A friend of mine, after reading my blog, confessed to having found his new iPod to be a wonderful addition to his life, keeping his entire music library accessible. My daughter has two, due to the second she received as a bonus incentive for the purchase of her macBook before going to college. Perhaps mentioning the iPod yesterday in a somewhat derogatory view of American culture is out of line. One thing I learned from Lucy is the effectiveness of the iPod as a purposeful tool of urban isolation. She described being on the subway at 12 AM going to the Port Authority to meet a visitor from out of town. "I set the volume so I can hear something if necessary, but people can see I'm listening to music and don't bother me." The music provides a means of withdrawal from potentially undesirable social circumstances.

In Time magazine this week, an article described the renewal of interest in vinyl recordings-the old LP that you can either dig out of closets or buy on eBay, and new ones imprinted with the images of the artists, complete with liner notes and the visual information that made music collecting an important part of American culture. Being a hands-on person as well as being deeply affected by sound and vision, I can well remember being in countless social situations with liner notes and LP cover in hand, while the rich sounds of stylus on vinyl filled the room.

It seems the same things that mattered before still matter. New advocates of old vinyl find the warmth of the sound, the liner notes being passed one to another while friends gather around turntables and swap vinyl disks, return music to its position as a social center, providing context for shared warmth and companionship.

And of course there is a lesson to all this as described in in an old Girl Scout song. You may not be able to find it on vinyl or iPod but will find it sung by pre-teens in camp. It goes like this: Make new friends but keep the old. One is silver, the other gold. It is too corny, so I won't sing it for you. But it tells us something about why we need to have hammers, saws and screwdrivers and why we might want vinyl, even in an age of iPods and laptops.