Vinyl

This isn't weird America; it's Canadian, and considering the exchange rate, it's only about seventy percent as weird. Alan Zweig, now dipping into middle age, has a jones for vinyl. He's got shelves of neatly ordered records, but he doesn't have a wife, a girlfriend, a child, a house, a life. He decides to find out if the vinyl habit is really just methadone for hardcore loneliness. Visiting the musty, record-strewn catacombs of collectors, Zweig looks for answers in the easy listening LPs and Yiddish specialty discs. Among the quirky accumulators of the 12" he encounters is a guy who's memorized the playlist of every K-tel release, and another whose fetish is organ and bongo LPs. Then there's the fellow who spent four years playing his collection in alphabetical order, and another who rearranges his records just to get to the bathroom. Compulsive behavior is in heavy rotation, spinning faster than you can ask, "Do you have...?" Still, Zweig treasures these pack rats with their personal scratches, pops, and warps. You gotta collect them all.

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