Unedited thoughts on Physical Media Resurgence & Backlogs & Media Access & Self-Control

 I’ve been seeing more and more videos of people younger than me doing self imposed challenges where they don’t use social media for X amount of time, or limit their media consumption to just a few things for a month, or spending a year tackling their backlog of movies/videogames/etc. And it’s interesting seeing people live in the way a lot of people HAD to in the 90s and earlier. I was just thinking recently about how I have more, and more easy access, to videogames than when I was in say 8^th grade, where unless you borrowed a game from someone or rented it, you just had the games you had to play, and nothing else. Same with CDs: I remember when I finally owned more CDs than my 15 disc CD wallet could hold, and how it felt like I had SO MUCH music, whereas now I can open Spotify and have access to thousands upon thousands of albums and songs.

At the same time, I see comments on social media about how people miss videostores and that whole experience. Of course they forget the inconvenience and limited stock and the other downsides that were the reason videostores went away, but perhaps in some way the limited stock is a desirable trait.

Anyway, all of this has me thinking it’s not a black and white issue like it’s portrayed as. When I was in 8^th grade, I would’ve given anything to have access to media like I do now. And this isn’t even a matter of we’ve been spoiled for so long we don’t appreciate what we have; I, at least, always appreciate the convenience of the Internet and nearly-limitless access to information and entertainment. So this whole topic doesn’t to me boil down to “limited media access” vs. “unlimited media access” and which one is better. As with anything, the truth is more complicated and nuanced. Yet ultimately this can be boiled down to self-control. If you can’t stop yourself from endlessly scrolling TikTok all day and checking Reddit every 20 minutes, no amount of self-imposed challenges will permanently alter your behavior. As soon as the week or month or whatever length of time the challenge lasts, I would bet dollars to donuts that most of those people eventually slide back into their old habits. YOU must control your consumption. YOU must learn the balance of mindless content vs. meaningful content you need in your life. YOU must learn to put your phone down and sit down to concentrate on an album or book wholly. But that’s not as simple and sexy as a clickbait title that screams “I lived like someone in the 80s for a week!”

So let’s do a little thought experiment. If you go to your local used media store and buy a DVD boxset of, say, The Office, and this is in your selection of physical media you’re “allowed” to watch during your self-imposed challenge. So on the first day of it, you begin watching season one of The Office on DVD. Outside of the interface and having to physically change the discs as the seasons go on, there is no fundamental difference between the two ways of watching. You could just as easily have used your self-control to say, “I’m going to put my phone down and watch the first 6 episodes of The Office on streaming.”

Ultimately you can use whatever methods or systems proposed by YouTubers and others to enjoy as much media as possible and not waste your life on social media and mindless content churn websites. But you still have to have the self-control to stick with these methods or systems, and this ultimately is what makes them a novelty rather than a paradigm shift: you are ultimately responsible for yourself. It’s always within your power to decrease your social media time and increase time spent reading or watching new TV shows or whatever.

I do think the one valuable thing people are taking from this whole topic is getting back into physical media and as a result having real ownership of media again. While I still maintain there’s a balance to find between being all physical media and all streaming, I can’t deny that with the former the movie studio can’t come into your house and steal your bluray copy of The Princess Bride.

My own system for say music is that I curate a collection of vinyl records of my absolutely favorites and rare releases you can’t always find on streaming, but I also use streaming all the time because of the ease of use and the amount of music you get for that monthly fee. Similarly with movies, I only buy a physical copy of something if I especially love it OR if it’s an obscure movie that might go out of print—it’s been re-released recently, but for a long time you couldn’t watch Dogma on any streaming services and had to track down a DVD copy, for instance.

Now as for backlogs…I think this is also about self-control, but additionally about having honest conversations with yourself. We all know that sometimes we purchase things because we’d like to think of ourselves as the kind of person who casually decides to read One Hundred Years Of Solitude but realistically most of us will stop at the purchase/acquisition. This is why so many people have dozens of games in their Steam library they haven’t touched. You WANT to be the kind of person who plays in-depth strategy games or esoteric RPGs with dense mechanics, so you buy those games, yet you never end up playing them. You can use whatever systems or self-imposed challenges you want, ultimately you have to make yourself accountable and actually play them. I have this thing where, when I’m between videogames, I play an hour or two of a few different games I’ve bought but haven’t played. This gets me to rapidly reassign games in my own ranking: Games I’ll Never Want To Play, Games I Might Want To Play Someday, and Games I Want To Keep Playing After This Is Over.

 

Unedited Thoughts on Edward Hopper

Really the most obvious thing that jumps out to one is the sense of loneliness and solitude and contemplation in Hopper’s paintings. Even when there is no human in the paintings, there is a tremendous sense of the artist or the viewer adding something to the room or landscape by viewing it. Hopper’s works often depict lone humans in different situations, and when we’re able to see their facial expressions, they’re never one of outright happiness. We see person after person in environments made by humans—buildings, cities, offices, movie theaters, homesteads, etc.—and what stands out is how lonely and solitary they feel. Anyone who has ever felt utterly, devastatingly alone in a crowded room can relate.

Rather than pick up on how Hopper’s works influenced things like the liminal art/photography movement, I think it’s worth noting that to me his paintings aren’t about the absence of things or being in an in-between zone/state of being of some sort. Rather when there’s humans they seem resistant to their current situation yet resigned to it. They’re still lost in thought or rumination about their life but their look and auras are of one who has accepted, perhaps capitulated to the situation they’re in, whether it’s an unhappy marriage or a new suddenly unhappy job or a moment or realization you know you can’t do anything about. When there are no human figures, we see ourselves in the landscapes; we feel almost invited in to project our own feelings of loneliness and alienation.

Yet in this last point I find there to be a feeling of mutuality and invitation in Hopper’s works. Even if they make you feel lonely, they also make you aware that other people have felt just like you have, even if the details are technically different. I look at a work like Man Seated On Bed (1906) and Summer Interior (1909) and especially Office In A Small City (1953) and I can see flashes of my own life, and/or people I’ve known, in these snapshots in time. With the latter work we see a common technique of Hopper’s during this mid to late era, where we see a human figure but also a bit of a voyeuristic angle were we see the exterior of the building/setting the human figure is in. Perhaps another way to see it is almost like an omnipotent viewer peering into dollhouses at the tiny lives there.

The emptiness of the cityscapes with one human figure in focus really underscores how many people over the years have felt alienated and alone despite ironically living in large urban environments. Curious then that the last painting I’m riffing off of should specify that it’s portraying a SMALL city. Anyway, I imagine the person in this painting has just sat down for their first day of work, and—peering across the cityscape that at first perhaps is scenic and lovely but will soon become ordinary and repetitive—it dawns on them that this is going to be the next however many years of their life. You are just a cog in the machine of society; welcome home.

Interesting to me that some art critics back in the day tried to associated Hopper’s later works with abstract art/surrealism, I think this is just because of the vaguely dreamlike feeling his later human-less landscapes/cityscapes/roomscapes can have. Certainly you can see Rooms By The Sea (1951) and it can look a bit along the lines of a Renè Magritte b-side, but this is another feeling the viewer brings to the work. If you visually engage with this work you can explain away how the perspective makes it seem like the door opens directly onto water, when in actuality this room may be up on a hill overlooking a body of water, with the POV disguising the steps or slop just outside the door. One could interpret this painting quite simply and just as validly as: the open door to nature brings in water and light, crucial elements to (most) life. While the room in the back has sunlight too, it’s less and fainter than the open door to nature.

Much has been commented on, even by the artist himself, with her focus on light and shadows. I feel this is mirrored in the focus on loneliness/solitude and external forces. By which I mean, even in the landscapes with no human figure, the viewer sort of substitutes in and is made to reflect on their own feelings. The landscape can match your mood or you an allow it to suggest one to you. When there are human figures, even more than one, you still get the sense they are inside themselves and looking outward, rather than imagining how they fit “into” the scene they’re in. For instance, the earlier cited work Summer Interior depicts a woman who is in her environment yet given the arrangement and her state of dress and look, she is also a million miles away from her environment focused on something else. Did she just get divorced? Is she depressed and thinking of the past? Or it is even something good that has her so flustered?