BilmBlog500

I should be reading a manuscript but it's late and I'm tired and it's not the right conditions for work reading. So instead, let's reflect on one year of life after Borders. Technically I could do in September, but this week marks the real end, the week when the liquidation became official, when the theory of the Borders bookstore gave way to the going out of business sale. And it still sucks. To tackle some good news first, the end of Borders wasn't the end of publishing as we know it. I don't know of any publishing company that went under because they were left holding a bag with a hole in the bottom of it. At least not yet. I'm also not aware of any publisher with cash flow issues where our receivables get kind of long in the tooth that's had its circumstances improve over the past year. But that's about the extent of the good news, that the Borders bankruptcy wasn't the start of some fancy game of dominoes where we could watch them all m

There's no doubt that there's a stretch in 1980/81 that was the most formative in forming the film-loving part of my self. May 1980, when The Empire Strikes Back opened, and we drove down to see it in 70mm on the huge screen of the RKO Stanley Warner Route 4 Paramus Quad. Around that same time, that I saw The Shining. December 1980, when I saw Altered States at the Loews Astor Plaza . The summer of 1981, when I was on my own in Boston for several weeks. So it's with extreme sadness that I read on Monday in the New York Times that the AMC Loews Harvard Square theatre has shuttered. According to Cinema Treasures , the theatre opened in 1926 with 1700 seats. Who knows how many seats it had in 1981, and I'm not sure that the balcony was in use at that time, but it was still one massively mammoth theatre with one humongously huge screen, and it showed a different double feature every night. And you could buy a card for ten prepaid admissions for, if memory serves, $18. I