Results tagged “dcistmatt”

Via Atrios, this little geographically motivated blog spat between Ben Adler at TAPPED and Brian Beutler, about whether New York or California has a better environmental record, misses the more important point: This study shows that it's Washington, DC that actually has the lowest per capita gasoline consumption of any place in the country, by an impressively wide margin. We've certainly explored issues related to the relative greenness of densely populated urban environments, compared...

Now Ryan Zimmerman knows how George Allen feels. It was as close as they come, but when they counted the votes for NL Rookie of the Year, Zim narrowly lost to Florida shortstop Hanley Ramirez. DCist Matt saw it coming as the year wound down, posting about Ramirez in September: "If anybody's going to beat out our boy Zim, we think it's going to be this guy." It's easy to make a convincing case for...

One of the first lessons you learn about blogging is that timing is everything. Earlier this week I was emailing DCist Matt about a story idea, a two part story that would ask the question that just had to be answered: Who is crazier more eccentric, Gilbert Arenas or Clinton Portis? We decided to write it over the weekend and run it next week. Great in theory, right? But then Esquire had to go...

Whoooooosh! What's that giant sucking sound? Oh yeah - it's the sweet reverberation of another record store totally biting it and going out of business in this era of iTunes. In this case, we've got Tower Records bowing out of the business, a fact that, though it feels inevitable, saddens us all the same.

According to an AP article that ran in the Post,

On Friday, after a 29-hour auction, most of the bankrupt music retailer's assets were sold to liquidation firm Great American Group, which bid $134.3 million. The company outbid Albany, N.Y.-based retailer Trans World Entertainment by a mere $500,000.

Though Tower is a national chain, I have super fond memories of all the local stores scattered around the area. My particular favorite was the one on Route 7, where I bought my first-ever CD (Radiohead's The Bends), a purchase that sent me on the downward spiral of total music obsession and cost me a fortune spent on weekend shopping binges at the store during high school.

DCist Hemal has her memories of Tower too, saving her from Tysons purgatory:

I was working at the most soul crushing job ever in the paved hell of Tysons corner my first year out of school. I'd escape into the tower records two to three times a week during my lunch break and browse through the CDs, trying to reconnect with something artistic for a few minutes before I had to go back and be an office bitch.

And DCist Matt says:

I remember when my right-wing Christian ex-girlfriend broke up with me and I went out and bought Bad Religion's Against the Grain and a couple of other great punk records at Tower, and I remember thinking, "Aaah, freedom."

See? Even though Tower might have had insanely high prices, often-snooty employees, and happily shilled talentless Top 40 artists, it still managed to resonate with some people in the area. Well, maybe not with DCist Ian:

I'm hoping for a FUTURE Tower memory in which they eventually start having stuff marked down to the point where I can finally take revenge for years of having to take it in a very uncomfortable place from Tower once I reached the cash register.

Point taken. But still, I, personally, can say that I'll kinda miss it. And one more bonus: keep your eye out for out-of-business deals at the stores as the weeks go on.

Do you have any memories (good, bad, or ugly) of Tower Records?