So Lost City is an interesting blog, an attempt at documenting all of the old bits of New York that are rapidly vanishing and being converted into Subway restaurants and doggie day cares and five dollar cupcake shops in the Bloomberg wet dream of gentrification and sterilization. But I should say was, because the proprietor of this nostalgic blog has decided to close shop.

In a sense, I feel bad about this; I mean, I never found out about this blog until I heard about its closing, so I didn’t get to waste tons of time scouring its pages, looking for things I remembered that got bulldozed or scraped out to build yet another Bank of America branch.  One of the first things I found on his pages is that Chumley’s, the underground, speakeasy-like bar hidden in the village, once  a haunt of literary types and just around the corner from William S. Burroughs’ place, has since shut down because of a chimney collapse, and has been forever stalled in that “under construction” phase that means death. Anyway, I do love me some nostalgia, especially having to do with places I lived, so it’s sad to see a site like this go away.

But, here’s the deal: I know how hard it is to run a gig like this.  I worked on The Necrokonicon for a good four years before I finally scraped it into a paper book and shut down the original site.  It’s a thankless job, one that can generate some decent traffic, but that requires constant revisions, to the point where your full-time occupation becomes the maintenance of this profitless venture you could never hope to monetize.  You get constant emails from people bitching about how you got an opinion of yours “wrong”, and how you got facts backwards when explaining an urban legend that wasn’t true in the first place.  You find dead ends researching restaurants that have long since closed, in cities that don’t keep records of the past, with residents that have no long-term memory anymore.  Every little update becomes a political struggle, and you wonder if it would be easier to just write Twilight fan fiction and call it a day.  There’s some reward when you find a person that gives you some information that’s useful, or when you stir up the thread of nostalgia in someone who appreciates it.  But it’s also a bitch, and there’s never an end in sight, because you’re talking about a city that always changes.  So I understand the decision to call it a day.

What I don’t get is all of the negative bullshit being stirred in the link above that goes to theawl.com.  I started poking around this site a bit, and it’s sort of a hip New York-centric pop culture thing.  So it doesn’t surprise me that much that all of the commenters go off on this guy and proclaim the general uselessness of his work.  I mean, it’s hard to really explain the undertone of the comments without a complicated Venn diagram, but in general, there’s a lot of venom.  I’m not sure - do these people actually appreciate when a place like Zen Palate goes under and gets replaced by a TGI Friday?  I thought urban decay and throwback architecture is hipster cool, but there are people who actually seem excited about mallifying Times Square and building huge glass condos that will look asinine in five years.

I don’t know - arguing about urban planning with someone who self-identifies as a New Yorker is almost as futile as arguing religion with someone who runs a church.  These are the people who claim the city never sleeps, even though I could never, ever find a 24-hour pharmacy within ten miles of my apartment, and yet Elkhart, Indiana, population 40,000 has at least a dozen.  I mean, there is a certain validity in the fact that you can’t keep New York into the exact thing it was the second you got there, because everything constantly changes.  But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to try to remember these things.  Because we have no attention span and now with the death of all paper media and the twitter-ification of all things reference-oriented, you will find it absolutely impossible to look up something that happened five years ago without facing a sea of 404s.  All news has become blogs, and all blogs have a shelf life of even less than a Thai-Mexican fusion restaurant with a $14,000 a month rent in SoHo.  So I find it commendable when someone does try to make a reference of the past like this.  Because all of you are going to wake up tomorrow, a dozen years from now, and only have the vaguest of memories of that Shea-whatever-it-was-called place where the Mets maybe used to play, and every single maybe-relevant phrase you enter into google is going to redirect you to a CitiBank advertisement.

In 1996, I suddenly decided I was going to become a filmmaker, and bought a Hi8 video camera.  I’m sure some of this was the intersection of past viewings of ROX, the blooming Seattle public access cable scene, and the fact that I actually had enough money to buy a video camera.  So I bought the camera, looked at video editing software for the PC, got discouraged, and eventually did nothing.  But on and off for a few years, I lugged around this thing on trips and captured some video, and then never did anything with it.

Now with YouTube and advances in software, this stuff is slightly more useable.  I mean, in 1996, you had to spend at least five grand on a good Mac to pull in and slice up the video, and maybe another couple grand on software like Avid or Premiere.  Now you can buy a thousand-dollar iMac, fire up the included iMovie, and you are set.  Add to that a hundred dollar Flip camera, and you’re ready to roll.

So I have a ton of lost video on these tapes.  I lost some tapes in the last dozen moves, and some of them are disintegrating, but others have some nice little time capsules in them.  All of the quality is garbage, and I am not a very good cameraman.  But sometimes I find little bits and pieces that are interesting.

Anyway, here is a shot of Seattle from 1999, right before I left.  I was with my friend Virginia Lore, doing my big round of goodbyes, so this is probably the last time I saw her in person.  We were hiking around Queen Anne and I shot this minute or two from the hill looking down onto the city.  This is right before Boeing left town, before the big protests, before Microsoft stopped minting millionaires and before the dotcom economy crashed, so it’s an interesting little touchstone into the Seattle that was, at least for me.

(Note: this is my first attempt at embedding a video.  If you’re looking at this in facebook, it probably won’t work, and you have to actually look at it on my journal page to see it.)

It’s hard to realize that it was almost exactly five years ago I went to Maine.  But I was messing around with Wordpress, trying to figure out the easiest way to get a picture out of iPhoto that didn’t involve printing out the photo and then re-drawing it by hand into MS Paint (and in OSX 10.5 and up there is - more in a second) and I found this picture and a couple more from that visit.

The whole thing came out of a trip to Boston to read at Tim Gager’s Dire reading series.  I read there before with John Sheppard - actually, John read there and I took the bus up from New York and stayed in a hotel that used to be a bunker at some deactivated Navy base, and I had enough drinks in me to convince myself to get up during the open mic part of the reading.  I read from Rumored, and someone got up and walked out, so I consider that Mission Accomplished.

So I rented a car and got a hotel and invited along Sarah, who just started dating me a couple of months back, and this would be our first trip together.  I wanted to hit all 50 states - I still do - and pretty much everything north of Mass. still stood in my way, and I couldn’t think of any other reason to visit up there.  I mean, I’m a fan of maple syrup and all, but not enough to freeze my ass off and walk into the middle of nowhere to watch it being made (or extracted, or bled, or whatever.)  So I proposed we make a long weekend out of it, and twist up through Vermont and New Hampshire and stay in Maine.

My only experience with Maine was a certain ex I had in college who many of you lovingly remember because she was essentially the female version of Winchester from MASH and had some pompous entanglement with pretty much everyone I knew from 1989 to 1995.  She hailed from Bangor and could not have a conversation without mentioning how much better Maine was than anywhere else.  She left long ago, so I figured it would be safe to check it out, and cross that state off the list.

The reading went okay, except the opener wrote a book about how his sister died in 9/11, which really set the stage for an experimental fiction author who wanted to read a piece about necophilia.  Also his entire extended family was there.  And I was sober, which doesn’t work well with public speaking for me.  I read a chapter from Dealer Wins, and did okay.  We stayed in this Holiday Inn Express out in South Boston, and the only things I remember about it were that it was in the middle of nowhere near a highway; it was a block or so from a huge row of big-block stores; and there was some local chain of diner right next to the hotel and we ended up eating there like five times, because anywhere else would have involved driving in a town where the roads were mostly laid out for horses, (except for that eleventy billion dollar tunnel that would collapse in about a year, which had plenty of lane width.)

The drive up to Portland reminded me of the heavy forests and winding hilly roads of upstate New York.  We stopped somewhere, a sandwich place/gas station in an old converted barn that sold homemade fudge and little glass bottles of syrup and homemade pies.  We also pulled over at a rest stop after the crossing into New Hampshire so I could get a picture of my book at the welcome sign.  (This was back when I took pictures of the book at every weird place I could, like at the Reichstag or Pearl Harbor.

We stayed at a fancy four-star hotel in Portland, and walked around all day, popping into little book stores and looking at these little taverns that sold local beers and crabs and oysters.  And I didn’t drink or eat seafood, but I appreciated the local flavor and the fact that every other person we saw looked like he worked on a boat slinging lobster traps for 20 hours a day.  The hotel was this old restored building, like most of the restored places in that neighborhood, made of stunning red bricks with This Old House style fixtures and old timey windows.

I had an almost-new camera, this Fuji that eventually broke into pieces in my carryon bag a few years later, but I didn’t take many pictures.  The ones I do have, though, have this weird color tinge; that camera seemed to capture primary colors in a strange way I can’t explain, but I can always look back and easily tell what pictures came from it versus the couple of Canon point/shoots I’ve had since then.

And I have not crossed off any new states since.  We tried to go to Louisiana that year, but you probably saw what happened there on the news.  I need to go to both Carolinas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Nebraska.  Any suggestions on any reason whatsoever why I should go to Nebraska are appreciated.

Oh yeah - here’s how you get your iPhoto pictures into Wordpress without exporting them first.  Go to insert the picture, and pick the From Computer option, and click the button to browse your files.  If you have OSX 10.5 and up, if you look in the left panel of the file chooser and scroll to the very bottom, there is a Photos icon.  Click that and it lets you browse your entire iPhoto collection and pick images from that.  Genius.

The first Rockies game of the year for me was today, and it looked to be the pitching duel of the year, with two-time Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum versus Colorado’s ace who may be the 2010 Cy Young winner, Ubaldo Jimenez.  It didn’t end up that way, but it was still a great game, and always good to see the Rockies win.

Memorial Day’s a great day for baseball - a day off of work, nice weather without being too hot, and great crowds.  I scooped up tickets on StubHub,  in 108, row J, which is ten rows behind the visitor’s dugout.  We got there an hour early, which meant I got right up to the wall and took enough pictures to burn through an entire battery during batting practice.  I absolutely love the new DSLR for games, although I get lens envy when I see the pros with giant three-foot long zooms on the field.

They had a ton of veteran-related things going on for the holiday, which was surprising considering the political climate of the area.  But they had a ton of medal-laden vets out before the game. The national anthem was sung by Keni Thomas, who was a Ranger in the battle of Mogadishu; he actually did a pretty decent job of it.  They also did a moment of silence and “God Bless America” plus all of these taped things of various players thanking vets.

So, the game - basically, Ubaldo pitched very well, and Lincecum did well, but there were enough minor gaps to let the Rockies break it open.  Lincecum walked a couple of people in the second, and then Clint “I’ll swing at every pitch you throw at me” Barmes, who never had a hit against Lincecum, got in a two-run single on an error.  There was also a later pick-off attempt where the ball got loose and someone got two bases on it.  There were a few questionable umpire calls that went in the Rockies’ favor and royally pissed off all of the Giants fans, too.  And Lincecum threw way too many pitches, with a 32-pitch second inning.

Ubaldo’s pitching was phenomenal.  The numbers are amazing: he’s the first ten-game winner this year, something that only 15 people have done since 1952; he had nine strikeouts and extended his scoreless streak to 26 innings with the shutout. He pitched a complete game, which is the fourth time he’s done that - and what’s odd is I saw him do that in 2008.  His ERA has dropped to a microscopic 0.78, too.  What’s amazing is that he threw a 128-pitch game, but even well after the 100-pitch mark, he was throwing 99-MPH fastballs. And I wasn’t watching the pitch board the whole game (I always forget where it is at AT&T Park, and reflexively start looking near all of that Levi’s crap in right field) but even his curve ball was touching 90.

The game was pretty boring offensively, with no major bombs hit, except a few that the Giants launched that went straight to Carlos Gonzalez with no effort.  It was all manufactured runs and NL baseball goodness.

I took a ton of pictures - they’re on flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkonrath/sets/72157624180933230/

I go out for lunch maybe once a week, usually on the day of a day game when I want to catch a few innings in the car on my iPhone.  There aren’t many lunch places near work, but there’s a cluster of big-box stores, a sort of mini-mall that was plopped in place a few years ago, and when I’m done eating, I’ll sometimes wander the stores a bit.  One of the stores is a Best Buy, and the other day, I decided I was sick of all my music and I needed a new album. That typically involves going to iTunes and clicking away, but for whatever reason, I decided to go old-school and actually browse the racks at the big blue box store.

I was surprised to see there’s not really a CD section in Best Buy anymore. I mean, there is a token three or four racks, but it used to be that each of the bins would have maybe a row of 30-40 CDs, and there would be side-to-side bins for dozens of feet, and maybe a dozen aisles like that. Now, there were maybe three aisles, and each rack held exactly one CD. We’re talking about maybe as many CDs as the average Flying J truck stop holds, between the CB radios and coolers of pre-made sandwiches and beef jerky. And the selection - we’re talking about only the most popular of the most popular music; the most obscure thing they had there was maybe Guns N’ Roses.  Almost all of the titles were more expensive, although there was a token section of $6.99 albums.  But the selection part is what killed me. It seemed like overnight, they completely collapsed.  It’s like if the Strand went from 18 miles of books to a layout like one of those airport book stores.

I used to spend a lot of time at Best Buy.  In Seattle, I was hooked on Silver Platters, and used to go there twice a week for my CD addiction. In New York, I never fully found an indie place that met my needs like they did. I worked above a Virgin Megastore for almost two years, and while their prices were sometimes spendy, you could sometimes pick up good deals there, and they did have some slightly obscure death metal stuff.  And there was always Tower.  But I somehow always gravitated to Best Buy, maybe because I could also grab DVDs, video games, and ogle the new home theater stuff.

There wasn’t a Best Buy close to my place in Astoria, but there was one maybe a mile and a half south of me.  The subway didn’t run down there, so my Saturday ritual involved a walk down Steinway to Northern, headphones on, to go blow through part of a paycheck and stock up on digital media.  I’d usually have no shopping list, and would just run through the A-Z, picking out a couple of albums that looked interesting.  I’d do the same with movies, trying to think of a couple of titles that would hold my interest and give me something to do that night.  I’d have to deal with the crowds loitering around on Steinway, and push myself past a bunch of people or take a side street, but the walk gave me a routine.  And halfway between the two places was a Papaya King, so I could get some of their grilled hotdogs and a fruit drink.  (There’s one thing I do miss about New York.)

When the weather wasn’t as good and I didn’t feel like braving the walk, I’d get on a train and head to Chelsea, where they opened a big Best Buy there.  I guess it wasn’t any faster, and maybe the walk on either side of that trip almost added up to the distance from my apartment to Northern, but it got me out of the house and into Manhattan.  And I got a couple of hours of time to read and listen to music on headphones. Plus the subway is heated, and half the damn time my apartment wasn’t, thanks to my shithead landlord.

But here’s the thing: I eventually figured out this wasn’t a routine, it was a psychological problem.  I had this gaping hole in my life, and I tried to fill it by collecting stuff.  And my poison was a 12-centimeter disc of plastic and aluminum.  And I didn’t think anything of it, but I spent a lot of my time and money collecting DVDs and CDs.  And I know, what’s the harm in CDs?  It’s not like I was smoking crack or shooting heroin.  But there is a certain psychic impact on getting locked into a collection like that, and it’s hard to see how nuts you are until you go a couple of years without dropping hundreds of bucks a week on music, or having an entire apartment that’s wall-to-wall CD racks.  I guess a big part of it is you’re always running toward a goal you can never catch.  You’re always buying more music, thinking you’ll get to some mystical state where you have “enough” music, where you’ll always have something to listen to.  But you get to a stage where you have enough CDs that if you actually listened to them all end-to-end, 24 hours a day, it would take you months to finish, yet you are perpetually in a state where you have “nothing” to listen to, and it takes you 20 minutes to leave the house because you can’t pick out a couple of albums to take with you.  (This was pre-iPod, when I did not carry around my entire music collection in my pocket.)

I don’t remember the last DVD I actually bought.  With movies, it’s much more of  a moot point - we have a NetFlix account and a Roku box and a DVR and on demand, so any time I want to watch something, I watch it once, and then that’s it.  I don’t spend $40 on it, watch it once, and then lose that amount of storage space in my apartment forever.  It makes no sense for me to ever buy a DVD.  Even if I really love a movie, I’m not going to watch it more than once or twice a year, so why give up the storage space and money to keep a copy on hand?  I still have a few DVDs, but I put them in binders, which is also a big collector no-no.  Part of the fetish is to have the original packaging, the entire article, and not throw out the cases and keep only the booklets in a binder.  That’s a cardinal sin, but it’s not like I’m going to resell my DVDs, so I don’t care.  In the shelf area that used to hold maybe a dozen DVD boxes, I have three binders that hold maybe a hundred titles.

As far as CDs go, I use iTunes a lot, and the instant gratification there sort of kills going to the store, especially when a $16.99 CD at Best Buy costs you ten bucks online.  Sure, I don’t get the physical case, the printed book, but that’s more collector-ism for you.  There was a time where I thought I NEEDED the physical disc in a rack on the wall, but do I?  I buy songs and albums to listen to them; I don’t buy they to pay some allegiance to a band, to have their entire collection, even if I don’t like some of the songs or albums.

So I went through the racks at the Best Buy, and found a Peter Gabriel album I didn’t have, a collection of covers he did.  I felt bad about buying nothing and leaving, but I also felt bad about buying something.  It felt like dieting for years and then ending up at a McDonald’s and getting the old meal you used to eat five times a week, and then getting sick off of it.  I don’t even have a place to put CDs anymore, and as I opened up the plastic, I realized I’ve probably only listened to a CD in my car maybe twice.  I was firmly in the iTunes camp by the time I got this car in 07, and I’ve only used the iPod connector, and the occasional AM radio scan for traffic or a local ball game.  So it felt weird to listen to the CD, and didn’t compel me to return and buy a hundred more.  Always weird when you realize an era has ended for you.