- Tue Apr 08, 2014 3:39 pm
#15180
That interview Rasmus posted has some great stuff. A couple of my favorite answers:
"I spend some time listening to records almost every day when I’m at home, and I spend time just pawing through the collection, just looking at what I have. Sometimes I’ll pull a record off the shelf and just marvel at it, that it exists and that I own it. Again, it’s a sickness. It’s embarrassing to admit openly to such behavior, like talking about masturbation or something."
"It’s true that acquiring a good record for the collection is like a fix, a shot of heroin. I’m not too bad — one every few days is enough for me. If I get, like, five or six good ones all at once, that will hold me for a couple of weeks until the craving returns. A really big find — like, say, twenty or thirty or more, is almost too much. Certainly it’s thrilling, but at the same time it’s overwhelming, it makes me feel a little queasy, a little dizzy and nauseated…. It’s too much, an overdose. It might take me weeks to get straight from acquiring too many good records all at once."
"We humans with all our intelligence and cleverness are helpless creatures driven by forces over which we have very little control and which we barely understand. Who can fathom the collecting compulsion? It’s not something to be proud of, though it’s certainly not the worst human trait. Relative to some other human drives it’s harmless and innocuous. The unspoken unacknowledged thing that’s always in the background when collectors get together is the absurdity of it… We all know deep down that this is a ridiculous way to be spending our precious lives, and we all know that we can’t help it. We can’t stop collecting and put our energy and intelligence into something less selfish and more, shall we say, heroic. In all our ironic joking about collecting is the mutual acceptance of our common absurdity.
Some collectors will take offense and consider this view of collecting as too negative. C’mon fellas, own up! It’s true! You know it is! Don’t be a jerk! To not face up to your own absurdity makes you, in the eyes of non-collectors, a creep! Really! That is the hard, painful truth of it"