Is it just me, or is what Woebot's been doing lately pretty goddamn awesome? If you haven't been following it, well, here's how he puts it in the initial post:

"In the spirit of meta-criticism I will no longer be reviewing records, only record stores."

And yep, then he does it!

I particularly like the latest one, where he takes pictures of record shop patrons and lists what they bought. I kind of want to hang out with the dude who bought the Monkees CD. You don't need to justify that! Just gives you more cred in my book.

I would do a similar thing for New York, except I don't have a digital camera, and I clearly don't know anywhere near as much as Matt about my local shops. And, uh, because I'm just not a collector geek. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I can say, though, that I prefer Kim's to Other Music for CDs, and Earwax to Dance Tracks for vinyl, although I do buy some 12"s at Kim's when the arrangement doesn't confuse me, and if I was anything other than a dilettante about dance music I'd probably like Dance Tracks a lot more. I've never been able to find any Severed Heads vinyl there, though, so it can't be that good, right?

Anyway, for whatever reason I like this particular regionalism a lot more than all the frankly boring arguments about "London as center" or Pret vs. cafes in London proper. Maybe it's because record shops are more universal? I dunno. But yeah, I just haven't been able to get up the interest to read much of those threads. (Although on the Pret thing: those offer a consistent quality, which may or may not top that of any individual cafe; they offer reliability and more surface cleanliness, so they're attractive to people who are new to a given region of a city.) And why aren't there any of these for NYC? Maybe because there's more non-natives living there? Aw, hell, I dunno.

posted by Mike B. at 2:56 PM 0 comments