​“Under the paving stones, the beach!” – French graffito 

Greetings and welcome back to Cheap Thrills, your source for speculation on the spectacle of modern living, and how to sidestep it by downshifting into a lifestyle less reliant on the systems of media entertainment pushed by McGovCorp. In this edition I’m going to head out on an excursion to extol the many virtues of taking a stroll and how the simple act of walking in this world can become a profound pastime. To that rambling end I will examine the tradition of the flâneur, the concept and practice of the dérive, and psychogeography. Along the way I’ll look at how industrial culture reordered traditional notions of space and time, and how the nascent topology of deindustrial culture might in turn cause new flows in time and space. 

            Walking is the most perfect exercise. It stretches and strengthens the body as it eases and expands the mind.  As the industrial revolution transformed the cities of the world, walking around the city also became a chance to observe the ways society was changing.

             Enter the flâneur .

            The word is derived from the Old Norse flana, which translates as “to wander aimlessly.”[1] The word found its way to France in the late 19th century, where flânerie gained currency to describe people wandering about without apparent direction, rhyme or reason; the people who engaged in this pastime were called flâneurs.[2] These were the idlers, people of leisure who transformed the mere act of taking a walk into an artful practice.  Observing the rhythms of the city, the flâneur is a passerby, just one of many, a person lost in the faceless crowd. Mesmerized by his or her own thoughts, the flâneur sifts through the secret strata of the city and comes to know its many mysteries.

            The practice of flânerie materialized at time when factories spewed coal smoke from their snouts like dragons of iron, when industrialization vivisected the streets with strangling traffic, when forge and foundry vomited pollutants into air and stream, when the labyrinthine passages and glass arcades of Paris were turned into homogeneous boulevards. The flâneur was there to explore the metamorphosis of urban renewal amidst the defilement of the old. Walking, they soaked in the modern metropolis as a spectacle: they were inside of it, yet through the act of watchful observation, they remained detached and apart.
       
     The word and concept may be French, but the literary origins of the concept came first from American writer Edgar Allan Poe and his short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1840). The story centers on a man living in London who has just recovered from a long illness and who is finally able to get outside and onto the streets of the city again. Still fragile, he parks himself in a coffee shop and is enraptured by watching the coming and going of the passing crowds. First he sees them as a swarm of humanity. Then his view zooms in closer to observe different classes and occupations of people: the aristocrats, lawyers, merchants and clerks, common drunkards, pickpockets, ragamuffins and riffraff.  The narrator neatly categorizes each person, until an old man comes into view whose countenance grabs his “whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression.” He becomes obsessed by this figure and thinks this man has a hidden power inside him, some kind of secret knowledge or history. He becomes so obsessed he can’t let him out of sight. So he follows him out onto the street, and it becomes a story of one man walking in a meandering circumambulation through byzantine thoroughfares following another walker. In his compulsion he follows the man until daybreak, then again all the next day until the sun disappears into night, finally acquiescing to the fact that however much he observes this person, he will never truly know the man of the crowd.[3] 

      French poet, essayist and philosopher Charles Baudelaire was a big fan of Poe, and a translator of Poe’s works into French. He was rather taken by the ideas Poe presented in his story and built on the idea of the restless city observer in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” In one crucial section of Baudelaire’s peregrinating essay he draws a comparison between Poe’s protagonist and the artist Constantin Guys, and then uses Guys as a template to flesh out his vision of the flâneur:[4]

 The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amidst the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of those slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life who makes his whole world his family […] thus the lover of universal life enters the crowd as if it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy.

Baudelaire’s figure who walked and strolled through the lanes of life, often decked out as a dandy, as Guys was, became crucial to his understanding of the complex relationships between the individual and the masses inside the industrialized metropolis. A transformation in the consciousness of the city dweller coincided with urban economic transformation. The pressing in of people on all sides, the stratification and striation of the social classes, enterprise and business always on the go, twenty-four hours a day in full swing: all of this is enough to set anyone’s nerves on edge. Walking became a coping mechanism for those citizens who had what might now be called sensory processing disorder, a way to remain invisible by blending in with the swarm; and yet also a way to maintain autonomy from the swarm by cultivating the habit of detached observation and contemplation as an individual distinct from the concrete anthills of humanity. Walking remains a way to cope as industrial society breaks. Mind and body have a chance to reintegrate away from the fragmentation of spectacular digital life, while reassessing the possibilities of a disintegrated built environment.

As the habit of flânerie was taken up by the bohemian set, it worked its way from Symbolist poets, exemplified by Arthur Rimbaud’s precocious and prodigious tramping, on to the early modernists such as Walter Benjamin, who was the next to stamp his impressions on the term. For him the flâneur became an investigator of the city, a kind of journalist and amateur detective who made connections between the clue of a street sign, the evidence of architecture, and the forensics of local events and current conditions. These coalesced inside the mind of the observant walker until the code of modern life was cracked.

Benjamin also thought the flâneur was “a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism.” In building on Baudelaire’s work Benjamin formulated two terms to describe opposite ways of reacting to the modern city. Erlebnis described the stress brought on by the sensory overload. To cope with Erlebnis he saw people retreating into a numbed-out, anesthetized life. On the other end of the spectrum was Erfahrung, which represented the enjoyment of mobility and the multitude of sensory textures the city had to offer.  

I see the deindustrial urban walker existing in a third point, triangulating the two ends of Benjamin’s spectrum, and mixing in with them the crucial element of imagination. As the walker’s feet wander, so the mind wonders on its own meandering paths. As the feet traverse the layered history of a neighborhood, so memories from a person’s past are also elicited. Interwoven with these come stray thoughts from the astral static, ruminations, and other glints from subtle and diaphanous realms. Discursive meditations are assisted in this ambulatory mode. The clues gleaned are insights that help resolve the mystery of how best to live in the days of decline. 

The artistic potential of walking gained further recognition from Guy Debord during his time in the Lettrist International (LI) and then the Situationist International (SI), whose members included sound and visual poets, filmmakers, political revolutionaries, and a cadre of bohemians just hanging around for the party.  When they weren’t drinking and talking in bars, they drifted around the city on long walks, and these walks became a major theme for the groups. Debord dubbed this practice the dérive, which literally means drifting, and he differentiated this from the classic notion of a walk or stroll by placing further emphasis on the way geography affects psychology and psychology affects geography. It’s not an original idea, but he was able to express it in an artistic and political language that was rather catching:

​On the one hand the drift was a way for them to cope with the spectacle of the city. It allowed them to discover a new city within the old, by studying it at different times in different lights and alternate points view. It was also a major tool for escaping boredom and the banality of workaday life. The drifts aroused their passions, their love for adventure and discovery. 

Those who share these adventurous predilections may find their peripatations also take them into the underworld of urban spelunking and the exploration of abandoned buildings that litter the world’s decayed urban landscapes. Those who become adept at this skill may even be able to parlay it into a way of earning a living. I can see a role for guides versed in the practice of urban exploration paid to retrieve objects or people from dangerous and poisoned locations of the deindustrial future.

            One of the psychogeographical games played by members of the LI and SI was called the possible rendezvous. A person is invited to go alone to a square, café, park, or other location at a preordained time. With no one to meet and no one to wait for, the player of this game is freed from keeping up small talk, or listening to a friend’s impressions, and so has more mental space to allow the surroundings to seep in. The possible rendezvous was also used to encourage a person to think of new ways to use time: in conversations with a stranger, in staring at a sidewalk, in witnessing something unexpected. The person who set the appointment may even turn up. If these rendezvous are organized by a large enough pool of participants, the parties may not even know each other. It’s a game that can help mix up the habits and routines of daily life. Games such as these can help a person become more agile and antifragile. As futures become more uncertain in terms of resource availability and unpredictable catastrophes, the ability to engage situations and people with a spontaneous awareness becomes an asset.

Tours became detours in this milieu. Going the long way around, or going the wrong way altogether, turned out to be a road into new places and psychological situations. Detouring cleared the path for one of the key strategies of the SI: détournement, a word that means “rerouting” or “hijacking.” It is shorthand for the phrase “détournement of preexisting aesthetic elements.” The practice involved taking preexisting works of literature, art, maps, sound, film and whatever else they could get their hands on, and reworking it into something new. Détournement treats all of culture as a common property for the artist to make creative reuse of. It actively encouraged all modification and transformation derived from old works into new works; it incited the deformation and reformation of cultural materials as an active position of agency and challenge. From highbrow to lowlife, from posh to pulp, all are fair game for fair use in a grand mash-up. In my mind détournement represents an early technique for cultural synthesis, beneficial as a way of retrofitting existing cultural artifacts into forms more useful for a world wracked by extreme weather events and energy shortages. Détournement could also be further developed as an art of combinations, potentially as one component towards a real-life Glass Bead Game.

To return from this meandering sidetrack, the Situationists took old city maps, cut them up and collaged them into new maps as part of their work. These détourned cartographies were used to reach places that didn’t exist before. Instead of looking for lines that made borders they looked for lines that made connections, pasted these together and attempted to follow them into imaginal territories. Cutting up a map and rearranging it cuts through time as well as space. Following such a détourned map gives odds to overlooked potentials. 

            To walk in 21st-century America is to have the experience of a schizophrenic. The psychological state of our cities is as split and cracked as its concrete and asphalt. Past the crumbling plazas with their succession of empty shops, past the gas stations with their promises of high-speed travel and convenience, another mental state of the union exists. This reality is waiting to be touched by a new breed of deindustrial flâneurs. It can be found underneath the bridges, where mini neighborhoods of tents and cardboard are set up to escape the rain, past the fringe dwellers who wait for derelict metro buses as the fumes of the frenzied motorcade sift into the dust-colored sky, past the rusted-out, broken-down vehicles of an exhausted country.

      As the phantom existence of the metaverse disappears into a mess of tangled wires, the streets will need to be revived.  Walking allows a person to see the world at a natural pace. Car travel rushes over the terrain, while on slow, observant strolls, details erupt from the landscape.

     Where the 19th-century flâneur was a spy on assignment in the world of consumption, the 21st-century flâneur is a vagabond fleeing the boredom of McGovCorp’s televised internment couch, looking to see what might remain and become of the city as the post-industrial marketplace shudders and shutters its doors, as the age of fossil fuels sputters and convulses. The deindustrial flâneur is an advance scout reporting on how the remaining detritus might be rearranged and combined into more useful arrangements.

      “Far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape,” Benjamin said. Layers of history are present in the parade of architecture. Walking is a visceral way to learn local histories. Deindustrial flâneurs can become repositories for local lore that becomes the connective tissue between time and place.

     My wife Audrey and I have always enjoyed walking around our hometown and surrounding areas. It’s helped me to internally map the land I dwell on. Since 2019 we have been exploring the region a bit more systematically with the help of a guidebook (Walking Cincinnati). It’s a nice guide; it lays out walking routes for over thirty different neighborhoods; interspliced amidst the directions are choice tidbits of history that have given us have a greater appreciation for the heritage in our hometown. On one walk in the neighborhood of Glendale we stopped by the Swedenborgian Church where Johnny Appleseed was a congregant during his time in the area, and it imparted a sense of wonder to know that legacy is still with us.

While guidebooks like these don’t ever go too deep into details, they do serve as a point of introduction to the layers of the past still present. Building, street, and neighborhood names come alive when you know something of the biography of the people they honor. Another way to soak up local history from the ground up is to take frequent walks in graveyards, noting the names on stones of interest. The bits I’ve found really exciting often call for further research, another cheap thrill that can occupy hours of time inside libraries and archives and at the meetings of historical societies. These venues also provide opportunities to make friends with new people who share common interests. As the industrial age continues to unravel and once commonly agreed-upon understandings of history fall apart, all this research stands to become fodder for the propagation of new histories by which the future might better understand its past.

     If you happen to be lucky enough to live in a place where the buildings aren’t all brutal, where there is more brick, wood or stucco than siding, where the roofs are gabled and the windows are Folk Victorian style, then you may also benefit from an architectural guidebook, which adds another layer of enjoyment to an urban hike. Learning about the various types of houses (Italianate, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival…) gives a greater appreciation for the design of diverse domiciles. Knowing something of domestic and traditional architecture brings an awareness of the psychological effects of various buildings, often in counterpoint to the obloid shapes the architects of more recent structures have wrought on the landscape. The go-to book in my household is A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia Savage MacAlester.
             
            In all this talk of walking I’ve barely even mentioned the rural, the stretches between the towns which are perfect for rambling, for scrambling down ravines and up to high lookouts. While the flâneur remains the iconic literary walker of the urban wild, there is a class of wayfarers more at home along the brakes of creeks and down old country lanes adorned with unmortared stone walls where the mullein and mugwort bloom. Here the example of such writers as John Clare, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson may be of inspiration.

            When we drift, the spaces we inhabit are not just traveled through, but are experienced. When we invest them with time spent walking and learning they become invested with meaning. No matter where one lives, whatever the size of one’s income or lack thereof, the act of heading out for a walk opens the door to new zones of perception, to mental and physical liberty.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.   I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

FURTHER RE/SOURCES:
Here are just a few books to stuff into your backpack for reading on a bench next time you head out into the urban wilds.

Baudelaire, Charles. 1992. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Jonathan Mayne, trans., ed. Rochester, Vt.: Phaidon Books.

Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 

Cameron, Julia. 2003. Walking in this World: The Practical Art of Creativity. New York, N.Y. Penguin.
• This book is a sequel to Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and focuses on exercises and thoughts on manifesting creativity centered around the practice of walking. She encourages writers, musicians and artists of all stripes to take a weekly walk and this book is filled with a multitude of suggestions for sustaining the imagination.
Debord, Guy. “Definitions,” “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” “The Theory of the Dérive,” “Two Accounts of the Dérive.” Situationist International Online.  <https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html>

McAlester , Virginia Savage. 2019. A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture. New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf.

McDonough, Tom. 2002. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Several of the essays in this collection by Debord and others get into ideas about cities, urbanism, and architecture.

​Ninjalicious. 2005. Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration. [ See infiltration.org ]

• This is the guidebook for getting into places you are not supposed to be. From behind-the-scenes areas of in-use buildings, to abandoned sites, to drainage systems and other urban underground areas. Explore at your own risk.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1987. Tales of Mystery and Imagination. New York, N.Y.: Mystic Press.

Wark, McKenzie. 2011. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Verso.
• This book is the best I’ve come across for putting Guy Debord, the Situationists, and their whole milieu into a social and historical context.

​
[1]      https://www.etymonline.com/word/flaneur

[2]      While the word flâneur historically implied the masculine, modern advocates recognize it as something that can be applied equally to women as well as men. In French the word passante was used as female equivalent, particularly in the works of Marcel Proust. Twenty-first-century academics have used the word flâneuse to designate the female version. For the purpose of this column I’ll be using the word flâneur as something applicable to all sexes. 

[3]     Poe’s story is great. The main character is also a bit stalky. I’m not advocating people go out and follow strangers around.

[4]     It was also in this essay that Baudelaire coined the term “modernity.”

This essay originally appeared in New Maps, Volume 2, Issue 1 from the Winter of 2022

Standby for failure. It is inevitable if you want to live a life of action. Of not standing by. Of doing and making your own things instead of being fed the garbage churned out by the corporate spectacle.

Do you think there is no future for you? There may not be within the preordained choices promulgated by straight society. But the future is at least partially amenable to our own interventions. If you don’t want to be just a fly on the wall, to live a life where nobody notices you and all you do is observe the actions of others, it can be helpful to get off your shit, detach yourself from looking at whatever the fuck other people are doing, and chart a course of your own.

The current state of our disintegrating culture would have us all feeding off the corporate tit, our brains plugged in to a digital matrix. Down home punks reject this insolvency. The only debt worth having is the debt to our family, friends, and ourselves – the debt to do better. We are free to pursue a course with no commercial potential. Yet often, what was deemed by the business world to be unvaluable has proved to be a viable way of making a living -and more importantly a way of living a life.

To multi-national corporate America, most of us, and whatever scraps of community are left, are just pawns inside an abstract data stream, numbers in a game, and they only take notice when those numbers fluctuate below the level they like or when there is a glitch in the system. Our soi distant overlords in the corporate managerial class have demanded that our lives be less lived, be depersonalized by consumption and playing the pawn in their game, and this has led many into quagmires of inaction and internal querulousness.

​Jon Lydon noted how “anger is an energy.” Apathy is the lack of that energy. And while many of us punks prefer the equanimity of peace, it seems that over time, anger has given way to a pestilence of inaction, afear of doing. It is a catatonia of anhedonia 

Yet the undercurrent of anger is there, and it has been there, and it can be tapped into. On the chessboard of life, refuse to be a pawn.  The authenticity and the ferocity, the energy that comes from doing your own thing in face of the prevailing winds opens oneself up to new eddies and swirls within the crosscurrents. Lean into the wind.

Instead of “do it yourself” there is a “do it for me” attitude, propped up by being habituated to the servile service industry. I think part of it is a kind of Stockholm syndrome resulting from being held hostage to interests that are better served by people being consumers rather than producers. These systems seem to encourage a heightened awareness of alienation.

At one time punk was about transgression, but transgression has become banal. And there is nothing more dull than banal. Our society transgresses every day. Transgress a healthy diet by eating Doritos and twinkies. Transgress a healthy boundary by revealing too much to strangers on the internet. Transgress our needs by giving into our wants and buying more plastic crap that serves no purpose. The temptation to transgress comes daily and those transgressions are rewarded by those who believe in putting no limit on their desires or the things they deserve.

But such a life is hardly satisfactory, and those with a conscience can feel the way these transgressions eat away at their integrity. The old adage that money can’t buy happiness still applies. The number of “likes” received on social media content will also not deliver the ultimate good, though it may deliver dopamine in increasingly small amounts.

The material affluence and corruption of decadent America has led to a withering of our self-control, and as those fruits have died on the vine, so too has our self-respect. Though the United States has been in sharp decline since the 1970s, we still live in a country that, for the time being, has a greater share of the earths limited resources. Within this affluence people have gotten bored on the glut of material out there for their minds to glue themselves too, rather than do anything on their own. Amidst the trappings of external wealth, we have become paupers with regards to the inner dimensions of life. This leads to our terminal boredom as the spectacle never brings true fulfillment.

Let’s just say you’d better have great discipline and a very rich interior life if you expect to be happy amid great affluence. If this is true of individuals, that money doesn’t buy happiness, why can’t it be true of a whole society?

The spectacle would have us all sit still inside a terminal waiting room, holding our breath, listless, flipping through magazines and taking in their ads and messaging, until our name is called. I say don’t wait for your name to be called, but get up and do something. Cancel the meeting with the higher authorities and make your own appointment with destiny.​

The monks of the Christian tradition had a name for the spiritual sickness of not wanting to do jack shit. They called it acedia. Weakness of will is not the curse of our time alone, though in our time it may be exacerbated by all the things around us that can sap the unwary of their will.

From the Greek, acedia is a word that means, “indifference, lethargy, exhaustion, and apathy.” This monk dude named Evagrius of Pontus wrote about acedia back in the 4th century, when he compiled a list of temptations known to plague those living the monastic life. As these became codified over time these temptations became the well-known seven deadly sins and the experience of acedia became better known as sloth.

Today this can be seen as a general aversion to activity, to taking action. For the most part this seems to be an acquired behavior -or lack of behavior. Sloth thrives on confusion and disengagement, two things the spectacle continues to provide. Confusion from the malfeasance wrought by a media now allied to the state, and disengagement by being fed a constant supply of dubious entertainments.

Leave the meh behind and get stoked. Blahness is so boring and passé. Excitement and interest generate resonance and relation and lead to activity in the areas of one’s interests. At a time when the noonday demon seems to be present at all hours of the day, buckling down to some good old-fashioned work may be the best thing to keep the demon at bay. This doesn’t have to be work for the system, for Babylon, or laboring for the false glory of making a manager look good.

A new self-respect can be built from taking on obligations -to oneself and to others outside the orbit of corporate control.  The good feelings generated by doing something voluntarily, by oneself or as a group, were part of the fuel that kept the punk rock engine burning.

Fulfillment comes from other things, and one of those is action. Distance oneself from the fear of failure and do whatever you can to put a leash on apathetic catatonia.

Living only on the internet tends to catch a person up in an abstract intellectual world. But reality, and its material components, are not primarily abstract. The abstractions society has found itself embracing from modernity to post-modernity to the atomizing effects of the internet, tend exacerbate this embrace of the abstract. What is happening online seems more real than what is happening outside the frame of the television, computer and smart phone screens. What is needed to counteract this late-capitalist abstraction is tending to the concrete. Even more than tending to the concrete, tending to the soil.

​Too many choices is no choice at all. So make one. Work with the hands and get out of the head.  

.:. .:. .:.

he  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.   I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

When I first started collecting music the medium of choice was tape. My older sister had a grand collection of cassingles -all the greatest pop and rock hits from the late eighties and early nineties on short cassettes. She could buy one at a time, at a cheaper price, than paying for a tape of the whole album. She did get whole albums on tape -for some of her favorite groups, but often a cassingle would suffice. One to three or four tracks, sometimes with an instrumental on the B side, so you could sing it yourself. When I started buying my own music, tapes were the medium I (my parents) could afford. Allowances could be saved up for a tape, or they’d get me one as a special treat, along the lines of the paperback books and comics they bought for me too. Thanks mom and dad. I know you worked hard for stuff you didn’t like yourself and even found quite questionable.           

​At the time CD’s were still expensive, and we didn’t have a CD player in the house, probably until sometime in the nineties. It was just boomboxes with a tape player, or my sisters non-component stereo system. I still remember my first tape, the one I bought at what is now a dead mall, Forest Fair Mall. We went there to celebrate my eleventh birthday with a few friends from the street. I grabbed Anthrax’s, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath tape, that had their “I’m the Man” track on it, which I’d heard from an older metalhead down the street. My mom wanted to take it back after she found it out what it was on the tape, but somehow I got her to let me keep it. There are advantages to being the youngest of three, as my older sisters never forget to tell me. 

​​I’m not quite sure what my first CD was, but I do know that when I got into punk a few years later, so much of it was on cassette. Taped by my older friend Andy Gable, who turned me on to so much good music, and then by other people. All of us made mix tapes and traded them with each other all the time. Some were for courting. Some were for tripping. Some were for rocking out.
            When I really started buying CDs I was drifting more and more into electronic music and industrial material. One of the first ones I bought was the Future Sounds of London, Lifeforms. I remember my friend Erik criticized it saying it was just a bunch of sound effects, but for me it was a doorway into my ambient listening habit which has continued to this day.
            Recently, while reorganizing the home multimedia library, I went through my entire CD collection and weeded it out. Periodic weeding is necessary in any collection if you want it to remain a collection, and not slip into the realm of the hoarder. It might be a fine line, and I realize I might get some flak for the idea of weeding the collection all, especially from my hoarder friends. Sometimes I’ve weeded and regretted what I got rid of… but most of the time, I haven’t missed the things I let go of. Hopefully they are making someone else happy now instead of just sitting on my shelves.

​​For awhile I stopped buying CDs, around the time when I stopped being a regular programmer on WAIF. Between 2001 and 2014 when I was on the air very regularly, towards the end, I got burned out and even got sick of listening to music. I got over that sickness after about a two-year break. Then I got into it again.
            Well, I never really totally stopped buying CDs or ever stopped listening. But a break from the way I had been doing it was necessary. When doing the two-hour radio show every other week or every week, I needed to have a constant supply of new stuff to play. Or I felt like I did anyway.
During the pandemic and when I’d gotten my musical mojo back, I started getting into building a Bandcamp and adding to my cache of files on the hard drive. Another collection built around things I ripped from the library and from friends.
Yet I still love a CD. I love reading the liner notes. I love the way it is easy to rip them to use in a DAW when making mixes for Imaginary Stations. And though I’m not on WAIF every week anymore, I do go up a few times a year to fill in for Ken Katkin’s Trash Flow Radio, and I still think the best way to do the show is to make two fully loaded mixed CD’s that I can then select from while on the air.
And I never stopped scouring the thrift store for CD’s or going through the bins of used CDs at the record store. It’s interesting because my local shop, Shake It!, doesn’t really even have a new CD section anymore. I spent a lot of money there on CD’s before the vinyl boom took off again. Now the store is very different than it was in terms of all the new music that is out on vinyl and all the used music is on CD. The trend has flip-flopped. I do buy vinyl, but not in huge quantities.
             Getting used CD’s has really come into its own again. It’s a great time for CD collectors to go out on the hunt again, because people are ditching their physical collections in favor of streaming. I think that’s a mistake, because unless you are your own streaming platform, ISP, or have your own internet radio station, someone else will always have control over your ability to access, download, or get to the music you want to hear and listen to.
            Sure, someone can rob or steal your physical stuff, or it could disappear without you knowing what happened, as if often the case when small little things get stolen by elves and pixies. Sure, physical media can be destroyed. Certainly, you can’t take your CD collection with you when the body is set aside at physical death. But perhaps some collectors will want to be buried with their media. None-the-less, if you want to listen to music offline, now is a good time to start raking through the used bins at your favorite record store, at yard and garage sales, at the thrift and charity shops. Vinyl is in demand, and even cassettes are in demand, but CDs are being turned back into the wilds of the secondhand market by those who believe a digital singularity is just around the corner.
            In combing the secondhand market I have been able to get a lot of good music that I couldn’t either afford back in the earlier heyday of my collecting, or that I I couldn’t find or obtain. Now it is out there, waiting to be found. I like looking at used CDs the same way I like looking at used books: there is serendipity at work in what you will find, synchronicity at play in the thing you want and need finding its way to you. I’ve also heard reports of people finding really amazing things: $1 dollar Steve Roach CD’s (his music is timeless and priceless), Sun Ra boxed sets at the thrift store. Other friends are reporting rare underground records from The Hafler Trio, Current and the album Le Mystere De Voix Bulgares, an influence on the vocal techinques of Lisa Gerard and Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance.

​This past fall I was tipped off by a coworker that the local NPR affiliate WVXU/WGUC was giving away boxes and boxes of CDs from their radio library. I went by and picked up several. The only rule there was you had to take everything in a box even if you only wanted one disc. But I managed to find some great recordings from the Hearts of Space label and a Hildegard Von Bingen box set.
            WVXU should know that keeping a collection is an archival commitment. It takes up space and time. They were in the process of moving to their new location, and so they had to free up some space to deliver more airtime. Some people don’t want to commit to the physical space CDs take, but too much streaming ends up cheapening the listening experience because it doesn’t take up space you have to commit too, and it fills time in such a way that almost anything will do (cue joke about the ubiquity of lo-fi beats for experiencing boredom). For them, I suggest the solid nineties option of a binder to put their CD’s and liner notes in. This doesn’t work as well as digipaks, but is still worth doing. It’s also good for burned CDs and very good for information gathered on hacking exploits as we learned from Mr. Robot.               

​There is another reason to build a physical music collection of your own. Streaming platforms may be fickle, and they aren’t great to artists either, but the energy they consume from the natures storehouse of ancient sunlight has very real limits. The amount of power it takes to keep the so-called “cloud” running is enormous. A little boombox could run on power from a generator or some off-grid solar panels in case of an energy disruption. The rolling brown outs and weather disruptions that have become more common with global weirding may mean a loss of internet connectivity for extended durations, especially as our ability to cope with these happenings is thwarted by the law of limits. Having some music on hand while you weather the literal storms can go a long way to making the psychological aspect of a long emergency much more manageable.
            It also makes economic sense to build a physical collection of music you enjoy. Many people cut the cord of cable for their television viewing habits and saved money by having a Netflix or Hulu subscription. That was when these first got going, but now people want to have every show from every platform available with a click, plus a Spotify subscription to have access to a world of music. Plus some Substack subscriptions to read some of their favorite independent journalists and writers (these are probably the best choice). I have done all this myself. Yet as stagflation sets in, it now may time to dam up the streams, collect physical media, and put up antennas for over-the-air reception of media. I’ve canceled several streaming subscriptions or memberships to certain services or platforms so that our household can save a bit of dough. My wages may have gone up over the years, but so have the prices for everything, and the standard of living has been going down ever since the 1970s. Being frugal and thrifty when it comes to entertainment, and having something physical listening on hand is a way to cut back on streaming services.
            It’s also a way to slow down, to really listen to entire albums, and to be more selective in how you feed your imagination and mind.
            The library is another option if you want to save even more money. Many have CD collections that are worth mining, and even a modest collection will have gems. My own work in writing about avantgarde music would have been impossible if I hadn’t been turned on to a world of music with “no commercial value,” but of immense cultural value. Libraries, community radio stations, and local PBS affiliates all have a role to play in preserving and transmitting things of cultural value, that may not have much mass appeal as commodified music in the capitalist system, but create the wealth that can be enjoyed by living a life of the mind. I hope families and individuals who are strapped can continue to turn to these resources for their education, entertainment, and edification.
            Beyond all that it is simply fun to pick through the detritus of the age and find your own listening treasure. Let us resuscitate the compact disc. Keep on digging!