There is no spoon, there is no dress, and there is no Nickelodeon/Last Picture Show DVD. Or at least, not in the Manhattan video stores (quaint term!) I’ve been to today.

The kid at the downstairs video desk in the Union Square Virgin Megastore said the buyers never even ordered it. “Only the really big titles between now and closing,” he said. “But Dave Kehr reviewed it last week in the N.Y. Times and made kind of a big deal about it,” I stammered. “I thought you guys might at least have four or five copies.” Naahhh.

Even the guy at my favorite little video store, a place that sometimes sells Blurays ahead of their street dates, said “we never got it in. A friend who works at Sony has a copy but copies never came to us.”

I know it’s irrational and sort-of stupid to go to video stores when it’s obvious they’re no longer the providers they once were and with online ordering being so easy and simple. But I wanted to see Peter Bogdanovich‘s black-and-white version of Nickelodeon today, not next Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday.

This is the end of a world I’ve known and loved since the ’80s. The lazy camaraderie of movie mavens in a well-lit, library-like atmosphere, casually assessing some of the latest releases in terms of remastered visual quality and, strictly as a secondary consideration, how good they are in terms of story, theme, directorial chops and emotional penetration. Union Square Virgin is the last well-stocked DVD store in Manhattan and it’ll be closing in three or four weeks.

Hello, Amazon.com. Farewell, impulse buys and browsing through the stacks and getting lost in that world. No more, never again.