duck-shaped pain

2000-08-14
Where I Finally Cull The Sick And The Old

My method of reducing my pudding-in-Sleeper-like mass of CDs, a project that has engaged my attentions to a frightening extent the past week: mini-discs. Lots and lots of mini-discs. I've been wanting to get a mini-disc recorder literally since they came out in 1991, when doing so would have been beyond the pale of stupidity - not just because they were $600, not just because they were bigger than your fist, but mainly because the discs themselves were 10 bucks a pop. I didn't care - I knew a good idea when I saw one. I've hated tapes since I can remember, for the obvious reason that they suck: they degrade, you can't really skip around, they break incredibly easily, every time you record something you have to decide whether to live with the hiss or use Dolby and cut out the frequency spectrum that contains most of my favorite trebly guitar parts and adenoidal vocalists, and they have a disconcerting and inexplicabler tendency to, when in my possession, spontaneously transform themselves into Moebius strips. Tapes have never treated me well, and in response I've never treated them with any respect. I lose cases, stuff them into a drawer, start mix tapes and never finish them. At this point, I have no idea what is on at least a third of the tapes I own.

Mini-discs, on the other hand, are wonderful little sci-fi fetish objects that do just about everything I could hope for: unlike CD-Rs, you can divide tracks, move them around, combine them, and erase them with complete impunity, totally fulfilling my inner control freak. They're tiny, nifty-looking, and more sturdily-built than I am. Every so often, when I'm handling one, I take a look at it and have that same weird, giddy, childish moment of satori that I occasionally have when I'm dicking around with my Palm Pilot: I'm living in the future. Although I've never been a complete technophile, I certainly understand its appeal; it's the only secular religion that engenders the sort of pie-eyed optimism that the old-style, non-secular religions do, or so I hear.

Anyway, this has been my non-work, non-girlfriend portion of my week: putting CDs up on half.com, listening to the ones I think I might want to save tracks from, copying those tracks onto mini-disc, mailing off the CDs. The MD recorder I got, the Sharp 722, is, to quote the phrase my father asked to have carved onto his tombstone, "Top Value At A Reasonable Price". Admittedly, it's not for the fashionable - it's a bit bulky compared to the pricier models, and it bears a resemblance to�the best way to describe it is as a Swiss Boy Scout Chronometer, but even that doesn't quite capture it's chrome-plated goofiness. Nevertheless, it's an admirably designed piece of consumer electronics that works perfectly and cost under 200 bucks: it's got a car-stereo-style loading slot instead of a hinged door, so as to save on wear and tear, the controls all make sense, and - perhaps most importantly - it has a big spinning dial for inputting song titles, which turns it from a chore into the continual mindless amusement of seeing how close, with one quick spin, one can get to the letter you're looking for. At this point, I can get within a letter pretty much every time. It's like my Tetris addiction Freshman year of college, except this time, there's actually a semi-productive result.

So, copying the CDs. The first decision I had to make was which ones to get rid of. I set the bar at anything that had less than 20 minutes of music that I'd actually ever want to here again in my life. This constituted a good 200 CDs or so - not just music I ended up with by accident, but plenty of albums that I always assumed I liked: my Pixies, Warren Zevon, and Bikini Kill collections have all been decimated. In the case of the Pixies, it was due to the realization that, although I like a decent chunk of the Pixies songs, I've never actually liked the Pixies as a band. In other words, I take them purely on a hook-by-hook basis, and neither Doolittle, Bossanova, nor Trompe Le Monde have more than 6 or 7 hooks I'd really care to hear again - and now when I'm in the mood for them, I can hear them all in one fell swoop, anyway. Sebadoh, the same way. Warren Zevon's gone because, even though I love him, the albums I have on CD are so spectacularly inconsistent that it's best to just remember the good songs and get the bad ones as far away from my stereo as possible. And being that Kathleen Hanna has never released an album longer than 28 minutes in her life, economics dictated that she be among the first to go, right along with all those dinky little They Might Be Giants EPs that I never bother to listen to because I don't have a CD changer.

Then there's just the chaff: CDs I haven't even listened to since I came to New York, stuff I found in a dollar bin and figured I might listen to someday, two Stone Temple Pilots CDs, one of which I even bought, Weird Al albums, et al. Listening through this drawerful, trying to figure out which songs made me buy the damn things in the first place started out fun and has since become, as the half.com orders come rolling in and I have to mail the CDs out, a Bataan Death March through my benighted past of rockin' out, my ears trudging their way through near-barren soundscapes of early 90s alt, early 80s comps and the occasional foray into the twilight world of Christian Rock. (sadly, it turns out that the only good Carman songs are the ones where Jesus is actually duking it out with Satan in a boxing ring or an Olde West town or somesuch.) At first, I tried to be scrupulous enough to give every song at least a minute's worth of my time, but at this point, you know, if King's Fucking X have more than one decent song on their CD, well, butter my ass and call me a corncob[1], but I just don't care.

On the plus side, though, when all this is done, I'll have two of my drawers back and will actually listen to some of the music that used to be in there. And every so often, it all becomes worthwhile. For instance, did you know that there's a third decent Rentals song?


[1] This phrase originates, like most good things, with Mr. Chris Ware, and it is what I programmed in as the macro-y finishing Word98 thing for the word 'well', just to see how said thing worked. I never got around to deleting it, mainly because I forgot which menu it was and find it a mild but consistent source of amusement every time I type the word 'well'. This, though, was the first time I actually hit return.

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