Vinyl

Sykesville may not have Victorian grandeur, but the turn-of-the-century charm of a working-class town is slowly re-emerging on its bustling Main Street.The town is restoring its storefronts and homes, hoping that its history, riverfront and railroad ties can make it an antiques mecca for Carroll County and beyond.But preservation is battling practicality in this town of 3,500. The issue: vinyl siding.In a feud that has spilled into public hearings and the courts, residents are scrapping over the Historic District Commission's insistence on preserving Sykesville's character by maintaining the original wood siding of buildings.

Sykesville is involved in a battle between practicality and history.Its Historic District Commission insists any renovations to local buildings must adhere to federal Department of the Interior standards that encourage repair or replacement with like materials.Business owners in the town of 3,500 are calling the standards "guidelines" and asking for flexibility, often mentioning "vinyl," amaterial that's anathema to preservation purists."The operative word is guidelines," said Bruce Greenberg, owner of several Main Street properties.

Ryan Homes has opened a model of the Wellington series at Oakhurst in Columbia, where it is building 39 three-level townhouses with insulated vinyl tilt-in windows, oak stair rails, gas heat, smoke detectors and sprinkler system.Homes in the Howard County development will face the community pond and back to woodlands.Prices for the 1,800-square-foot home start at $119,490 for an interior unit with vinyl siding, and increase to $124,790 for an end-of-group with angle bay window.A foyer, 18-by-11-foot living room, 9-by-10-foot dining room, 10-by-10-foot kitchen and storage area make up the entry level.

By 10: 30 on Thursday nights, disc jockey Bobby Nyk's 1970s biosphere throbs with hustling, bumping, pretzeling, booty-shaking, uh-HUH uh-HUH retro rhythms.Strobe, black light, smoke machine, beacon and a rotating, high-voltage monster called the Mace have transformed the Belvedere Hotel's swank, 13th-floor bar into a disco inferno.The "piece de resistance," a mirror ball, shoots a dizzying galaxy of whirling stars across the small dance floor, where Nyk and three volunteers have become the Village People, complete with hard hat, headdress, policeman's hat and that ridiculous Gilligan sailor cap.As if the nonsensical ditty were part of their primordial memory bank, the four men lip sync and perform the signature moves to "Y.M.

It has been called one of the more pristine historic districts in the county, but Uniontown's efforts to maintain its charm have pitted neighbor against neighbor.In the middle of the brouhaha, again, is Uniontown's Historic Preservation Commission -- a group of volunteers who say they just want to maintain the community's historic purity and try to be fair.The faces on the commission have changed throughout the years, but the battles have been the same. This year, the debate is about fixing rickety windows with vinyl replacements instead of the more expensive custom wood windows, which meet restoration guidelines.

Sykesville residents and business owners crowded the Town House on Monday to protest restoration policies of the Historic District Commission.A standing-room-only crowd of about 80 people filled the council chambers, adjoining offices and the foyer. Nearly the same number of residents voted in the town's spring election."We are all concerned about the direction the town is taking, particularly the lack of progress on improving the appearance of Main Street," said Bruce Greenberg, owner of several properties in the town's business district.

Nearly all of Sykesville is taking sides between old wood and new vinyl in a battle that pits preservation against practicality and tears at the fiber of the town.Many of the 3,500 residents, drawn by the charm of turn-of-the-century homes and storefronts, are willing to pay the price of preservation. Others, particularly Main Street business owners who want to replace decaying wood with less-expensive vinyl siding, find themselves at odds with the Sykesville Historic District Commission.

DAISY MARSH, DEL.-- And now -- decorator crab pots.You probably haven't seen them yet, but you probably will soon. I saw my first ones this year, at a hardware store in Ocean City. They were just like the traditional crab pot that most recreational crabbers use, a two-foot by two-foot by two-foot cube of vinyl-coated wire, only instead of being black they were vivid red or shocking yellow.I asked the sales person why the colors and she said she didn't know. I asked the fellow who runs a bait and tackle shop outside Fenwick Island, Del. I had been buying crab bait from him for years.

In search of vinylRemember vinyl records? I still have a few left that I occasionally give a spin on my dusty turntable. Sometimes the record skips, and I have to tape a penny to the needle's arm. But that's OK. Not every great record has been issued in CD form, so we vinyl fans cope. We'll be the ones poring over the really old records at the Maryland Music Collectors Record/CD Expo on April 17 and May 22 at the Arbutus Volunteer Fire Hall. Buy, sell or trade your vinyl here. You won't find any professional dealers, just plenty of people who appreciate all types of recorded music.

So now we officially have a new Orioles television package in place. How long have I been waiting to write those words? How long have you sat on the edge of your couch, longing to read that sentence?How long has this been going on? (to quote the late British one-hit wonder Ace, whose album that once was a staple of cutout bins when record stores still carried vinyl -- and how can they be record stores anymore when they don't have records? -- featured a cover that pictured a soccer game, so, yes, this is connected to sports somehow and not just another digression being produced by a winter-weary fellow tired of shuffling across the ice each day, braving a certain fall and then perhaps a visit to the Bo Jackson Hips-R-Us Replacement Center, all just to check the mailbox once more, hoping in vain that Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition has arrived.

THURSDAY HIGH ZERO FESTIVAL: These classically trained and self-taught musicians think way outside the box. Their avant-garde improvisations can be heard around Baltimore through Sunday. Though it might sound like noise to some listeners, these performers are visionaries whose exploration of the fringe will one day influence the mainstream. Thursday performances start at 8:30 p.m. sharp. Tickets are $10-$12. Go to highzero.org. 'THE MERCY SEAT': Neil LaBute's play takes place the day after 9/11 and concerns two World Trade Center workers who survive the attacks and consider using the event as a means of escape to start a new life together.

The image of a home surrounded by a white picket fence has always stayed with Lynne Gibbs of Clovis, Calif. "To me, it represented the all-American dream," says Gibbs, 63, a retired paralegal. "It was why I wanted one. When I was growing up, the white picket fence meant harmony with your house, your family, your spouse. Everybody wanted the house with a picket fence." The dream became a reality for Gibbs when she bought the last lot at the end of the street in a new subdivision. Before she and her husband moved in 2005, she went to Lowe's and bought some vinyl white picket fencing.

If you have reached a certain level of "maturity," you probably have boxes in the basement filled with artifacts known as vinyl records. We played these dinosaurs of the analog age on gadgets called turntables, and if we played them enough times - or spilled enough beer on them - they developed that combination of crackles, pops and distortion that teary-eyed audio tweaks like to call the "warmth of vinyl." Many adults persist in keeping these long after the only turntable that could play them has crumbled into dust.

Having spent last week on vacation sans Internet, I had to wait until today to extend a slightly belated happy 25th birthday to a gadget that forever changed the way we entertain ourselves. On Aug. 17, 1982, the first compact disk (or disc) rolled off a German production line, paving the way for a generation of devices that can now cram a thousand hours of hours of music or more into a box the size of deck of cards. The technology that made the CD possible has also changed the dynamic of the music business - including the role of artists, the companies who market their music, and those of us who listen to it. Ironically, that same technology now threatens to make the CD irrelevant.

Last November, DJ Lovegrove finally caved. Mosaic, the outdoor lounge he manages in Power Plant Live, closed for the season, and Lovegrove took up a residency every other Friday at Sky Lounge Tango Tapas. Before then, Lovegrove, aka LG Concannon, spun some CDs but mostly stuck with vinyl - even as his fellow DJs slowly went digital. But Sky Lounge's DJ booth was too cramped for Lovegrove to comfortably set up two turntables and two CD players simultaneously, so he had to choose one or the other.

Carson Kressley, the fashion guru of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, has been attached to some unusual projects since his Bravo makeover show bounced into the mainstream last year. He is a columnist for Us Weekly, an NBA pitchman and a sought-after author with a book on men's fashion published by Dutton and due out in the fall. Last week, Kressley and his Queer Eye pals released a compilation of songs related to the show. The next day, he made his debut as a DJ at a benefit for the Archive of Contemporary Music at S.O.B.

The 45 rpm vinyl single is a fragile black platter, 7 inches in diameter, with a doughnut-hole center and concentric ridges. To baby boomers, it brings back memories of living-room bashes and junior high make-out sessions. To anyone under age 20, it's as foreign as a rotary phone. But its current irrelevancy hasn't deterred Bill Windsor, a 54-year-old Dunwoody, Ga., entrepreneur, from compiling one of the largest collections of 45s around. At his Web site, www.45s.com, collectors can buy almost every vinyl single that charted on the Billboard 100 from the 1950s to the '90s, most for a modest $5. "Except for Sinatra, the Beatles and Elvis, most of my 45s aren't worth that much," Windsor says.

Record players, those churning fossils buried by cassette tapes and compact discs decades ago, are back making noise. Step into most department, home electronics and furnishing stores, and you'll see brand new portable "suitcase" versions selling for a C-note or two. They don't pump out the listening quality of a turntable tied to a sophisticated audio system, but they do play LPs and singles evenly. And, more important to those who paid half a buck for "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to spin at a patio dance party in 1964, they deliver sound waves of nostalgia.

In most neighborhoods, new vinyl siding is a home-improvement project. In historic districts, it's a sin. Two suburban families recently learned that painful fact the hard way when they covered aging asbestos siding with vinyl and were ordered to remove it, at a cost each said would top $60,000. They say they had no idea that they were living in areas with historic regulations when they installed the modern siding - the Harrises on their century-old house in downtown Ellicott City and the Badarts on their mid-19th-century home in the Elkridge neighborhood of Lawyers Hill.

Scratch will make even the uninitiated believe in the joy and propulsive power of hip-hop. The history of the music is given plenty of due, beginning with Grand Wizard Theodore's recollection of how he invented the hip-hop DJ back in the early 1970s when, after his mom complained about the loud music, he stopped the record with his hand and liked the sound that came out - that distinctive scratching sound that hip-hop DJs have been playing endless variations...