Our choices are chisels

On Jason Guriel's On Browsing

I was talking to a friend the other week about the movies in which Catherine Deneuve plays a lesbian, as one does, and asked her if she’d seen the best of them, Les voleurs, the 1995 film directed by André Techiné. She hadn’t. Well, that’s easy to fix. I’m sure the library has a DVD… no they don’t. I remember taking it out of the library just a few years ago, mais bon. Doesn’t matter: someone on Amazon is bound to sell it… huh. No. There’s a…VHS being sold for multiple hundreds of dollars? Oh wait, I see the DVD format for North America. Oh. It’s sold out. OK, then somebody must have posted it on YouTube, or the French YouTube called DailyMotion. Nothing. Surely there must be a streaming service in France that offers French cinema for a fee? Nope. Mubi? Double nope. I went on the website of the last movie rental shop in Toronto, Bay Street Video, and they appear to have a Techiné box set of unspecified films. Perhaps I’ll find it there.

This has happened a few times now. I would try to introduce someone to a film that was hugely important to me when I was in my twenties and it turns out it’s  impossible to find it; it fell through the cinema-VHS-digital-streaming crack in time.

First thing this friend asked when I suggested she take the DVD out of the TPL was, Where do I play the DVD, I haven’t owned the player in years. On your laptop, I suggested. Alas. I’ve learned this recently when shopping for a new laptop, the laptop computers do not come with DVD players built in any more. They haven’t for a while now.

As anyone who’s ever performed an unsuccessful search on any of the streaming services will know, streaming companies are not in the business of preserving culture. Things come and go according to the streaming channel’s own inscrutable logic. Same goes for the online offer of the public broadcasting companies too, including the CBC. I regularly type a handful of TV shows from the early noughts that I liked in the Gem search box, always to no avail. (Am I the only one who remembers the Trudeau mini-series with Colm Feore?) Preserving the culture is effectively a lot of people buying physical copies of something and adding it to their personal libraries, which are then shared, bequeathed, re-sold in estate sales. City libraries do it up to a point: there’s a rule I think that if an x number of years has passed since the book was last requested, the shelf and catalogue space will be cleared out for newer additions. The DVD and CD recordings get damaged, discontinued and not renewed – there’s often no way to buy the physical replacement. 

Does it matter, though? Humanity has lived for countless centuries without recorded music and film – would it be so tragic to return to the performing-art-is-only-live era? Depends on where you live. If in one of the five global cities, you’ll be fine. Anywhere regional or lower income (ie most of the world) and your options will be diminished, plus your children will not serendipitously discover musical genres and singers. Because I am boring, and come from the opera and classical world, my first argument is equity and access. Recordings and public broadcasting era was what grew – solidified, perhaps created? – large audiences for the so-called elite music. Internet is great, but musicians can’t earn money from it. YouTube and streaming platforms are great – and they aren’t, because the offer is at the mercy of engagement algorithms. If you watched this, you might like that because it’s similar – but we often like and need something completely different.

I hadn’t realized that I badly needed someone to write a paean to physical media and brick-and-mortar retail until I came across Jason Guriel’s On Browsing, which was published this year as one of the slim volumes in the Biblioasis’ Field Notes series. Throughout the nine essays he also makes the equity argument, but what takes up most of his bandwidth (heh) is how the lack of physical media is already changing us, our psyche, temper and our understanding of art.

Going downtown to HMV, Sam the Record Man, Soundscapes, World’s Biggest, Vintage Video was a reason to leave the confines of the suburb, writes Guriel, whose closest subway stop growing up was Kipling. (I’d add: Atelier Grigorian in Yorkville, Queen Video, Suspect Video, and at one point Chapters carried CDs and DVDs if memory serves. The Bay Street Video still exists. They sell and rent films on DVD and Blu Ray.) Music magazines helped educate younger audience, but retail staff in those specialized shops were usually extremely knowledgeable too and not reluctant to comment on customer’s choices and offer advice. Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity was not an exaggeration.

Music and film which enter our lives at particular junctures add meaning to it and owned and collected become bricks of our personal history. The fact that the allowance was limited and would cover a low number of items every month made the art search into a serious and studied endeavour, Guriel writes. The fact that we could only have an X number of new albums every month made replaying mandatory. And art with any degree of complexity often requires repeat engagement. A lot of his favourite albums and films, he writes, took more than one go to be absorbed by the mind. They required second or third chances. Had they been available on streaming services, the first indifferent listening or viewing would have been interrupted and the culture consumer would have hopped on to something else.

“Streaming would have offered me too easy a way out of my boredom. It would’ve allowed me to change my mind too quickly—to sample a few seconds of something, then toggle to something else in a matter of taps. And it’s the taps, the touchscreen interfaces, that are part of the problem. The small barriers posed by physical media—loading tapes, say, or depressing buttons—hobbled us a little, slowed us down, whereas smartphones only speed us up. Nothing grows on a scrolling mind.”

That we sometimes have to make do – rather than have unlimited choices and/or time at our disposal – can actually improve the creative process. Guriel describes a number of works of art that were produced under constraints, either technological or financial. Sometimes they were self imposed, in the Oulipian manner. Guriel has a lot of time for late, and last, adopters. “When the Prufrockian rocker Jack White came to record Elephant, The White Stripes’ fourth album, he insisted on using Toe Rag Studios, a cramped space in London whose most modern piece of equipment was from 1963. (As the liner notes take pains to boast, “no computers were using during the writing, recording, mixing, or mastering of this record.”) What’s more, White imposed a deadline on himself: ten days to record… The sessions yielded “Seven Nation Army, an instant chestnut of stadia, its riff a trigger to mass sing-along. Constraints can be generative.”  

Visual artist Tacita Dean, known as an advocate for celluloid vs. digital film in visual and media art, has eloquently argued that the two are effectively two different media producing different art forms. Constraints that come with filming on celluloid force one to be nimbler, more focused – it’s a more urgent engagement with the medium, you could argue. Over in the world of television, the creators of some of the classic British TV sitcoms (like Fawlty Towers) have often talked about having to write, rehearse, rewrite, record episodes within a week. They also knew when to stop, unlike American television. Guriel himself (alongside some other poets eg the always interesting Alexandra Oliver) is known for advocating in favour of metered and rhymed poetry. His most recent book before this one is a novel in rhymed couplets.

The final chapter is a program of resistance. It’s a mix of familiar (shop in bookstores and record shops), conoisseurship (“Play your kid the original 1977 theatrical release of Star Wars on discontinued DVD. (Don’t stream the airbrushed version on Disney+)”), best friend therapy (“be careful not to cart your memories to the curb”) and sensibly indulgent (“Read the liner notes. (Smell the liner notes; no one is looking.)”).

“You will be amazed at what lies just out of view of the scroll.” A warning to my 40+ crowd: you may find yourself with something in your eyes.