Dispatches from the old home town:
Sad to report that Karma Records has closed its Indiana Avenue location (others remain open in Indianapolis and vicinity). I shopped here a lot in the late '80s and hung out with many of the then-employees, to the extent that I memorized the shop's phone number. (Truthfully, however, it never really changed with the times and in the early '90s I left Karma behind for the more low-key hipness of TD's shop.) I'll always harbor fond memories of getting up way too early one spring day in 1986 and walking down from my dorm to buy John Mellencamp tickets. E. reports that fittingly, they've still got Mellencamp posters in the windows, along with a goodbye note. (Yours truly is visible in the glass, with camera.)
On a happier note, citizens can now see films in downtown Bloomington for the first time in years. This article notes:
The BCT was donated to the Bloomington Area Arts Council in 1995, after being owned and closed by the Kerasotes theater chain. Kerasotes insisted in the donation agreement that the BCT not show any films so business at other Bloomington Kerasotes theaters wouldn’t suffer.
Managers of the BCT and the Kerasotes theater chain recently reached an agreement that the BCT may show theatrical films that have been released for at least a year.
Meanwhile, B&W goes offline for a few days. In the meantime, don't miss this great CJR article on one editor's experience of editing Hunter S. Thompson at Rolling Stone:
It fell to the editor and his trusty assistants to manage the flow of additions and corrections, impose order on the piece, and perhaps even slide it into a narrative frame. I wrote endless cheerful memos about such things, encouraging the writing of new, connecting material to form a coherent whole. The issue for the magazine was never that Hunter wasn’t the funniest, cleverest, most hilarious writer, sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph. The editor role was getting those sentences to pile up and then exhibit forward momentum. (Hunter called this process “lashing them together.”)