There are 17 relics on my coffee table, now reduced to digital bits you can get in less than 60 seconds from an all powerful server, express.
Like the automobile stomped out the horse and led us to build new ways to get from here to there - highways, paved roads, rest stops - the Information Superhighway (aka The Internet) has put some mighty powerful animals out of business these last few months.
Namely, four local bookstores here in SF - two chains and one independent - and now, the mother of those 17 relics (VHS tapes; remember those?), the Film Yard in North Beach is too closing.
I had been on my way to the post office when my artist neighbor Gustav and the tower of films spilled on my sidewalk path. The sign just said "Free." I figured they were bringing in Blue Ray, clearing out old merchandise. I let myself be lured in immediately by a copy of Nanook of the North for Mustacho, then Smoke, then Chasing Amy, and before I knew it the package and the baguette -- which was to join me and my 1948 Royal Deluxe typewriter and hot cocoa after this post office sojourn - were teetering on my arms.
Maybe I was starting to confuse liberty with graveyards.
When the owner handed me a box which I tried to refuse, he explained why we were all there. "Take it all, or just come back. Netflix has taken over and you can download it all now, so this is our last gift to North Beach." He rushed to serve the consumers of the free.
(Like we all do now, no?)
I stopped my rifling. "You're closing?" The previous weekend, after searching out a book for my brother at City Lights and then in the sad, sick carcass of the Union Square Borders, I headed to B&N by the Wharf. Surely the Nook was keeping them alive. But I'd arrived to a bordered up Barnes & Noble, with the white gray ghost of death paper taping up all the windows from floor to ceiling. The way I remembered the papered windows of the townhouse of a murder-suicide in my South Philly neighborhood.
Closed for business. No one there. Echoes of laughter contained like a capsule in your mind of the light and life that met an untimely end.
Whether on the page or on disks and reels carrying stories, the demand curve for new packaging is thriving and spinning in the opposite direction of some of my favorite stalwarts (Libraries. Bookstores. Now old cases of where we used to go). While the US is swinging out of recession and new jobs are being created along the edges, the undertow is dragging a few casualties (and an industry) into the sea of memory.
"That's three spots in just weeks," I said to Gustav, our eyes squinting from the sun and our bodies shifting to let others dig.
"I think we're seeing history made here," Gustav said, his red bandana and thrift shop jean jacket threads leaning over me to check out the few tapes that had fallen below. "That store up in Russian Hill's shutting down too. It's an end of an era."
An era when I went to my first church of books - a used shop in Fredericksburg, Virginia that spilled with Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams and where my $5 extra a week had somewhere special to go. An era when I found another branch of this church of the page in the first Borders I ever saw with rainbow striped walls of new books that seduced me to finally purchase a copy of On the Road - brand spanking new as if reborn just for me, forgiving my abuse of the privileges of our one library's copy. Where any sojourn of my life - 40 something states, six countries - has been spent flipping and seeking out the pages of time and thought and wonder and challenge and new worlds far beyond my steps. My three days in Paris were merely strolls between English bookstores. The Seine only existed to touch the chapbooks and stand on cobbled streets of literary greats and literary wannabees - most of all dreamers and collectors of tales.
A city that made stories.
Stories that have moved from our mouths to typeface to processors and screens and theaters and now it's all these digital bits - l's and O's that scramble and reassemble and transmit what it is we want to say faster than a second. A blink. In 12/4 time or less. With none of the sweet clickety clack of a typewriter, the bend of pen on paper, the spiritual exercises of centuries, the shuffling of men and women and raincoats and children's hands across binding, or the slow hum of some damn great music.
It is all immediate, it is all right there. It is all whatever you want it to be and itching at you with the fastest tempo and whispering to you: Buy More.
Until you don't want it to be any more and it can disappear from your screen, your community, and your server - if you so choose - and there's no need for boxes, no need for movers, or patronage or more than a transaction that only your credit watchers and Google Ads know best.
Or you can choose to hold onto it. As if it could tell your tales, straighten out the hum and unsettling of your life and days, and be easily stored with the 1000s or the 10000s or the 100000s that make you feel rich - having accumulated the collection, but not created the art.
Until you can't remember what you have and what you don't.
And what you'll like, and what you won't.
I stopped mid crouch and watched Gustav. "These are the only places I hang." Thank God for the Mission goes through my head.
"Well, now it's history."
Gustav is 30 years my senior - I was the one who was a history teacher. And here I was, typewriter awaiting me by an Edwardian window dated infamously 1906. Here I was, amongst reels on relics, generally spilling of sketchpads and notebooks (delaying mailing a special one - an old fashioned visit to the post office - while I stood in the graveyard). Surrounded by pages most of this Karma-Karma-Karm-a Chameleon lifetime of constant change of scenery and self that's only consistency has been to be bookended with These Shops, This Writing, This Quest for the Quiet Escape -- alone and together -- throughout the intimate pages of myself and others.
Gustav came up for air with Cabiria and another man asked if we've seen anything French. A shaggy gray haired woman tried to lean to the far end of the table, taking in the toppling cases, unsure where to undulate her hands.
"What are you looking for?" I asked.
"Anything Harrison Ford or Denzel."
"Training Day," the young Asian film student and I replied in unison, and point to stage right. We would have laughed but it'd probably have been a bittersweet sound.
I came to the city to be torn apart and reinvented by its art. And I didn't see the change coming, from the most obvious place - less than minutes from the Internet geniuses that created the demise of these escapes and democraticized reading access like music access.
And really who can argue with that?
We chew it up and spit it out and let it be a form of ourselves in all new shapes, and that is what is true and sometimes great and sometimes bitter about this country, but always pressing on. Where now ideas glow like the sun and moon are captured - but constantly need recharging. And if we're honest, we're not easily satisfied. In fact, we're probably never satisfied and churn on with relative depravation, confusing quick for good and easy for best. Instant is a measure of time, not quality. Not of experience. And I love America for it and I hate America for it, for erasing with these strokes the places I call home.
Shift (or Alter), Control, Delete.
Gustav works with his hands and while he is alive and dying at the same time, as we all are, as America is, I looked at him and wondered if art forms are alive and dying at the same time.
I think of music, which is now portable and anything I want it to be, that still serves to keep me in tune, and I remember that I will need a world with books I can see and feel and hear - like seeing and hearing and feeling the world - just as I crave a concert or live tingles of sound and am lost without my guitar or the promise of the banjo, the piano, the slide - and I pray we hang on to something here.
I wonder if we're destined for shops filled with digital windows or beams of story and art straight to our head. Or if we'll one day up our capacity -- be able to add RAM to the cerebrum or update our processers - and never find ourselves alone of stories in deep caves of our head and bone instead of cased away to discover on film, in book, in sound. And Napster, e-readers, downloads were merely the astral dust of this big bang and reinvention of our universe - zooming the universe right to you.
So did I write this on the 1948 Royal Deluxe typewriter gifted to me, baguette at my side, cocoa heated up?
No. I couldn't wait for the cocoa (the baguette is half gone). I had to get online right away, use Creawriter as it plays typewriter sounds with a mythical fireplace crackling.
All so I could send it right to you.
INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE?
The Espresso Book Machine - "What Gutenberg's press did for Europe in the 15th century, digitization and the Espresso Book Machine® can do for the world...today!"
On Studio 360 - Do we still need bookstores?
Encapsulating an era, closing before our very EMF-indulged eyes. Thanks, amiga!
Posted by: Raven | 27 March 2011 at 13:09