Another victim of the changing technological winds gives up the ghost
Video killed the radio star; streaming killed the video store.
So it is with Hastings Entertainment. The company has thrown in the towel and is in the throes of its final liquidation sales. Once upon a time, it was a source for books (at that time printed on paper) and music (at that time recorded in the grooves of vinyl platters). Video (at that time magnetically recorded on half-inch tape) and video games (at that time recorded on various types of electronic media) came later.
I found my first Hastings in the late ’70s, early ’80s in Amarillo, Texas. Rock music blared from speakers, the record section was huge, the book section was enticing, the posters on the wall bright with color. Some of the stores were found in those temples of consumerism, the indoor mall, but others could be found in the old-style strip shopping centers or stand-alone buildings.
When I went back to New Mexico, I found Hastings already had invaded, including a couple of stores in Santa Fe. Once the legality of home viewing of Hollywood movies on rental tapes was confirmed, Friday nights became busy places as individuals, couples and whole families came in looking for a weekend’s entertainment possibilities. Sometimes all copies of the movie they wanted were all gone, setting tempers on edge. A waiting game was sometimes played as employees brought in the returns from the drive-up drop-off bin. That paid off only occasionally, but for some customers, always worth the chance.
I worked one summer at one of the SF Hastings stores. I was assigned the Books section (naturally), and found that the chain practiced what I call the “shallow inventory.” This meant only those books that moved fairly quickly were stocked and if they didn’t, they were out. Even so, the sheer number of books was amazing. Once, the entire staff stayed all night doing a “purge” — the managers called it “inventory” — where we pointed a hand-held electronic device at the UPC code (the store pasted its own code over the publisher’s before the book went on the shelf) and if it beeped, the book was pulled. By daybreak, the aisles were jammed with the new rejects, which soon disappeared from the store, probably as fodder for the pulp mills. Or to return as bargain books to be placed on the special shelves. You could get some pretty good books for little money but of course the authors don’t get a cut of sales. Cheap for you, total loss for them.
Stocking the shelves was the Task That Would Not Die. The guys in receiving would cram wheeled carts with the night’s arrivals and they’d be waiting when I reported for work. Morning, noon or night, those damn carts never seemed to empty. Help a customer find a book, go back to shelving the new ones. Clean up the children’s section — another constant task; kids, you know? — go back to shelving books. Make the four thermoses of coffee in the morning, go back to shelving books. Put away the magazines and books left on the chairs where the customers had been reading and drinking coffee like the place was Starbucks (also just getting going), go back to shelving books. It lasted until it was time to play janitor and vacuum around the Books desk, the last task if you were the closer. During the night, some strange magic would be performed and the stocking carts would appear the next day loaded to the point of collapse again.
The only respite came when I was assigned to a cashier slot. I hated that, I’d rather shelve books than cashier. I’m not a people person, so being pleasant to a long line of customers was a real trial. Most of the customers were video renters, and if late charges showed up their accounts, they could get nasty. Gift certificates — not cards then, paper, another sign of antiquity — took special processing. And the soda companies thought it’d be fun to stick coupons for free drinks on the caps of the plastic bottles, creating another pain for cashiers.
Vinyl records were still the main option for music when I started. There was something zen about standing flipping through the eye-catching art on the sleeves. But, technology changes, as it always does, and new gadgets started rolling in. First it was cassette tapes (eight-track tape cartridges had pretty much withered away), then CDs slowly started to proliferate. (Digital audio tapes, DATs, came and went practically unnoticed.) Vinyl is having its last laugh, though, rising from the dead on wings of audiophile preferences.
On the video side, VHS won the war against Betamax, but soon they were succumbing to DVDs. Tech advances add new capabilities, but the disks seem to be the end of physical media. Streaming is the new paradigm for now, as it is for music and video games. Books still cling to printed life against e-books, but Hastings evidently missed the import of all this streaming and electronic downloading and such. So it has to pay the piper, as it were.
One time my friend and I were waiting our turn to get a Saturday night movie when a woman in the next line freaked because she didn’t want her name entered in the store’s computer. That’s Santa Fe, N.M., folks, and that’s not unusual. She asked if there was a video store that didn’t use computers, and, that again being Santa Fe, of course there was.
(That store was called Video Library, and Hastings reportedly opened a second store in SF with the express purpose of running them out of business. Didn’t work; they’re still renting VHS tapes and DVDs and still keeping track of them on file cards filled out with pencil. The locally owned bookstore, Collected Works, also has out-lasted Hastings. The record store, alas, didn’t.)
When Santa Fe raised the minimum wage, Hastings retaliated by closing one store (the one I had worked at, but I’d long since left). That left the one in the DeVargas Mall Center, which needed a viable store badly at the time as malls themselves were being rattled by changes in shopping habits. It wasn’t the only video store in town, but the Friday and Saturday crowds made it seem so.
In their heyday, the stores became nodes for pop culture. Comic books became a staple, and the stores stocked theme merchandise, everything from bobble-head dolls to clothing to posters to kids toys. Some electronics, too; headphones, portable players, that sort of thing. The last time I saw a Hasting store, the shelves were jammed, the music loud, the lights flashing. What they looked like the day before the bankruptcy was announced I don’t know.
The other cultural phenomenon Hasting rode for a while was the rise of the “speculation genres” — science fiction, fantasy, horror — into the mainstream of popular culture. The revolution in special effects in movies made possible by computers helped spark this boom. It was necessary. Harry Potter had jolted popular culture with a huge blast of storytelling magic. Seeing the movie version with the old special effect methods would have made them laughingstocks. Suddenly stories that had been around for years — Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Beowulf — became fodder for the new tech in the new movies. Along with that was the realization that books for children and young adults held some great source material for Hollywood producers eager to get a share of the disposable income the new generations of entertainment-savvy youngsters had rattling in their pockets.
I asked George R.R. Martin during a signing in the DeVargas store why he, having spent time in Hollywood working on TV shows, thought the old, venerable tales like Lord of the Rings had to be made into movies. He gestured around at the store with its mass of merchandise and said something like “it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?” Uh, yeah, I said, but beyond money, isn’t just reading books good enough any more? We did agree that visual storytelling pulled in more people to the material than just books could, and perhaps some of them then would turn to the original sources, which was a good thing. Thus was Hasting’s mission defined: To be a conduit for fans to get access to their favorite stories be it videos, CDs, books, video games or music.
(This conversation likely took place around the time of the publication of A Game of Thrones, the first book in the Song of Ice and Fire series. Yes, it was possible to have a conversation with George at a signing because not many people showed up that day. Not like now, when such an event would cause eager fans to form a line that would go out the door, up the highway and into the next county. Plus, at that time, he had no desire to make a movie or TV series out of his tale. Ha, ha, ha, how quickly things change, right?.)
I don’t mean to suggest that Hastings was a haven for all that was cool and hip. It was a corporate operation that looked upon all that merchandise with a cold eye for profits, not cultural milestones. The stores looked pretty much the same inside wherever they were. The music playing on the sound system generally was top-forty, with only an occasional foray into something cutting-edge. (And when that happened, it was quite noticeable.) The trailers playing on the monitors above the cashier stations were for that week’s new movies, but if you wanted something more esoteric — small independent, foreign, cult, obscure — your best bet was to hit one of the local video stores. Same with the books. Same with the games. Same with the music.
The shutdown of the chain signifies the end of another American cultural touchstone, like the passing of the malt shops of the ’50s or the malls of the ’70s, and ’80s. And while Gen-Xers and Millennials might look upon this as just another Baby Boomer lamenting the passing of his childhood, it could be worse — this could be about head shops with their psychedelic posters, background sitar music, albums (vinyl, of course) with bands like Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Canned Heat, Jimi Hendrix and such filling the racks, all in a haze of incense (and perhaps something, shall we say, more pungent). So count your lucky stars.
So long, Hastings, you were a bright and noisy source for home entertainment and the occasional community hang-out for a while. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to buy some stuff from Amazon.com.
The spat is over, just in time for the holidays
Certainly glad to hear Amazon and Hachette have settled their tiff about e-book pricing. While its good for customers and fans, the authors caught in the middle should come out better once the buying and rating systems are restored for their books..
I don’t know if the boycott did any good — I doubt my not buying anything from Amazon made much of an impression. Perhaps the effort led by Douglas Preston and others nettled Amazon corporate honchos enough to give ’em a little extra incentive to stop being jerks. I hope so. I hope no one forgets the authors were hurt the most by this.
I support the effort to bring Amazon’s shenanigans to the attention of the Department of Justice, even if nothing happens there. Regulators need to be made aware that even one large company can strangle free enterprise without much risk on that company’s earnings.
Some people are saying the Amazon boycott should continue, but I’m not so sure. I think we ought to buy as many Hachette authors as we can for the next few months to show Amazon that they can suffer from bad business practices, too. Plus, its a good way to let those authors know we missed them and still support them.
I’m still wary of both companies despite this sudden breakout of amity. These two giant corporations still can — and do — new methods to screw the writers and artists. We must watch both sides constantly or face the possibility of losing a lot more than delayed deliveries or loss of sales. The stakes remain large.
Win a date with George R.R. Martin! And help wolves and hungry people!
George R.R. Martin, author of — in case you live under a rock or something — The Song of Ice and Fire series, a.k.a. Game of Thrones, is raising money for the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary in northern New Mexico ( the wolf part) and The Food Depot of Santa Fe (the hungry people part).
A $25 donation will get you into the drawing for the grand prize, where the winner will be flown to New Mexico, meet with George, then fly to the sanctuary together (in a chopper most likely, not on the back of a dragon, more’s the pity). There are pretty cool goodies available for other donation levels, but some have already been snapped up. There are 59 days left (as of 6 June) in the campaign, and they’re a tad over half-way there. I don’t think there’s any doubt they’re going to reach their goal (George R.R. Martin! Wolves! Helping hungry people! What’s not to like?). And, mayhap, you’ll even get to see a movie at George’s theater in Santa Fe.
All the information is available at the Prizeo.com site, including how to donate.
Ebert and the movies: A one-sided conversation
I can’t say much that hasn’t already been said about Roger Ebert, except for what influence he had on me. An influence that came from what he said and how he said it. He was one of those people I wanted to know how he felt about particular things, and that he was able to help me understand a bit more about movies was an added bonus.
I met him once, a lucky moment in time. About 20 years ago he went to Santa Fe, NM to attend a film festival honoring the work of Francis Ford Coppola. I think it was a reception surrounding the premier of Return of the Black Stallion (Coppola was an executive producer). Ebert was standing by himself, so I walked up to him and asked how the TV show was doing. “Great,” he said, and we talked a bit about that, and we talked a bit about Coppola, and we talked a bit about movies in general. A conversation, I like to think, between colleagues. He worked for a newspaper and did movie reviews. I worked for a newspaper and did movie reviews. Of course, his newspaper was in a big city, his reviews were syndicated all over the country and he had that TV show. I worked for a small-town newspaper and, this being the age B.W (before web), that’s as far as anything I wrote got. Still, a colleague is a colleague, and having a friendly chat with someone like Ebert sticks in the mind.
Since then, our relationship has been pretty much one-sided: I read what he wrote (my days of movie reviewing long gone). Once I discovered his web site, I set up a routine. Every Friday evening, I would read every review he posted whether I was interested in the film or not. I learned much about films that way, and if I went to see the movie, I knew what to expect, what was wrong, what was right, the subtleties I should be aware of, and whether or not I agreed with him. I didn’t always expect to, but I made sure my (pretend) arguments with him were thought through and cogent. He wasn’t always right, and sometimes I wanted to yell “Oh, for crying out loud, Roger!” But, so reasonable were his arguments, so telling his points, that upon reflection, sometimes I’d have to mumble “OK, you have a point, but I hate you for forcing me give this terrible movie and/or franchise the benefit of the doubt.” And, yes, once in a while Ebert was flat wrong. (A-hem, cough, mumble, Chronicle.)
Now the impassioned voice for movies and movie culture is stilled. There cannot be another Roger Ebert, much as we wish that were true. There are no reviewers, as fine as they are, right now that I consider a similar friend, someone I can have a dialog with about movies as one-sided they may be. Perhaps that’s because I haven’t given anyone else a chance, and it could change. Still, it won’t be Roger …
For the second entry on this blog no one reads I discussed Martin Scorsese and his love for movies. (Lucky guy, he gets to make them.) Now he’s working on a documentary about Roger’s life, fitting given both men’s passion about the medium.
Martin Scorsese, making a film about Roger Ebert. Pretty damn good for a guy who spent most of his adult life watching movies.
And this is why it makes no difference to me
Steve Alford, the Lobos coach, last week signed a 10-year extension with UNM. This week, he signed a contract to coach at UCLA. See, this is why I have such disdain for college sports: It’s all a game of numbers. There are a lot of numbers floating around as dollars these days. Too many. Way too many. Second only to pro sports.
The big difference, though, is that pro athletes get paid for playing..
College athletes, supposedly being “amateur,” don’t see a dime. This makes them sort of akin to gladiators, performing for the masses in giant coliseums. The big difference is, of course, that today’s college athletes aren’t slaves. They do have the option to go pro, and why not?
I used to think that was a bad thing, but now the “amateur” designation for college sports is just a thin veneer. Everyone else is getting rich off the sweat of some talented athletes. Which is still an abomination, of course. Alford signed for something like $2 million; he was getting $1 million-something at UNM. The athletes he coached might get a shot at the big money on pro sports.
UNM paying more than a million for a coach. It just doesn’t compute.
I doubt many professors at UNM are getting more than a million. After all, they’re just teaching academics. You know, literature, math, science, engineering, philosophy, drama, psychology, medicine, business — things of the rest of the world.
But, you say, successful athletic programs bring in money for the whole university. Do they? I kind of think they go to athletic department salaries, sports facilities, that kind of thing. Here’s what should happen: The federal government should pro-rate whatever federal money these schools get based on the amount of money they receive through sports. Say a college pulls in $30 million in a year for all sports. Well, any grant, contract, scholarship or research money will be cut back at X percent, the holes to be filled with the sports-revenue money. Taxpayers, then, get a little slack and some of that sports windfall does go to help the ostensible reason universities exist.
Oh, and drop all pretense about “amateur” athletics.
(OK, so I did feel a little frisson when U of Kansas blew a 14-point lead and lost. It means UNM doesn’t have a lock on blowing expectations.)
March madness means little to me …
… except when the University of New Mexico Lobos lose to Harvard.
Harvard?!
Losing in the first rounds is not unusual for the Lobos. Indeed, it’s like the sun coming up every day. They have a good season, they get into NCAA tournament, then one and done, sometimes two and done, but done quickly nevertheless.
This time was slightly different in that they had a really good season and they were given a good seed. There was hope. There was optimism that for once, they’d be part of the Elite Eight.
Except Harvard — Harvard! — put an end to that. In the first round.
Arizona, of course, quickly took care of Harvard. Arizona and New Mexico used to play each other a lot, but Arizona got too big for the WAC (both schools were in that conference at that time). I saw the 2013 bracket and thought it’d be great if UA and UNM played each other again. Never thinking the Lobos would lose to … Harvard.
I care slightly about this because UNM is my alma mater. I usually don’t follow the teams (football is abysmal) except when they make a little noise. And they did this year; an ESPN site even suggested a First Seed for UNM was possible (not in a million years). Third Seed, pretty high for those Lobos, though. Maybe this time, maybe, oh, please …
And then along came Harvard.
Harvard!
(Not that I have anything against Harvard, certainly not academically. Lots of smart people come out of there [too many lawyers, though]. And I suppose it’s a cliche to think of Ivy League teams as easy walk-overs. Harvard had a good team this year, they exploited it and got as far as the second round in the tournament.
By defeating the Lobos.
(Unless, of course, Harvard is jonesing so hard for some of that sports money that the college is doing what other “top” schools have done in de-emphasizing academics. Say it ain’t so, Harvard.)
Well, there’s always next year.
Ha! And you think things will be different?.
Bradbury had the imagination and a way with words
Ray Bradbury in my mind was one of the top-tier science fiction writers of trailblazers and inspirations. And now they’re all gone — Isaac Asimov. Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Bradbury.
These were the ones I thought of when I thought “science fiction,” especially in my youth. Clarke was the one I remember reading first and it might have been the cover that caught my eye. I got to the others eventually, each pressing itself into my brain (though I have to admit Heinlein not as much as others, but I really can’t say why).
And thinking of Bradbury as an SF writer doesn’t really do him justice. He did write SF, but it had its own style. The popular way to judge SF is if it’s “hard” or “soft.” To say Bradbury was soft is a misnomer. “Lyrical” is a better term.
And Bradbury could be lyrical about pretty much anything. A sea creature falling in love with a lighthouse (when you see an illustration of a sea creature knocking down a lighthouse, “love” isn’t the thing that comes to mind). A virtual-reality playroom (long before anyone could explain the room with the term “virtual reality”). A circus-carnival train. Mars. Burning books.
OK, I said “lyrical,” not happy. That playroom might have been a marvel of technology, but the kids used it for deadly purposes. Who picks up one generation’s new technology faster? That generation’s offspring, leaving the adults befuddled — and vulnerable. Bradbury saw that. Circuses and carnivals are exciting and wondrous things for young boys, but the glitter and and the noise can cover up some nasty surprises. And government-sponsored book-burning isn’t always as far-fetched as we’d like to think. Bradbury may have been lyrical in his writing, but never obscured the point he was trying to make about ourselves, our technology and our futures. (Although I have to say that lyricism did get in my way. Sometimes I had trouble getting around all those similes and metaphors and the words dropped in to make a sentence more rhythmical. Just me, I guess.)
One thing I never will take away from Bradbury, though, is imagination. That’s what drives successful storytelling and he had it in spades. In this age where the creative impulse is little more than taking someone else’s work and prequelizing and sequelizing it or dumping vampires or zombies into it or gussing it up with awesome CGI makes sometimes Bradbury seem quaint. While imagination does manage to show up occasionally in contemporary culture — see Pixar as example: Wall-E, Up, Toy Stories I-III — it’s definitely taken a back seat. Jerry Schuster, imaginer of Superman, once boasted he could write a story about a Coca-Cola bottle.* Bradbury could, too, if he wanted. And it would be a story you would want to read.
Imaginative writers still write in the SF and fantasy fields following the paths Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke and Heinlein blazed. And they’re not just copying and pasting; they’re original, entertaining and just plain good. Check out the writers listed on this page if you want a place to start.
Bradbury is gone, but his legacy is secure.
*Where did I get this? From Larry Tye’s new book, Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far, it’s a good read.
Good reading from NM Hugo nominees
Nominations for the Hugo Awards — the best SF and Fantasy stories of the year as voted by fans — include three from New Mexico who also happen to be acquaintances.
James S.A. Corey is really two people and those two people — Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck — wrote Leviathan Wakes, a corker of a novel set in the solar system where Mars and Earth are ready to have at it. Enter an alien protomolecule and things really get interesting. Available from Orbit as print or e-book. And if you are a qualified Hugo voter, vote for it.
The other acquaintance is George R.R. Martin, whose book Dance of Dragons also is nominated. I can’t say much that hasn’t been said about Martin, the book, the series, the HBO series, so unless you just arrived from Mars, I’ll just say if you haven’t started reading/watching, now’s a good time. And if you’re a qualified Hugo voter — oops, wait, I’m about to ask you to vote one against the other. Ah, well, you’ll just have to vote for your preference.
It’s not my fault these guys got on the same ballot.
Three short movie reviews
The Secret World of Arrietty
From the studio that gave us Spirited Away and My Neighbor Tortoro, this is a Japanese take on The Borrowers, a British series of stories about little people who live in the walls of our houses and borrow what they need. “Japanese” because no real villains threaten the main characters (just a befuddled housekeeper), no one chases anyone else all over the place and nothing blows up. It’s subject is connections we make with other beings, courage, and ties to family. It ends on a bittersweet note, and I’d bet the last voice-over by the boy was added for American audiences because the Disney company — the distributor — doesn’t think Americans will accept ambiguous endings. It is a lovely, tranquil movie, paced more for quiet meditation than over-the-top action. While Hayao Miyazaki, the director of most of the studio’s famous films, co-wrote the script, he stepped aside for Hirosama Yonebashi, a young director at the studio. The passing of a torch?
Chronicle
I had high hopes for this. It started out well enough exploring what teen-agers could do if given nearly limitless power. It then goes cliche on us, becoming just another story about the oppressed, neurotic kid taking revenge. If you’ve seen Akira, if you’ve seen Carrie, you know how it turns out. A main rule in science fiction literature is that if the science is removed and the story still stands, it’s not science fiction. The same is true for movies: If the fantastic element is removed,and the story still stands, then it doesn’t need the special effects. Such is the case here; the deterioration of an adolescent soul can be explored better with mundane reality. Add that to the plot holes and the movie just collapses.
The Descendants
Nothing fantastic here, just a story about human beings in the mundane world. A story where the locale is, as has been noted by other reviewers,a character, too. Part of the plot revolves around Hawaii’s landscape and the human history that has swirled around the islands. George Clooney plays a father who has paid too much attention to work instead of family. When his wife is knocked into a coma in a boating accident, he has to reconnect with his daughters. And he has to decide whether to sell a huge plot of land on Kauai to developers who plan to build more hotels, more golf courses, more places for people unconnected to anything on the islands to come and stay few days, lie in the sun in scanty clothing, then go home without touching, or being touched by, the place at all. Yes, the family story could be told without the Hawaii subplot, but this is a film about connections: connections with family, connections with the family’s ancestors, connections with the place you live, connections to the history of the place you live — and the impact you have on all of this. (The novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings is good, too.)
Finally! The Big Game is here! Sit down, be quiet, watch and don’t think
The Big Game is here!
Boo-ya!
Time to gaze in rapture at the tube – no, no wait! They’re not tubes any more, they’re flat sheets of glass hanging on the wall, oh! oh! ecstasy! They’re huge! They’re giants! Blessings from Consumer Heaven to all us good little patriots!
And all of them made in Chin–
F*&% that! It’s the Big Game!
Such good citizens we are, dutifully placing our broadening butts in the recliners made in China and sagging couches made in China and guzzle watery beer and over-sugared (and not even with real sugar!) sodas our Corporate Masters tell us to drink and chomp the chemically preserved-to-eternity potato and corn chips dipped in a concoction made from stuff never found in real cheese our Corporate Master tell us to eat, all while we pretend that anything that’s happening on those big screens Chinese laborers who have no idea what a “Super Bowl” is because they’re too busy trying to make a living on those paltry wages pertains to us.
Oh, I’m sorry, am I interfering with your viewing pleasure? Am I distracting you from the annual massacring of the national anthem by an overpaid and overexposed pop singer? Does me yammering about “labor” and “workers” dilutes your enjoyment of the latest super-spiffy ads our Corporate Masters have prepared for us? And you’re saying I’m missing the point of the “Super Bowl” being a unifying force in America? Yes, you’re probably right. There’s not another event in this country that requires so many American bottoms to be numbed for so long for one cause. Take one for the zipper–
What? Oh, sorry, being a pest again.
But you know, somewhere in China, away from the repetitive-movement mind-numbing assembly plants producing everything an American could want, there are smart people planning ways to get to and colonize the Moon. And in one of the last vestiges of the American intellectual frontier, the few smart people left in this country are finding dozens of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, some possibly with conditions ripe for life–
Oh, uh, what? There I go again? Yes, yes, I’m sorry. Get into the spirit of the day, you say. Cut loose, enjoy life. Uh, I guess there’s something to that.
Well, OK, here goes … Go Indians!
Now what … wrong sport? Oh, I see. But … what difference does that make?
The light-bulb fight is over. Who actually won?
So the budget bill just passed contains a provision stopping the requirement to phase out tungsten light bulbs and replacing them with more efficient devices. The reason given had to do with the new rules infringing on the “rights” of individuals to choose money-burning tungsten technology. (The money isn’t really burned of course; it just goes to the huge corporate-owned power-production plants. Who’s the real winner here?) Some old technologies might be worth saving — vinyl records, Kodachrome, manual typewriters — but others have dragged on well beyond their usefulness and ought to be dumped. Wrapping the issue in “individual rights” demeans the struggle for liberty. Light-bulb choices are minor compared to our real constitutional rights. Which, by the way, are under siege, in case you haven’t noticed.
Terry England 