The News Letter: Issue #001
A NEW KIND OF NEWSSTAND.
So here it is, finally: The inaugural issue of The News Letter - the official House Organ of our grand experiment in retail mirth-mongering, The Newsagent's.
A year in the making (but a lifetime in the baking), The Newsagent's aims to be both the course correction and the path of least resistance; both the antithesis and the antidote; both the figure of speech and the blunt instrument of great force by which we wrest back control from the careless machine that rules modern culture.
Practically speaking, The Newsagent's is no more than your average, everyday, friendly neighborhood newsstand. We buy & sell pre-owned books, magazines, movies, records, comic books, and collectibles of varying size, shape, age, and provenance. We serve coffee, both cold and hot, both fancy and not, always fresh, never store-bought. We offer folks a place to congregate and communicate; a place to hang out and browse around; a place to look, listen, learn, and grow as a person (ask us about our screenings, readings, lectures, and clubs!).
In short, The Newsagent's is your happy place: Not a place where you need to be, a place where you want to be.
Impractically speaking, though, there's so much more to The Newsagent's than our simple storefront might imply. Just beyond the welcoming threshold of our unassuming (yet iconic) Orange Door lies the staging ground for a raging set-piece battle between the forces of good (that's us!) and the ever-accelerating Bot Army of Algorithmic Annihilation. We may not have their unquenchable thirst for human misery and distraction, but what we lack in fear and misinformation we more than make up for in lack of screens.
So come on in, unplug, unwind, and rewind to a time before feeds and FOMO; before doomscrolling and shitposting; before sludge and slop and grok and brain rot; before the false sense of ownership over intangible streams stored in nebulous servers that are routinely vaporized by faceless mega-corporations with no qualms whatsoever about limiting your access to unexpurgated literature, film, music, and art; before we became so obsessed with perpetually chasing after what's fast and fashionable and new that we forgot to slow down and savor what's already here.
Because here's the thing: that old thing? It's still good.
Introducing The Rabbit Hole: A semi-regular column devoted to different obscure fixations that have been living rent-free in our headspace -- from things that were big and have now been forgotten, to things that should have been big and now finally might be.
For issue #1 we're reaching into the archives to republish an excerpt from a feature that first appeared in the second issue of The Newsagent's sporadic magazine, The News Paper...
ODE TO PHYSICAL MEDIA.
You're going to hate to hear this, but listen anyway. If a person falls off a cliff while doomscrolling on their cellphone in the woods, and all they leave behind is a subscription to Spotify, did they make a sound?
Physical media is more than just stuff:
[1] Owning a tangible copy of a song or a story means it can never be erased. It exists. For as long as people exist, it will endure. The same cannot be said for digital artifacts. In fact, massive virtual libraries of films are being deleted every single day, or, worse, altered (censored) to be made "acceptable" for public consumption. The only way to experience that piece of media, the way it was intended to be experienced by the artist who created it, is to own an unaltered physical version. Conversely, many, many, many key contributions to culture have never been digitized, existing solely in their physical media form. “Buckingham Nicks” is not on Spotify. “The Heartbreak Kid (1972)” is not on Hulu. “The Brave Little Toaster” is not on Disney+. “The Adventures of Pete & Pete” is not on Paramount Plus (but "Hey Sandy" is on Spotify, so that's something!). Thousands upon thousands of books, magazines, newspapers, zines, pamphlets, documents, screeds, deeds, treatises, and treaties have never been (and never will be) made available for download, rendering their enjoyment eternally out of reach for those who dwell exclusively in the domain of the digital. And should Peter Jackson's “Heavenly Creatures,” by some heavenly intervention, suddenly appear on Netflix one fine day, it could very well expire the following night without so much as a see you later (which, incidentally, is exactly what happened). That's no way to live.
[2] But that's precisely the problem: Life today is far too transient. Nearly 40% of all websites that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible by 2023, according to a chilling Pew Research Center study. Over half of all Wikipedia pages cite at least one website that is no longer online. Information should not be contingent on servers and hard drives and domain renewal fees. Knowledge should not have to depend on the kindness of Microsoft or Amazon or GoDaddy. Our collective past deserves better than to be unceremoniously unplugged and subsequently scrubbed from the Cloud to make room for more brainrot slop. You know what can't be extemporaneously erased or whimsically withdrawn or permanently purged from existence? Physical media. You know what still works today without a subscription? Without apps? Without needing an update or new firmware or a biometric eyeball scan? A book.
[3] Which finally brings us to the heart and soul of the digital media debate: Our hearts and souls. Or, to say it slightly less schmalzily, our identity and legacy. Who are we? Why are we? What will we pass down to those who come next, to those who will one day ask themselves these questions, to help them find answers? As we witness our digital culture decaying before our very eyes, the most important question remains largely unasked: "what good is a footprint that leaves behind no track?" In the end, memory is all we really have. Memory makes us smarter, more thoughtful, more empathetic. Remembering past mistakes is supposed to keep us from repeating them. But what if the reason you can't remember the past is because it no longer exists? Physical books, music, movies, and art can't be so easily memory-holed. These cultural keepsakes serve as tactile, indelible proof of the past: The bookshelf piled high with marginalia-enriched paperbacks; the milk crates stuffed to the brim with well-spun records; the entertainment console bursting with row after row of not-so-guilty-pleasure DVDs. Your truest self, incarnate, proudly displayed for all to see.
And when the time comes, these hallowed landmarks will serve as a treasure map to buried wisdom for future generations to unearth. Now that's an inheritance.
(Certainly beats bequeathing a playlist.)
With nearly half of all websites online in 2013 going dark by 2023, it's only a matter of time before the entire internet of yesteryear is gone. Scary stuff! That's why we've decided to devote an entire section to random cool links from the internet of days past, to prove to future generations that it wasn't always just a bunch of Cocomelon clones and rage-bait fan-edits...
LINKS
- 75 Years Ago, One of the Best Dance Routines Ever Was Filmed, Unrehearsed on the First Take
- Bill Robinson, Jeni LeGon & Fats Waller - "Living In A Great Big Way" (1935)
- "What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople?"
- "What's the most mindblowing fact you've ever heard?"
- Classic Reload: Over 6000+ DOS/Windows and Console games preserved for future generations.