“So, bought a DVD player yet?”

If I had a quid for every time someone had asked me that, I would, indeed, probably have bought a DVD player. But as yet, I remain mired in the oh-so-80’s technology of laser discs, and must look on in wonder as more technologically advanced work colleagues witter on about the latest movies they’ve got on DVD. Well, less “wonder”, more “mild annoyance”, for I can’t help thinking that if laser disk had received one-tenth the promotional push DVD has got, then it’d still be a viable medium rather than one being replaced by one which is technologically only marginally superior. Smaller, sure, cheaper to make, certainly (though rather a lot of the savings seem to have gone missing between manafacturers and consumers), but in terms of picture and sound quality, the results are, by most unbiased accounts, somewhat variable — DVD is perhaps a little better, yet nowhere near the same leap you get from tape to disk.

For anyone who just has VHS at the moment, I’d still heartily recommend DVD, although for the foreseeable future, you won’t be able to replace your household recorder. This will prove a large stumbling block to its general acceptance, since Joe Public, who’s perfectly happy with video quality, won’t want to add another box and remote control to his living room. Sure, Net-savvy people like you are aware of the untrammeled delights of personal import, allowing you to get movies well in advance and without censorial tampering. But since Blockbuster Video and Virgin have to stick to the rules and rent or sell pretty much the same titles they have on tape, it’s not much of a selling point for Mr. Public.

For those with laser-disc, the problem is different; new titles available have been steadily drying up, though the price of back catalogue has been a source of rampant delight: $9.95 in a lot of cases. Needless to say, I’ve been plunging in headlong. But do I really want to buy Blade Runner for the fourth time? [Tape, widescreen tape, laserdisc, DVD] Frankly, no. Not unless there’s some value added, which is how I got into laserdisks in the first place; things like a widescreen version of ‘Cat People’, unavailable on tape, were among the dozen or so discs bought before I actually had a player. This advance preparation was partly due to memories of my first CD machine: I blew all my money on it, and had precisely one disc, a gift, to play on it until next payday. I don’t think I’ve listened to the Human League’s ‘Travelogue’ since.

There’s another problem looming; back catalogue. Obviously, new films will come out on DVD, but what odds on releases for the likes of ‘Reform School Girls’, ‘Edge of Sanity’, ‘Date With an Angel’ or ‘Miracle Mile’? I’m not holding my breath, and am damned if, like some, I’m going to sell my collection off in expectation of replacing them. However, there is also a hardware issue here. My laserdisc player is a good five years old, and is not immortal — it’s already been to the repair shop a couple of times. But as laserdiscs dry up, so will the supply of machines, and I risk getting stuck with hundreds of discs, and nothing on which to play them. I am seriously contemplating buying a new, but now cheap, player, and stashing it in the attic against this contingency.

But even I accept the inevitability of DVD, and am contemplating stocking up on new titles as they come out: A Bug’s Life is probably the leading contender for My First DVD. Although my main fear is that it’ll become just another lame-duck medium, which kills off laser-disk but fails to break out of the niche market and ends up limping along with a small following, despite its technical superiority. I really hope it doesn’t happen, but…can you spell B-E-T-A-M-A-X?

17th September: put on hold by the phone company today, the music playing on the line was Bing ‘n’ Bowie’s “Little Drummer Boy”. Christmas is clearly in the air, folks. My preparations are already under way, I’m now once again fighting my way through the annual month of sobriety, designed to flush the toxins out of my body, in preparation for…er, loading them all back again, big-time, over the remainder of the year.

It’s now the third time I’ve done it, and as before, the first week is about the toughest, simply through sheer force of habit — on one occasion I even found myself half way down a pint of Guinness before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be drinking. It does restrict your social life, too, since there’s a limit on how mucb orange-and-lemonade you can stomach drinking in an evening (and it’s a lot less than the beer limit!), while all around you get steadily more slurred. I have thus been making steady progress with ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and the video backlog.

I can’t say I’ll be sorry when it’s over, though there is something strange about coming home from a night out, with absolute clarity of thought. I miss the fuzziness round the edges somehow, cocooning you from the harsh idiocy of reality. And certainly, reading things like “Fire brigades ordered to end culture of sexism and racism” in the papers today are almost enough to drive one to drink. Stop me if I’m wrong here, but I thought the main job of a Fire Brigade was to put out fires, not to act as some Benetton-advert representation of society as a whole? And even the Home Office report praised the high standard of work in the service.

I’ve little doubt that the Fire Brigade is a deeply macho institution, but I wouldn’t want it any other way, since dealing with raging infernos in general is also pretty macho: you ain’t gonna talk a firestorm out (well, Tony Blair could probably give it a good shot, simply by sucking up all the available oxygen). Firefighters in Hollywood are the likes of Kurt Russell and John Wayne, not Rupert Everett and Divine. Even its name – fire brigade – is military, and this ethos runs through it like a stick of rock: uniforms, ranks, drills. And for good reason too: following orders isn’t an optional extra when you’re staring serious injury and death in the face on an everyday basis.

So it’s first the army, then the police, now the fire brigade. It’s probably no coincidence that the areas where discipline are most essential, are those regularly found, to shrieks of horror from liberals, to be “institutionally ___ist” (insert favourite “-ism” here). In some cases, this may be a bad thing: a racist police force, for example. But I have nowhere seen even the slightest suggestion that fire brigades are any slower in responding to calls from ethnic minorities, or any other group. Their allegedly unacceptable behaviour is limited to within their own ranks, and it’s a bloody difficult and dangerous job to boot. So as far as I’m concerned, what firemen do in private is entirely their own business — up to (and probably including) the sacrifice of small children.

In the end, does anyone really give a damn whether their burning house is extinguished by heterosexuals or not? “It is time the Fire Service began to understand that society is changing and it is time it began changing too,” said Home Office minister, Mike O’Brien. So, the next time you roast to death because your disabled lesbian fireperson of colour can’t get her wheelchair through the door of your blazing home, you know who to blame.

…or not, as the case may be. At the moment, I’m less than enamoured of, since the TC Web Site is celebrating its second anniversary in a somewhat crippled state, thanks to hardware which refuses to run Windows 95 any more. Got rid of the “Windows protection error” messages (thanks to those who offered help with that, incidentally), but now it just hangs. And before anyone asks, this all happened *before* 9/9/99. Now, the only way to access my files is through the wonders of DOS, which is…interesting — albeit in much the same way as a dose of meningitis.

Occasionally, even this confirmed technophile yearns for simpler times: you switched a computer on, it made a “Beep” sound, and went to the prompt. Now, you can go away and cook dinner before it’s ready, such is the litany of configuration, communication and contamination that is apparently required to run the behemoth known as Windows 95. At work, it’s even worse, because of the networks involved: you’d think it’d learn but every time you log into my machine, it greets the rest of the LAN with the caution of a Portillo facing a press conference. To make matters worse, we’ve now had Office 97 imposed on us — see the latest TC for my opinion on that piece of dinoware. Actually, since having to use it, I’ve found it has one or two nice features, such as the conversion to HTML feature. Expect an enhanced version i.e. colour piccies! video clips! of TC22 to be available on CD Rom before the end of the year.

That, however, will have to wait until we are now longer limping along in DOS. As it stands, I’m having to shuffle files back and forth on floppy disk, and updates to the site are being kept limited to what can easily be done this way. Work on the TC Top Fifty Films, for example, has been halted, with 42 of the 50 reviews written, since delivering them onto the Net will involve a wholesale reconstruction of the Film Blitz section, a hideous, tormented nightmare given the current state of play. I can keep plugging away at the editorials and reviews, but even Undressed to Kill is pushing the boundaries of what is possible without sending me hurtling into the abyss. And since it’s not even my machine, there’s a limit to what I can do to get it sorted.

Actually, I’ve never owned a PC in my life: the only computer which has been mine was the Atari ST used to produce TC during its “primary school” years. I’ve survived on a combination of work supplied boxes and those belonging to my housemate; hell, while he’s happy spending his money surfing the tsunami of technology, who am I to interfere? 🙂 However, I suspect the perpetual upgrading may be part of the problem — if six years of working on front-line IT support has shown me anything, it’s that if you just leave things alone, they tend to work fine, and that “upgrade” is merely a synonym for “chaos” — thus, what’s going on in East Timor is an upgrade to Democracy v.1.1.

Of course, in the PC world, you’ll also be obsolescent in about 18 months. And thank goodness for that: the machine supplied by work, so I can dial in and fix stuff, is being upgraded, although not because it’s spec is insufficient for the job. After all, how much CPU and RAM do you need to act as a dumb terminal? But the gateway we now use requires Windows 95, which in turn requires a certain spec of machine. I’m probably looking at a replacement box which will be, oh, five or six times more powerful than the existing one. Naturally, the ability to surf the Net and run the TC site is an irrelevance. Hmmm…perhaps this tech thing’s not so bad after all.

Tack one day onto either end of last week’s Bank Holiday, and what do you have? A trip to New York, that’s what — and, let’s face it, nothing less could get me up at 5 am in the morning (thank heavens I didn’t go for the “early” flight…), and carting luggage, largely consisting of copies of the new TC, across to the hell which is Heathrow on the Friday before a long weekend. Bizarrely, the plane was less crowded than the departure lounge, and more sleep was obtained, thanks largely to American Airlines remarkably soporific choice of in-flight entertainment.

Met up with Chris in New York, and headed to the apartment — this was the first time I’d stayed elsewhere than a hotel, and it does make you feel more like a resident. This is particularly true when you have to deal with the perennial New York pest: the cockroach. Not that the place was exactly infested with them — we only saw one, but what it lacked in numbers, it made up for in sheer size. It was, and this is no exaggeration, a good three inches long to the tip of its antennae; never mind them taking over the world after a nuclear war, this one was ready to make a start right now.

Poor Chris was in the shower at the time, and she set a new record for the bathroom to living room sprint. So what do you do with something that is both way too big to flush down the plughole — chuck it a lolly stick and teach it to surf? Because our attempts to drown the little bastard were met with a threatening unfolding of wings, and the last thing we wanted was it flying round our heads. At least when it was in the bath, we knew where it was. Finally, a solution was decided upon. I’ll spare you the icky details, but it involved the vacuum cleaner, with a wad of paper stuffed into the end of the hose, just in case. Though I confess to feeling a bit guilty about this, with regard to the next inhabitant — I just hope this wasn’t a pregnant female we were trapping in the dust bag…

The other experience worthy of comment here was watching two games of baseball at Yankee stadium, which exists in the middle of a neighbourhood where you *really* wouldn’t want otherwise to be. The first was impressive for the 50,000+ attendance, the second for the way a single hit changed the crowd from muttering malcontents to cheering fans, as the Yankees turned a 0-4 deficit into a 7-4 win. And you have to appreciate the way, unlike football here, that you can get a beer at these events, from your seat, simply by shouting “Beer!” — someone will come and sell you one. And if you’re stuck in the middle of a row, don’t worry, just pass your money along to the end, and the beer will come back. Can’t see that working at White Hart Lane somehow: “Money? What money, mate?”.

Also headed out of the city, for a day spent driving round Long Island, right the way down to the tip at Montauk. Watched some of the whale watching boats come in, though the passengers didn’t exactly look stirred by encountering the kings of the ocean. Particularly the Japanese ones with their knives and forks. The Hamptons, as the area is known, is richly rural in a way unlike any area in Britain: even small towns like Sag Harbour are packed with designer dress-shops and arthouse cinemas. And, for this weekend, Presidents of the United States, since Bill C. was out there raising money for the upcoming election. You can imagine what THAT did to the traffic on the way back to town, Sunday night…

Plus of course there was the usual shopping, though I am sad to announce the (not unexpected) death of laserdisc: none in Virgin, and Tower were having a clearance sale: only in Kim’s Video, down on 8th St, was there a decent supply. Buy now, while stocks last… So I return, refreshed, recharged and ready for action. Or, more likely, wishing I was still across in America, eating lasagne and watching baseball…cockroaches notwithstanding!

There’s no point in being embarrassed about it, really; they’ve been the sporadic bane of my life for the best part of a decade now. Sometimes, they shrink to almost nothing, and life can go on normally; but at other times, they swell to an enormous size, and impact severely on my social life, because deal with them is about all you can do. If you ignore them, and hope they go away, they just get bigger. Sometimes I get friends to help me, but in the end, I’m the one who has to live with the problem, which is probably an inevitable result of my editorship.

Sorry, what was that? Ah… I’d better explain that I am, in fact, talking about piles of unwatched video tapes — what did you think I meant, inflamed rectal blood-vessels? Ew, gross… No, I mean the continued, looming presence beside the television set of things that have to be seen. It’s a feature of the living-room that grew out of necessity: if I don’t keep focussed on incoming tapes + laserdiscs, they will get stuck on the shelf and vanish into the crowd, never to be seen — and no “again” about it. But by keeping them in sight, and restricting my choices to them, I know that they will be seen at least once.

This is something of a mixed blessing, in that it’s both limits the choice, and makes it easier. On average, there’s maybe 20 titles in the pile, which is enough to give a broad spectrum of titles for every mood and company. On the rare occasions when I’ve flattened it totally, the enormous range of possibilities that exists if I have my entire collection to choose from, rather than a limited subset, is simply so paralysing that I usually end up going down the pub instead. Where do you start, when you’ve hundreds of titles to choose from? And that’s *after* you’ve already decided you fancy something from Hong Kong.

On the down side, the difference between the collection and the pile in quality is significant. I own films because I like them, enjoy them, and want to watch them again, not for any other reason. Movies in the pile may be there because I’ve bought them — or they may have been foisted on me by acquaintances, or review copies from video companies, and the quality of those is far less certain. It’s a big temptation to cherry-pick the best, but you have to exercise restraint, or else the average quality slowly declines. There are times when you can face what you know will be really bad, and there are times when you just can’t: you must learn to strike when the iron is hot, and the fridge full of beer.

The worst I recall was a spell when the TV was off being repaired, back in my previous home, in the days when this was a one television household: somewhere more than fifty tapes were accumulated by the time the set returned. Since then, they’ve been whittled away, and built up, rarely evaporating totally or getting out of control. But since I got TC out of the way, I’ve been able to make a serious assault on it [didn’t leave the house last weekend!], and at 6:57 pm, I finished watching “Yes Madam ’95”, the only outstanding item — though “outstanding” it wasn’t, being a particularly mediocre Hong Kong action film and perhaps a new low-water mark in Cynthia Khan’s career. That’s not important: what matters, is that the headline at the top is no longer accurate, although “I’ve not got piles” is a far less eye-catching title. Maybe it should have been “My piles have cleared up”?

I doubt it’ll last long, not with a dozen titles on order, but it’s probably worth documenting since it’s only the third time I remember it happening since I started TC back in 1989. Solar eclipses are everyday occurrences in comparison. And now, I’m going to watch… watch… oh, sod it — I’m off down the pub…