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The problem with purging

Put plainly, I have too many CDs, and no pressing excuse to listen to them, save for when programming my still mostly theoretical radio show, or torturing the kids at the coffeeshop.

Every once in a while, then, I try to file some of the ones that need filing, and to flling aside some of the discs that I'm sure I'll never wish to hear again so as to leave room for the rest. The main plan, the one I never get 'round to, is to winnow this down from what I guess to be 10,000 CDs housed in five three-drawer cabinets and five shelf units into something more manageable. Whatever that might be, but I'd like to lose the shelving units.

Which is where the problem begins, inevitably.

Today, for example. I made it to the Bs, and stumbled. Why had I kept an album by a modern bluegrass quintet whose name rang no bell, called Bearfoot. The album is called Follow Me, it appears to be the fourth they've recorded over nine years, and the most recent seems to reflect a lineup change and focus on a single lead singer.

By which you are meant to understand that I took the CD out of the drawer and began to play it, and on it plays, having driven me now entirely away from my theoretical purging project and back to words. Sometimes, see, I left myself these little treats in the stacks: music from acts we weren't ready to write about yet, reminders, precursors should they turn into something. Crumbs.

Some of the crumbs are now inedible, of course. It's not clear to me why I kept the Addrisi Brothers reissue (on DelFi), nor, even that I listened to it. I suppose that I presumed that the simple fact of its reissue made it worth keeping, worthy of note, something. Probably I read the liners and resolved to study the matter more intently later.

But the problem remains: what guarantee have I that I'll not suddenly develop a craving to listen to the Afghan Whigs, whose entire catalog I seem to have moved from house to house over the years? I cannot remember ever having really liked the band, and vaguely remember Greg Dulli cocking his fist in my general direction when I leaned across him at a Sub Pop party to tap Tad Doyle on the shoulder and say hello, before I fled the occasion.

You see the problem.

Well. I shall restore Bearfoot to the shelves, though it's still a close call. There's life here, and I suspect their newer record, the one Compass put out a year or two back, is more focused (though I'm not sure I'd like the focus). No. No. No. I shan't. Away it goes. Not because the seventh track has lost my interest, but because something has to go, and this album doesn't quite make the case for staying on the shelf. Maybe if they'd taken a swing at me...

Tags: afghan, alden, bearfoot, purge, whigs

Comment by Easy Ed on December 28, 2009 at 2:46pm: I don't feel much like working today...which is the case most of the days. So I came here for just a second to check something in the archives and saw this. A couple observations, if I may. For someone who describes themselves as an unemployed writer, you're certainly writing a lot here these past few weeks. (That's a good thing for us.) And if you're only in the "B's" and reading liner notes, listening to CD's and having such a hard time deciding what to keep or not...forget this project. When you're truly ready to purge, you'll feel it. It's just like quitting smoking and although you may have good intentions, it seems to this casual observer that you still need one more puff.

Comment by Gar on December 28, 2009 at 3:59pm: Well, if you are going to sell a bunch of them off, let us know. I am sure there are some that we would be happy to buy off of you.

Comment by Grant Alden on December 28, 2009 at 4:24pm: Ed...I'm writing a bit more because of my holiday schedule...the coffeeshop I sort of manage is closed until school resumes, and so I'm home tending to my daughter or working at the other place or cleaning or whatever....Gar...I'm pretty sure what I'm getting rid of almost nobody wants. Nobody wanted most of it when it was new...

Comment by hyperbolium.com on December 28, 2009 at 4:47pm: Reducing the raw number of CDs is one angle, but you might also consider reducing the space that each CD inhabits. Though they're not cheap, Jewel Sleeves provide a much more dense way of storing CDs together with their tray cards and booklets. Cheaper sleeves are also available. Alternatively, you could rip your collection to networked hard drives, install networked playback devices wherever you want to listen (or use a software player at your computer), and banish the physical artifacts to storage.

Comment by Kyla Fairchild on December 28, 2009 at 6:22pm: Ha, now that I'd like to see! Somehow I can't imagine Grant ripping his cd collection.

I've also tried to pare down my collection and have ripped many of them and now I have the ripped shelf, the unripped shelf and the mess in the middle that have been removed from one shelf or the other to be played by various family members that I now have no idea which shelf belong on.

Almost solved the problem by signing up for Rhapsody and now I can stream just about anything I can think of whenever I want. But still can't bring myself to part with the physical cd's for now.

Comment by Grant Alden on December 28, 2009 at 7:46pm: Yeah, clearly hyperbolium drastically over-estimates both my income and my technical competence.
And, of course, I live rather at the end of the power grid, and propose to remove myself further, which makes dependence on these nice little electronic boxes a little less...attractive.
Not to mention where the hell I'd find time to rip 10,000 CDs...

Comment by Adam Sheets on December 28, 2009 at 8:23pm: I'd be happy to take some of them off your hands for you...

Comment by hyperbolium.com on December 28, 2009 at 11:21pm: How do you listen to CDs (or post to the Internet) at the far end of the power grid? The little electronic box could be as simple as an iPod or non-Apple equivalent. Paring, condensing and ripping are parallel means to an end -- no one of them is necessarily going to solve your problem. My dad could rip a CD with iTunes on his PC; I'm guessing you could too.

Comment by Penelope Pitstop on December 28, 2009 at 11:47pm: I can't do it. Have tried, and I just can't. No matter how many times I have NOT listened to a CD, or tape, or album for that matter, these items are all part of the Timeline of My Life. I have committed myself in the past to listening, in order, to everything I have ever picked up, no matter how irrelevant, remote, or unpleasant...*Of course* I never make it all the way through, or even half-way through, or maybe even a quarter of the way through, but just rearranging the dang things, even the things that I don't immediately recognize will eventually reconnect and jar some memory of how and when I purchased it and why. The memory trace continues, and I am then remembering people, times, and places from my past I would otherwise never ever think of. I'm not sure if that would happen if these things were all stored electronically...I wouldn't bother recording half of them electronically, and then gone would be the triggers of such important moments in my life as when I attended some show where Pog Donk played and they were handing out CD's for free....

Comment by Grant Alden on December 29, 2009 at 6:49am: It's not so simple as hyperbolium's most recent post suggests. Or, perhaps, I make things too complicated.

First off, the original suggestion at issue was: "Alternatively, you could rip your collection to networked hard drives, install networked playback devices wherever you want to listen (or use a software player at your computer), and banish the physical artifacts to storage." I can't afford that, don't have the time for it, don't wish to make room to store things I'm not going to use (nor to make time to store them in an order which would allow them efficiently to be retrieved).

My two issues with electronic files are these: (1) MP3s are not files of sufficient sound quality, and while I listen to them on my iTouch (a gift, not a purchase!) they're not so much better than listening to AM radio that I'm prepared to digitize my collection. I suppose theoretically I could buy the software to process everything as .wav files (which I know about from prerecording my theoretical radio show), but, again, that seems like a huge time suck, and a massive storage issue. And, then, they wouldn't play on my MP3 player, if I understand the technology right. And I probably don't. (2) The issue about living at the end of the grid is simpler. Trees fall on lines. Lightning strikes (ah, Lou Christie!). Drunks drive into things. Ice storms. All of those things lead to power outages and surges. Yes, I have invested in a fairly elaborate and expensive (by my standards) surge protector, the first of which actually gave up its life apparently to save my computer, and I'm grateful. But the prospect of storing my music on an electronic device which still quite conceivably can be spiked into misbehavior or failure (and how many of us have had dead hard drives over the years?)...or inventing backups for my backups...or renting a storage unit offsite by way of backup...all sounds silly. And expensive. And I haven't time.
Virginia Fee, that I understand. It's the Squeeze song I often quote: "Singles remind me of kisses/albums remind me of plans." It's the ones that I can touch without memory which have to go. Only then I end up with a bunch of Roy Acuff that I'm not all that interested in but it's Roy Acuff so why would I toss it. Or, for that matter, how much Johnny Cash do I really need? (In the main, his catalog seems less essential, cut to cut, than does Merle Haggard's. I need to puzzle on that.)

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