Rewind in Peace

I see there's another trio of celebrity deaths. Eartha Kitt really was blackballed like Losey, Lardner, Faulk, Robertson, Kirsty McColl, Geer, Trumbo and so many sadly more. LBJ had more and deeper Hollywood connections than those pikers Bill and Hilary. I'd like to remind my reader(s) that Sir Harold Pinter was taken to visit Quentin Crisp back in the days when he, QC, kept company with hooligans and rough trade. Pinter describes this visit in the memorial Stately Homo and says it was the genesis of his first play, The Room.
The headline that saddened me most was the announcement that, for all intents and purposes, VHS was officially dead. The awkward poorly designed winner of the VHS vs. Betamax scuffle was now only a memory. Perhaps in ten years VHS collectors will pop up like eight-track tape aficionados. There's a boutique market for vinyl records, so who knows? I'm pouting over VHS not only because I own so goddamn many films-on-tape but because my most intense phase of movie viewing and film scribbling centered primarily around VHS. Home Vision, tape predecessor to the overrated Criterion Collection, had the best looking copies of Alphaville, Spirits of the Dead, L'Enfants du Paradis, Kwaidan, Peeping Tom, L'Avventura, Rules of the Game, Shock Corridor and more. The room seemed to expand when I manipulated the frame-by-frame advance button.
David Cronenberg was urging me to find out how long they waited to cut from the actor to the exploding head in Scanners. Hal Hartley assured me that it was quite all right to stare at Adrienne Shelly putting on her glasses to look at Martin Donovan, disappearing in the back of a police car in Trust. Even Polanski could look back to 1965 and that eerie flat in Repulsion.
Brian Eno was right. Tape is a plastic medium. Even prerecorded tape.
Now the obsolete DVDs are piling up, tidy and flat and crammed with "extras."

I creep over to the turntable on its stand and cue up the soundtrack of Absolute Beginners and hiss at the Luddite in the mirror.