I am in Fopp.
It happens. Not too regularly, but regularly enough. I popped in to see if the new Bjork album was actually out yet on CD after some cad leaked it online [1].
While I was there I thought about buying the new Charlatans album (So Oh was one of my favourite singles from the end of last year), but instead splashed out on a couple of DVDs. OK, three. Neil Jordan's Company of Wolves which I haven't seen since it came out in 1984. A Dario Argento 1971 giallo, The Cat O'Nine Tails and Nic Roeg's Bad Timing, his last great movie. Haven't you seen it? Vienna. Sex. The Cold War. Harvey Keitel. It's the one where Art Garfunkel of all people turns out to be ... Actually, no. I don't want to give you any spoilers. Let's just say it probably deserves its 18 certificate. Or X certificate as it was back in 1980 when the film came out. [2]
Anyway, three classic (or ancient, depending on your attitude) DVDs for £16. Bargain, I'd say.
A few years ago the late lamented pop magazine The Word [3] defined a particular substrata of the 21st-century male. They called him the "50 quid bloke". Said bloke was defined by the magazine's editorial director David Hepworth as "the guy we've all seen in Borders or HMV on a Friday afternoon, possibly after a drink or two, tie slightly undone, buying two CDs, a DVD and maybe a book - 50 quid's worth - and frantically computing how he's going to convince his partner that this is a really, really worthwhile investment".
I never quite reached those heady heights of consumption. I'm more of a "20 quid bloke". Still, "50 quid bloke" or "20 quid bloke", either way I'm uncomfortably aware that I'm on the wrong side of history here.
In five, 10 years' time will there be still be DVD players to play DVDs on? We had to buy a new TV last year. The man in Currys was a bit taken aback when I mentioned my DVD collection. "You can see everything on Netflix now," he said. "You can't see Bad Timing," I would have said if I'd thought about it. "You can't see 1970s Italian giallos."
Somewhere online you probably can though. So what am I hanging onto? Some sense of physical ownership I guess. I don't believe instant access via the Cloud or whatever it is means the same thing. It's not tangible. There's nothing there.
It's the reason I still have boxes of vinyl singles and albums in the back of a cupboard, even though I've nothing left to play them on and haven't had for years. Look at my good taste, I'm subliminally saying. Look at my carefully curated collection of music/film/literature.
I suspect it's an attitude that marks me out incontrovertibly as a relic of the past though. Fact is, I am clearly just so 20th century. Cut me open and my inners are probably stamped "best before 1999".
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