Collect Call

Critic Bill Wyman has a piece at Slate about how pop culture collecting has changed.  Years ago, music and film fanatics were like cultists, seeking out rare material, as well as each other.  Thanks to new technology, almost everything, and everybody, is immediately available.  As Joni Mitchell put it, something's lost and something's gained.

The gain is greater, but there is something romantic about searching for hard-to-find material.  I've never been a collector type (i.e., someone who fetishizes something for its rarity rather than its quality), but I remember wanting to see or hear things that weren't easy to get.  When you finally managed to, it was sweet.

I remember paging through Goldmine, a magazine for record collectors, looking at hundreds of pages listing what various people had available. I remember indie record stores that sold bootlegs.  I remember searching through garage sales, hoping to find out-of-print albums that, if available at retail stores, would go at premium prices.

I also remember people passing around unmarked videotapes with rarities--old films, foreign films, shorts, etc. (I learned about Hong Kong cinema that way).  Before that, I even remember people squirreling away reels--actual celluloid--in their closets, pulled out occasionally for special film nights.

Now people can call up any song any time anywhere--on their computer, their phone--and pretty soon, they'll probably be able to do the same for movies.  Whenever I think of that, I'm reminded of my first year in college when a guy down the hall spent the better part of the year searching for a copy of Frijid Pink's "House Of The Rising Sun." Is he out there now watching it on YouTube, or does he hang out in his basement, playing his old 45s, cursing all this new-fangled technology?