Wednesday, October 07, 2009
"[V]ideo on demand is something of a conceptual oxymoron, since most people who demand video often don’t know what they want. For the indecisive renter, the video store has been an ideal waiting room." That gets at the heart of it pretty nicely, for video and for music stores. Sometimes-- lots of times, really-- you know you feel like watching a video, but you don't know what you want to see. The next three things on our Netflix queue, for example, are Woody Allen's "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex", "Ride With the Devil", and the "Saragossa Manuscript". Assuming that the three disks on top of the TV right now go, or have gone back, (a longshot) that's our weekend line-up. I can already tell you that there is a veto vote for each, which means that Saturday after dinner someone is walking down to Blockbuster. The Blockbuster experience gets drearier almost by the week, all fluorescent lights and dreadful stuff from the 80's that I never feel like watching. It was different when Mondo Video was down the block, but that was obviously an unsustainable business years before it closed. What's been lost is serendipity, coming across something and just taking a flier on it, and I miss that.
// posted by Bill @ 10:43 AM 
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