From 2003:
I’m always struck by the small things that distinguish my home town in southeast Missouri from my adopted home, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I’d never really noticed until today, for instance, but the only houses that are architecturally “modern” in any recognizable sense are a half-dozen Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs built in the late Fifties. Similarly, you rarely see reproductions of modern art on anybody’s walls. It’s as though time had stopped in 1900. None of the video stores carries more than a handful of “older” films (i.e., made prior to 1975). I was astonished to find Citizen Kane and Casablanca at the neighborhood video store this afternoon….
Read the whole thing here.