ON THE AVENUES: Alas, New Albany is less of a place without a bookstore.

Hi, I'm Nawbany's village iconoclast. In my spare time I write sentences and drink lots of beer. 

The onetime PBS anchorman Jim Lehrer died on January 23, and when I heard the sad news, my thoughts raced back to those many occasions during the decade of the 1980s, working evenings at the long departed Scoreboard Liquors, and doing something that almost never happens with me nowadays: watching the evening news via television.

Whenever I spot a package store clerk with eyes glued to an iPhone or laptop, I think back to my entertainment options on slow business nights: a minuscule black and white television set with shabby rabbit ears, from which many a McNeil-Lehrer News Hour was observed. I probably should have been sweeping or stocking, anyway.

The city of New Albany had cable television back then, having handed the keys to the city to the first enterprising operator who stepped forward with hands extended, much as the nation’s railroads once fleeced the federal government for right-of-way privileges extending to the earth’s core in on direction and the moon in the other.

However there was no way Scoreboard’s owners would ever have paid for something quite that frivolous, although store manager Lloyd “Duck” Cunningham gladly would have watched Cubs day games if WGN were available.

In other news, there were sporadic attempts to have the morning’s Courier-Journal delivered to Scoreboard, although these usually came to nothing because the newspapers would so often get stolen. Seems journalism was subject to thievery even when the Binghams practiced it (until 1986, at least).

Given that I usually worked two jobs, time for me was scarce. To make it down from the Knobs a little early for work at Scoreboard meant having the chance to walk a block to the library and catch up on magazines, then in 1988 came a job at Data Courier in Louisville, where I abstracted magazine articles, exponentially expanding my available options to self-educate.

This experience genuinely changed my life, and while the public library remained a go-to-when-could, now there were some publications of sufficient obscurity to require a visit to the IU Southeast library for perusal.

By this time Scoreboard had moved to the corner of Spring and Beharrell Avenue on the other end of town, and I was living in Floyds Knobs with two good friends. We plumped for cable, which in practice meant sports, MTV and CNN. My library visits waned; there wasn’t much time to read, anyway. My social life was active, which is to say I drank far too much.

The overarching point to this opening digression today is that I’ve always placed supreme importance in being informed, by whatever means it takes. Almost certainly to a degree these channels of journalistic expression 30 or more years ago were biased and tainted. It would be foolish to argue otherwise.

Still, it is increasingly hard to imagine they were any worse than the befuddling cacophony greeting me each morning as I try to learn exactly what’s going on in the world. It's as if we cannot possibly know -- which benefits the oligarchs nicely, don't you think?

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Fast-forwarding 15 eventful (read: exceedingly rough) years, and seemingly as many personal lifetimes, and suddenly it was 2004. There’d be another dozen years to unfold before my NABC tenure concluded, and Diana and I had purchased a house on Spring Street, where we still live.

As for the time of which I'm about to speak, I’m guessing it was October, as I’d just returned from what proved to be the finale of my side gig as European motorcoach beer tour operator.

Diana and I decided to attend an open house at the Moser Tannery, then fully intact and only a short period removed from daily operation. It had been purchased by Al Goodman, who envisioned a museum of tanning among other uses for the buildings, as well as an ecological preserve for the Loop Island wetlands behind them.

Frankly, I didn’t know the natural area even existed. In 2020, it’s the only part of Al’s dream to come to fruition, because sadly, only a few months after the open house, a heavy snow caused the roof to collapse onto the amazing century-old hide tanning bays, completely destroying them.

Subsequently Al couldn’t leverage his plans into existence, and eventually what was left was scooped up by the opportunistic city, which acquiesced in the neglect of the remaining structures until they were torched by arsonists in what might be Jeff Gahan’s most cynical and purposefully scripted moral failure ever.

Ah, but I’m digressing into a previous existence. Apologies, Andrew.

If for no other reason, the open house at Moser Tannery in October of 2004 was memorable because I met Randy Smith for the very first time. I already knew his wife Ann Baumgartle from our time as students at IU Southeast. They informed us of something we hadn’t heard: Destinations Booksellers was soon to open at 604 East Spring Street, a mere five blocks from our house.

Know that in 2004, the downtown food and dining revolution had yet to be launched. The embryo came in 2006 with the advent of Bistro New Albany, which by all rights should be memorialized by a plaque at Brooklyn and The Butcher, which now occupies the space.

Maybe today’s Develop New Albany can work on that if they the governing committee runs out of groveling, self-congratulatory photo-ops.

However, we got by. In late 2004 there was plenty of great beer and pizza at NABC on Grant Line Road, a short bicycle ride from our home. The library remained a reasonable ten minute walk, and providentially, just down the street was a bookstore.

Finally New Albany threatened to become livable.

At its inception in 2004, Destinations Booksellers was New Albany’s first full-service bookstore since 1947. Two years before this, our original brewery at Sportstime and Rich O’s was the first in New Albany since 1935. Whether any of this helped Randy and I to become friends is questionable, but it strikes me as significant in the sense of shared visions.

NABC expanded downtown to Bank Street Brewhouse in 2009, and contracted back to the mother ship in 2019. I left the business for good in 2018. As most blog readers already know, Destinations Booksellers has spent the past two weeks winding down and now has ceased operations after almost 16 years in business, making way for a soon-to-come food service tenant, leaving Randy and Ann to be landlords.

They’re not going anywhere. Neither are we, and yet already I feel the absence of their bookstore. In spite of all the many electronic and technological advances governing the way we interpret the world, receive news and fundamentally communicate, books remain sacred objects to me.

A bookstore, the public library, our private library where there’s no space to put any more books because there are so damn many books … well, these are the churches and chapels for an unrepentant atheist, humanist and rationalist.

I’m grateful for Randy and Ann for Destinations Booksellers. 15-plus years is a great run for any business, and New Albany isn’t exactly the sort of milieu that celebrates “book learning.”

Of course this city wasn’t much for snooty imported (and later craft) beers, either, but I started evangelizing about better beer all the way back in 1983, and had 20 years to prepare the market before we began brewing our own. Aspiration takes time and patience to nurture, and probably most often in life, the seedling fails to reach its full growth potential.

When it does, those are the special times.

Randy and Ann are our friends, and I’ve richly enjoyed the hours I’ve spent browsing at Destinations, attending the civic events held there (like pubs, bookstores need to be community centers), and chewing the fat with the proprietor.

To be honest, it made me proud as a New Albanian that New Albany had its own bookstore. It may be gone, but I won’t forget it. Maybe someday the city as a whole can be the sort of information-friendly learning zone like that room at 604 East Spring was from 2004 through 2020.

Unlikely, but a boy can still dream.

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January 9: ON THE AVENUES: Elusive sounds of silence.

Oliver Sacks: "Information is different from knowledge."

Oliver Sacks died in 2015, and it's not clear when this essay first was published, but it's excellent. That's all I have to say. Technology obviously isn't going away. However, individuals can resist its ubiquity. I recently wrote about this.

Just an off-the-cuff rumination about taking our sweet time to get it right.

My resolution for the year 2019 is that whenever prompted to breathlessly participate in our short, social media-driven collective attention span, I'll do my very best to opt out, remain calm and seek space sufficient for deliberation.

Want me to hurry up? Sorry, this only encourages me to stop and think harder about it. Pour yourself another drink, because my musings might take a while.

Want me to scroll through the image carousel and indulge in the national flashcard kaleidoscopic consciousness? Nah. I'd rather slow down and mull the topic in depth -- and look at the pictures later, once I'm familiar with the context.

Now, to Sacks.

The Machine Stops, by Oliver Sacks (The New Yorker)

The neurologist on steam engines, smartphones, and fearing the future.

 ... I have not adjusted as well as my aunt did to some aspects of the new—perhaps because the rate of social change associated with technological advances has been so rapid and so profound. I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along. Such children, unable to attract their parents’ attention, must feel neglected, and they will surely show the effects of this in the years to come.

In his novel “Exit Ghost,” from 2007, Philip Roth speaks of how radically changed New York City appears to a reclusive writer who has been away from it for a decade. He is forced to overhear cell-phone conversations all around him, and he wonders, “What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said? . . . I did not see how anyone could believe he was continuing to live a human existence by walking about talking into a phone for half his waking life.”

These gadgets, already ominous in 2007, have now immersed us in a virtual reality far denser, more absorbing, and even more dehumanizing. I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.

Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.

A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century. One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. Half the audience cheered; the other half booed ...

ON THE AVENUES: If it's about learning and knowledge, then by definition it's a Gahan Free Zone. You're welcome.

ON THE AVENUES: If it's about learning and knowledge, then by definition it's a Gahan Free Zone. You're welcome. 

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

This week’s column begins with the famous words of Duke Ellington.

“Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.”

It’s important we understand his intended meaning. Nowadays the noun “mistress” generally is used to reference an unsavory male power scenario in which the woman is subservient, but the primary definition of the word is different and more positive:

“A woman who has power, authority, or ownership.”

Ellington definitely did not view music as something he controlled and kept in its place, to be shielded from view in an efficiency apartment until he needed it to relieve his desires. If anything, it was the other way around. Music was his life, and it called the tempo.

Wait – it seems there’s a question from the cheap seats: Roger, who is this Duke Ellington fellow, anyway?

Ah, yes. I keep forgetting about the calendar. It’s 2019, and music comes from computers just like bread originates with Kroger.

Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was a musician and orchestra leader in the then-dominant idioms of jazz, big band and swing. To me, he remains one of America’s foremost composers in any musical genre.

My parents raised me on music like Ellington’s, and in 1971 they took me to see a concert in Louisville by his ensemble. The rock and roll bug subsequently bit me hard, but I’m eternally grateful to have been exposed to these old-school variants of American music. They remain huge daily components of my internal soundtrack.

We all hear music differently, and as noted oft times before, my own default calibration prefers catchier tunes. Ellington wrote his share of these, capable of being whistled while strolling or “interpreted” in the shower – and selling a few 78 rpm records in the process.

Music is a big tent, and a well-constructed pop ditty with a hook means as much to me as a classical concerto or Ellington’s own extended suites of conceptual music.

Moving along, there is no rational way to make the transition from “music is my mistress” to “living in the material world” so I won’t even try. Ten years after Ellington passed from the scene a talented woman by the name of Madonna Louise Ciccone had a hit with “Borderline,” a song written by Reggie Lucas.

I heard a snippet a few weeks ago while shopping for groceries, and devolved into a reverie amid the canned vegetable aisle. As surprising as it might seem for casual readers, “Borderline” is a favorite song of mine. Granted, I’d never seek to compare it to Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” although “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good)” perhaps functions as a serviceable parallel.

“Borderline” always prompts a smile because from sheer serendipity it became a theme song for my early European trips. From the first expedition in 1985 through mid-1990s, it seemed as if whenever I was packing my bag for a trip “Borderline” would play on the radio.

(That’s an increasingly antiquated music dissemination device.)

Indeed, different strokes; lightweight ear candy to some, symbolic prelude to others. Borderlines are for containment, and also for crossing. I had an easy life growing up as a white middle-class male, with no wars to go fight, compulsions to attain wealth or lasting romantic ties (I’d quite likely have traded my imaginary kingdoms for a meaningful relationship, but that’s another whole story).

What I needed was a kick in the butt. It surprised even me when this became self-administered. For 1,001 tiny incremental reasons, my becoming obsessed with the idea of roaming Europe became the foundational theme tying together all the topics of the human experience that struck me as interesting.

Neither internal combustion nor deer hunting was among them. Selling insurance, widgets or houses? Nope. Math absolutely wasn’t a priority. The Arithmetic was a hideous curse, but reading and writing hit closer to the center of the target.

What excited me the most was history, geography, literature, music and art, as components of what we call the Western canon.

The Western canon is the body of books, music, and art that scholars generally accept as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. It includes works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, music, art, sculpture, and architecture generally perceived as being of major artistic merit and representing the high culture of Europe and North America. Philosopher John Searle suggests that the Western canon can be roughly defined as "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature".

My own “Borderline” was located and surpassed when I finally accepted that craving an ever greater exposure to this body of knowledge wasn’t a bad thing for a hick from somewhere near French Lick. In fact it was a very good thing, and the pursuit of culture made me happy. Maybe Rite of Spring would have been preferable to Madonna; to each their own.

I chased knowledge for its own sake, not because it would lead to a better job or a higher standard of living. Piles of excess money beyond the minimum required to get by, while allowing an escape every now and then, were never much of a priority or motivation.

Four decades later, an ongoing immunity to the supposed imperative of capital accumulation renders me only shakily American and utterly ineligible for membership in One Southern Indiana -- and that’s something to be extremely thankful for.

I was sure that knowing these things would make me a better person, and after college when funding was tight a lot of it came free of charge. Reading, studying and listening at local libraries (those vicious socialist institutions) were essential to preparing for trips as well as maintaining my sanity when the prevailing philistinism became too much.

Later, when there was more disposable income for books and CDs, the cash went for them and not fashionable clothing, hyper power tools or fancy sports cars. There isn’t anything wrong with any of these discretionary items; they just weren’t for me. These days books, music and art surround us at home, and they’re still representative of mental equilibrium when travel isn’t possible. I can’t imagine life without them.

There’s a sobering realization that in the end, for all one’s efforts, a lifetime of learning counts for little more than skimming the surface. However, this doesn’t deter me or intrude on my idealistic dreams. I’m eager to carry a few fragments of those past manifestations of thought forward for the benefit of the next generation.

If you tell the story in an engaging way, they listen. Indeed, the headlines lie, and the kids are alright.

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When you’re a youngster, people ask you what you want to be when you grow up. I never had an answer for this question, at least one I was willing to concede aloud. It was different inside:

“Beats me. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”

Looking back with all the benefits of hindsight, all I really wanted to be was well-informed about the world outside. Forever painfully aware of my own myriad social deficiencies, the simple aim was at least to be bright enough to ask intelligent questions and claim a bluffer’s knowledge about topics falling outside my circle of interests -- to be a competent concierge, barkeeper and conversationalist.

Blowing my life savings on a three-month backpacking trip through Europe in 1985 wasn’t about food and drink. Rather, travel would help me find myself by bringing into focus aspects of my character previously unchallenged, while cramming as much as humanly possible of the Western canon into my receptive skull.

Moussaka, Guinness, pickled herring and the joys of a genuine Bavarian beer hall were important, and yet secondary.

If you’ve stuck with me this far, thanks, and I know exactly what you’re thinking: the Western cultural canon omits so very much important about this planet. That’s absolutely true, and it’s something I’ve tried mightily to redress by broadening my exposure to the non-Western bearded white male aspects of “herstory.”

I’m the first to concede these results haven’t been very consistent, and this is disconcerting to me. Given the various biases of a Southern Indiana upbringing, and the fact that my first and abiding love is all things European, improvement requires persistence and an active effort to broaden the scope of examination. Perfection isn’t attainable, and so this campaign will continue. Reader suggestions are always welcome.

In closing, please understand that the preceding is not intended to be construed as “look at me – I’m smart.” At the end of the day, being “smart” means precisely one thing, and that’s realizing how little you really know. All of us must willingly concede the vastness of knowledge outside our immediate spheres, about which we can gather only little bits and pieces.

Ellington occasionally was described as “Duke Elegant,” and my own formulation does not achieve his level of poetry:

"An abiding obsession with knowledge is my mistress." 

In a year and a half I’ll be 60, with no firmer notion today about what I want to be when I grow up than way back when, during the presidency of Adam’s “tricky dickey” namesake Nixon.

But I’m comfortable with the journey. It's been a grand ride. I know what I know, and also what I don’t. Time is running short, and yet there’s no hurry, so let’s kick back, enjoy one or two nice beers, tell the hamster’s spinning wheel to go straight to hell -- and learn something.

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January 29: ON THE AVENUES: How has the 3rd district councilman fared since this question from 2015: "Et tu, Greg Phipps?"

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January 15: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Jeff Gahan and Adam Dickey are Trumping the Donald when it comes to breathtaking moral turpitude. Have they no shame?