2 posts tagged “kim's”
Tower Records recently filed for bankruptcy, again, and this time their stores are actually going out of business. I have a real soft spot for Tower Records. Unlike many music nerds, I did not learn about indie rock by going to some tiny store, flipping through vinyl and having some grungy clerk tell me about Television or XTC. I learned about music through a combination of a friend with a very hip older sister, subscriptions to Sassy and Spin, and a dad who would go with me to Tower and buy me a handful of CDs that I'd never heard before every time we went to Chicago. So the Tower Records on Clark is where I bulked up my knowledge along with my collection. Tower Records was also where I first bought a Sandman book. (There was also a comic book store downstairs where I bought my first Cerebus book, but that's neither here nor there.) When I lived in Chicago, trips outside of Hyde Park often revolved around going to Tower. I very specifically remember buying double albums by Tori and Trent on their first day of release my second year -- that took a bite out of my wallet! The last batch of CDs I ever bought at the Chicago Tower included an album by Mandalay that was in one of their listening stations, saying it was Madonna's new favorite album. It's a great, great record.
I never had the same connections with either of the Tower Records stores in New York, but in my first couple of years here the Tower by Lincoln Center was a fairly regular destination on my Upper West Side outings. So today, we decided to go down there and scout out their "Blowout Sale" to see if there were any remaining Battlestar Galactica DVDs to be had for cheap. MAN, was that place ever torn to shit. It was the dregs of popular culture to be had at that store today, though if you're looking for a copy of the Spielberg/Cruise War of the Worlds, you'd be in luck. And the prices weren't even that great! A blowout sale where almost everything is only 20% off? You could buy this stuff for cheaper any given day on Amazon!
But I realized, when Tower closes, and when Kim's inevitably closes (and it will soon, have no doubt), there will be hardly anywhere to buy DVDs in the city -- certainly nowhere with any decent selection. There are the Virgin megastores -- I haven't heard how they're doing. According to rumors floating around the Kim's staff, Blockbuster will soon be closing, so their paltry retail selection won't be available. Barnes and Noble sells DVDs at some of their stores, but their selection is small and expensive.
I buy the vast majority of my DVDs and books on Amazon. Their prices are the cheapest, and if you spend over $25, the shipping is free. (The free shipping may not work so well for people in more isolated areas, but in New York, it's actually faster than UPS.) So I realize I have personally contributed to the downfall of brick and mortar stores. I suddenly regret it. I will miss the ability to wander through a store, leisurely considering items and making impulse buys. Sure, I can (and often do -- beware late-night Ambien induced Amazon shopping, folks) accomplish the same thing online. But the depersonalization of it is suddenly very unsettling. As a matter of fact, I do almost all of my shopping online -- I hate trying on clothes in stores and would rather do it at home and then take back the things I don't like to the physical stores. I bought my new phone online. When I buy a new computer, I will likely do it online. I buy furniture and gadgets online. But I always did it with the understanding that if I wanted to go to a store and do it, I could. And soon, I won't be able to. I love shopping on the internet. I've never been a great window shopper. But I always reserved the right to window shop if I so desired. That's ending.
I would like to explicate upon the random things I have hanging out in that sidebar over there. One of my main complaints withLJ for years has been the inability to put real honest-to-god HTML in your sidebar, to create nice little "I'm reading/listening to..." collections instead of putting them in the bottom of each individual post. So, presented with that opportunity here, I honestly didn't know quite what to put up. So, there's an mp3 by the Twilight Singers, probably my favorite band. It's a cover of a Massive Attack song, and it's actually sung by Mark Lanigan as well as Greg Dulli.
OK, OK, the album cover up there is from what I bought the other day, the Girl Talk album Night Ripper. It's pretty insane and sure to be pulled from the shelves before long for MASSIVE copyright violations. I plan at some point tomorrow to sit down and figure out how many of the samples I can pick out. It's like Name That Tune! Did anyone reading this ever watch syndicated reruns of Name That Tune? It was pretty awesome. I think if it were 1975 and I was on that show, I would just guess that every song was "Afternoon Delight" and by the law of averages I would come out on top. The one sample that stuck in my mind was where he blended "Heartbeat" by Annie with "My Humps". And there was a lot of Ludacris on there, I think. I've got to listen to it again.
Books, I've got Copyrights and Copywrongs by Siva Vaidhyanathan up there. I'm only two chapters into it, even though I've had it for about a month and a half now. It's not a hard read at all, and it's very entertaining and enlightening. But I just have so little free time to read these days, now that I'm working in a job without a lot of free intarwebs leisure time. I have to get all my tech yayas out at home, and that eats up the normal reading time I used to have. Don't even talk to me about my thesis. That's a whole other thing -- that's writing, not reading. The reading is done, and no, none of those books are going to be listed in my sidebar. Because no one other than me should ever have to read Ben Wattenberg's ideas on neomanifestdestinarianism if they don't have to. And yes, that's a word. I think it usually has hyphens in it somewhere, but the general idea is right. ("Anti-distinctly-minty-monetarism!")
The other book I have in the bar, which ties in with the apparent copyright law theme of my interests as expressed in this post, is Lost Girls by Alan Moore. Yes, the graphic novel porn staring Wendy from Peter Pan, Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, and a very agressively dykedelic Alice from Alice in Wonderland. It's organized into three separate books, kept in one slipcover box. I've read the middle book, because my husband started with the first book but I wanted to read, too. It was a little more short on plot than I thought it was going to be. Don't get me wrong, I knew it was going to be primarily "erotica", as that was Moore's intent. But I thought there'd be a little more narrative, instead of just "Isn't it subversive to have the beloved characters of children's literature fucking each other with strap-ons?" Oh, and then Franz Ferdinand gets shot. Unfortunately, not the band. The duke. And then the war starts, and everybody leaves this hotel in Austria except these three women and some debauched hotel maitre'd-slash-pimp, and they have an orgy. That's as far as I've gotten into the third book. But throughout, I've gotten to see Dorothy do it with the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow (I know I'll be getting to the Tin Man soon) while she longs for her Uncle Henry, and Wendy get jerked off on by Captain Hook and fuck Peter Pan while Michael and John watch. Alice's stories are less entertaining, and mostly she just pisses me off.
Anyway, the copyright issues here seem pretty cut and dry -- Wendy is not a character in the public domain, and the people who own the rights to Peter Pan are NOT happy about this book and are trying to stop it's current publication in England. Alan Moore, being Alan Moore, just doesn't seem to care and thinks they're a bunch of wankers. He's kind of a bad-ass. The book is worth a look, if you can somehow get your hands on it without paying an arm and a leg -- its list price is $75, but it's not being carried many places so add some hefty shipping charges in to that. Unless you happen to live near a decent comic book store in New York City, because I hear there are a few copies floating around. I was shocked to see it at the Kim's where I used to work, because one of my best friends is in the book department and he expressed doubt that they would stock a book that expensive that would probably not immediately sell. I proved him wrong by, well, buying it immediately and getting a nice little discount from a current employee or employees who shall remain nameless. Whatever the circumstances ended up being, I now have the book for under $60 and only had to get harassed by a suspicious security guard to get it. And it's a pretty nice book, presentation-wise and, I suppose, content-wise. I also like the idea of having it if it gets pulled from the shelves and becomes the subject of a cool fair-use trial. All very controversial and fun, I think.
