2003-12-04 - 11:00 a.m. I love guitars, but I do not love guitar shops. I rarely feel comfortable in the crowded, bustling, loud shops in midtown, and while I enjoy some of the smaller shops in NYC, it embarrasses me to sit there and try out guitars in front of people standing 18 inches away. So the answer to my neuroses has arrived in the form of the new branch of the Guitar Center, smack dab in the middle of 14th Street, in the historic building where Storefront Hitchcock was filmed. The place is cavernous, and resembles a theme park for musical instruments. There's a grass-hut room for drums, a rustic wooden shack for acoustic guitars, a forbidding room called The Vault for the really expensive vintage stuff, and a bunch of other gimmicky display schemes. It's all laid out with a pleasing sense of feng shui--spacious, open, tantalizing. Guitars, guitars, guitars! And if you sit there playing, no one notices because the place is so huge. The prices seem OK. This is the paragraph where I'm obligated to denigrate the place for being a super-store and putting the mom-and-pops out of business. I can never get passionately behind that argument, because I think the really good small shops will not be driven out of business, and the super-stores tend to carry things that the mom-and-pops don't. I feel no moral imperative to support capitalism in the form of a small business over capitalism in the form of a large business. It's just business. "But what about the soullessness of the big conglomerates?" Given the choice between the soullessness of the big conglomerates and the soullessness of the average store clerk, I'll take the soullessness that is better-stocked and has better prices, thanks. And technically, I'm not buying anyway, I'm just browsin'. Which describes both my spending patterns and my politics in a nutshell. To emote onstage or not to emote? thoughts? (8 comments so far) previous - next blog archive contact