Tag Archives: nostalgia

Saying Goodbye to My CD Collection

I start­ed pack­ing up my remain­ing CDs last night. I’ve final­ly real­ized that no mat­ter how often I tell myself that I’ll rip them to a dri­ve, or that I’ll fall in love with the medi­um all over again, they will only col­lect dust in a dark cor­ner of my house. Don’t believe me? Look how many times I’ve lied to myself about it!

I’m rid­ding myself of a col­lec­tion I’ve built over 20 years. With a lit­tle effort, I could turn the entire thing into a Spo­ti­fy playlist in about an hour. It’s hard not to feel defeat­ed. How often did I spend mon­ey bet­ter spent on food or clothes on music that I bare­ly heard? I’m still find­ing unopened CDs with receipts that are a decade old. Now I’ll sell them for pen­nies on the dol­lar and be glad.

I’m doing my best to not be sen­ti­men­tal about it, but it’s brought back mem­o­ries of trips to record stores around the world. My R.E.M. CDs have been with me since I lugged them to Den­mark as a 17 year old! I can still remem­ber how much I cher­ished the 40-odd albums I took on exchange. I remem­ber when my col­lec­tion bal­looned to 120 care­ful­ly curat­ed discs in grad school. I spent time man­i­cur­ing it, trad­ing in to trade up, bud­get­ing as best I could to have a col­lec­tion my peers would respect. It grew to near­ly 1500 discs when I moth­balled it in the walk-in clos­et. Now as I pack it up and pre­pare myself to sell it all, I shake my head with every obscure disc I find encased in shrink wrap.

If you or some­one you know would like to own a music col­lec­tion that imme­di­ate­ly makes it seem like you came of age in the ’90s, you might want to stop by AKA Music in the next cou­ple weeks. It’s only fit­ting that I take them back to the place where I spent so much time and mon­ey on the music I’ve loved most.

Grand Opening of New Mitchell and Ness Store

If you know me, you know I pos­i­tive­ly adore Phillies throw­back jer­seys. Heck, I own three of them per­son­al­ly. My first was a pow­der blue Mike Schmidt ’76 throw­back, fol­lowed by a ’76 Carl­ton home jer­sey. Got a Bur­rell rook­ie jer­sey for my 33rd birth­day this year. (Pat broke into the league wear­ing 33.) So you know I can­not tell you how excit­ed I am to stop in and drop some coin in Mitchell & Ness’ new flag­ship store at 1201 Chest­nut. The pic­tures of their new spot are sim­ply glo­ri­ous! T‑minus Christ­mas and count­ing until I grab a sweet Robin Roberts home jer­sey or this amaz­ing Philadel­phia Quak­ers throw­back.

Watch May­or Nut­ter open the shop in style in the video above.

Pitchfork’s Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s

I’d been wait­ing to write how awestruck I’ve been by this, but I can’t con­tain myself any longer. This list has been facemelt­ing­ly per­fect, at least from the per­spec­tive of any­one who’s been read­ing Pitch­fork since the days of dial-up. I can hard­ly be both­ered with the snooty crit­ic’s picks, but what fas­ci­nates me are the entries for the cor­po­rate rock enti­ties that defined a gen­er­a­tion who thought they were rebelling against cor­po­rate entities.

Favorites of the moment include the entry for Oasis’ “Live For­ev­er” and the Verve’s “Bit­ter­sweet Sym­pho­ny,” to say noth­ing of New Order’s “Regret,” the song that intro­duced me to their entire cat­a­logue. Those open­ing strains still stop me in my tracks.

Am I a lit­tle bummed no one has out and out shocked the read­er­ship by includ­ing the Verve Pipe? Am I amazed that nei­ther Live nor Dave Matthews Band have made an appear­ance? Which U2 song will make the list? I hope they pick some­thing from Zooropa. The ’90s weren’t per­fect and nei­ther were we. I hope they acknowl­edge that somehow.

What Are Your Favorite iPhone Games?

Man, I loved me some Com­modore 64 as a kid. Hell, we had a Vic 20 before that, but the games were prim­i­tive! To be entire­ly hon­est, I was pret­ty much only play­ing edu­ca­tion­al games when we had that, so maybe I’d have fonder mem­o­ries if I was­n’t play­ing word games on it.

I remem­ber ask­ing to “play com­put­er” on rainy days grow­ing up, and when I did, I’d haul ass upstairs to play games like Bruce Lee. Now I’m play­ing on my iPhone and the mag­ic’s gone. The inter­face makes it near­ly impos­si­ble to car­ry out the repet­i­tive moves that once made this game so much fun. What went wrong?

I’m reach­ing out to you to find out your favorite iPhone games. Sure, nos­tal­gia let me down once, but I’d love to check out old Nin­ten­do games like Super Mario, or the weird stuff I could­n’t afford like Neo Geo games and so on. Share your favorites in the comments.