Fibber's Closet Dept.

Next weekend I'll be visiting my good friend Sarah in Jersey, and making a key stop on the way back: the Princeton Record Exchange. There, I'll be unloading most of my existing collection of vinyl. Most of it is actually my wife's — between us we have mostly Eighties heavy metal, punk, underground / noise / alternative / college tunes, and some weird one-off bits. (CM von Hausswolff's Life and Death of Pboc, for instance.

After mulling over selling off the collection picemeal on eBay or Craigslist or the like, I decided it was just easier to dump the lot there and be done with it — there's only so much time I can devote to curating a collection like that, especially when most of anything important in it has already been released on CD or as a download. Most of them aren't in great shape, anyway — they've been played pretty aggressively, the sleeves are rather ragged, and neither of us were terribly obsessive about keeping them in forensically perfect shape anyway.

The nostalgia of the LP never completely left me. I loved the fact that LPs had cover art you could hang on a wall (as opposed to postage-stamp-sized CD sleeves), how turntables had tonearms that looked like surgical instruments from a science fiction movie, and that little electric sput that jumped from the speakers when the needle met the record. And I don't think vinyl will ever quite die — not as long as there are wheels of steel and DJs to man them, and milk cartons to shove the records into. And folks like me to go digging through them.