The whole point of having a library is so that I can access the things I want to review over and over again, to keep me off streaming services unless absolutely necessary, and to look only at things that matter.
And screenshotting software is a much-used tool here.
It’s true that maintaining a personal library of physical media requires a certain amount of physical space – back in the Nineties I knew people who built vast monoliths of stacked VHS tapes – and that a lot of it can be done digitally. But I’m more likely to have a drive fail than irreparably scratch a disc. And there’s a thing about gathering stuff digitally… if I let myself fall back into that hole, I’ll end up with uncounted gigs of stuff that I may never have the time to listen to or watch. This was the rabbit hole of mp3 blogs, back in the day – I’m sure I still have zipfiles from that era that I never even opened. I have a feeling Simon Reynolds wrote about that some years ago, and there was a distinct ping of recognition from me.
I recently dug into one of my old external drives, in search of a song I only dimly remember – I can hear the sound of its last 40 seconds or so in the back of my head and wanted the whole thing. It was on a label sampler CD that came in a pink-and-white striped bag, of the kind you used to get sweets in back in the Seventies, but the CD came out in, oh, the early/mid 00s. I would have bought it from Piccadilly Records. The receipt is long since lost, and I cannot remember the name of the label. There was a point around 2012 when I digitised a lot of my CDs and got rid of them, because I needed the space, and I still regret that. I’ll never find that CD again, and the song – I only half-remember its title – is either misfiled or disappeared in a digital glitch.
It’s weird to be sad about the loss of a song you can barely remember, I’m sure. But I also remember the pang of frustration when THE DEATH OF STALIN, a film I like very much, was taken off Netflix just as I was in the mood to watch it again and make some notes on its dialogue. So I bought a physical copy.
Now I just need someone to put Jessica Beshir’s films on blu-ray.
My copy of 2001 is still available, (UK) (US).
