“Gonna ring a few bells in your ear / ring a few bells / oh yeah right now / baby don’t you know it’s in your ear”

Jessie Hill, “Ooh Poo Pah Doo”

While back and forth is ongoing around the advance of digital media and connected issues around authorship and ownership — copyright very often — entities are pushing and pulling and likely plotting and scanning to gain some control over these media and their content.  News Corp buys MySpace and hedge funds pick up distressed labels.  What was seen by some as a democratic — maybe artistic — utopia in the making begins to all of a sudden look like corporate hegemony settling in.  Enthusiasts for a wide open digital community out there become skeptics.¹  Google too big to fail?

No Longer Empty — NLE — a nonprofit working in this down real estate market puts on art shows and holds events in vacant spaces in New York City given over by the landlords — NLE identifies them as in the public domain — a slightly slippery designation.  NLE put together a show called “Never Can Say Goodbye” and events at the ground floor of the former Tower Records store at the corner of Broadway and 4th Street — vacant since the music retailer liquidated its inventory and went out of business in 2006.  The curatorial claim is that the show aims to look back at what was and make known what is.  Tower was a place to go to browse for records — hold the things — compact discs later on.  It might have put independent sellers out of business and the tale is told about downloading and file sharing doing the same to Tower.  Whatever.  It was a place to go to spend money or not spend money and get a lot of information either way and now that it is gone its absence might be a kind of marker for travel between the empire of Gap Inc. to the south and Whole Foods, Staples and Barnes & Noble and one of the 214 Guitar Center Locations to the north.

Walk west on 4th Street to Broadway and you walked past a big blue banner in the former Tower windows for Vernado Realty Trust — sponsor of the show and landlord giving over the space — and offering it for rent.  Vernado — headquartered in New York — is the second largest real estate investment trust in the country owning or managing over 100 million square feet of property.  It — motto — “Strength — Opportunity — Vision” — takes its name from the line of appliances sold way back in its Two Guys stores.  Those stores — losing money — were closed when Vernado determined that the locations were worth more than the businesses operating at them.  That strategy seems to have been implemented at least once more when Verndado — after buying Virgin NA — shut the record stores in New York to get the real estate.²  So much for the music.  Go a few block north and a few east to Stuyvesant Town — site of another vacancy strategy now gone bad.  So much for the school teachers and cops.  No way you can find them in the lifestyle images crawling across the Tishman-Speyer Stuy Town site.  Anyway.  In 2006 Tower sold the ground floor at the Broadway and 4th Street Silk Building — a condominium since 1982 — to Vernado with a lease back agreement that allowed it to operate the store and liquidate the inventory.

So artwork moves into the former Tower Records January 16.  A hipness food chain.  Businesses want artists.  Artists want music (how cool the studio rendered in words or pictures with the Fender in the corner).  By my count — 12 practitioners installed artworks in the bare — stripped — ex-store including one installation itself containing work of 43 other practitioners or practitioner teams.  15 concerts and a panel discussion about the impact of technology on the making of music and art were presented.  All this being-in-a-bandness might want to look like what might have gone on at this latitude — maybe a little further east — in the bad old days.  Kind of move in — squat if you will — in some disused place.  Bring in the records and compact discs (a few bins here but not sure about playing these things).  Bring in the guitars (two here fused at their headstocks) and the amps and speakers (stretched and painted canvas here).  Some glossy magazine cutouts (mounted to foam core here).  Hang out and watch a few videos (a few here).  Daylight fades light some candles (nice lights going up the non-operating escalator).

So what if No Longer Empty — never can say goodbye after all — and the practitioners involved — had not packed up this show and after it closed February 13?  A real squat.  And other Vernado venues in the area: 148, 150, 155 Spring, 478-86 and 770 Broadway, 386 and 387 West Broadway, 40-42 Thompson?  Way cool.

1. Jaron Lanier in “The Serfdom of Crowds”, Harpers, Vol. 320, No. 1917, February 2010:  “A common rationalization in the fledging world of digital culture back then was that we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm — or were already in the eye of one.  But we were not passing through a momentary calm.  We had, rather, entered a persistent somnolence.”  Also: “But who is the lord that owns the cloud that connects the crowd?”

2.  “We bought the business to wind it down to get hold of the real estate”,  Sadeep Mathrani, Executive Vice-President, Retail Real Estate , Vernado Investment Trust, Reuters, June 3, 2008