From an eccentric Jewish Texan family of compulsive record keepers — their father maintained a four-page list of his life's achievements — Marie became a New York liberal, Carl a diehard conservative who abandoned a legal career to farm apples.
His portrayal of an obsessive compulsive record-store owner in High Fidelity kind of validated the kind of existence I had in the early 1990s, when I was suffering through eating disorders and I'd bum a couple of bucks from a friend so I could buy a 79-cent taco at Taco Bell (and call it dinner).
These are the words of the most remarkable item on a compulsive new record, the Beatles' latest LP (Parlophone stereo PCS 7009; mono PMC 7009), called in typical punning way "Revolver".
Instead, there's something canned about this compulsive record, and Swofford seems at least in part to know it.
Our compulsive recording of the world around us is an attempt to make memory something that it can never be: snared, stowed away, able to be relived in high fidelity whenever we choose.
I felt I was a witness to significant historical events and, being a writer [Mullin is also a novelist] felt a compulsive desire to record them.
They eventually ended up with their mother but lived first with their father, Albert, a compulsive videographer who recorded more than 300 hours' worth of home movies.
Murphy had peculiar, wide-ranging tastes at a time when amassing a huge, eclectic record collection indicated a compulsive, cooler-than-thou personality.
Melville was a compulsive researcher, but his attitude to documents and records has a humane, if melancholy, aspect which Parker simply couldn't countenance.
And he recorded everything in his own films, celluloid diaries born of a compulsive need to capture people on film.
