PondaBlog

a sad commentary on the times, indeed.

an ace piece on a lucky fellow (well, perhaps not so lucky…) who owns the greatest record collection in the world. plus, the dude is from pittsburgh – home of my beloved Steelers!

sports jingoism aside, this video raises all sorts of troubling questions. the collection’s estimated to be worth $50 million…and he’s asking for a mere $3 million (by the way, if anyone wants to send me the asking price, please feel free…tell you what, all you need to do is send me $2,995,000, and i’ll kick in the remainder).

despite Paul Mawhinney’s astounding collection, so far, there have been no takers. it’s like he says…no one gives a damn.

it’s a scathing indictment of these virtual times, when everything is accessible with the click of a mouse or the touch of an iPad screen. the consummate pleasures of digging for treasures amongst crates of vinyl, or even CDs, is fast becoming an anachronism. and in the process, whole eras are simply disappearing. as he says, more than 80 per cent of his collection that dates from 1948 to 1966 isn’t even available on CD. whole histories are being vaporized. and are we the poorer for it? absolutely.

really, it’s a commentary on late-stage capitalism, a phenomenon where all that matters is acceleration. what’s left behind is detritus, whole eras forgotten, discarded to the dustbin of the past. history just doesn’t matter anymore, and music has become pure commodity.

don’t get me wrong…i’m not a luddite, and technology has made an incredible amount of music available to me personally that i never would have been able to find otherwise. my love of electronic music is based on hardware and software that keeps evolving incessantly. and every week – actually, nearly every day – i manage to get turned on to all sorts of sounds via downloadable mixes and the like – that i never would have been able to find by myself.

but there’s also an essential spirit that’s being lost in this endless rush for ease and accessibility. no one has to actually try anymore. and the pure pleasure of the fetishism of the object – and let’s face it, so much of collecting has to do with this fetishism – is rapidly disappearing. vinyl records, and even CDs, on a smaller scale, are not just objects to listen to. they are (well, at least some of the time) artworks in their own right. they are physical, visual entities – entities that can be held and examined and read and observed in a way that no MP3 download can replicate. they engage us, and we engage them.

our whole way of listening is changing as well. with vinyl records in particular, one typically listens to a full side of one record, then flips it over and listens to the other side. yes, tracks can be skipped, but the action required to do so is laborious. it’s simpler, and often more pleasurable, to listen to the record in its entirety.

this process was radically altered with CDs, which allowed listeners to simply fast forward to whatever track they wanted to hear. and yes, i have done this countless times myself. but still, one is presented with a single object that can be played from beginning to end, amen.

today, listeners don’t have to bother with such constituent and bothersome units. they can download whatever track they want from a particular release and forget the rest. instant gratification, no personal investment required.

in 1982, Walter Ong wrote a fascinating treatise entitled Orality and Literacy, which examined the shift from oral societies to the culture of the written word. we’re now well into the next stage…moving into some post-physical aether where ease is everything and the difficult yet consummate pleasures of existence – what we used to know and experience as the human condition – are being consigned to the ontological sidelines.

things keep changing.

and after all this, i like the fact that Mawhinney’s most valuable record is from the Rolling Stones.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.