Actually, there is something more local than a power failure

This.

That’s my husband’s car, hit by a falling branch during the heat-wave breaking thunderstorm on June 10. But trees fell throughout Baristaville. Still, it was so local that some blocks were disaster areas and others were spared entirely. Baristanet ran about 15 stories the day following the storm, and despite more power failures, people managed to get on the site in record numbers. We tracked 18,000 visits — about twice our normal.

Global warming to the contrary, there’s nothing more local than the weather.

There’s nothing more local than a powerful failure

Yes, it was hot everywhere in the northeast. The heat, the humidity, the discomfort was just a given. But when I was driving down Bloomfield Ave. today aroudn 3 pm to take Noah to his eye doctor appointment, and we passed through one, two, three non-working traffic lights, we knew instantly that the story was bigger. Not bigger geographically. Bigger locally.

It meant a power failure. And the more lights we passed, the wider the failure was. A power failure in 99 degree heat is always a big local story.

As the son of a publisher, Noah of course knew this was a big story for Baristanet, and called my partner, Liz George, to take the story while I drove. Through the magic of modern communications, I was able to update her (the power outage went all the way to Verona) by phone. I’m pretty sure we were the first to break the story of the power failure, which wound up affecting 75,000 customers. Though the Star Ledger and all the local radio and TV jumped on it, as usual the Montclair Times, the local newspaper of record, ceded the breaking news coverage to us. And as usual, it was a huge traffic day for us: 13,000 visits for the day, almost 2,000 just in the 4 pm hour.

I didn’t even know whether my own house was affected until I got back to my street. (It seemed less important than getting the news out and picking up a few non-perishables from the grocery store.) It was.

Suddenly, things got even more intensely local. I called my friend Lori, who lives less than a mile away, and who has a pool. She also had electricity. Her house became the unofficial emergency operations, homework and cooling-off center for a whole network of friends. I sat by the pool with my laptop and my cellphone, getting information from Lori’s friends. We also got e-mail tips, and people left information in comments. In an emergency, people are generous with information. And so we learned: power was due back at 7:30 pm, the YMCA was closed, power was due back at 9 pm. Then finally, at 8:05 pm, the power was on again!

Yes, I know. It wasn’t Myanmar and it wasn’t China. It was mainly a bunch of upper-middle-class people with a lot of droopy arugula. But for five hours, if you lived here, it was the only thing that mattered.

Wanderful, wanderful, wanderful

Although fuel prices are going to make travel once again the privilege of the elite, the question begs: why travel anyway? The human landscape is becoming awfully homogenous, with the GAP, Williams Sonoma, Ann Taylor and Victoria’s Secret popping up everywhere you go. What is Lincoln Road in Miami but the Short Hills Mall with palm trees?

I think this is why my last (and final) trip to Disneyworld about 10 years ago was so damn depressing. We stayed in Kissimmee, an endless strip of cheap hotels and chain fast-food restaurants, which made me feel fat, bloated, stupid and blandly American. (Read: Homer Simpson) I thought I was just being cheap when I forced my family to forgo a day of Disney for a $5 per person rodeo; actually, in retrospect, it was a spiritual revolt. And Disneyland, that in itself is the perfect symbol for the awful homogeneity of place. That stupid Main Street, a corporate reproduction of the very kind of small town that no longer exists because of the success of corporate behemoths like Disney. Uggh.

But my young friends Mark and Katie are not so jaded, and they’re planning a trip across the country and looking for corporate sponsorship. They’ve got a name and a url for their adventure, Wanderful.us, and they’ve got a marketing proposal, looking for sponsors to wrap their van in exchange for 6 milion+ impressions as they spend three months traveling the country.

Of course, the economics of their adventure suggest a sponsorship of a national chain. They’re young and good looking; maybe they could get the GAP. But I’ve suggested they try IndieBound, and make it a quest to visit every independent bookstore in the country. Or TrueValue, the trade group for independent hardware stores. As Mark and Katie drive off into the sunset to see America, wouldn’t it be nice if they could find something that they couldn’t see right here in New Jersey? And maybe, as they burn fuel at $4 a gallon, do something really profound: help save America from itself.

Gone fishing?

That great indie slayer, Amazon.com, has been down this afternoon — leaving customers and journalists scratching their heads. From Dow Jones, via CNN:

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Web site appeared to down early Friday afternoon.

Several Dow Jones employees in various locations were unable to call up the site.

Attempts to contact Amazon weren’t immediately successful.

Internet site www.theflyonthewall.com told its subscribers of the outage earlier Friday afternoon. Tech-focused blogs were also discussing the outage.

Of course, even my website, Baristanet, has been crippled from time to time by spam attacks, but you’d think Amazon would have double, triple, quadruple redundancy. Just a cyberglitch? Or perhaps an unhappy independent bookseller with some hacking know-how?

Meanwhile, if you have an urgent need for a book, you might just have to go to a local bookstore. In fact, you might just find you get it faster that way. How novel!

UPDATE: At 4 pm, I was able to access Amazon.

Now official: it’s part of the zeitgeist

When in the course of human events…

I’ve been talking for a while about starting this blog. It’s a confluence of two streams of my professional life, novelist and founder of Baristanet.com. As a novelist who does readings at independent bookstores, I’ve witnessed firsthand a hatred of Amazon that has begun to rival the antipathy for Walmart. As a placeblogger, I am part of a local ecosystem of entrepreneurs. I write about them, sell them advertising, watch them succeed and fail. I started out as a new media entrepreneur, but along the way have unwittingly become a champion of place.

This idea’s been simmering on the back burner for a while, something I bring up at cocktail parties when I’m tired of talking about how my book is doing. Today, I got a kick in the butt when I heard about the new initiative launched at Book Expo America this weekend by the nation’s independent bookstores, who have launched a new marketing campaign, movement, nay manifesto, called IndieBound. It even comes with its own declaration:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for individuals to denounce the corporate bands which threaten to homogenize our cities and our souls, we must celebrate the powers that make us unique and declare the causes which compel us to remain independent.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all stores are not created equal, that some are endowed by their owners, their staff, and their communities with certain incomparable heights, that among these are Personality, Purpose and Passion. The history of the present indies is a history of experiences and excitement, which we will continue to establish as we set our sights on a more unconstrained state. To prove this, let’s bring each other along and submit our own experiences to an unchained world.

John Mutter of Shelf-Awareness covers the campaign in today’s newsletter.

But will bookstore clerks wearing T-shirts that say “This is the part where I save the day” really be able to turn back the tide of Amazon.com in general, and the Kindle in particular?

I don’t know. But I’ve set up camp here to watch and report on the revolution. Welcome.