I mean no disrespect to any readers who are living there, but Ashland -- the town where I grew up -- seems like a sadder place every time I go back.
Part of it is just the passage of time: other than my grandmother, the rest of my family lives elsewhere, giving me less and less of a connection to this place where I spent my first 18 years.
Someone else lives in the house where I grew up.
Behind that house there’s the Willow Park.
In the 1980s, the borough had all but abandoned it (or so it appeared to me back then), making it a perfect place for 9-12 year old boys. Who needed actual playground equipment when we could build elaborate tree forts and carry out an invisible, one-sided war against teenagers who rode through the woods?
But now the Willow Park is an actual, well, park, with benches and swings and a softball field.
Equally depressing: there’s an entire block of downtown Ashland where nearly every building is for sale or rent. (Including the dearly departed, oddly named Gay Store, which deserves an entry of its own someday soon.)
The only thing left is a tobacco store. There wasn’t even enough business to support a fucking dollar store.
None of this, however, makes me as sad as the loss of Black Diamond Video.
Between 1985 (when we got our first VCR) and 1995 (when I left for college), Black Diamond was one of my foremost sources for my cinematic education.
Now, it would be silly of me to expect a small town, independent video store to stay in business when even chains can’t make a go of it. And I haven’t been a regular video store customer in years, so it’s not like I can make a “What’s wrong with you people?!” argument.
Also, as much as I hate those Redbox machines for offering such pathetic choices (unless I’m not using them the right way, it seems like they only offer new releases), I realize that not everyone’s movie viewing habits are like mine.
So maybe what I need to do here is to say: "Thank you, Black Diamond, for the 10 years in which you allowed me to see the following movies."
Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Karate Kid, Gremlins, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Time Bandits, Labrynth, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, JFK, In the Heat of the Night, Mississippi Burning, Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas, Angel Heart, Glengarry Glen Ross, Blue Velvet, River’s Edge, Sid & Nancy, Platoon, Devil in a Blue Dress, One False Move, Full Metal Jacket, Heathers, Eight Men Out, Lone Star, Dead Calm, Born on the Fourth of July, City of Lost Children, Malcolm X, Do the Right Thing, The Crying Game, Menace II Society, Dazed and Confused, Short Cuts, Natural Born Killers, Quiz Show, Heavenly Creatures, The Last Seduction, The Fisher King, Heat, and Welcome to the Dollhouse.
Hell, I’m even grateful for kid-friendly 80s afterthoughts like Enemy Mine, The Explorers, Young Sherlock Holmes, Cloak and Dagger and The Monster Squad.
(I have less of a soft-spot for Rad, The Dirt Bike Kid and The Peanut Butter Solution, all rented by my parents, I suspected, solely because they were in the kids’ section.)
If there's a bookish, introverted kid in Ashland today -- and I'm sure there is -- he has the internet, and can make the kind of discoveries I made with relative ease. He doesn't need Black Diamond or anything like it.
But I did. So thank you, Black Diamond. Without you, my world would’ve been much poorer.
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It occurs to me now that I should also pay tribute to the neat little FOX Theater -- just two screens -- stuck inside the Fairline Village Mall. The mall is still there but the theater is long-gone, and honestly, I can't remember many of the movies I saw there, other than Return of the Jedi and Pulp Fiction in the spring of 1995, about two months after I finished high school. Most of what I do remember is, well, not all that memorable: stuff like Turner & Hooch.
I seem to remember -- and I was such a little nerd that I noticed stuff like this -- that for a time the FOX theater only got movies put out by 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, and a few other subsidiaries. The competing theater, the "UA the Movies" at the Schuylkill Mall, showed movies from all different companies and had four screens, and thus showed a lot more movies.
And that's where I saw a lot of 80s/90s blockbusters: the Tim Burton Batman movies, Terminator 2, Ghost, Goonies, The Neverending Story, and -- after it had been nominated for a bunch of Oscars -- Pulp Fiction.
Interesting side note, involving Pulp Fiction: I had a chance to see it over the Christmas/New Years break of 1994/1995. My friend Rick and I had driven to the city of Hazleton to take the SATs, and when we finished, we were planning on seeing Pulp Fiction at this multi-plex theater. Then his car radio exploded, and his parents had to come get us. We couldn't tell them "Wait until this three hour movie is over," so we were stuck. We wound up at our local mall, where this friend of Rick talked us into seeing the Kenneth Branagh Frankenstein. We all left disappointed. By the way: Among the other movies playing at the Hazleton theater that day: Clerks, Quiz Show and Ed Wood.
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