Ceci n'est pas une pipe, pt. 118

From a recent discussion between Susanne von Falkenhausen and David Joselit, concerning the latter's curatorial hand in the Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age exhibition, via the German edition of Frieze mag:

SvF: So medium specificity – that’s the old spectre. And what does medium specificity, what does Clement Greenberg, have to do with Guy Debord? You would like to get painting out of the register of Greenberg and put it into a register of Debord?

DJ: I suppose it’s very hard to characterize a complex project in a slogan. But from my point of view, what painting really can do is represent, even theorize, the circulation of pictures – and by ‘pictures’ I mean commoditized images as they arise in mass media of all types ranging, in our period, from television to the internet. We know that appropriation was aimed at indexing the ‘life of pictures’. But it did so in a very severe way, which in fact made the displacement from one context to another – art to advertising, for instance – clean and unambiguous. Whereas in painting, what you see from Robert Rauschenberg to the present is that commoditized images are put into circulation in time and space, and move at different rates. Many of the questions animating conceptual art with regard to changing values of visual knowledge have been explored in painting, but I don’t think this has been sufficiently recognized. While it is a simplification that has many problems, for the sake of argument I think your characterization is largely correct: we are trying to take painting from Greenberg to Debord.

SvF: But Debord...

DJ: He would have hated the project.

SvF: Yes, I think so. He would have sent in some black paper or something like that.

DJ: Right, or a film. ...Obviously Debord did not and would not approve of painting.

Unless the painting in question were one by Asger Jorn (who's included in the exhibition). In which case, Debord was all to ready to accept it as a gift, which -- lore has it it -- he would turn around and sell, using the money from the transaction to fund the publishing of the next edition of the SI journal.

All That is Signal Dissolves into Noise

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The One and the Many

"Money is the one thing that connects us and that we cannot truly have in common. In societies without qualities we can, in theory, have any number of things in common. However, after the decline of symbolic orders, it is an enormous effort to call them up and give them words and form. Remember, this is the desert of the real ...So never mind good intentions, they won’t get us anywhere: when art addresses the future in (self-)skeptical ways, it refuses nostalgia and hope as sentimental compensations for an uncertain future. [...]

Aesthetic problems can’t be solved in the social sphere, and vice versa, because the two are one, and the one becomes two. The social begins and ends in art, but not the other way around: art dies when it becomes a model. ...Are models necessary? Social models usually have a mimetic relation to a given reality, and they start with the whole, not the part. ...What would it mean to engage in historical processes and social struggles, but proceed without a specific model or image of the society to come?

Arguably, such an approach can only be articulated momentarily, as a flash, and maybe its sense of undoing and letting go relates first and foremost to aesthetic experience. In the early 1970s, Jean Baudrillard gave an alternative, downbeat definition of utopia: utopia, he wrote, is what is never spoken, never on the agenda, but 'always repressed in the identity of political, historical, logical, dialectical orders.' Utopia is what the order of the day is missing ...Something elusive that dies when aggressive interpretation sets in. When utopia is deprived of its telos, it becomes compatible with aesthetic thinking, with the ambivalence and skepticism through which art returns real events and bodies to virtual non-places. Like utopia, art is insoluble and uninhabitable, its speech threatened by reality principles."

From Lars Bang Larsen's "The Society Without Qualities", in the latest edition of the E-flux journal.

Also of interest in the same issue, Amanda Boetzkes and Andrew Pendakis's essay "Visions of Eternity: Plastic and the Ontology of Oil." In some respects it represents an attempt at de-reifying the material economy of petroleum, which is a notion that's intrigued me for some time.

Canon Fodder, Pt. 2: Farewell to an Idea?

David Maljkovic - Retired Form,  2008-2010

As far as the possibility of a condition of art being lately preoccupied with its own past, Dieter Roelstraete made the stronger case back in 2009, with his e-flux essay "The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art":

"In the present moment … it appears that a number of artists seek to define art first and foremost in the thickness of its relationship to history. More and more frequently, art finds itself looking back, both at its own past ...[A growing number of artists] either make artworks that want to remember, or at least to turn back the tide of forgetfulness, or they make art about remembering and forgetting: we can call this the 'meta-historical mode'" [...]

Elaborating later:

"In their cultivation of the retrospective and/or historiographic mode, many contemporary art practices inevitably also seek to secure the blessing (in disguise) of History proper ...Time, literally rendered as the subject of the art in question, easily proves to be a much more trustworthy arbiter of quality than mere taste or success. Hence the pervasive interest of so many younger artists and curators in the very notion of anachronism or obsolescence and related 'technologies of time' ...meant to convey a sense of the naturalization of history, or of time proper."

Unlike Cotter, Roelstraete provides specifics, citing a number of projects that illustrate the argument. What’s more, he theorizes that this condition might be indicative of "the current crisis of history both as an intellectual discipline and as an academic field of enquiry." As such, he describes the retrospective tendency as being melancholic in character, adding the caveat that it might be "potentially reactionary," as well.

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A similar argument emerges in Claire Bishop's "Digital Divide" Artforum article from autumn of last year, overlapping particularly on what Roelstraete describes as the "technologies of time." Bishop writes:

"The fascination with analogue media is an obvious starting point for contemporary art's repressed relation to the digital. ...Today, no exhibition is complete without some form of bulky, obsolete technology -- the gently clunking carousel of a slide projector or the whirring of an 8-mm or 16-mm film reel."

By Bishop's reckoning, this deference of the present amounts -- in some respects -- to an an abdication of responsibility, a failure to fully engage in contemporary cultural modes of social relations. But as far as this matter or interventionary agency and cultural imperatives is concerned, there might just as likely be someone lurking in the wings ready to issue the counter-thesis: Art is not a gadget.¹

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Tacita Dean, from the series The Russian Ending

Amid all this talk of returns and regressions, I find myself experiencing a sense of déjà-vu, like I’ve heard all this discussed and diagnosed somewhere else at some early point. Sure enough, Bishop mentions in passing one of the texts I have in mind – Hal Foster’s 2004 essay “An Archival Impulse.” In that essay, Foster examines the work of artists Tacita Dean, Sam Durant and Thomas Hirschhorn, and how the work of these artists often coalesce around a similar theme; how they “share a notion of artistic practice as an idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, philosophy, and history.” Artists working this vein are “drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and in history alike – that might offer points of departure again.” In this way, such work points to lapsed, overlooked, or abandoned histories – failed or unrealized futurisms, endeavors left in limbo. Or obscure artifacts and objects which, in the case of Tactica Dean’s film about the sound mirrors of Dungeness, “serve as found arks of lost moments in which the here-and-now of the work functions as a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future.”

Much of this, by Foster’s account, takes the form of projects that strive (in Hirschhorn’s words) to “connect what cannot be connected.” However “tendentious” or “preposterous” such an undertaking might seem, Foster sums up the character of the exercise thusly:

"This not a will to totalize so much as a will to relate – to probe a misplaced past, to collate its different signs (sometimes pragmatically, sometimes parodistically), to ascertain what might remain for the present. ...By the same token,...the art at issue here does not project a lack of logic or affect. On the contrary, it assumes anomic fragmentation as a condition not only to represent but to work through, and proposes new orders of affective association, however partial and provisional, to this end, even as it also registers the difficulty, at times the absurdity, of doing so."

Gabriel Orozco, Island Within an Island, 1993

But perhaps the more incisive text to refer to in this instance would be another Foster essay, written several years later, "This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse".²  At this point, Foster expands on the thesis of "An Archival Impulse," steering its focus away from various wayside microhistories, and toward the legacies of modernism and art itself, as they've been addressed in the work of recent artists. To this end he discussed the versions of an "end of art" scenario as declared in the past half-century by various parties (e.g., pluralistic, post-structuralist, Marxist), arguing that these accounts – out of "triumphalism, desperation, or melancholy" – perhaps "concede(d) too much too quickly." And that if we see a backward-gazing trend in some strains of contemporary art practice, it might be the result of different attempts at reclamation for a critical enterprise that had not fully run its course before being issued its last rites.³

What then comes after death, after all these alleged ends, when certain forms and legacies and discursive modes continue to linger in a supposed "posthistorical" limbo? Foster lists a variety of practices that constitute a type of "living on" or "coming after," which he categorizes into four designations, each serving as a type of "mnemonic strategy." These strategies Foster delineates as: the traumatic, the spectral, the nonsynchronous, and the incongruous – each engaging the past via practices involving methods of recovery and re-engagement, "ghostly" shadowing, juxtaposition, or hybridized "dislocation and dispersal" or the highlighting of temporospatial disjuncture.

It is in the third of these strategies – the nonsynchronous – that we find the use of outmoded technology (a la Bishop) come into play. To some degree, Foster allows that the use of such things (film, say) might be intended merely as a material riposte to "the presentist totality of design culture." Otherwise, he considers it a practice more in keeping with Surrealist tactic of utilizing "displaced forms." Making his argument by way of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Foster offers:

"Such a weird array of things is not the stuff of a renewed medium; on the contrary, it is part of the Surrealist project to 'explode' conventional categories of cultural objects. ...There is the further dilemma that 'the outmoded' might now be outmoded too, recuperated as a device in the very process that it once seemed to question – the heightened obsolescence of fashion and other commodity lines. Yet one aspect of the outmoded is still valid…and Surrealism is still a touchstone. 'Balzac was the first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie,' Benjamin writes... 'But only Surrealism exposed them to view. The development of the forces of production reduced the wish symbols of the previous century to rubble even before the monuments representing them had crumbled.' The 'wish symbols' here are the capitalist wonders of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie at the height of its confidence, such as 'the arcades and interiors, the exhibitions and panoramas.' These structures fascinated the Surrealists nearly a century later – when further capitalist development had turned them into 'residues of a dream world,' ...According to Benjamin, for the Surrealists to haunt these outmoded spaces was to tap 'the revolutionary energies' that were trapped there. But it may have been more accurate (and less utopian) to say the Surrealists registered the mnemonic signals encrypted in these structures – signals that might not otherwise have reached the present. This deployment of the nonsynchronous pressures the totalist assumptions of capitalist culture, and questions its claim to timeless; it also challenges the culture with its own wish symbols, and asks it to recall its own forfeited dreams."

In contemporary work that engages the nonsynchonous, Foster asserts that the use of outmoded form and tech serve as a reminder that "'form' is often nothing more than 'content’ that has become historically sedimented."⁴

The Shapes of Things

"Perhaps they were a bit more adept than others at making out or even provoking the auguries of good fortune. Their ears, their fingers, their palates -- permanently on the alert, as it were -- lay in wait for such propitious instances, which could be set off by minute details. But when they surrendered to those feelings of unruffled beatitude, of eternity undisturbed by the slightest ripple, when everything was in balance, deliciously slow, the very intensity of their bliss underlined the ephemerality and fragility of such instants. It did not take much to make it crumble: the slightest false note, a mere moment's hesitation, a sign that was perhaps too vulgar, and their happiness would be put out of joint; it went back to being what it always had been, a kind of deal, a thing they had bought, a pitiful and flimsy thing, just a second's respite which returned them all the more forcefully to the real dangers, the real uncertainties in their lives, in their history."

- Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties [1965]

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Between Ideation and Agitation

Some interesting reading, of late...

The past two online editions of the e-flux journal feature the first two installments of a panel discussion on "Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe." Hosted by Zdenka Badovinac, the panel features -- as one would expect -- Boris Groys as well as a number of curators and writers from across Eastern Europe. From the first portion, in which the participants discuss the nature of conceptual art in Soviet bloc countries during the 1960s-1980s, and its differences from the same as it appeared in the West:

CH: [...] When modernism breaks down, it does so in more or less the same way everywhere. That’s to say that the aesthetically authorizing processes are giving way, leaving behind whatever authority they may or may not have. On the other hand, I think we have to be very careful not to fall into the wider sense of Conceptual art as a means of ratifying anything that looks like avant-garde practice.

ZB: This is the crucial question.

BG: That is a really interesting point. In fact, this kind of shift from the form or image to a kind of theoretical interpretation, which was crucial in the 1960s in the work of Conceptual artists, could never have taken place in the Soviet context, where this pure visual form was never taken into consideration. That means that the most recognizable aspect of these Soviet artists’ work was primarily their ideological intention.

CH: Not that the idea of pure visuality is not ideological...

BG: It was ideological, but immediately recognized and understood as such. That means the political attitude of an artist was the first thing you identified when you saw the work, from the initial Russian avant-garde to the end of the entire period of Soviet art. If you saw something like pure form, it probably meant that the artist was anti-Soviet. The work was based on the premise that ideological content and interpretation were everything. As there was no market, no connoisseurship, the visual quality as such was nothing. At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s people like Kabakov, Komar & Melamid, and others began to diversify, differentiate, and mix these ideological contexts.They started to develop interpretations that were non-pro, non-con, non-anti. It was a deconstructivist practice, which in effect amounted to the same thing as the Western Conceptual art. It was a different kind of shift, from a very strictly ordered ideological system of interpretation to a free-floating, ironical, and deconstructive interpretation. And to invent this type of interpretation, to undermine this strict order of ideology, was the main goal of the artists inside the circle. So, Western and Eastern European practices are comparable on this level, but very different on the other level. There was the market, connoisseurship, and concentration on pure form in the West, while in the East there was a very rigid ideological context with a very rigid system of interpretation.

At one point, Groys addresses the matter of "exoticism" in relation to Soviet and Eastern European conceptualism; which is a thorny criticism that has sometimes arisen in discussions of the work of K&M, Ilya Kabakov, and others over the years.

The conference dates back to 2007, taking place as Badovinac was starting to amass the Arteast 2000+ collection for the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana. Of interest is the presence of British art historian (and career-long Art & Language affiliate) Charles Harrison, who passed away in 2009. The first portion appears here, the second here, with the third to be posted in the journal's next edition.

Bringing things into a more current context in the latest edition is Keti Chukhrov's related essay "Epistemological Gaps between the Former Soviet East and the 'Democratic' West." Chukhrov examines the social dimensions of artistic activity in post-Soviet society, particularly citing the slippery role of "subversive" and "transgressive" acts as they relate to recent scandalous works by Russian art groups such as Voina and Pussy Riot:

"In such conditions, it becomes important to develop an analysis that evades both Cold War discourse and nostalgia alike. While Foucault’s cultural archeology did this for Western European disciplinary societies, this kind of work—apart from certain sporadic efforts—has not fully addressed post-Soviet societies. Why is it necessary? Why can’t we simply claim to be part of the global pro-Western democracy, where even terms such as 'Former West' are used to describe itself?

"The ethical differences between historical socialism and Western liberal democracy or its critical traditions arise not so much from ex-socialist authoritarian Politbureau decisions as from deeply different epistemological interpretations and treatments of crucial philosophical notions of consciousness, the unconscious, power, culture, psychics, the idea, the ideal, the common, and freedom."

In the final portion of the essay, Chukhrov discusses of the place of "interventionist" art practices in the wider post-Soviet culture in relation to the "urgent necessity for non-utilitarian values in the life of a society," by way of Russian philosopher Evald Ilyenkov's "dialectics of the Ideal" as it relates to cultural subjectivity and everyday life.

Vinyl Reckonings, Redux (Geezer Edition)

This past week I've seen a number of posts from various U.K. music bloggers about the pending closure of the HMV record-shop chain. Out of which I found Neil Kulkarni's "Some thought about growing up and falling apart" to be the one that, for me, had the most personal resonance.

"But hold on. Nostalgia, as it’s phonetic adjacency to neuralgia suggests, is a more complex, nagging, painful thing than that. Nostalgia doesn’t have to be about yearning for what’s lost. None of us are dumb enough or depressed enough to think our school days were the best years of our lives, let alone wish ourselves back into the strange world of threat, confusion and hyper-sensitivity that childhood was. Nostalgia can, though, be about confrontation, can be about running against the brick wall of time’s ongoing moves of obsolescence on everything you once held dear. It can be a brutal realisation that in at its depths, what you’re really sad for is what the hell’s happened to you, how much you lost getting so much smarter."

Kulkarni's yarn has little to with any brand or particular store, but the experience of growing up with music in a particular physical form(at), and with the part the experience of frequenting brick-and-mortar premises, and is ultimately the larger and overarching role that the ritual of bin-browsing and the discovery of certain special recordings play in one shaping one's sense of self during one's youth. As well as a mediation on recorded music's evolution from material to immaterial (or its return to the latter state, as he points out), and about the history of recorded music in general.

* * * * *
Of course I can identify, because I'm of that age/generation when music was only acquirable in said material form -- particularly that of LPs (and, to a slightly lesser extent, cassette tapes). But in recent years I've had any number of younger friend for whom that formative relationship was unknown, was an anachronism. Who maybe grew up with CDs, but who in adulthood mostly abhorred music in any "hardcopy" form.

Or the realization I had of this generational disconnect when I started doing radio over a decade ago, and was occasionally assigned a new and much younger DJ to train in the studio's booth. The first time I blithely and unthinkingly told one of these kids to cue up a record, and then watched in horror as they threw the stylus onto or across the LP (one of mine, actually) with a destructive, audible KWU-THUMP. And immediately realizing how much I had witlessly assumed -- figuring that any music lover would've at some point learned how to handle vinyl and a turntable.

Kulkarni's spiel taking a record home upon purchase and experiencing a revelation upon first listening reminds me of Lester Bangs's similar description of same in his "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" essay. But I also remember, like Kulkarni, of having my mind blown upon first hearing Public Enemy. Of buying Yo! Bum Rush the Show back in 1987 when I knew fuck-all about the record or the group, getting it home, dropping the needle in the groove, and within a matter of seconds have my sensibilities turned upside-down by the onslaught of noise that was "You're Gonna Get Yours." Of being immediately smacked upside my head by it, and immediately feeling like I would thereafter listening to music with a completely different set of ears. That sort of aesthetic-altering epiphany that happens with only so many songs or albums in a person's youth.

And in his post, Kulkarni also described the process of going out on a untested limb, of buying the unknown and unpreviewed item, "things that I HAD to learn to live with to make the money spent seem worth it." Which is a situation I knew very well in my teenage years, taking a chance and winding up with something that disappointed or confounded me when I first played it, that I simply didn't warm to at first because it threw me a curve. And how in some cases, after repeated spins -- with me determined to find something about the record that would justify the money spent -- some of these items became favorites, sometimes even nudging my own tastes and preferences in a different direction. So what Kulkarni's talking out was also (or often) a part of a process of personal development and discovery.

Someone Still Lives Here (and: Returning to the Topic of Ruination)

Returning to two prior topics, for the first time in a long while...

It seems that 2012 two saw a bit of a slowdown with the "ruin porn" meme. Perhaps there were a few too many photo books and essays of the stuff published around the beginning of they year, leading to a saturation effect and prompting appetites to slack. If anything, the previous year showed a turn from the usual gratuitous ruin-porn offerings and a turn toward analytical discussions of "Why the popular fascination with Detroit and ruin porn?"

The Design Observer, however, has stayed with the topic throughout; with various contributors focusing the discussion on Detroit's history, framing it in the larger issues of sustainable urban planning and the socio-economic dynamics of inner-city communities. Recently they posted a slideshow of some work by photographers Aaron Rothman and Dave Jordano, each of whom chose to turn their cameras away from the city's often-photographed monuments of urban decay and focusing instead on the lives of the citizens of the city -- aiming to capture life as it's lived in the city, and to also "counteract the aestheticizing and mythologizing effects of much Detroit ruin photography."

The post was closely preceded by an article by Andrew Herscher, associate professor of architecture at U Mich; and Herscher's piece almost serves as an accompanying or introductory text for Rothman and Jordano's photographs. In his essay, Herscher discusses grass-roots urban reclamation in terms of a city's "unreal estate"; the creation of a "proto-commons" from the spatial and infrastructural voids and ruptures left by the abandonment of capital from previously industrialized cities...

"What if Detroit has lost population, jobs, infrastructure, investment, and all else that the conventional narratives point to — and yet, precisely as a result of those losses, has gained opportunities to understand and engage novel urban conditions? What if one sort of property value has decreased in Detroit — the exchange value brokered by the failing market economy — but other sorts of values have increased — use values that lack salience or even existence in that economy? What if Detroit has not only fallen apart, emptied out, disappeared and/or shrunk, but has also transformed, becoming a new sort of urban formation that only appears depleted, voided or negated through the lenses of conventional architecture and urbanism?"

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The Secret Life of Plants

Contra Marinetti & co., contra the notion of an 'industrial sublime':

"Today, when the truly wretched aesthete, at a loss for objects of admiration, has invented the contemptible ‘beauty’ of the factory, the dire filth of those enormous tentacles appears all the more revolting; the rain puddles at their feet, the empty lots, the black smoke half-beaten down by the wind, the piles of slag and dross are the sole true attributes of those gods of a sewer Olympus. I was not hallucinating when, as a terrified child, I discerned in those giant scarecrows, which both excited me to the point of anguish and made me run sometimes for my life, the presence of a fearful rage. That rage would, I sensed, later become my own, giving meaning to everything spoiling within my own head and to all that which, in civilised states, looms up like carrion in a nightmare. I am, of course, not unaware that for most people the factory chimney is merely the sign of mankind’s labour, and never the terrible projection of that nightmare which develops obscurely, like a cancer, within mankind. Obviously one does not, as a rule, continue to focus on that which is seen as the revelation of a state of violence for which one bears some responsibility. This childish or untutored way of seeing is replaced by a knowing vision which allows one to take a factory chimney for a stone construction forming a pipe for the evacuation of smoke high into the air — which is to say, for an abstraction. Now, the only possible reason for the present dictionary is precisely to demonstrate the error of that sort of definition.

"It should be stressed, for example, that a chimney is only very tentatively of a wholly mechanical order. Hardly has it risen towards the first covering cloud, hardly has the smoke coiled round within its throat, than it has already become the oracle of all that is most violent in our present-day world, and this for the same reason, really, as each grimace of the pavement’s mud or of the human face, as each part of an immense unrest whose order is that of a dream, or as the hairy, inexplicable muzzle of a dog. That is why, when placing it in a dictionary, it is more logical to call upon the little boy, the terrified witness of the birth of that image of the immense and sinister convulsions in which his whole life will unfold, rather than the technician, who is necessarily blind."

From Georges Bataille's "Factory Chimney" entry in the Dictionnaire critique, c. 1929.

The Half-life of Ephemera

Or: That which we have now, having never been (Slight return)


Something that used to happen to me fairly often, but hasn't in a long while...

Acquiring a book from either a library or a second-hand bookstore, books that had passed through other hands. A photograph found between the pages, or falling out from someplace therein. A photographs no doubt having been haplessly placed there as a bookmark many years or decades previously, before the reader had returned the volume to the library or sold it off to whomever.

One of these I can remember quite well. A black & white snapshot, with the blank white frame of a border. A man and a woman leaning against the side of a broad and bulky car. Behind them, beyond the car, a few homes marking the point where a short stretch of residential block gives way to an open vista, the road receding to the horizon over a terrain of rolling hills. The model of the vehicle and the man and woman's hair and clothes suggest that the photo was taken no later than 1952. The landscape and the sky have me thinking the location might be the outskirts of San Francisco or possibly Seattle -- some place like that, someplace coastal and right off the water, in California or the Pacific northwest, back when large portions of that region were still thinly and spottily populated, when many of the roads had only recently been laid down.

 Despite the fact that someone had them stand against the car -- to stop just here for a moment, so that someone could capture an image of the occasion -- they position themselves toward the camera quite loosely, but can't really be bothered to fully, formally face the camera. Their posture is relaxed and casual. The man grins, the woman appears to be on the verge of laughter. The way they are interacting suggests that they are something other than lovers or man and wife. Perhaps instead an old dear friend or sibling was visiting from elsewhere, making the rare trek across a large expanse of the country, for a few days of catching-up and spread over several days. With the photo having been taken in that last hour before the visiting party had to say goodbye, departing homeward.

At one point a had a small collection of these photos, amounting to only a few. Don't know at what point -- in which move or purging -- I lost them, but I had them for a while. I kept them as I had encountered them, as physical objects; as flotsam from other people's lives that had been unintentionally (one assumes) set into indeterminate circulation. The sort of photos you look at and deduce what you can from the information they contain. The sort of photos you look at and wonder: Who are -- or were -- these people? What did this moment mean to them? Where are they now?



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Needle to the Groove

I did my Record Store Day shopping a day early to beat the crowds.

Actually, that's a lie. I'd lost track, didn't realize that RSD was today, and just happened to hit a local spot yesterday. I have hadn't much reason to keep track of such stuff, lately. It ain't in the budget like it used to be. Which is neither here nor there, because I was majorly spoiled what what Chicago had to offer in that category, and the ones in my current locale simply do not stack up to what I'm used to. The Delmark-affiliated Jazz Record Mart, Dusty Groove, plus innumerable second-hand spots scattered about the city...it all made RSD a bit pointless because almost every Saturday (or Sunday) was a record-store day. What little shopping I've done for music since I moved here has mostly involved buying gifts for other people. It isn't uncommon for me to spend an hour or more in a place and leave empty-handed because I didn't encounter the temptation to make a purchase.

But yeah, it all comes down to my being irredeemably "pre-digital" when it comes to be attached to music as embodied by a physical object -- especially wax. There've been plenty of testimonials written on the topic already, so I see little reason to go into it at length. Chalk it up to my suffering from some unshakable case of old-school geezer commodity fetishism. But yes, kids -- vinyl does sound better when played on a half-way decent system. Warmer, richer, more "organic," whatever, etcetera, blahblahblah. But mainly I find the physical aspect results in a different relationship with the music itself -- from the large-format packaging (including liner notes with some genres), down to extra manual effort involved in de-sleeving, cueing, lifting and flipping. It leads to a more intimate relationship with the music, if only because the format involves a more linear and durational experience with the act of listening.