![]() ![]() John Darnielle did not, but as the lead songwriter for the Mountain Goats, he’s created pop folk with the quirky cinematic sensibility of a Wes Anderson. Some of those kids went on to make films themselves. Suddenly, even farm boys in Podunkville and punk-rock girls in the suburbs had access to everything from Truffaut to Troma. ![]() Even now, I’m not sure sociology has paused to recognize the seismic effect of those video stores on the culture. Imagine a single cinder-block room, crowded with aisles of VHS cassettes organized by genre, and a curtained-off closet in the back with the tantalizing adult videos hidden on the other side. The mom-and-pop video rental joints were even better. In most moderate-sized burgs, you could find a Blockbuster or a Hollywood Video in every strip mall, often parked between a one-hour photo shop (also all gone now) and a Borders bookstore ( sob!). It’s like trying to imagine the enormous storms of passenger pigeons that crossed the Midwest in the 19th century, traveling in flocks the size of Manhattan island, darkening the sky for hours when they passed overhead. $25.Īlmost all of the video rental stores are gone now, and it is probably hard for people who did not live through the late 1980s and early ’90s to imagine how plentiful they once were. UNIVERSAL HARVESTER By John Darnielle 214 pp. ![]()
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