpected, it was also only yet another way in which I suddenly found myself at loose ends: I'd recently finished my graduate program as well, but failed to find a job. I had no money, nowhere to live, and no prospects for employment in academia until the next academic year began eleven or so months later. Example-colleague was the other half of the only really well-maintained and functional friendship that I had at the time (in spite of my good-natured but ill-considered attempts to upend even that) and after two straight years of 60- and 70-hour work weeks as a graduate student, I had completely lost any faith that younger me might have ever had in my ability to communicate with human beings that weren't related to me by blood and thus required to be understanding.
I spent a lot of that summer driving around the country, smoking American Spirits, playing a guitar, doing a little hiking, and mostly reading and re-reading those John Irving novels. There was something oddly captivating about them: a tone, a portrayal of the world as simultaneously merciless and stupefyingly beautiful in its illogic, the reaction of a character somehow more real than real...I don't know. As I read them stretched out in the back seat of my car, on beds in skanky trucker motels, by headlamp in my old, stupid, stupid bargain-basement tent, on friends' couches and eventually, at the stereotypical nadir of every graduate student's fall, on my childhood bed in my parents' house, they helped me fix something. When I started back at WSU the next fall as an instructor, my getting hired was certainly more luck-of-the-draw than anything else, but a lot of the reason that I came back as someone capable of doing that job with as much energy, enthusiasm, interest, and confidence than I'd had before graduation and the unraveling of everything in its aftermath is in those books somewhere. Even if I can't remember the titles or anything else about them right now except a sort-of Virginia Woolf analogue and a bear on a motorcycle.
They're on my mind again, now, I think, because I'm starting to feel like I'm in a similar position, with similar anxieties. But that's another post, for another night. If I've learned one thing in my last five or so years of relative complacence, happiness, and comfort, it's that you rarely actually solve your problems by sitting up all night staring into your computer screen when you've got to get up and start work at eight the next morning...
A little short of five years ago, a colleague of mine with whom I had become rather close friends moved away from Pullman after completing her graduate program. I, of course, stayed in Pullman because that's how all of my stories end, it seems (I'm not really complaining). I can't remember now if it was when she left town or when I drove to visit her later that summer that she gave me a stack of John Irving novels. There were three, I think, and I'll probably ruin my last chance to inject this story with any pathos by admitting that at the moment I can't even remember the titles, though I remember a decent amount of the content of each.
Anyway, I was eventually compelled to express interest in a romantic relationship, a proposal which she thankfully had the good sense to gently reject. Though this development was really the complete opposite of unexpected, it was also only yet another way in which I suddenly found myself at loose ends: I'd recently finished my graduate program as well, but failed to find a job. I had no money, nowhere to live, and no prospects for employment in academia until the next academic year began eleven or so months later. Example-colleague was the other half of the only really well-maintained and functional friendship that I had at the time (in spite of my good-natured but ill-considered attempts to upend even that) and after two straight years of 60- and 70-hour work weeks as a graduate student, I had completely lost any faith that younger me might have ever had in my ability to communicate with human beings that weren't related to me by blood and thus required to be understanding.
I spent a lot of that summer driving around the country, smoking American Spirits, playing a guitar, doing a little hiking, and mostly reading and re-reading those John Irving novels. There was something oddly captivating about them: a tone, a portrayal of the world as simultaneously merciless and stupefyingly beautiful in its illogic, the reaction of a character somehow more real than real...I don't know. As I read them stretched out in the back seat of my car, on beds in skanky trucker motels, by headlamp in my old, stupid, stupid bargain-basement tent, on friends' couches and eventually, at the stereotypical nadir of every graduate student's fall, on my childhood bed in my parents' house, they helped me fix something. When I started back at WSU the next fall as an instructor, my getting hired was certainly more luck-of-the-draw than anything else, but a lot of the reason that I came back as someone capable of doing that job with as much energy, enthusiasm, interest, and confidence than I'd had before graduation and the unraveling of everything in its aftermath is in those books somewhere. Even if I can't remember the titles or anything else about them right now except a sort-of Virginia Woolf analogue and a bear on a motorcycle.
They're on my mind again, now, I think, because I'm starting to feel like I'm in a similar position, with similar anxieties. But that's another post, for another night. If I've learned one thing in my last five or so years of relative complacence, happiness, and comfort, it's that you rarely actually solve your problems by sitting up all night staring into your computer screen when you've got to get up and start work at eight the next morning...
Jul 15, 2012
A Few Thoughts Just Short of 31
Yes, I still have a tag for "introspection." Some angsty, mid-20s parts of you die harder than others, I guess.
So I've been trying to write this blog post for a few weeks. "Trying," I guess, more in the sense of "needing to find thirty spare minutes to actually sit and type" than "this subject matter is so wrenching I can't see to type through the flood of my tears," but having said that, I also like to think that I'm always doing something more...umm...meaningful in addition to performing the mechanical act of writing just to stay in practice, and maybe I've been trying a little harder to do that "something more" than is really necessary. So, here goes.
At first, this post was going to be about everything that's happened in the last few months: I became Dr. Bunting officially, I finished my dissertation, I gave an amazingly fun colloquium in front of a significant percentage of my department's faculty and graduate students, I climbed some really gorgeous mountains, lived in Portland with my college roommate for a week, ran eight miles in one go, learned to ride a road bike and then pedaled 26 miles, chopped my own firewood, learned HTML and a little CSS, got another essay accepted for publication, won a postdoctoral fellowship...and those are only the things that I can think of offhand that have happened since my last real blog entry back in April. I have something like six hundred pictures up on Facebook and Google right now from the last few months, and honestly lately I've been taking them as much to "capture the moment" as to make sure I actually remember what I did day-by-day in the maelstrom of things-doing that this summer has become when I look back on it in a few months or years. It's been intense, but also great, and I've been really happy to be able to direct some of the near-boundless energy I've learned to summon while semi-functioning as an overworked grad student for the last few years toward other interests and pursuits for once, at least for a little while.
But as you might have guessed at this point, it's a bit ridiculous to try to go back and sum everything up, no matter how much blog-writing might insist upon itself as a form of minutiae-laden self-documentation. I've been away too long, and summary would just bore both of us, writer and reader, at this point. 'Tis the price of a (rather wonderful) way of a life lived a little bit further away from the internet than usual, I suppose. Suffice it to say this: whatever the ultimate physical and existential results of my two months of scholarly and literal wanderlust have been, they're likely a significant part of my DNA now, and describing my hand to you would be a bit impossible for me. It's been one of those brief but intense episodes of time that occasionally happen in life, usually as the result of a tragedy and not a graduation, that end with you suddenly realizing one day that you're not sure if you'd recognize yourself from two months ago if he was standing in front of you. I can't really say how I've changed because it was so sudden and fundamental, but I definitely have, and I think it's been good. I suppose time will tell.
Melodramatic much? Yes, I guess I've still got a bit of 2005 left in me yet.
While trying to find the true summit of Moscow Mountain on Wednesday, I sort-of stumbled upon a grove of old growth cedars, and it was amazing. So that is the thing that I will write about.
According to the internets and some people in Moscow who should probably know (or at least know more than anyone else around), these trees are in the neighborhood of 1,000 years old, and, walking into the grove, you can feel it. I can't explain how, but the feeling is there, an ancient-ness only slightly offset by the picnic table that sits in the middle of the grove. The oldest cedars in the grove don't even really look like cedars anymore: they're enormously wide at the base, strikingly tall, and warped with age, the typical striped-bark pattern of a younger cedar tree twisted by a thousand years of incremental growth.
I walked around in the grove for about a half-hour, unconsciously in a hushed silence. I took some pictures, but they fail to really convey much of anything useful. I've posted them on Facebook, but I won't repost them here because it's sort of pointless. At some point I realized that I was, again unconsciously, standing at a respectful distance from each tree, while flies and other short-lived bugs climbed up and down the bark just as their bug-ancestors had for the last however many bug-generations. I realized I was being a bit silly at that point, and leaned into one of the larger trees and was struck at just how rooted (no pun intended) it felt. I've touched very few things in my life that date back to around the time that Beowulf was first written down, and even fewer of those very few things have been alive. As I stood there under the sun that was arcing above the cedars for something close to the half-millionth time, I felt one emotion overwhelming all others: humility. Coupled with this emotion was the thought that if I'd ever had a church, so to speak, this was probably it.
Interesting.
I don't mean to turn this into a post/argument about religion, but religion/worship was the thing on my mind while I hiked back out of the grove and to my car, and I want to get those thoughts down in a slightly clearer fashion, hopefully without offending anyone.
Now, worshipping a tree might seem like a silly idea (unless you're a druid, I guess), but the thought is built upon a lot of things that I've thought about religion for a long time (even while I was a Christian and, later, a Buddhist, before giving up on those labels entirely). First, religion is about transcending death. Death is the one (ultimately final) experience that our minds simply cannot compass. Nobody comes back from death to tell you what it's like (except Jesus, but I digress), and most likely it's just your body ceasing to work and your thoughts disappearing from the world. That's a pretty scary, nihilistic end to an individual human life likely peppered with moments of transcendence and vibrant, pulsing relevance. One moment, you're eighty or forty or twenty or ten years' worth of experiences, contributions, connections, and emotions, the next moment you're a sack of flesh dead on the ground, likely having pooped yourself. It's all rather inglorious, and the fact that death can happen, theoretically speaking, at any time, is frankly pretty horrifying. So we've created stories in which there is something else, in which there is an overall point (and sometimes even a reward) to a well-lived life. Or stories where we just keep living, but somewhere else.
Death is inexplicable. Religion seeks to explain it. What's more, religion more generally seeks to provide a definition to the otherwise rather indeterminate human project. You live, you die, you impact some people, some people impact you, but it's all rather messy because the only judgment you have to base the quality of those impacts on is subjective human judgment (yours and others). So, God or whoever provides this judgment for you at the end. Great work, what you did was the right thing. Good dog, here's a treat. Don't suck at this or you go to hell. Suddenly, there's an obvious answer to this indeterminacy...the problem is that it's provided by a mysterious, immortal deity, not the other humans that we have to live with on earth, the only life that clearly, obviously, agreeably exists for every single one of us.
Here's where humility comes in. I've no problem with constructing a system of belief or values that's based in staving off death. Death is scary. I don't ever want to die, and when I do, I'm sure it will be horrifying. I'm all about dealing with that fear instead of being mastered by it. But I think one does this best by acknowledging one's place in the scope of life, and the cycle of birth and death, rather than tossing that aside for a human-centric afterlife fantasyland that carries the very real possibility of encouraging us to ignore the importance and scope of what we do here, and now, on this earth.
Which is, of course, in the great scheme of things, not that much.
For me, the humility implicit in this view is the heart of whatever religion I have. It's what makes a thousand year old cedar numinous instead of just a plank of wood. It makes me feel small, insignificant, and rather than a cause for nihilism, I see this as a cause to be grateful. Grateful to have the opportunity to live a brief time within a system that is a hell of a lot larger, more complex, and older than my brain could ever possibly understand, let alone surmount.
I wonder, then, how can it possibly matter who or what made that system, or why? Why is it so hard for us to accept awe over mastery? Maybe if there still more 1,000 year old reminders around, we'd find it easier to see ourselves as small?
It's long seemed to me that gods are, generally speaking, representations of the people who worship them. Religion comes from within, not from without, and throughout history it seems like it's been the gods that take most after humans that have caused the most trouble. There are worse lessons to learn from death than humility.
So I've been trying to write this blog post for a few weeks. "Trying," I guess, more in the sense of "needing to find thirty spare minutes to actually sit and type" than "this subject matter is so wrenching I can't see to type through the flood of my tears," but having said that, I also like to think that I'm always doing something more...umm...meaningful in addition to performing the mechanical act of writing just to stay in practice, and maybe I've been trying a little harder to do that "something more" than is really necessary. So, here goes.
At first, this post was going to be about everything that's happened in the last few months: I became Dr. Bunting officially, I finished my dissertation, I gave an amazingly fun colloquium in front of a significant percentage of my department's faculty and graduate students, I climbed some really gorgeous mountains, lived in Portland with my college roommate for a week, ran eight miles in one go, learned to ride a road bike and then pedaled 26 miles, chopped my own firewood, learned HTML and a little CSS, got another essay accepted for publication, won a postdoctoral fellowship...and those are only the things that I can think of offhand that have happened since my last real blog entry back in April. I have something like six hundred pictures up on Facebook and Google right now from the last few months, and honestly lately I've been taking them as much to "capture the moment" as to make sure I actually remember what I did day-by-day in the maelstrom of things-doing that this summer has become when I look back on it in a few months or years. It's been intense, but also great, and I've been really happy to be able to direct some of the near-boundless energy I've learned to summon while semi-functioning as an overworked grad student for the last few years toward other interests and pursuits for once, at least for a little while.
But as you might have guessed at this point, it's a bit ridiculous to try to go back and sum everything up, no matter how much blog-writing might insist upon itself as a form of minutiae-laden self-documentation. I've been away too long, and summary would just bore both of us, writer and reader, at this point. 'Tis the price of a (rather wonderful) way of a life lived a little bit further away from the internet than usual, I suppose. Suffice it to say this: whatever the ultimate physical and existential results of my two months of scholarly and literal wanderlust have been, they're likely a significant part of my DNA now, and describing my hand to you would be a bit impossible for me. It's been one of those brief but intense episodes of time that occasionally happen in life, usually as the result of a tragedy and not a graduation, that end with you suddenly realizing one day that you're not sure if you'd recognize yourself from two months ago if he was standing in front of you. I can't really say how I've changed because it was so sudden and fundamental, but I definitely have, and I think it's been good. I suppose time will tell.
Melodramatic much? Yes, I guess I've still got a bit of 2005 left in me yet.
 |
| ...AND I WILL DRINK THE COLORS OF THE WORLD! |
According to the internets and some people in Moscow who should probably know (or at least know more than anyone else around), these trees are in the neighborhood of 1,000 years old, and, walking into the grove, you can feel it. I can't explain how, but the feeling is there, an ancient-ness only slightly offset by the picnic table that sits in the middle of the grove. The oldest cedars in the grove don't even really look like cedars anymore: they're enormously wide at the base, strikingly tall, and warped with age, the typical striped-bark pattern of a younger cedar tree twisted by a thousand years of incremental growth.
I walked around in the grove for about a half-hour, unconsciously in a hushed silence. I took some pictures, but they fail to really convey much of anything useful. I've posted them on Facebook, but I won't repost them here because it's sort of pointless. At some point I realized that I was, again unconsciously, standing at a respectful distance from each tree, while flies and other short-lived bugs climbed up and down the bark just as their bug-ancestors had for the last however many bug-generations. I realized I was being a bit silly at that point, and leaned into one of the larger trees and was struck at just how rooted (no pun intended) it felt. I've touched very few things in my life that date back to around the time that Beowulf was first written down, and even fewer of those very few things have been alive. As I stood there under the sun that was arcing above the cedars for something close to the half-millionth time, I felt one emotion overwhelming all others: humility. Coupled with this emotion was the thought that if I'd ever had a church, so to speak, this was probably it.
Interesting.
I don't mean to turn this into a post/argument about religion, but religion/worship was the thing on my mind while I hiked back out of the grove and to my car, and I want to get those thoughts down in a slightly clearer fashion, hopefully without offending anyone.
Now, worshipping a tree might seem like a silly idea (unless you're a druid, I guess), but the thought is built upon a lot of things that I've thought about religion for a long time (even while I was a Christian and, later, a Buddhist, before giving up on those labels entirely). First, religion is about transcending death. Death is the one (ultimately final) experience that our minds simply cannot compass. Nobody comes back from death to tell you what it's like (except Jesus, but I digress), and most likely it's just your body ceasing to work and your thoughts disappearing from the world. That's a pretty scary, nihilistic end to an individual human life likely peppered with moments of transcendence and vibrant, pulsing relevance. One moment, you're eighty or forty or twenty or ten years' worth of experiences, contributions, connections, and emotions, the next moment you're a sack of flesh dead on the ground, likely having pooped yourself. It's all rather inglorious, and the fact that death can happen, theoretically speaking, at any time, is frankly pretty horrifying. So we've created stories in which there is something else, in which there is an overall point (and sometimes even a reward) to a well-lived life. Or stories where we just keep living, but somewhere else.
Death is inexplicable. Religion seeks to explain it. What's more, religion more generally seeks to provide a definition to the otherwise rather indeterminate human project. You live, you die, you impact some people, some people impact you, but it's all rather messy because the only judgment you have to base the quality of those impacts on is subjective human judgment (yours and others). So, God or whoever provides this judgment for you at the end. Great work, what you did was the right thing. Good dog, here's a treat. Don't suck at this or you go to hell. Suddenly, there's an obvious answer to this indeterminacy...the problem is that it's provided by a mysterious, immortal deity, not the other humans that we have to live with on earth, the only life that clearly, obviously, agreeably exists for every single one of us.
Here's where humility comes in. I've no problem with constructing a system of belief or values that's based in staving off death. Death is scary. I don't ever want to die, and when I do, I'm sure it will be horrifying. I'm all about dealing with that fear instead of being mastered by it. But I think one does this best by acknowledging one's place in the scope of life, and the cycle of birth and death, rather than tossing that aside for a human-centric afterlife fantasyland that carries the very real possibility of encouraging us to ignore the importance and scope of what we do here, and now, on this earth.
Which is, of course, in the great scheme of things, not that much.
For me, the humility implicit in this view is the heart of whatever religion I have. It's what makes a thousand year old cedar numinous instead of just a plank of wood. It makes me feel small, insignificant, and rather than a cause for nihilism, I see this as a cause to be grateful. Grateful to have the opportunity to live a brief time within a system that is a hell of a lot larger, more complex, and older than my brain could ever possibly understand, let alone surmount.
I wonder, then, how can it possibly matter who or what made that system, or why? Why is it so hard for us to accept awe over mastery? Maybe if there still more 1,000 year old reminders around, we'd find it easier to see ourselves as small?
It's long seemed to me that gods are, generally speaking, representations of the people who worship them. Religion comes from within, not from without, and throughout history it seems like it's been the gods that take most after humans that have caused the most trouble. There are worse lessons to learn from death than humility.
Jul 6, 2012
TWO-PART PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
MAKING OUT WITH SOMEONE OF THE SAME SEX DOESN'T MAKE SENSE TO ME ON A PERSONAL LEVEL, BUT IF OTHER PEOPLE ENJOY IT AND IT'S NOT HURTING ME DIRECTLY, THEN GOOD FOR THEM. ISN'T NOT HATING SOMETHING JUST BECAUSE YOU DON'T COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND IT ONE OF THOSE SKILLS YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO LEARN WHEN YOU BECOME A RESPONSIBLE ADULT? I THOUGHT SO.
ALSO, WELCOME BACK, BLOG, IT'S BEEN AWHILE.
ALSO, WELCOME BACK, BLOG, IT'S BEEN AWHILE.
Apr 23, 2012
Thoughts on Record Store Day from Someone Who Lives in the Desert
Apparently this is my first post in quite awhile. Huh. I suppose I've had a lot going on, what with finishing my dissertation and gaining super-secret doctor-powers and all.* But still. I hate to neglect ye olde blogge. I've actually been writing quite a bit in my new pitiful-for-normal-people-but-enormous-for-overworked-grad-students amount of free time: bits of songs, bits of poems, a new short-story-type-thing and a few nonfiction narratives...and that's not even counting the two essays I'm revising for (hopefully) publication. So yeah...lest the lack of blog-activity lead you to believe that I haven't been following through on my promise to write more: I'm writing a lot. But I'm also playing outside a lot, and cooking huge meals a lot. And those three things combined bring me as close to my ideal zen-puppy-like existence as I can rightly get.
As you might have guessed from the title of this post, though, all that blather has fuck-all to do with what I want to write about right this second, which is my ambivalence re: Record Store Day. If you don't know what Record Store Day is, you probably just closed this tab and went across the room and threw on your favorite Third Eye Blind CD, or A-Ha cassette, or Kanye West iMusic thing-a-ma-jigger, or Native American ululation wax cylinder, or whatever the hell you listen to music on instead of vinyl. If you're still here, I'm writing specifically in response to this article, which I think pretty evenhandedly explains why I found it hard to get excited about Record Store Day this year.
In fact, now that I've linked to that article, I realize that all I really want to do is rearticulate the same points less articulately. Which is sort of pointless...but then again, isn't a blog, by definition, pretty pointless? Here we GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
So, Record Store Day. A day in which lots of brick-and-mortar, independent, and often financially embattled music stores attempt to attract new (and presumably repeating) customers once a year by getting in extremely limited selections of already rare and obscure vinyl and CD albums, singles, and EPs, and charging well over what "regular" vinyl albums, singles, and EPs would cost to the lucky few who actually get in line early enough in the morning to snag the rarest stuff while sending everyone else home dejected. Make absolutely no sense yet? Moving on.
Next, those who do get their hands on the rare stuff sell it on eBay for an inflated price, and many such albums pass from owner to owner this way for months or years, never leaving the packaging because to actually take the music out and, you know, listen to it would ruin the item's collector's value.
Better still, there appears to be no logical reason that this hipster-consumerist (hipsumerist?) holiday couldn't easily be executed in such a way that would actually entice more people to buy vinyl and frequent their local stores.
Instead, we have a situation in which:
1. Much of the music purchased on Record Store Day never even gets listened to in the first place.
2. Much of the profits made off of those rare pieces of vinyl and CDs never actually go to artists, or to record stores but instead to private eBay sellers.
3. Many, many people want to buy something, and yet there is a purposely limited supply for some reason, meant to enhance the specialness of record collecting, I guess.
4. Many customers are turned off from going back to small, local stores after having to wait in line for hours during their first-ever visit since the staff can't handle the demand RSD generates one day a year because they aren't set up for the indie rock equivalent of Black Friday.
5. Ultimately, the whole experience ends up replicating the stereotypes of small, independent record stores as nerd havens where people who aren't in the know get treated like ignorant Philistines and vinyl purchasing as a hobby only for people who are interested in paying fifty dollars per album and competing with other buyers to score the limitedest limited edition of everything.
Tell me again why this was a good idea?
I'm all for getting people out to independent record stores. Moscow has a great indie store, Deadbeat Records, staffed by a bunch of great people, and they've thrown pretty excellent RSD shindigs the last two years. I went last year and poked around the "used" bin for fun, bought a few cheap singles, and then went home. I didn't even try for any of the limited stuff because, despite having called the store months early and had them order copies of four different albums for me. They simply didn't get them in, they said, explaining that you can ask the RSD mothership for whatever you want for your store, but the odds that you'll actually get it in stock (especially in Moscow, Idaho) are pretty low.
What's infuriating is that just at the one store I stopped in at, there were five or six of us customers ready to throw down around a hundred bucks or so each on new records, but because of RSD's manufactured limited-edition nonsense, that was five hundred bucks that our local store didn't get because they weren't able to stock any of the things that any of us big spenders had hoped to buy. I ended up spending my money on used climbing gear and like to think that my life was the better for it, but the whole episode just drove home how mixed a message RSD gives to the consumers that it's supposed to be romancing.
This year there was only one thing I wanted: Phish's first-ever vinyl release of their first album, Junta. I knew for an absolute fact that there wasn't going to be a copy at Deadbeat, so I just fished (hah) around online for a few days, then by the morning of RSD, when copies started popping up on eBay for $300, I gave up and went and did other things, resigned to the fact that there was no way to get a new piece of vinyl by my favorite band because of Record Store Day.
Which leads me to my primary suggestion for making RSD more consumer-friendly (and thus more record-store-friendly): cut out this limited edition bullshit and cater to people who just want to own and listen to music. Isn't that what buying music is about, listening to it? And isn't that supposed to be the draw of vinyl, that it sounds better? Do record stores want to encourage "record collection" or do they want to stay in business while disseminating awesome music to people who want to pay to enjoy it?
Why not just have a Record Store Day where lots of your normal inventory is on sale? People can still get albums by their favorite artists, and there's still an incentive to come to the store on a particular day, but it's just a price thing.
Or, better yet, why not have a Record Store Day where lots of new vinyl albums are released, but are released on a non-limited-edition basis? This is what has, ultimately, come to gall me the most about RSD. People will stand in line for hours and gouge each other's eyes out for, say, a new M. Ward 7 inch, and yet much of M. Ward's catalog of normal, non-special-release albums are more or less unavailable on vinyl unless you're willing to pay exorbitant prices for old pressings on eBay. It's frustrating to me that labels are willing to go through the effort of making goofy limited edition pressings of things like Feistodon while entire discographies of their best artists are begging for a normally-priced, normally-alloted vinyl release.
Take Phish's Junta for example. The pressing of the album that came out on Saturday was limited to 5000. Knowing both the Phish and audiophile communities as I do, I can more or less guarantee that a press four times or more this size would have sold out just as well. In addition, the band regularly releases "special" 7 inches like Mike Gordon's Moss Remixes and the Two Soundchecks single when most of its studio albums have never been released on vinyl, and the few that have are well out of print and can only be heard by people willing to pay upwards of $500 for one record. Why not participate in the next ten Record Store Days by releasing one studio album per year at a price that most of your fans can afford and in a quantity that won't result in pile-ups at the cash register and absurd eBay auctions? Such an approach would make stores a ton of money, get music into the hands of the fans that want to hear it, and get rid of all the manufactured drama that so many people assume is inherent in vinyl "collecting."
How does this not make sense? WHY ARE WE LIVING IN HELL
* The power that I gained was actually just a +1 to my Number Of Cheeses Combinable On A Grilled Cheese skill, which was already at 3 due to previous leveling up.
 |
| So typing that into GIS made me aware that this is apparently a thing. |
In fact, now that I've linked to that article, I realize that all I really want to do is rearticulate the same points less articulately. Which is sort of pointless...but then again, isn't a blog, by definition, pretty pointless? Here we GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
 |
| I don't have to explain myself to you. |
Next, those who do get their hands on the rare stuff sell it on eBay for an inflated price, and many such albums pass from owner to owner this way for months or years, never leaving the packaging because to actually take the music out and, you know, listen to it would ruin the item's collector's value.
Better still, there appears to be no logical reason that this hipster-consumerist (hipsumerist?) holiday couldn't easily be executed in such a way that would actually entice more people to buy vinyl and frequent their local stores.
Instead, we have a situation in which:
1. Much of the music purchased on Record Store Day never even gets listened to in the first place.
2. Much of the profits made off of those rare pieces of vinyl and CDs never actually go to artists, or to record stores but instead to private eBay sellers.
3. Many, many people want to buy something, and yet there is a purposely limited supply for some reason, meant to enhance the specialness of record collecting, I guess.
4. Many customers are turned off from going back to small, local stores after having to wait in line for hours during their first-ever visit since the staff can't handle the demand RSD generates one day a year because they aren't set up for the indie rock equivalent of Black Friday.
5. Ultimately, the whole experience ends up replicating the stereotypes of small, independent record stores as nerd havens where people who aren't in the know get treated like ignorant Philistines and vinyl purchasing as a hobby only for people who are interested in paying fifty dollars per album and competing with other buyers to score the limitedest limited edition of everything.
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| "Fuck you for not being me!" |
I'm all for getting people out to independent record stores. Moscow has a great indie store, Deadbeat Records, staffed by a bunch of great people, and they've thrown pretty excellent RSD shindigs the last two years. I went last year and poked around the "used" bin for fun, bought a few cheap singles, and then went home. I didn't even try for any of the limited stuff because, despite having called the store months early and had them order copies of four different albums for me. They simply didn't get them in, they said, explaining that you can ask the RSD mothership for whatever you want for your store, but the odds that you'll actually get it in stock (especially in Moscow, Idaho) are pretty low.
What's infuriating is that just at the one store I stopped in at, there were five or six of us customers ready to throw down around a hundred bucks or so each on new records, but because of RSD's manufactured limited-edition nonsense, that was five hundred bucks that our local store didn't get because they weren't able to stock any of the things that any of us big spenders had hoped to buy. I ended up spending my money on used climbing gear and like to think that my life was the better for it, but the whole episode just drove home how mixed a message RSD gives to the consumers that it's supposed to be romancing.
This year there was only one thing I wanted: Phish's first-ever vinyl release of their first album, Junta. I knew for an absolute fact that there wasn't going to be a copy at Deadbeat, so I just fished (hah) around online for a few days, then by the morning of RSD, when copies started popping up on eBay for $300, I gave up and went and did other things, resigned to the fact that there was no way to get a new piece of vinyl by my favorite band because of Record Store Day.
Which leads me to my primary suggestion for making RSD more consumer-friendly (and thus more record-store-friendly): cut out this limited edition bullshit and cater to people who just want to own and listen to music. Isn't that what buying music is about, listening to it? And isn't that supposed to be the draw of vinyl, that it sounds better? Do record stores want to encourage "record collection" or do they want to stay in business while disseminating awesome music to people who want to pay to enjoy it?
Why not just have a Record Store Day where lots of your normal inventory is on sale? People can still get albums by their favorite artists, and there's still an incentive to come to the store on a particular day, but it's just a price thing.
Or, better yet, why not have a Record Store Day where lots of new vinyl albums are released, but are released on a non-limited-edition basis? This is what has, ultimately, come to gall me the most about RSD. People will stand in line for hours and gouge each other's eyes out for, say, a new M. Ward 7 inch, and yet much of M. Ward's catalog of normal, non-special-release albums are more or less unavailable on vinyl unless you're willing to pay exorbitant prices for old pressings on eBay. It's frustrating to me that labels are willing to go through the effort of making goofy limited edition pressings of things like Feistodon while entire discographies of their best artists are begging for a normally-priced, normally-alloted vinyl release.
Take Phish's Junta for example. The pressing of the album that came out on Saturday was limited to 5000. Knowing both the Phish and audiophile communities as I do, I can more or less guarantee that a press four times or more this size would have sold out just as well. In addition, the band regularly releases "special" 7 inches like Mike Gordon's Moss Remixes and the Two Soundchecks single when most of its studio albums have never been released on vinyl, and the few that have are well out of print and can only be heard by people willing to pay upwards of $500 for one record. Why not participate in the next ten Record Store Days by releasing one studio album per year at a price that most of your fans can afford and in a quantity that won't result in pile-ups at the cash register and absurd eBay auctions? Such an approach would make stores a ton of money, get music into the hands of the fans that want to hear it, and get rid of all the manufactured drama that so many people assume is inherent in vinyl "collecting."
How does this not make sense? WHY ARE WE LIVING IN HELL
* The power that I gained was actually just a +1 to my Number Of Cheeses Combinable On A Grilled Cheese skill, which was already at 3 due to previous leveling up.
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