One day I was in the garage (okay, the Jack Russell was peeing in the house, on the not-exactly-cheap Persian carpet, and I was digging out the cage in order to retrain him that you pee on the old Washington Post, not the carpet), and there, in front of the cage/box/whatever you call the thing, was a stack of boxes of vinyl. I had read or heard on the radio something about kids-these-days thinking that music was free, and I saw all of that old vinyl, and I got to thinking about the artifact.
People talk about electronic books vs. real books and I got to thinking about MP3 music vs. real music. Back in the olden days of record store/head shops, when it cost about $3.99 to buy an album and about $0.51 more to buy a concert ticket, I remember the whole sort of fetishistic thing of the record album. Lying on the floor in a daze and poring over the album cover for clues as to the genius of, say, Frank Zappa. Continue reading