The Frame

Saying goodbye to St. Louis

On July 30, 2006

I’ve been spending the last few weeks trying to enjoy St. Louis as much as possible. There’s no love lost between me and the Midwest or between me and Missouri, but there are a lot of things I love about St. Louis. Partially, it’s because it’s the only place I’ve ever lived, so there’s a nostalgic “home” element, even though I tend not to be “home”-oriented. And the sad thing is, I know there’s a lot of St. Louis I’ve never experienced, because when I look at Riverfront Times, there are hundreds of restaurants I haven’t heard of, dozens of music venues I’ve never been to, tons of museums and attractions I haven’t seen, etc. Oh, well. Guess I’ll have to come back and visit. ;) But here’s a few things I’ll miss the most (not including people, because duh):

Forest Park
I love Forest Park so much. You can usually find me there every pretty day that I have time to go, either walking under the trees by the Grand Basin, or sitting on Art Hill people-watching, or reading by the stream across from the Muny. I don’t go in the art museum or the zoo or science center much, but I love the fact that they’re there–available and free whenever I feel like popping in. I love the variety of landscape, from the lazy river to the woods in the west, from the European-style Grand Basin to the eastern streams and fake prairies. I love driving home along Lindell and picking out my favorite houses. I love the World’s Fair history and the mark it has left.

Ted Drewes (on Chippewa)
I tried to explain Ted Drewes to my coworker from St. Charles the other day, and she didn’t get it at all. “Why would you want to go somewhere and wait in long lines just to get ice cream, and then have to stand outside to eat it?” The Ted Drewes Experience is ineffable, I guess. How do you explain that it’s precisely the waiting in the lines and the standing outside that makes Ted Drewes what it is? I mean, the ice cream is top-notch, too, but that’s not the reason people turn out week after week all summer.

The Loop
The Tivoli, Vintage Vinyl, Streetside Records, Subterranean Books, Tomatillo’s, Ben & Jerry’s, Fitz’s, Blueberry Hill (sadly, one of the places I always meant to go to but haven’t), the Pageant, streetside musicians, the best Blockbuster in town, the best municipal library in town…all in the space of five blocks. How can you not love it? If I’m bored and just start driving around, as I often do, I almost always end up at least driving through the Loop (yeah, that would be on the way to or from Forest Park). The people-watching can hardly be beat.

The City and County Library systems
It’s an empirical fact that St. Louis has one of the best library systems in the entire United States, especially if you include St. Louis County, St. Charles County, and the various municipal libraries in the reckoning. In St. Louis county alone, there are probably twenty-five or thirty different libraries. Each of them has strengths and weaknesses, so I frequent probably half of them regularly. Between them all, there’s very little you can’t locate, whether you’re looking for books, CDs, or DVDs. I am so library-spoiled that I expect I’ll be missing St. Louis libraries no matter where I go in life.

The Washington University library
And if you can’t find it at the city or county libraries, WashU almost certainly has it. I can spend hours in there, just wandering up and down the aisles and flipping through books here and there. The film section alone takes up like four or five aisles, which is an incredible amount. And WashU isn’t even well-known for its film programs. From what I’ve seen of Baylor’s library, it’s very good, but it doesn’t have the sheer breadth of depth of WashU. (So, you may ask, why did I not just stay here and go to WashU? Tempting it was…but my wanderlust got the better of me, and one of my essential criteria when school-searching was that it be somewhere else, so I could experience living somewhere different for a while.)

Ragazzi’s
Here again I have to confess to a lack of having really experienced St. Louis dining. I’ve found that most people don’t think of Ragazzi’s first when they think of restaurants on the Hill, but it’s the only one my family has ever frequented. Sure, it’s not authentic Italian. But for fun family time, and more great American-Italian food (and drink!) than you can shake a stick at, it’s hard to beat. I’m looking forward to good Mexican food in Texas, but I’m not sure good Italian food is going to be as easy to find as it is in St. Louis.

The Tivoli and the Hi-Pointe, and the Webster Film Series
I hesitated whether to list these or not. I love the indie film theatres, and the indie scene has been growing in St. Louis, which is great to see. But the Austin film scene is so much better that if I get much chance at all to get down to Austin, I probably won’t miss the St. Louis theatres. I decided to put them in just because I can get to them here in about twenty minutes, and Austin is two hours away from Waco, giving St. Louis the convenience edge. And Waco doesn’t have an indie theatre at all, so except for Austin day trips, I’m stuck with multiplex offerings. Unless there are screenings at the university that I haven’t heard about yet.

Patten Books, on Manchester
AKA my favorite used bookstore. It never fails that I go in there and find something that I’ve been dying to get, and it’s like $4.00, rather than $15.00. I always get four or five books at a time, and I’ve never paid more than $18 a trip. It’s awesome, and the people that run it are great…they’ve always got good recommendations based on what you’re buying, and I–I who never talk to anybody–usually get into conversations with them. I know there are great used bookstores in Austin, but I don’t know about Waco. I would guess that being a college town, it has some.

The variety that St. Louis has
I’m sure that any city made up of a lot of small town has this variety, but I love the distinctive characteristics of Kirkwood, Webster, U-City, South City, Clayton, CWE, Downtown…etc. You’d never mistake them for each other. Waco is small enough that you can drive across it in fifteen minutes, and while it does clearly have sections of haves and have-nots, my slight experience there so far suggests that the differences are superficial and artificial, rather than built on a century or more of history as individual cities, like the different cities that now make up Greater St. Louis.

Is it safe to say that I’m much more excited about Baylor as a university than about Waco as a town? The campus is gorgeous, and I’ll probably end up spending most of my time there anyway. A few things I’m not going to miss…the humidity (Waco has some humidity, more than western Texas, but less than here), the inability to get sweet tea, the cold winters, the drivers who won’t let you in when you signal.

June Reading/Watching Recap

By Jandy

On July 26, 2006

In Books and Reading, Film, Reviews

After the jump, reactions to Thumbsucker, Elizabethtown, Winchester ’73, Junebug, A History of Violence, Smiles of a Summer Night, Reading Lolita in Tehran, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and more!

Counting down…

By Jandy

On July 24, 2006

In Personal

One more week. Four more days of work. Six and a half more days. Seven more nights.

It’s so weird. I’m the worst procrastinator ever, so I haven’t really started packing. Got some boxes tonight. Put some books in a couple of them. Might do some more of that tonight, but I think most of it’s going to happen on Saturday. Then packing the truck on Monday, and heading down there Monday afternoon.

I must say I am really, really looking forward to the couple of weeks after I get down there and before school starts. I have a few minor things to do, but mostly, it’s going to be a nice break from working 9-5. I think I will have an Alfred Hitchcock marathon. The 39 Steps, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious (except I don’t have it), Rear Window, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. Yes. I will do this.

So…weird weather we been havin’

By Jandy

On July 21, 2006

In Personal

AmerenUE’s website is claiming Wednesday night’s storm was the worst they’ve ever seen, from the power company’s perspective. I believe that.

I was at the AMC Creve Coeur theatre when the wind started picking up…supposed to meet a friend there. I got there early, and was waiting outside until the wind picked up too much for me to stay out there. Grit was blowing into my eyes. As I headed inside, my friend called and cancelled, wisely deciding to stay at his North County home rather than get out in the weather. About that time, the power went out in the theatre. So there was that. I decided to go ahead and head home. At that point, it was windy, but the dark clouds were still largely north of me, and I had to go south anyway. So I headed down Lindbergh. Every traffic light was out.

It always amazes me how calmly people tend to handle situations like that. You’d expect to see a few idiots just careening down the road, going right through the lights. Nope, everybody just immediately treated the lights as stop signs and patiently waited their turn to go–which can be quite a trick when the intersection has a total of ten lanes of traffic. I got down to the north side of Kirkwood before I headed west toward my apartment. I was hoping to outrun the storm enough to pick up some DVDs at the Kirkwood library. But I hadn’t seen any sign of electricity since Creve Coeur, and I wasn’t hopeful.

People were out with video cameras…I suppose they were filming the trees blowing wildly in the gusty wind, because as hard as I was watching, I never saw anything resembling a tornado. In fact, it was an incredibly easy drive. With the way the trees were bending and twisting in the wind, I expected to feel it blowing my car, but it never did. In fact, the storm would’ve been a complete nonentity as far as driving was concerned, had I not had to keep pulling around downed limbs and trees. When I got home and watched the weather reports (through necessity–I’d seen enough of the storm’s movements after five minutes, but my highly anticipated episode of So You Think You Can Dance never returned to the air), I noticed an area of calm in the center of the storm. I’m pretty sure that’s where I was, because on the weather map, it tracked pretty nearly my route.

It started raining just as I got home, and tornado sirens went off. My power only went out for about fifteen minutes. Cable (including internet) was out for longer, but came back in time for me to see…more weather reports. Oh well. I was glad to have power at all. It wasn’t until the next day at work that I found out that large portions of the city were out entirely…and still are, as far as I know.

Tonight I drove down to WashU after work to do a little research (mostly unproductive, especially since the library apparently closes at 6pm on Fridays during the summer. Bah! There’s summer classes, people!), and the thing that’s the weirdest to me is how sporadic the power outages are. Mine essentially wasn’t out, in the Ballwin area. St. Charles seems to be in good shape. But I know people in North County, South City, and Eureka who were without power for at least 24 hours. Not close-together-areas. First Bank had some ten or twelve branches without electricity today, and they’re scattered all over the area. And driving to WashU, there would be a traffic light here that was on, five more that were off…a business here that was open, some more over there that were totally dark. The south side of the Loop was active, but the north side was powerless. Traffic lights all down Big Bend were fine…until Manchester. Then on Manchester they were on…until Brentwood. The light on the east side of Dougherty Ferry and I-270 is on, but the one on the west side isn’t.

It’s probably not random to someone from the power company, who knows that the south side of Delmar is on this substation which is up, but the north side is on a different substation which is still down, or that some traffic lights have backup power, or something. But to the casual observer, it’s very strange indeed.

(And this is not even mentioning the freaky rainstorm we had in Hazelwood this morning…strong winds, torrential rain, hail even…it was so bad we couldn’t see the cars in the parking lot from the door twenty feet away. It leaked through the windows, leaving puddles of water on the windowsills. And then, it was done, and a couple of hours later the sun was back out. I think I should get out of here and move someplace else. *g*)

People are watching “Nobody’s Watching”

By Jandy

On July 11, 2006

In Television

This is awesome. A sitcom pilot that was passed on by NBC and the WB may get a second chance after becoming a YouTube sensation. (That’s a NYTimes link which is good right now, I think, but may go behind a paywall at some point.) It’s called “Nobody’s Watching” (and yes, they actually reference the issues with that title in the show), and it’s about a couple of sitcom fanatics who get the chance to go to Hollywood and produce a sitcom…the twist is that they’re being filmed twenty-four-seven while they do it, and it’s being broadcast as a reality show. Sort of a Truman Show vibe, and a little Sports Night in places. It’s not the best show I’ve ever seen, but it’s more amusing than a lot of sitcoms that do get aired. You can see it on YouTube here (there are three parts, but you can get to them all from there).

The exciting thing is that networks are taking notice of the show’s YouTube success and reconsidering it–opening the door for networks to actually start “getting” the internet and what a great tool it could be. If networks would throw the pilots they get on YouTube, or heck, even on their own sites (prominantly, not like the half-hidden “Lazy Sunday” link) and let the public watch them, comment on them, discuss them over the summer, wouldn’t they have a much better idea of what could be a hit come fall? Especially since they were concerned that “Nobody’s Watching” wouldn’t make it because the plot was too convoluted for people to understand. Please. *eyeroll* I would love the opportunity to see pilots early. I really hope the networks wise up. Then at least we could have something interesting to watch over the summer, right?

Unmediated.org has a good post on it, too.