On Record Collecting

I’ve always been a bit of a collector. When I was a little kid I had a collection of bottle caps my dad helped me press onto a cork board. Later I went through phases with stickers (all the rage in grade five), stamps and hockey cards. These days it’s records. But it wasn’t until recently that I gave much thought to the seemingly straightforward – you like something, you gather examples of it – impulse to collect. What got me going was Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds, which includes a chapter (subtitled “Record Collecting and the Twilight of Music as an Object”) about what it means to collect vinyl records in the age of the internet. Why would anyone bother with records when virtually all of them can be found on the internet, for free if you’re so inclined, and stored on a hard drive smaller than one LP (or online, with no hard drive at all)?

“I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane.”

Die Hard is one of those greater-than-the-sum-of its-parts movies where everything just came together. I’d say it’s the best American action movie of all time (although I am prepared to entertain arguments in favour of Robocop). One of the things everyone loves about it is its villain, Hans Gruber, famously played by Alan Rickman in his first movie role, and he’s everything you want in an action movie bad guy; stylish, formidable, quotable and fun to watch*. But he also has a team of henchmen, and the way they’re portrayed makes the movie even better.