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Moving Beyond Object Fetishism

Ok, not really: I still want to have my cds & dvds & books & vinyl displayed in nicely neat, alphabetical or genre categories so that I can peruse & browse & yes, show them off.

Considering that I have roughly 475 cds and 500 books (here in my NY apt, I probably have another 400 – 550 books in my parents’ attic), these individual objects combine to create a collection, a library. And someday I’ll have the room to display them as such. For the immediate future, however, I’m going (almost) all digital: having spent most of Memorial Day weekend ripping cds, I plan to rip maybe 5 or 6 of my favorite movies (to supplement a number of already digitized movies & tv series that are sitting on my external hard drive), and pack up all my books (except for a few that are pertinent to the Living Theatre research paper I’m still working on – will probably get myself down to 2 boxes . . . ok, probably 3 boxes for the trip out to New Mexico), and then will store them at my parents’ house for, well, the foreseeable future. Depending on how well the iPhone might work as a pdf reader, the bulk of my upcoming book purchases may very well be digital as well.

Which is rather amazing if I stop to think about it. The ability to have all of that stuff on a hard drive that takes up less space then 10 cds may seem normal these days, but upon reflection it’s still pretty damn cool! And, in the end, I’m looking forward to not carrying all this stuff with me – although in part that is probably because I know that it is a temporary situation and that someday, hopefully in the next 5 years, I’ll find where I want to live and settled down to a place that has the room for my library of books and media to be displayed and categorized and organized. Till then, however, it’s a hard drive life.

With backups . . . oh yes, plenty of backups!!

On this day..