Does New Albany even have an intellectual history?

Originally written and published at NA Confidential on October 30, 2014. ON THE AVENUES: Does New Albany even have an intellectual history? The last time I can recall dressing up for Halloween was in 1986. It was the year after my first trip to the Soviet Union, where I’d bought a top quality ushanka (a furry cap with ear flaps) for $25 at a hard currency shop in Leningrad. As a regular customer of the old Sam’s Tavern, as opposed to the newer generation “Food & Spirits” moniker, my curiosity was piqued by a Halloween costume contest at the bar, but why waste precious drinking time on creative wardrobe when a pair of work boots and the ushanka perched atop my head announced my participation as a Bolshevik? Shrug. It was good for second place. After all, on yet another pagan-sourced holiday excuse to flaunt base capitalist greed and excess, one ostensibly devoted to ghosts and ghouls, my posing as a communist bogeyman seemed perfectly fitting. Joe Stalin was a failed seminary student, and his paranoiac, murderous police state has c ......Read more