Other Music

Now that we’ve been at this for some time, I’ve found my way back to poems and music and art as a source of consolation.

Sometimes I’ll just watch footage of New York City from the 1980s and get lost in the fashion, the cars, the iconic scenes that defined the mythology of the city as it first entered my consciousness as a child.

If I’m feeling more melancholic, I’ll watch videos of people buying newspapers and chewing gum in the lobby of the twin towers.

I try to remember what it was like and who I was when I moved to New York City in the summer of 2001, a few months before my 22nd birthday, and I need for the towers be standing to get there.

Yesterday, I got lost in a modest, eloquent documentary about a music store, Other Music, in the East Village, which transported me straight back to my early twenties in the early Aughts.

The premise of this film is straightforward as it captures the final weeks of this beloved music store, before they shuttered for good in 2016, after twenty years as a hub for alternative, avant garde, new — other — music.

There are no surprises here: We know what’s coming with the rise of digital / downloaded music during the early part of this century, and the eventual streaming services that replaced physical albums.

But that did not diminish the joy or heartbreak of spending 80 minutes back inside this music store with its staff and patrons.

Though I recognize only a fraction of the bands referenced, I know several people in this film.

I shopped at Other Music with my roommates, riding the subway over the Brooklyn Bridge to lower Manhattan. I went to high school and college with a couple of the aspiring musicians, who actually made it all the way to indie stardom. I recognize the clerks, the cashiers, the customers.

At one point as the customers are lamenting to the cashier the impending close of the shop, one says that there should be a therapist on site, and Dan and I paused the movie to recognize that these words had just been uttered by our good friend Andrew!

It’s that sort of film.

One that appeals to me very personally, but I think it will appeal to anyone who cares about music, or community, or local institutions or sacred space, or human interaction. So, basically, everyone who I know!

It also reminded me — reflected by the diversity and color and character of those represented in this film — that these places: record shops, rock clubs, independent bookstores are a natural congregating place for people of all races, genders, sexual orientations. And that when we move everything online, we lose these vital physical unifying spaces.

And I wish that, as a society, we valued these spaces and protected them more.

At one point, near the end of the film, as the owners are watching the junk-lugging crew disassemble the shelves and clean shop, Dan said to me, “Wow, you’ve really got to love this place to watch this part,” and we did, because we do.

Prayer + Action: shop independent & diverse