Comments on: Record Stores

By: Michael Grant Smith

Michael Grant Smith — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 15:00:17 +0000

Cooper, all of these assertions of your supposed boringness are very stimulating to read and quite interesting. Please continue with your arguments.

By: Cooper

Cooper — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 14:54:18 +0000

Oblique Strategies, of course! Thank you. I think my box is still in storage at my mom’s–it’s one of the very few things I still own.

Get this: I think Top Ten Records on Jefferson Blvd still exists, though I haven’t been there. It seems like it’s in the phone book. Once I’m back in that neck of the woods, I should stop in and see what form it has taken.

A minute ago, I tried to respond to everyone’s kind comments on my ClusterFizzle, but I think it vanished into CloudCuckooLand. Thank you all for your kindnesses, but I really am boring.

By: Sheila Ryan

Sheila Ryan — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 04:10:46 +0000

Renner: Oblique Strategies. That's the name of that Eno/Schmidt card set/divination aid. It's now possible to consult a version of this Mystifying Oracle online.

By: Cindy Scroggins

Cindy Scroggins — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 20:50:32 +0000

Boy, Sheila, did you just bring it all back for me. Summer of 1980, a million straight 140-degree days with no rain, people dying like flies. I took ballet lessons in an un-airconditioned Preston Center loft. The 8.0 opened in the Quadrangle, and I was there. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alive as I did that summer, and I associate much of it with the Quadrangle and the seediest segments of Oak Lawn. My friend, Scott, lived in an apartment on Fairmount that was straight out of David Lynch, complete with a hole in the back wall of his closet that allowed us to watch the men next door do the things they did in their bedroom. Scott’s toilet didn’t work, so he shat in a Hefty bag. The floor of the apartment was covered with paint, the walls were covered with writing, the stove was covered with Ajax that he’d sprinkled months earlier but never got around to actually wiping off. I walked in one day and Scott was crying his eyes out, just heartbroken, and finally composed himself enough to blurt out, “Peter Sellers died and I never got to fuck him.”

The Quadrangle. Yes.

By: Michael Grant Smith

Michael Grant Smith — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 20:11:23 +0000

Some people also use this as a rule for driving:

That which is behind me is of no consequence.

By: Sheila Ryan

Sheila Ryan — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 19:33:18 +0000

Metamorphosis. The Quadrangle back in the funky-but-chic days. A hop, skip, and a jump from the End of Cole Avenue (where the Velvet Underground performed), as well as the Gazebo back when it was a shabby-chic emporium featuring splendid clothing both old and new. Oh, yes.

And what say we spin the dial on the Wayback Machine one twist further? What of the record store on Jefferson Avenue whose heyday was the mid-1960s — Top Ten Records? (Or did the word ‘Hit’ come into play?)

Oh, yeah. For many a year I was one of those odd girl record-collector geeks, the lone ‘honorary boy’ in a gaggle of nerds a’ravin’ and a-goin’ on about Don Van Vliet, say, or Sun Ra, or Exotica before it appeared on CDs.

Matter of fact, I remember one party in Madison, Wisconsin (when I was nearly thirty, married, and had already junked one career and embarked on the next) at which there was a brief buzz All About Me. “There’s this girl out in the garage with a bunch of the guys, and . . . ” Not what you might suspect; rather, “She knows everything about Van Dyke Parks.”

This comment is getting all lugubrious and backward-glancing, I fear. Le (la?) nostalgie is a pathological condition.

By: Cindy Scroggins

Cindy Scroggins — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:59:08 +0000

Hey, Daryl. I seem to remember a story about model cars and lighter fluid and fire and a roof and parents. You should tell it for Mary and Sheila, who like stories about things getting bashed and blown up and might also enjoy tales of fire and punishment.

By: Daryl Scroggins

Daryl Scroggins — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:42:15 +0000

Now that you have swung over to models I can jump in. I never built models but I helped to destroy lots of them. I had a friend when I was ten or eleven–he was the same age–whose parents dumped piles of boxed models on him in much the way parents today will set the kid in front of the TV with a stack of DVDs, and then abandon the whole scene. He was always a little goofy due to the tubes and tubes of glue. He did all of the WW II planes and then moved on to the ships. But then he went on a brief trip to Arkansas, where you could still buy M-80 firecrackers reputed to be equivalent to 1/4 of a stick of dynamite, and he brought back a few dozen. We promptly took all of the ships out to the nearby creek, set them afloat, and got up on top of the railroad trestle above them. M-80s have waterproof fuses, and we dropped them over the side. What a battle! All was lost.

By: Michael Grant Smith

Michael Grant Smith — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:07:00 +0000

AMT had the best cars, and the more I think about it, Monogram did a good job on planes.

I remember lusting for the big Tamiya 1/8 scale Formula One car models. The detail and accuracy were amazing but they were almost a year’s allowance for each one!

By: Cooper

Cooper — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:59:42 +0000

Glad you liked the post! You have some great memories too. I had the American Blind Faith and wondered for years why a note on the back said that (catalog number)-B contains the same record as (catalog number)-A. I’d never seen it with an -A on it.

And I forgot a little shop called Jaylee’s that began in a little room tucked within a local restaurant called Youngblood’s, I think. I bought Wheels of Fire and many other records there, and he also occasionally had promotional copies.

Hey, and I too was a devoté of AMT model cars for several years. I was never as enamored of Revell models. And of course I had a Matchbox phase as well. My younger nephew (now 10) and one of my great-nephews (now 3) are also car adorers.