Another one's done gone.

Yes, I know the internets make life easier. Yes, I know they open up access to wonderful worlds many people never dreamed of. Yes, I know it's much easier now to advertise for anonymous sex and to download crazy videos. I know all that.

However, they're destroying what used to be a staple of college towns -- the independent record shop. Penn State is losing an icon after 31 years (and no it isn't Joe Paterno who has been with PSU football for half a century) as Arboria Records closes its doors.

In 1987 I picked up The Clash Combat Rock on vinyl with the original sleeve with all the lyrics on it. Not that cheap plastic insert that all the reissues had. Of course, years later my mother sold it in a yard sale, but hey...The same's true of the Beatles Hey Jude album (released 1970)...Also sold were all of my Madness albums (picked up in pre-college days) -- including a wonderful German import of The Rise and Fall -- except for Keep Moving. But really, this post isn't about what happened when I left my records at my parents' house because they were the only ones with a working turntable. This post should be about the loss of independent record stores and the transformation of downtown State College.

Arboria Records used to be located in a basement on Allen Street, but they moved to larger and lighter digs on Beaver Avenue in the 1990's. Allen Street itself is changed, changed utterly from what it had been, and perhaps that's true of every generation. Gone is the old five and dime that still had a lunch counter back in the 1980's; in its place is a Chili's. Gone is the small department store that sat on the corner of Beaver and Allen; in its place is a Panera sandwich shop. Let's just hope that Penn State Sub Shop is immune to all this change.

Anyway, as for Arboria, its fate may very well have been sealed by the advent of amazon.com and iTunes -- the record store is in many ways irrelevant in an age when you can sample music online and download or order what you want without ever leaving your chair or moving out of arm's reach of your can of soda and bag of doritos. Records and books I think are especially susceptible to internetization, where the stores that once stocked selections that made them legendary (think back in the day Smash Records for punk and Bridge Street Books for poetry and cultural theory) now find that Joe out in Frederick doesn't have to make a trip to the city to visit record stores anymore; he can sit at his keyboard and browse without wondering if the strange people behind the counter are really making fun of him.

I do wonder though as stores go virtual (Arboria plans to maintain a website even as its brick and mortar presence vanishes) what we've lost as far as a community of music -- or to enlarge the scope a bit, the cultural community in general -- goes. Bookstores and record shops often serve as social hubs for the small groups of would-be artists, writers, musicians, and other culture geeks.

Maybe in an interactive Sims iteration, the culture vultures will be able to have their characters hang out in virtual book and record shops.