Now that's what I call music

Discovered a record store with some funky hip-hop breaks and acapellas at the basement of the Excelsior Shopping Centre yesterday. Didn't even have a sign on the store, so Lord knows what it's called. But I'll be back. Ah, serendipity.

Man, to go all Jane Jacobs, it's these small specialised stores, not the big chains, that give a city life. Here's a good quote from Jacobs, guru of urban studies:

The New Urbanists want to have lively centers in the places that they develop, where people run into each other doing errands and that sort of thing. And yet, from what I've seen of their plans and the places they have built, they don't seem to have a sense of the anatomy of these hearts, these centers. They've placed them as if they were shopping centers. They don't connect. In a real city or a real town, the lively heart always has two or more well-used pedestrian thoroughfares that meet. (Link)

You can't just plonk a place down and say "everyone will interact here". It's more organic than that. You have to know how people flow.