From solenoid Sent Mon, Oct 4th 1999, 23:57
From solenoid Sent Mon, Oct 4th 1999, 23:57
Yeah, I think a trainspotter is someone who knows a ridiculous amount of detail about a particular thing/event, and that someone like Lance, who keeps an organized database of information, but doesn't necessarily have fetishistic levels of information. Lance is like a librarian, not a fanatical trainspotter who is into information for information's sake. I think the trainspotters I've met are more likely to know this exhaustive amount of detail of a narrow subject and pride themselves on it, but they don't know who JFK is or where the Baltic Sea is or how to catch a bus. In the 80's, I used to be more like a fanatic/'spotter, but now I find I'm interested in so many isolated aspects of music that now I'm sort of visually oriented and don't care about the details so much as the songs themselves alone, which must sound pretty stupid to the average detail-oriented trainspotter: me: "I like that one record with the black label with the picture of the tree on it and the second track on side A that goes 'click beep'" 'spotter: "Do you mean The XXX Band on the Y Label, catalogue #DC001.3, recorded in Blickyville, ICeland, 1992, before they toured with Current 93?" me again: "Yeah, those guys! Yeah, didn't they do that one in the all-red cover with the robot voice and clicking teapots for drums?...yeah, cool, that one guy is really tall and they use a bunch of Korg boxes. Yeah, they're great, what are they called again, I forgot...? They covered a song by those 4 German guys that did that album with the car noises on it.. Kraftwerk, you know?" 'spotter: "Never heard of them. If they are not on the Y label, or from that area of Iceland, who cares, really..." Solenoid On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Irene McC wrote: > On 1 Oct 99, xxxxxxx@xxx.xxx wrote re: (idm) Trainspotters Anonymous: > > > Just exactly how are we defining trainspotter? > > To me it's more somebody who knows the name of the guy who > was shaking the maraccas on the third track of some group's hard > to find second album. > > That kind of thing. > > I > * >