All hail the homogenizing of the North American Moviegoing Experience!

From Grady over at Kaiju Shakedown comes this sad news: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN - THE MUSIC PALACE HAS LEFT THE PLANET.

I've spent many hours of my life in old Chinatown cinemas, an insitution that died at the end of the 20th century. With great movies, cheap double bill prices, and strange snack bar food, they were exotic detours where you could feel like a stranger in a strange land and not leave your own city. Now NYC has lost one of North America's last Chinatown movie theatres, the Music Palace. For some fond memories, read Grady's piece over at Subway Cinema:

I'll come clean: I've done shameful things in the Music Palace. I've eaten dinner, breakfast, lunch. Slept all day, dozed off for a few minutes, worked my way through a pack of cigarettes in one sitting, gotten drunk, dug through their trash, smoked dope, taken speed, had sex, argued with a cell phone user, played with a kitty, and had a party. To be fair, the sex and the dinner were both before they started turning on the lights between shows...knowing what I do now I would've held off.