Through a handful of incarnations - it went from being neighborhood cinema to.. well.. a somewhat unsavory but still economically-contributing 'art movie' house. Now it's a really cool and funky (actual) art space, which is kind of cold for an Indiana winter... but there are church pews rather than theatre seats (thankfully, the theatre seats are gone)... can lights and old, cracked brick walls. I love old buildings - even the ones that are kind of mouldering... all the history and the smell of ghosts in the long velvet curtains.
What's the attraction to the smell of decay?
I think it's tied somehow to the idea that we spring from and go back to the earth - the fecund soil. Makes the existential footing more solid in the slippery slopes of 21st century teflon life. I can still smell the past - so it's never entirely gone - brings me more fully into the minute I'm in as I breathe in those microbes from long ago. And to extrapolate further - in this way, maybe I'll never be entirely gone. Because people will still be able to smell me. Especially if I develop some sort of signature cologne. I'll call it 'Smoulder'. or not. Probably not.
72 hours and I'll be on a plane to Europe. Where the history comes from. Our 100-year-old moulder hasn't got anything on their 1,000-year-old moulder. If I'm lucky, I'll get more than one big whiff of velvet ghosts clanking iron chains... No matter what I'll get a really good cup of coffee.
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After the Vonderschmidt's died in a plane crash the two theaters they owned; The VonLee and the Indiana were bought by a California firm called Carasota Theaters, My girlfriend at the time worked at the Indiana at the time and I remember quite well her surprise when she went to work one day to discover that she now sold tickets and concessions at a porno cinema! It did not last long, no one wanted to be seen entering a porno on a main street like Kirkwood.. But I did see the first musical porno there, "Alice in Wonderland"... I imagine you've played the Indiana?
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