»In which we have no independence

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story on the survival of some few independent record shops in the Bay Area, with only the briefest mention of Down Home Music in El Cerrito (with its new neighbour, Berkeley exile Mod Lang). I am still recovering from the sudden closure of my local shop, Open Mind Music.

Village Music in Mill Valley will go out with a bang: "In the meantime, Village Music will get a bang-up goodbye. [Elvis] Costello has agreed to perform in the store sometime in May, and DJ Shadow (Marin resident Josh Davis) has designs on playing every day in September until the doors close for good."

The struggle to remain open reminds me of all the book stores that have shuttered in recent years. When I moved to the Bay Area ten years ago, I printed out a forty-page listing (from the Internet!) of local booksellers, and started visiting each of them as often as I could, weeding out the shops that did not interest me (Rex Stout first editions, Greek texts and scholarly commentaries, contemporary American fiction). Now that list might be a fifth as long, and hardly as interesting. Similarly for the record shops.