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3 Ways To Get Your Family Out Of The House

Derek K. Miller
/
Flickr

You can make it through the weekend without touching off controversy. All you need is a little rare vinyl, a couple of movie tickets and a long walk.

Forget Black Friday. This is Record Store Day!

Those sweet remnants of record store culture are scant. So get them while they last: that urgency of finding new vinyl meets the nostalgia of re-released gems and plays out at shops like Good Records in Dallas or Mad World Records in Denton. At Good Records, there are bins of Legos flocking a plastic picnic table for children -- to make the experience easier for parents trying to access teenage dreams.

Here’s a list of all the special itemsthe shops could carry -- that’s the thing, you have to show up to know what made it there and what’s left, just like in Swing Kids. On that list: a rare April 1966 Scepter Studios recordings collection of early versions of songs later issued on The Velvet Underround & Nico; a 7” Bowie picture disc in advance of the 40th anniversary reissue of Aladdin Sane, featuring “Jean Genie” as performed on the BBC’s Top of the Pops in 1973; and, you know, something from Skrillex.

Box Office > Boxing Match

I’ll not soon forget an indulgent moment that defined my generation even better than Garden State itself: Dragging my parents to see that film at the Angelika on premise of really getting milennials, and then watching my horrified mom threaten multiple times to walk out of the theater. It’s a good thing much more universal and traditionally alluring films are out right now, like Anna Karenina, (grandiose period costuming is a wonderful mother-daughter equalizer), Life of Piand Silver Linings Playbook.

Film nerds Stephen Becker of Art & Seek and Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News address each of these in the special Thanksgiving-week edition of their Big Screen Podcast. (There’s also an interview with Matthew Quick, who wrote the novel on which Silver Linings is based.)

Nature Walk It Off

As NPR’s Alan Greenblatt explains, Black Friday actually does have dark origins. A nice way to disavow today’s crush of commercialism is to go hiking and laugh incessantly about it if you aren’t an “outdoor family.”

My indoor family’s version of this is to visit the Rowlett Creek Greenbelt, which isn’t as much hiking as it is walking, or biking, if you do that. (If you don’t usually ride a bicycle, but want to show your visitors a really vacation-like time, you can rent some from Richardson Bike Mart, which has a few North Texas locations.)

Denton has a Greenbelt as well.