Friday, January 04, 2008

 

This isn't a library

My shop cd player just bit the dust (cheap piece of shiny junk that it is - and no, not even the radio will play, now) and all of a sudden I have one of those bookshops which people enter and immediately ask in a hushed whisper if it's all right if they look around. Then they tiptoe toward the bookshelves, and is it just me, or do they flinch slightly when the old floorboards creak?

I hate overly-quiet shops. I don't want mine to be one. I like to have some music playing, something going on somewhere, so browsers feel comfortable, feel like I'm not Watching and Listening to THEM. I must take action. But I have no money (storm windows and storm doors for the house, that's where all the Christmas money went - oh, and sending in the sales tax) for superfluous gadgets. So I sit here wondering why it broke, instead of going shopping. I've tried all the obvious things - plugging and unplugging, using a different outlet, dead battery in the remote?, even what my friend Adam calls "the drop test" - which usually works on small machinery, by the way - but no go. Is it possible to wear out a year-old cd player? Must be the million times I played the Alison Krauss/Robert Plant cd last month.

Comments:
Sarah, I couldn't agree more; without some music it always feels like I have strangers mooching around my living room.

Manu Chao at the moment, courtesy of my shiny new Christmas Ipod, although I think we must have been doing some synchronized playing of Raising Sand last month, because I played it a million times too.

Happy New Year x
 
Yes, exactly, Jonathan - I even had a kid say that to me recently ("I feel like I'm in someone's living room") - he implied comfort, I hope, but really, not the best impression one wants for one's shop, is it.

Raising Sand must have hoodoo subliminal messages, "Play me again play me again play me again..." It hypnotized me, I swear. But I'm coming out of it. I think.
 
I discoverd last week that when I play the Saturday afternoon opera broadcast in my shop, my customers tip-toe around and whisper. When I slipped a Brazilizn CD in the player my customers started talking and laughing. I guess we all need Latin music to jump start us in the middle of a Maine winter!
 
I like bluegrass, too, and warm fuzzy alt-country. Vicky, I sense a trend with you - recreating various warm-weather climates in your immediate environment - wishful thinking? That, with a dash of your usual cheerfulness in the face of all this snow we've been having? Both...?
:O)
 
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