When I have time away from the obligations that dog a life, I return to my hometown of Brunswick, Maine, to write. The quiet and the cold, the anonymity and those luminous prompts to childhood memory, suit my mood perfectly. I disconnect. I write. I keep to a meager routine.
One of the chief pleasures of these visits, over the years, has been hours spent at the local video store _ Bart & Greg's DVD Explosion! _ housed in a charmless basement alcove below what passes, in town, for a mall. Bart & Greg's became so important to my ritual that it was no mere disappointment, but a shock akin to a death in the family, when I arrived in December to learn that the store would close. The owner, Bart D'Alauro, had held on as long as he could. The titanic popularity of TV and streaming services had made his shop obsolete.
Bart was one of those old-school clerks whose connoisseurship licensed a pleasant snobbery and surliness. I once overheard a patron telling Bart that Bart just had to see "Brooklyn," then playing in town. "It's wonderful," the man said, and Bart, drowning in the crosscurrents of honesty and civility, could only croak, "I can't, I can't ... . "
The DVDs at Bart & Greg's had stickers on them testifying to the staff's recommendations. Bart's stickers said simply "Bart liked it," the austerity of the encomium equal to the seriousness of the judgment. On less likely winners the sticker read "Bart thought it was surprisingly OK." When I rented Maren Ade's "Everyone Else," Bart dryly remarked that it was the best Eric Rohmer film he had ever seen not by Eric Rohmer.
