Chekhov's Mistress
Notes from the MiddleGround
Over in the everything old is new again department, I seem to be stuck on “I want to be your Personal Penguin” sung by Davy Jones of the Monkeys, who was a pop culture icon before our culture knew it had any. Don’t bother clicking over because The “Penguin” song is oddly addictive and if you’re not the parent of a small child you have no excuse.
So as I wander around town singing not humming this little ditty tomorrow’s culture seems to me like bow tie pasta at a farfalle affair. It’s everywhere. The Apple stores are approaching Vegas casino proportions and you can’t help feeling a little bit like a sucker walking in amongst the nano hordes and their appleinikepods that can tell you how fast you’re running. I’ve yet to take the glass elevator at the new 5th Avenue store because it seems like that’s just what they want me to do and I refuse, Mr. Wonka.
Meanwhile I’ve calculated the cost of a fully loaded Quad Core Mac Pro and it comes in at $16,934, roughly the cost of a new Honda Civic or 3,078 pints of Guinness. I thought insanely expensive computers went out with bufont hairdos and wide ties, but over in the department of redundancy department they tell me that everything old is new again.
At the fashionable yet oddly cold Sony store on Madison Avenue I checked out the much ballyhooed e-book reader. It’s light – much more so than even a paperback book – it’s readable – much more so than even a paperback book – and it’s amazingly functional – much more so than even a paperback book – but I’m afraid you can’t sit on it.
Like an unfeathered vulture I’ve been pretty impatient about Tower Records’ store closing and have dove in a few times for a nibble. The discounts are not yet great but the sense of change is a call to action for this long-time bin browser. Suddenly I want CDs and even 320 kilobytes per second bit rate can’t assuage my guilt over letting go of 8-tracks so easily way back when.
While I’m not particularly nostalgic, the current air of change seems to me to be particularly dramatic and in some cases downright scary. Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article ”The Formula” discusses a company that mathematically picks hit songs by weighting their structural components like melody, pitch, harmony, tempo. Apparently this “special deconvolution software“is so effective that music producers have used it to push whatever elements the software tells them to to make a hit: “McCready stressed that his system didn’t take the art out of hit-making.” I’ll leave it to you to figure out what’s wrong with that sentence, but I know I’ll sound like nothing more than old fogey when I say that so much hit music being released today does indeed sound like it was generated from a piece of software.
Stopping by Gotham Book Mart as I do at every opportunity to check for signs of life, I see the doors are still closed, but all the employees are there, even the woman at the front desk who I so often fork over my kid’s college fund to – hmmm. What are they doing, one wonders, if the store is closing?
I’m far more anxious about Gotham’s imminent disappearance than Coliseum’s or the myriad other indy bookstore closings because Gotham, among many other qualities, was a bookstore’s bookstore complete with lounging employees, reading cats and a seemingly infinite inventory of the types of books that can only be found by being found.
But according to a recent Wired article more independents are refusing to give up and some are surviving by going the drastic route of “luring customers by putting in cafes or opening specialty shops that cater to a specific audience.” The rest seem to be resorting to some sort of financial scheme that has little to do with books. I spend a lot of time wandering around indy bookstores and I’m happy that they’re finding new ways to stay alive, but as far as I’m concerned, if Apple ever decides to get into the e-book business all bets are off.
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: October 18, 2006
- Filed Under:
Song of Myself: Diary
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
