Closet media whore |
The Blogdex found me recently. I'm don't know how. Almost all the links I found listed there are internal, and from an arbitrary block of pages. Strange. It's not like I repeatedly link the A-list. I find their sites almost universally uninteresting, though I do enjoy the work some of them do. Other things, I just don't get. Like the Blogdex.
Sure, there's a nice sort of mission statement blathering something about democratic media and masses and that sort of thing, but everyone knows what it really is: What stupid link is making the rounds today? I hardly think that Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu, the Prime Number-Shitting Bear constitutes "democratic media." Now, the Turner Broadcasting System...
More importantly, though, the Blogdex will become: Who cares what we're talking about, how popular am I? How many people have linked me? It took five HREFs to claw my way halfway up a list of 14thousand. This is a pretty sad popularity contest. But I'm right where I belong. I want to be on the B-List. Real success entails little responsibilities I want little to do with. I'd thought at one time it might be amusing to try and get myself linked left and right or some junk, then said, "Meh." While it's not as glamorous, profitable or maybe even fun, mediocrity is a much more challenging aspiration.
Neglect |
I have a lot of music. I've been accused of obsession. But it's a gentle madness. Actually helps to maintain my sanity by helping to block the noise in my head.
There has been a box of CDs in the trunk of my car for several months now which I have only recently removed. Florida is a humid place. It's been raining a lot lately. This was a big mistake. Tray cards are stuck to cases. Booklets' pages fused together. Digipacs looking like form studies in driftwood. I've spent the last couple of days carefully peeling page from page, hoping the layers of fiber wouldn't separate, only to run into some little area near the binding of the insert where they've already glued themselves together. One old disc seems to have used had some volatile red ink that's eaten through the aluminum layer. It looks neat. It's probably unplayable now. I haven't tried yet.
I'm more than a little pissed at myself for this. There are probably somewhere around 250 discs in the box, and luckily not all of them got damaged, somehow. None of them are completely irreplaceable, but some won't be easy. Swans discs, which are just hard to find even for relatively recent releases. Old Wax Trax albums in their original pressings, before they were bought out and sold out. A few from Fifth Column Records, who went under so quickly and violently several years ago that some of the artists are still fighting to regain the rights to their own music. Even if they have, it just wouldn't be the same with a re-release. The Section25 album I spent three years hunting for someone because she loved Looking from a Hilltop so much. It was difficult to find any information at all on that band other than maybe just a discography. It will probably be just as much work to find them again in the same form. Oddly enough, I run into the Section25 almost regularly now. It's been rereleased. Just wouldn't be the same.