For the second time in as many months, I was interviewed, yesterday, for a documentary. Believe me — I’m as astonished as you are. But don’t whip out your remote and fire up Netflix just yet. The first one was for an Argentinian project about the quest to divine the precise location of an album cover photograph, which I — somewhat unwittingly — had a hand in (see this post for a summary, if you care). I have no idea when and where that will air or what its current status is, but I’ll let ya know if I find out.
This second one on Saturday afternoon, meanwhile, was for a student film being directed by the niece of a good friend of mine, and it’s all about the vanished record shops of New York City and, evidently, the maladjusted sociopaths like myself who regularly shopped in them.
Prompted by a series of strategic questions, I predictably invoked long-vanished ventures like Rocks in Your Head, Bleecker Bob’s, Rebel Rebel, Sounds, Second Coming, Freebeing, Subterranean, Route 66, Other Music, Venus, Lunch For Your Ears and several others, and windily extrapolated on the furtive community that frequented them. I periodically lapsed into the odd withering diatribe about how the jackbooted march of technology and the sickly allure of convenience have decimated this once thriving network and upended both its culture and ecosystem and probably trailed off in a semi-audible stream of potty-mouthed invective.
I babbled out a few anecdotes about the challenges of tracking down comparatively obscure LPs in the age before the internet, the singular joy of stumbling upon that crucial, rarefied import single and some of the key records that first inspired me to spend so much of my youth engaged in such activities.
I have to say, when you're otherwise used to expressing yourself from behind the safety and editorial control of your keyboard, speaking off the cuff about this sort of silly stuff in a coherent manner can be trickier than you might imagine. I suspect I frequently come across, in the ensuing footage, as either a laboriously pompous jackass or a snivelingly precious, trivia-addled weirdo, but -- if you're at all familiar with this stupid blog -- you probably assumed as much, already.
Again, I have no idea if this doc will ever play outside of a collegiate classroom, but should you give one whiff of a good goddamn, I’ll evangelize it if it becomes available for public consumption.
Watch this space.
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