Another long day battling flu-like symptoms. I somehow slept through my alarm blaring for 30 minutes this morning. I had to run a few errands before arriving at work. There were trucks and cars filling the parking lot. Soda machines were removed, shredding trucks destroyed a decade’s worth of tax information and other post-dated legal documents. It was eerily quiet inside. No machines humming, no more helping hands, just the owner, manager, myself, and one other person. For the last time today, we said “hello” and goodbye to our longest, most consistent customer Frank, who we’ve let sneak inside and practice for free for the past ten days. Frank has been an everyday visitor for the past 30 years. He arrived like clockwork every afternoon. On days when no-one else showed, in rain, blizzards and heat waves, we would keep our doors open because, “What if Frank were to show up–we’d be closed.”
Empty Space
I put up a new website with a short, schmaltzy letter and the address of our new P.O. Box. I managed to solve a computer problem that our hired technician couldn’t solve, and, naturally, proceeded to brag about it for the rest of the day. I helped pack cars full of personal property and gifted items. The place is entirely empty now. It’s like a ghost town.
Emptier Spacier
– NME is reporting that on March 27th of this year, Columbia/Legacy will be re-releasing the first three Leonard Cohen albums (Songs Of… ; Songs From a Room ; Songs of Love and Hate) with new restored recordings, liner notes, and bonus tracks. Now you know what to get me for my birthday.
– If you didn’t notice, Mike from Connecticut posted a link in yesterday’s comments to the Chavez recording from their concert at the Warsaw in Brooklyn on December 16th. The quality is nothing to go crazy about–it sounds like it was recorded from the back of the room with a microphone in a backpack, but…it’s a neat listen.
