City Scenes: Jerry's Records in Squirrel Hill

Jerry’s Records has been on my Pittsburgh to-do list ever since I first arrived in the city many years ago. My personal preferences in urban media spaces tend toward film venues, bookstores, and art galleries. Record stores typically don’t make it on my itinerary. When I was still buying CDs I would make it a point to peruse music shop shelves, but that seems like a previous life now and I never got into collecting vinyl. But Jerry’s is a local institution: a longtime independent shop and neighborhood fixture that was renowned for its enormous collection.

As is so often the case with the people and places that are so near-at-hand that they become taken for granted, I kept putting off a visit to Jerry’s until some indeterminate point in the future. Even when I moved to Squirrel Hill, and was living just down the street from Jerry’s, my appointment with the shop was relegated to “someday.” Proximity and familiarity tend to produce indifference, as that which is right in front of us is so easily overlooked. So when my musically-inclined sister and brother-in-law visited this summer it provided a perfect opportunity for finally ascending to record heaven.

The shop is an expansive space that nearly overwhelms with its sprawling assortment and towering stacks. Musical genres and themed sections are helpfully and whimsically designated with colorful decor.

Oh, and did I mention the milk crates? As I’ve reported previously, these polyethylene receptacles have recently become somewhat of a personal obsession. The portable, versatile, and stackable storage containers are put to good use throughout the record shop.

My developing milk crate connoisseurship has inculcated an appreciation for varieties of color and form, but I’m also keen on the different legal warnings against misuse that adorn the objects. The nooks and crannies of Jerry’s offered a veritable milk crate menagerie.

A cabin trip prelude in KC

My summer got off to a strong start this year with my only proper vacation travel of the season. For the past several years my sister has invited me out to her in-laws’ Colorado cabin, and I was finally able to accept the invitation this past May. Before making the trek out to the Centennial State I went to Kansas City to spend a couple of days with my sister and her husband (on their respective birthdays, no less).

For a fun outing and activity on her birthday my sister elected for a driving tour focused on the history of racial and spatial segregation in Kansas City (finding a nice connection to my own interests). To facilitate this tour she used a custom GPS-enabled audio program from an app called VoiceMap. This program, entitled “Dividing Lines: A History of Segregation in Kansas City”, was produced by the Johnson County Library as part of its “Race Project KC.” The roughly 90-minute audio tour includes explanatory host narration, audio from interviews with KC residents and historians, and a backing soundtrack sourced from local musicians. The audio segments are linked to GPS coordinates and interspersed with plain-spoken navigational instructions to help facilitate the self-directed audio tour.

It was an awesome, well-produced audio tour; I learned a lot about KC’s development history while also getting to see a lot of the city. One of the stops along the route was a house where Walt Disney’s family lived. I usually imagine Disney’s trajectory as moving from Marceline, Missouri directly to Los Angeles, forgetting that Kansas City came in between.

The route for the audio tour took us along the Paseo (and we did pause the app to listen to Tech N9ne’s eponymous anthem while driving down the boulevard). I asked my sister to pull over where the Paseo intersects Linwood Boulevard because I spotted a building that looked like a Masonic lodge (I am an aficionado of Masonic architecture). It was indeed a Scottish Rite temple so I walked around and took pictures.

Another point of interest along the Paseo is the 18th and Vine Historic District. I’ve been here on previous KC trips to visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

What I hadn’t realized is that just one street over from the Museum are installations commemorating the former location of Municipal Stadium, a ballpark that hosted an array of Kansas City teams in its history including the Monarchs, Royals, Athletics, and Chiefs.

After a little more Kansas City sightseeing it was time to continue onward to the mountains for the next part of trip.

Mediated Memories & Nostalgic Obsolescence

I spent much of the spring 2020 early pandemic period like many other people, holed up at home binging streaming content. It’s an interval of the past two years that I recall fondly: having nowhere to go and nothing better to do than consume entire seasons or series of television. During that initial period of displacement in which I spent several months living out of a single, hastily-packed weekender bag, I also got to share a lot of valuable viewing time with my family. But once we had exhausted all episodes of Tiger King, and the novelty of lockdown life evolved into an increasingly despondent drudgery, I began exploring the various family media stashed around the house.

We started in on the family photo albums and school yearbooks, scrutinizing snapshots and swapping infrequently recalled stories. It was a refreshing deep dive into forgotten memories; encounters with anecdotes that at one time perhaps seemed so integral to one’s personal mythology as anchor points for a cohesive sense of self. It also signaled the beginning of a pandemic-prompted turn toward introspection and reflection, one that I would continue throughout the following year.

From the photo albums I moved on to boxes of home movies on VHS that I found alongside a dusty VCR in storage. Miraculously the player still functioned and we were able to screen these family films that hadn’t been seen in decades: progressive construction updates on the building of a house; a family outing to tour the fall foliage in central Illinois; my father and grandfather retracing steps in Austria. I was also able to reconnect with my personal media library that’s been kept in my parents’ storage for the past twenty years. First there was my collection of commercial VHS tapes, mostly zombie movies procured during a period in the early days of DVD when these cult horror films were out of print on home video or otherwise in distributional limbo. But the real gold was my collection of mini-VHS tapes representing years of recordings from elementary school through high school when my camcorder was my constant companion.

Reviewing the camcorder tapes required more effort since you need a cassette converter to play the mini-VHS format in a VCR. I was thankfully able to extract a tape that had been loaded into my converter for the past 15+ years, but after that delicate procedure the device gave up the ghost and I had to order a replacement. I also came across my old camcorder itself and saw that there was a tape inside. After several unsuccessful attempts to get the camera to power up I resorted to surgery, prying the camera apart to free the tape. I was able to remove the cassette and respool the tape into playable condition; it turned out to be a tape my youngest sister had recorded sometime after I’d left the camera at home for college.

When we first began going through the home movies in Spring 2020 my family had discussed the prospect of digitizing the tapes or transferring them to DVD. I even researched local video houses and estimated the cost of digitizing our entire VHS collection. But it didn’t go any further than that: based on the effort and cost that would be involved I put the digitization project on the back burner. That winter I learned that an old friend of mine was very seriously ill. We hadn’t seen each other in ten years, and had only been intermittently in contact during that time, but he was one of my dearest friends so I quickly reached out. Six months later when I learned that he was dying and had ultimately passed away I was struck by a sense of paralysis that stretched back retroactively through the preceding months, wishing that I had done more or been able to offer more of a gesture for my friend. Immediately wishing I had been able to share the recently rediscovered camcorder tapes of our high school hijinks as a distraction while he dealt with his health issues, I took that digitization project off of the back burner and set about figuring out the process.

It turns out that I didn’t need to contract the services of a professional video house, or pay expensive fees for digital transfer. All that I needed was some software and a set of USB-to-RCA adapter cables. Oh, and a working VCR: the unit I had taken out of storage the previous spring was no longer functioning. My grandfather generously shipped a VCR that he had lying around the house but it wasn’t working either. However after one trip to the nearest Goodwill store I came home with what turned out to be a fully functioning DVD-VCR combo player.

I wasn’t able to put together a media care package in time for my ailing friend so I started curating a collection to send to the other members of our friend group. This involved digitizing the video recordings I had as well as salvaging audio: my storage boxes included CD booklets filled with burned CDs of favorite albums and mixtapes, and also recordings of Nite Owl, a show on my college radio station that my friends frequently co-hosted with me.

As my friends and I respectively sorted through mementos and ephemera in our grief, there were welcome surprises and reminders in the wake of our loss. For instance, my friend sent me this photograph he had discovered showing me at the radio studio boards getting ready for a Nite Owl broadcast:

The first half of the 2021 summer, as I wrapped up my strange pandemic year and prepared to return to Pittsburgh, it was a flurry of reminiscence and reflection. Not only on the previous 18 months - trying to process the twists and turns of that unprecedented time and what it meant to me - but further back as well, a deeper inventory of personal history facilitated by the mediated memories that I had rediscovered in that place. Those days also had the frantic pace of a futile race against time: hurriedly making preparations in advance of my upcoming move while simultaneously wrapping up that tangential sojourn with some sense of closure. And all the while desperately trying to stay one step ahead of obsolescence, technological or otherwise.

As I sorted out my belongings for transit I made one more push into the curios I had in storage to mine as much nostalgic material as possible. I went through all manner of outdated recording media from CDs to videotapes; I even unearthed a PC that hadn’t been activated ever since the campus network had quarantined it for computer viruses 18 years earlier. After hooking it up to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard I was faced with a Windows XP login screen and was even able to successfully determine the password following nearly an hour of cross-referencing the cryptic hint with my oldest available emails. I don’t know what it’s all worth aside from a cache of dusty data saved to a brand new external hard drive. But at least the effort kept me occupied, and recollecting the memories I left for myself all those years ago seemed like a sufficient reward.

A "Late Summer Days" playlist

Today is Labor Day, a holiday that commemorates workers’ movements and serves as a reference point for when it is fashionable to wear white clothing. The date is also considered the unofficial end of summer. This summer flew by. Aside from a couple of quick excursions I stayed local, having one of my most Pittsburgh summers ever. Ballgames, lots of trail time, and more local events in a season than I’d done in entire years in the city. I also got my CitiParks pool tag for the first time ever (although a planned pool-a-palooza will have to wait until next summer). This playlist features a selection of summer-centric songs, some of my earworms from this summer, and some songs that are just good for summer vibes. Here is the set as a YouTube playlist, and the tracklist is below:

1. The Fiery Furnaces, “Here Comes the Summer”

2. Yacht, “That Summer Song”

3. Sylvan Esso, “Ferris Wheel”

4. Ratatat, “Sunblocks”

5. Pinback, “Loro”

6. Neon Indian, “Should Have Taken Acid With You”

7. Animal Collective, “Summertime Clothes”

8. Nine, “Hit Em Like Dis”

9. Booker T. & The M.G.’s, “Time is Tight”

10. Matt Pond PA, “Summer is Coming”

11. Orville Peck, “Summertime”

12. The Flaming Lips, “It’s Summertime”

13. American Football, “The Summer Ends”

14. Agnes Obel, “September Song”

A Summer School Playlist

To commemorate the start of the summer school session, here’s a playlist of songs. I’m deeply indebted to my much-more-musically-inclined-brother-in-law Ben for sharing so much great new music during our time in the mountains this past week (not to mention his generous sharing of his family’s cabin, his inherited collection of audiocassettes, and his love of 90s Kevin Costner movies). I also want to offer apologies and appreciation for Mark Fisher’s KPUNK playlists. The result of this inaugural effort is an experimental earsore: some autobiographical navelgazing, some lame gestures toward a topical time capsule, a few efforts at thematic resonance, and some shameless incorporation of recent earworms. Here is the set as a YouTube playlist, and the tracklist is below:

1. Billy Bragg, “To Have and to Have Not”

2. Pedro the Lion, “Indian Summer”

3. Built to Spill, “Rearrange”

4. Jimmy Cliff, “The Harder They Come”

5. Kae Tempest, “More Pressure”

6. Digable Planets, “La Femme Fetal”

7. Brooklyn Funk Essentials, “The Revolution Was Postponed Because of Rain”

8. Jimmy Driftwood, “He Had a Long Chain On”

9. Dakh Daughters, “When I Was Thirty Six”

10. Pussy Riot, “Police State”

11. Randy Newman, “It’s Money That I Love”

12. Stereolab, “Ping Pong”

13. NOFX, “The Marxist Brothers”

14. Le Tigre, “Get Off the Internet”

15. Jeff Rosenstock, “Polar Bear or Africa”

Take the Movie and Run #2

The second episode of Take the Movie and Run is now available on PodBean. In this installment Caroline and Curry delve into Woody Allen's Celebrity. Visit the podcast site here!

Take the Movie and Run #1

My partner Caroline and I have launched a new podcast, Take the Movie and Run. We're watching and discussing every film directed by Woody Allen, one at a time and in random order. The tenor of our conversations so far has been irreverent rather than academic. The first episode features the most recent Woody, Café Society. This is tangential to the usual focus of the site but I'll be linking future installments as they are produced, and you can also visit the podcast home page here.