14B - The Michigan Daily Weekend Magazine - Thursday, October 3, 1996 0 0 The Michigan Day Weekend Ma mu Sound and Fury Ed About Town Yet, that only sketches Fitzgerald's huge impact. "Gatsby" continues to sell 300,000 copies a year. An F. Scott Fitzgerald Society started in 1990. And celebrations commemorating this autumn's centennial, are being held across the. world. Writer Garrison Keillor hosted an unveiling of a Fitzgerald statue in St. Paul; actress Sharon Stone attended a Paris celebra- tion honoring the writer. This month the post office tips its hat with the F. Scott Fitzgerald postage stamp. Why such a fervor over Fitzgerald? Dozens of other top American writers see their centennial birth anniversaries pass without such ballyhooing. What did Fitzgerald do to that makes him one of the country's favorites? There have been better writers born since 1896. But few have achieved the legendary status Fitzgerald holds. Fitzgerald captured the essence of the American spirit more distinctly than any writer ever has; "The Great Gatsby" defines the American attitude. The novel deals with hope, and Jay Gatsby exemplifies the American tendency to believe that they hope with more fervor AN AMERICAN QUIXOTE BY DEAN BAKOPOULOS Very few writers actually know the mark their works will leave on the world. That includes F. Scott Fitzgerald, born 100 years ago last week, Sept. 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minn. Fitzgerald said, "An author ought to write for the youth of his own genera- tion, the critics of the next and the schoolmasters of ever afterward." Fitzgerald heeded his own words. Indeed, the youth of his generation dubbed Fitzgerald a hero, prompting Ernest Hemingway to call Fitz a "prophet of the Jazz Age." Afterward, critics of the next cooed at Fitzgerald's repertoire, and today his most famous novel, "The Great Gatsby," tops reading lists of American Literature courses. and dream, with more idealism than anyone else. In the last passage of "Gatsby," Fitzgerald suddenly shifts to the first- person plural: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, the esse stretch out our arms farther.... American And one fine morning - more dish So we beat on, boats against the any Write current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Suddenly, Gatsby becomes "we"; his hopes have increased to envelop our hopes. Fitzgerald pulls off an ending of such movement and heaviness, the reader can't help to be crushed and lost and hoping along with the characters. This finale is of such brilliance, I'd argue that no writer had been able to match it to date. The American character in the 20th century shows that we are a quixotic nation, and Jay Gatsby, who believed in his dreams with as much fervor as Cervantes' Quixote, has become a model of that idealism. When we face advefsity, our leaders still speak avour the American spirit. We are told that tomorrow, if we keep on reaching around the corner, we can become a golden city set upon a hill. That's what Fitzgerald illustrated in "Gatsby": The existence of hope, no matter how foolish that hope seems. This oddly optimistic message is why, among the voices of today's angst- .. , ., , nwcnsr art pouting poets, Fitzgerald remains one of our favorite writers. It was hope that he would need most at the end of his life. Early on, the young i a1 Princeton fellow saw his career skyrocket, his generation prosper, and he married a beautiful, albeit unstable woman, the famous Zelda. He soon became the voice of a generation, and he accepted that role with a certain amount of joy. Later, he found it difficult to write because his own life was getting worse. Success Ce of the was whelming to him, as was his wifes worsening Sl"' ?mental illnesses. nctlythan His own infa- mous battle with alcoholism, referred to now as the "Crack- up, made his life seem even sadder. By the time he turned 40, Fitz was living in Hollywood, writing hack screenplays and magazine articles for money. Zelda was spending her days in a sanitarium. The fair-haired, blue-eyed golden boy of a Jazz Age, had hit his own personal great depression. Still, Fitzgerald never gave up his ide- alism. He tried to give up drinking, and for months at a time he would succeed, spending those sober months sitting up in bed, scribbling drafts for what would be his last novel, "The Last Tycoon," which remained unfinished when Fitzgerald died in December 1940. L- mlt wxcrtTu, i drove e tnr'mnc,:, the Midwest. It's autumn now, and the world is alive with new wind and fresh colors- reds and oranges and yellows, but soon a long grey winter will arrive. Fall in the midwest is a season of such intense hope and beauty, that one can't help to ignore the fact that winter is swift- ly approaching. It's fitting that a voice like Fitzgerald's Wouid be bore tn, in the fall, in the mid- west, bellowing hope and beauty despite the certainty of winter. We are lucky that the voice has remained with us for these 100 years. By Nick Farr For the Daily "Indie doesn't mean anything any- more," Schoolkids Records and Tapes employee Byron Bull noted. "Indie has been beaten into a meaningless term. Independent music stores like Schoolkids are slowly disappearing." Leaning in front of one of his many homespun album descriptions, Bull rambles on for a while about the sad state of music - everything from radio to press, companies and culture. "It seems like big names on big labels automat- ically get a good review.SchOolkid People come in and here all the time and tell ~ What: An indep me they bought store. a really bad ~ Where: 523 E. Indie Schoolkids Records offers actual vinyl, alternative music said. Being receptive involves more than opening stores. One of Schoolkids' strong points is its staff. Bull, who has worked at Schoolkids for eight years, said he enjoys "doing a little bit of everything. Every employee here is cru- cial." By Bergman's own admission, employees at Schoolkids work long hours for little pay and stand little chance of promotion within the compa- ny. Sean Westergaard, a store manager at Schoolkids, said his job is to "try to be about getting good and varied music into people's ears. We try to be an edu- cational resource. We have a deeper and more varied catalog. People come in going, 'What's good? What are you going to sell me today?' "Because we are an independent store, we're disposed to tracking stuff down and getting it in the store," Westergaard said. "We can react a lot faster to requests, because we talk directly to the manufacturer. We carry things that just scream National Public Radio profile. NPR used to send peo- ple to the New York Tower Records store." "Because we're a smaller store, our best people are really focused on the music. When you walk in here, you could be serviced by the owner or the buyer for the company," Bergman said. Bergman claimed one of the key rea- sons behind his success is his advocacy is!F Tap pende Liber "We work here more for the love of music than anything else," Records Bull said. "At the end of the s day you have int record to live with yourself." ty St. A few for- Student David Wallace checks oul for consumers and artists. "All of us firmly believe the we're working here as opposed to where else is because we're here to cate for artists and customers," Be said. "That means we don't sell wl like. We'd probably go out of busin we have an artist that we know has ket out there, we get a lot of plea hooking that artist and that custom The Warner-LaMbert/Parke-Davis Community Research Clinic is seeking healthy males, ages 18-55, for participation in medication research studies. Length of study time is approximately two - four weeks. Research subjects will be paid approximately $500.00 - $1000.00 for participation. i 3v wLwv1s®v I ae *..'*R £ -O r at (313) 996-7861, Mon. - Fri., 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. 2800 Plymouth Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48105 record because the review was great," he said. "Pop is just the junk." SHours: Monday umrougn thnursdiaye ml V uu~;ivuuyuiugi n yu mer emplc 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Friday and moved or Saturday 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and bigger and Sunday 12 to 6 p.m. , Phone: 994-031. ter things. owner of oyees n to [bet- Rob the C c e ac /, £1 qicf " zad 0A Professional Nail Care *SPECIAL PRICE. SUN"MON.TUES.WED FULL SET 22/fSTUDENT 20 FILL INS 13/STUDENT 12 THURS.FRI.SAT FULL SET 25/STUDENT 22 FILL INS 15/STUDENT 13 MANICURE & PEDICURE $30 Airbrushing AvailableoWalk-Ins Welcome 6ea4ff 2878 Washtenaw Ave Ypsilanti, MI 48197 Mountain Square Shop Cent. Hrs: And music stores? "You see the same chains everywhere you go," Bull said. "When was the last time the average person walked into a really good independent music store? That's the thing about Schoolkids Records. It's like an oasis in a desert of nromlng but sand." Steve Bergman, owner and founder of Schoolkids, explained why he's per- severed for 20 years under the same ominous awnings of the Michigan Theater building. "We realize how important indepen- dent retailing is to the entire industry, and what a precarious position indepen- dent retailers find themselves in," Bergman said. Things were not all that different in the spring of 1976 when he decided to start a new store for the Schoolkids Cooperative, a group of University of Florida students who owned a chain of record stores across the country. Bergman ventured north from Florida, started an Ann Arbor outlet and broke off from the co-op six months after he opened for business. "The kind of store I wanted to do did- n't seem compatible with what they were doing with the co-op," he said. "We had a grander scheme of carrying all types of product. Everyone else wanted to run a hip record store." Since then, Schoolkids has grown to become one of the leaders in indepen- dent music retailing. The Schoolkids site has sprawled fromethe original 1,000-square-foot store, to a 7,000- square-foot site with separate classical and used record stores. One of the expansion's products, SKR Classical, was not entirely about making money. "We opened a store more toserve a need. That's what good independent record stores do-- they're receptive to the needs of the community" Bergman Rykodisc label, currently manages his company's U.S. distribution from Minneapolis. He worked at Schoolkids from 1980 to 1983. "in general, consuners rarely care about the politics of retail, whether =." Y aV mg rneir recores from a chain or from a mom-and-pop store," Simonds said. What sets Schoolkids apart from other stores, he said, is its extensive col- lection and attention to music. "They do what they do very well, in terms of stocking, hiring knowledge- able sales people, and orienting them- selves toward people and consumers that love music and that have an appre- ciation for that;' Simonds said. 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