Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey Mouse Ornament
Borders Group, Inc. isn't doing so hot, and neither is Barnes & Noble Inc. I never liked such retail warehousing of books, although some people might bemoan the closing of such superstores as they might the closing of Starbucks Corporation locations, which are often paired up with B&N ones. They might be comfortable, they might even provide a modicum of community service, but let's face it, they're evil for the local bookseller, and they've contributed more to the homogenization and mechanization of existence, which is part of a Disneyfication of the world, the spectacle of the mediocre connoisseur. But karma will get ya.
Getty Center
It's old news that the elite are the most mediocre connoisseurs, because if ya look around its institutions such as museums, their breakthrough public ideology reveals the most banal private fantasy. In my hometown of Los Angeles, Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall itself is $274MM and now much more of cheap and derivative, and Richard Meier's Getty Center looks like some plastic poop on a hill, the patronizingly pretentious premises both cajoling and constricted although the walk up and the view is nice, and Rem Koolhaas/OMA's Prada Epicenter is just self-gratulatory lameness, where the living are metaphors for stupefied surveillance as seduction, etc etc etc.
Btw, I prefer the Getty Villa in Malibu.
Anyways, above links to some info on Borders and B&N.
Borders liquidation will be happening, and there might be more shoppers, and it's time for you to capitalize. I can't think of a better way to celebrate Borders' bankruptcy than to steal ummm liberate books. Use the crowds for cover, and get rid of any magnetic tape thingys, and just casually walk out with some choice booty. The war's still on. Do you support book liberation or not?!? )))
It's relatively easy. I hate to brag, but I've liberated over 500 books, but that's still a pittance. I still remember my first time, over 15 years ago, when I kept it to a conservative amount of five books. They were: David Frisby's Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin, Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two and Nietzsche: Volumes Three and Four, Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, and The Cantos of Ezra Pound. And it snowballed from there, sometimes walking out with a stack of thick art books so high it covered part of my face haha.
Another hint. There's a trick to Amazon.com etc too. Amazon's shipping quality control is atrocious, and more than 75% of the time, the book doesn't arrive in mint new condition. These can be returned for a full refund. So, you can peruse the book for a while then return it. Yeah, you can't keep the book, but some books are ok for reading but not for collecting. And you do need a credit card and also the initial spending, but that's only a minor inconvenience. Amazon is your revolving library, and it may have some books that aren't available at the public library even NYPL or university holdings.
