A Metaphor for the End of Just About Everything

Directed by Roger Beebe

At one level, this is a document of the final hours of Long's Book Store, a victim to both technological change (as books are ordered online or migrate to digital forms) and the pressures of real estate development (as a public-private partnership devours the blocks directly across from the Ohio State campus, nominally in the interest of establishing a new "Arts Corridor"). But the video is also a more general reflection on mortality and ephemerality, resonating with the billboard image of Félix González-Torre's Untitled (for Parkett), which was also destroyed with the building.