And Now, The Lament.

   Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

       Virgin Records on Fourteenth Street,  closed last weekend — another casualty in this city of a landlord’s lust for dollars. It’s demise seems to mark the end of an era where you could go to a record store just to hang out, peruse the shelves, find someone to talk music with — or just to listen.  Yes, there are other places.   
       But the Big Supermarket atmosphere of a Borders or Barnes and Noble  just doesn’t have the ambience, the joie de vivre, the sense of discovery that a great record store could offer.  The other Virgin Records closed earlier this year, and Tower Records is gone as well. 
     These music stores seemed almost like little communities unto themselves — and they are no more.  So, with the City losing another little piece of its soul, this speech  from Shakespeare’s ”The Tempest” comes to mind:

               OUR REVELS NOW ARE ENDED

     Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
     As I foretold you, were all spirits and
     Are melted into air, into thin air:
     And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
     The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
     The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
     Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
     And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
     Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
      As dreams are made on, and our little life
     Is rounded with a sleep.

     William Shakespeare
     From The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1