When I started this thread, it didn’t occur to me that folks would naturally hear the title as a question, only that they might identify with some of what Hsu and Caramanica had to say. For my part, I gotta confess that as much as I like their writing, I was bored with the dudes’ conversation after just a couple of minutes. But it’s been a lot more interesting to read some of the posts in this thread and to see & hear about people’s collections, their history with collecting, and (to take issue with
@Doug G.), their philosophical and psychological investment in collecting.
- @marpow: I hope your new listening room has focused curative multi-channel vibes on the coronavirus coursing through your body.
- @jimfisheye: you got a shareable spreadsheet with your comparative notes on all those competing masterings? (It might save me a lot of thread-digging at SHF... )
- @boondocks: I hereby volunteer to be your emergency backup executor, on behalf of the entire QQ community, if for any reason your official designee is unable to fulfill their appointed duties.
- @kap'n krunch: I hope the S.S. Guppy and its precious cargo have safe passage on their journey to the New World, and that La Migra doesn’t give them any grief when they reach these shores.
As for Ted Gioia: yeah, he’ll never be a YouTube star (I stopped watching and just listened), but he’s another fine music writer, and that video is both a good history lesson and a good opinion piece.
And as for philosophy and psychology (Warning! Now moving into professor mode!): those who have the patience and/or who dig music writing might be more interested in this recent essay by
New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, “
Shelf Life: Our Collections and the Passage of Time.” (I recently learned from another QQ member about “gift” articles, so that link should work even if you’re not a
Times subscriber.) I dug it in part because like Scott, I’m a member of “
Generation Jones” who can see himself in the dying Gen-X graphic novelist character in Joachim Trier’s
The Worst Person in the World, who “rhapsodiz[es] about the record, comic-book and video emporiums he used to frequent,” trying to “convey their magic and meaning to a millennial whose primary experience of shopping is likely to consist of clicking on an icon rather than rifling through bins.”
“I know that feeling,” says Scott. “I miss that feeling. But it may not, at bottom, have much to do with music or books or movies at all.” What
does it have to do with? Not nostalgia, exactly, Scott argues, but rather “a longing to arrest and reverse the movement of time, to recover some of the ardor and bewilderment of youth.” In short: a “fear of dying.” I find that ultimate conclusion a little corny—and facile. I think he’s on firmer ground, though, when he talks in more general terms about collections as “the objects and gadgets that form the infrastructure of memory.”
"The digitization of culture—the abstraction of all those beautiful things into streams and algorithms—feels to many of us like a permanent loss," he says, speaking for collectors everywhere (and for several members on
another active QQ thread). "What kind of a loss can be hard to specify, since there is also clearly a benefit." Namely? Well, what we all concede about the streaming universe: convenience, accessibility, having the entirety of cinematic and musical history at our fingertips, often for free, or at least for a relative pittance. So “[w]hy isn’t this consoling? [And w]hy do I, like so many of my colleagues, mourn the passing of things that aren’t even dead?” That is: yes, movies are dying. So are physical media. But "that may only be to say that the technologies of cultural consumption are always changing, and that the art forms that flow through them tend to wax and wane in unpredictable cycles. People continue to read, watch, listen, browse and seek out not only distraction and diversion, but also sources of meaning and connection. Young people tend to do so with a special avidity, sometimes as if their lives were at stake."
Right now it’s us Boomers and X-ers who are mourning the end of our accustomed ways of consuming culture. Our loss is real, and maybe the lost ways we're mourning are truly even objectively
better in certain regards. But “Gen Z,” Scott says, “will surely have its turn before long, even if its characteristic cultural pursuits don’t seem to be manifested in physical objects.”
)
