The list of links

I am still building the list of links. If you are not on there, and should be, holler. I probably have you on the list anyway, just haven't posted it to the template. I have also not been commenting on each entry with my ringing endorsement, mainly because I gather that my readers all know the other blogs anyway. Also, I am not putting time wasters on the list, so if it is on there it has my endorsement.

I am going to mention a blog today, though, because I just found it. It is from some fellow named Teachout in New York. He is some sort of arts critic, and is pretty knowledgable, for a New Yorker (a city that is still resting on 50 year old laurels and has not seemed to notice that nothing particularly interesting in terms of visual arts has come out of there for decades). I say that with charity, since San Francisco is heading the same direction.

But New York has fantastic performing arts, a few decent restaurants, great street life, great museums, a couple of good radio stations, and a great subway system. It is a little island in my exclusion zone (East of the Berkeley Hills and West of Viareggio, excluding Manhatten, Iberia, and any town in France that has an active bullring), even though there are no good record stores there anymore.

With the Internet good record stores are not as important as they once were, but something is lost from the culture with the demise of these great meeting places. Browsing Amazon for two hours on a Saturday night is sort of ghoulish: a solitary, eye-straining experience, but talking to a good record store man or just browsing through bins of interesting records, that is a social experience.

There are very few good record stores anywhere, though. You have the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago, Waterloo in Austin, the Louisiana Music Factory in New Orleans, Down Home Music in El Cerrito, The Musical Offering in Berkeley, and a few others. Someday this institution will return to the civic landscape. Without bookstores and record stores, the City is just a shell for people to do their banking in. Oh, that and a decent caffé.

But this Teachout fellow is an interesting New Yorker. He has some good things to say, and I look forward to reading his blog.