9. What is tower records?
when i came back to california from texas, i was still piercing
but i never considered it a real job, even something that i would
want to do as a career. i still had money from the guitar gig and
i didnt want to sit on my ass too long, so i went out to find a
meanless job to pay taxes on. something that would fill the hours
in the day and make me feel like i was doing something while
i was reinventing myself. i was working for bill grahman presents
on and off, making jewelry and piercing out of my house at
the time, but none of it really felt solid. because of too many
weird books and college courses that would never go towards
a degree or job of any sort ( i was spelling woman with a Y at
the time to make sure that i was not using male dominated
language and was vegan), i felt like i needed to go back to some
sort of artist type existence.
sacramento is the corporate home of my favorite record store
chain,
http://www.towerrecords.com and they keep all the main
warehouses there. in its time, it was a great store and the catalog
that they kept for a chain store was awesome. still at the top,
family owned and run, it was something that i could sign up for.
i didnt want to work in the music department, i was too much
of a snob at the time, so i went to work in the movie department.
i worked in the foreign and independent department of the video.
basicly what my job entailed was to review movies and decided
how many of them we were going to stock at which stores. i had
a job sitting around all day and watching movies. some might
think a dream come true.
i would watch almost nothing but abstract indy films and things
with subtitles. some of them amazing films, and got into to it
so much that i was talking movies home with me and watching
them there also. i was up to about five films a day, sometimes
six. black and whites. french. things that were three hours long
and had no speaking parts in them. director?s cuts of films that
were abstract to start with. i started going to critic showings of
new foreign films. going to showing where the director whould
be there for a question and answer after the film. not calling
them movies anymore, just calling it film. i had become a
movie art fag.
i left that job and went full bore into piercing afterwards, and
still to the day, i have a hard time going to an independent film.
i will look at it and think ?this is going to be a movie about two
gay Pakistani men living in london. one of their grandmothers
dies, and they have to walk across europe to get her rocking chair.
there will be long black and white shots of them staring at each
other not saying a word, just smoking filterless cigarettes. after
the movie is over, there will be a bunch of people out front
talking about how it touched them and how mainstream media
can never really be art?
after that, i will go home and watch adam sandler or bill murry
movie and eat ice cream just to shake off the thought of even
seeing something like that again. it almost makes me want to
eat meat and watch porn.