What Were We Talking About Again?
Happy (end of) October. This is the tenth issue of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit — it’s just like all those other email newsletters, except, honestly, it doesn’t shower as often as it used to.
Also, Happy Halloween. Since this edition is coming from Union Station in Chicago, it’s still an appropriate greeting for exactly one more minute. Below you’ll find the rambling piece with no ending that pushed the October newsletter to the very last minute of October until I had no choice but to press send. Will give it another shot next month.
Dead media
I’m trying to remember when and how I first saw The Holy Grail. Definitely in grade school. Definitely on VHS. But did someone own a grubby dub or did we find a fuzzy rental at the video store, or what?
I remember repeat viewings at sleepovers — suburban-LA kids pretending to be silly Englishman, staying up late and committing bits to memory (“I’ll bite your legs off!”) — a rite of passage for little boys destined to become giant nerds.
(I know it was my next-door neighbor Dave who introduced me to Monty Python to begin with. Since Dave was older, he gave me a head start on the good nerd stuff. He even helped me and a couple of friends write a skit for class called “The Knights of the Equiangular, Equilateral, Quadrilateral Table” — words you wouldn’t find in our primary school textbooks, that’s for sure. My line, spoken in a big, dopey, dumb-guy voice: “IT’S A SQUARE.”)
But how did I watch The Holy Grail the first time? I can’t remember, can’t really picture it. With VHS the way it was back then, the original widescreen image must’ve been cropped to fill the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio of our cathode-ray tube TVs… which leads me to wonder something else: When was the first time I saw the whole movie instead of just the three-quarters of the image that was leftover after it was mutilated by pan-and-scan?
I’m wondering these things because as I get older I marvel more at how all this worked, how different it is and how distant it feels. Copies of copies passed from cousin to neighbor to friend so that we could get these grainy, blurry, cropped glimpses of another world (in this case, 1970s Britain).
And this also happened with anime, with horror films, with blockbusters taped off cable TV. From distant lands and the back of closets, to crappy 1/4-inch tape, to glowing, bulbous TV sets, to straight into our brains. Maybe not the magic of a bottomless grail, but, it’s some kind of miracle — I don’t know what kind — the miracle of magnetic tape, I suppose. And if you waited a few minutes for the cassette to rewind, you could even do it again.
It’s easier now, thanks to the miracles of high-speed internet and streaming video. No need for bookshelves full of plastic and cardboard boxes, just a subscription (or two or three or four…) and a remote. The janky world of physical media is dead, replaced by a clean stream of 1s and 0s.
But if you look again, the janky-ness and grubbiness are still there: bad transfers and bad UIs, low bitrates and over-compression, judder, the reverse bowdlerization of cropping 4:3 images to fill HD TV screens, and the scourge of motion smoothing. Our home entertainment future is not all it was promised to be.
And dead media still dominates in the quality department for those of us who want to make sure we see every pixel and hear every bit the way they were intended by the creator. As with the audio quality of CDs, the images and sound you get off a Blu-ray remain about as good as you can get, from the depth of color to the richness of sound.
That’s one of the reasons why I was still getting shiny plastic discs from Netflix up until they shuttered their “DVD” business at the end of last month. But the main reason was selection. The promise of streaming delivery was anything we ever wanted to watch, whenever we wanted to watch it. But even though storing and delivering digital bits should be more efficient compared to storing physical discs in warehouses and sending envelopes through the U.S. mail system, streaming falls short here again.
At its height, Netflix’s DVD/Blu-ray library had 100,000 different titles to ship to your mailbox — whereas its streaming library has been estimated to only have somewhere between 3,800 and 6,500 titles at any given time over the last five years.
(And those streaming titles are heavily weighted toward recent movies and shows. When William Friedkin died in August, the only way to watch To Live and Die in LA (1985) was on a Blu-ray that had been released just a month prior. No download, no rental, no streaming option, and no previous physical release was available. Similarly, when Laurie Piper died a couple of weeks ago, I got curious about one of her early movies, Douglas Sirk’s No Room for the Groom (1952) — and the only way to watch that is to purchase what looks like a cheaply produced DVD from 2014.)
It’s not the physics of physical media that are holding the infinite library back. Turns out, serving the long tail just isn’t part of the streaming business plan. From Sam Adams’ article in Slate, “The Death of Netflix DVD Marks the Loss of Something Even Bigger”:
Netflix’s offerings increasingly reflected the understanding that, while people may think they like the idea of having tens of thousands of options a click away, in practice, they’re only interested in watching a handful of them, and they’re not especially picky about what that handful contains.
Or as one of the chief dunderheads in charge of HBO Max put it:
“This whole idea of warehousing content on Max, on a streaming platform, in retrospect is incomprehensible,” the CFO of HBO’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, recently told investors. “A small percentage of titles really drives the vast majority of viewership and engagement.”
As with the movies in theaters (franchises, superheroes, reboots, recycled intellectual property, more superheroes, and a year-round parade of horror flicks), instead of being surprised by all the things we can imagine, we mostly get more of same. (But at least The Holy Grail is available on Netflix — for now.)
Instead of a proper ending to this rambling post, here are some stats from my Netflix DVD–watching history:
Most rented year: 2006 — Including Marc Bolan & T.Rex: Born To Boogie (1973), Butley (1974), Xanadu (1980), Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swan (1982), UHF (1989), Aeon Flux: The Complete Animated Collection (1991), Truman Show (1998), Megadeth: VH1 Behind the Music Extended Edition (2001), Russian Ark (2002), The Nomi Song (2004), and The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005).
Least rented year: 2021 — After the Storm (2016). That’s it. That’s all I rented for the whole year.
Last disc shipped to me — Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Disc 1 (1979). Now I only have the first disc of a two-disc set, dammit!
Tito and Wake
From losing Jerry Remy to Curt Schilling becoming a pod person, it’s sad watching the 2004-era Red Sox fade away to time. But last month was particularly rough.
Terry Francona is retiring, but at least he got to go out the way he wanted to:
“I’ve taken pride in doing what I think is right, and I think this is right,” Francona said. “I don’t have the energy to do the job the way I want to do it. Rather than hang around for the wrong reasons, I’d rather just go out on my own terms. Not many people get to do that.”
Francona was Cleveland’s manager longer than Boston’s. and the hometown crowd gave him a nice sendoff (way better than the one the Red Sox gave him when he left Boston, anyway).
Don Orsillo also had nice things to say about Tito (and gets a nice cheap shot in there, as well).
Tim Kurkjian’s piece for ESPN captured a lot of Francona’s humor and humanity (which is one of the reasons it was such a joy having him as the Red Sox manager all those seasons — funny pre- and postgame pressers. Imagine that!).
I enjoyed the MLB documentary, “Tito: The Terry Francona Story”. (Good luck figuring out when and where you can watch it, tho.)
And then there’s Tim Wakefield, who passed away on the final day of the 2023 Red Sox season.
I was at Citi Field to see the Mets play the Phillies when Wakefield’s face and name suddenly appeared on the outfield scoreboard before the game, his life bracketed by dates — August 2, 1966–October 1, 2023.
It was a shock. The public had learned that he had cancer just four days earlier (news that was leaked by the aforementioned human turd, Curt Schilling).
Wakefield was with Boston from 1995, when he was traded from the Pirates, to 2012, when he retired before the season began, having worn the Red Sox uniform longer than any other player. Now he was gone, at age 57.
Since all the games on the last day of the regular season start at the same time, the news broke just before the Sox game began, just like it had in Queens. Kevin Youkilis, Wakefield’s teammate on the Sox for eight seasons, was on-air doing color commentary for NESN that afternoon, and he is audibly shaken at the start of the broadcast.
Later on in the broadcast, Boston Globe reporter Alex Speier reflected on Wakefield’s impact on the Sox and the community, noting that he was a “beautiful source of consistency who was always just kind and welcoming.”
On Twitter, Orsillo shared the story behind a funny NESN commercial he did with Wakefield during Orsillo’s first season as the new Sox announcer.
Going into the NYTimes archive, we learn even Wakefield’s opponents admired him. Following the Yankees’ spectacular (and ever-so-sweet) collapse to the Red Sox in the 2004 ALCS, manager Joe Torre called the visiting clubhouse to personally congratulate Wakefield on going to the World Series(!).
But if you only click on one thing about this stalwart baseball player — even if it’s because of the slightest passing interest in men in pajamas running around a field and playing a kids’ game — then I encourage you to click on this episode of The Memory Palace podcast.
In 14 minutes, Nate DiMeo captures everything that made Wake great — from the way he stepped toward home plate when he pitched to what makes knuckleballs and knuckleballers so special, to his selfless role in making Red Sox history.
Wake was supposed to start Game 4 in the 2004 ALCS, but he did not. Instead Tito made him the Opening Day starter in the 2005 Red Sox home opener. It’s a good story why.
Other rabbit holes
DVD RIP. Worth linking to again, Sam Adams’ has a proper burial for the DVD age in Slate’s ”The Death of Netflix DVD Marks the Loss of Something Even Bigger”.
Content stinks. Jason Bailey is right that Emma Thompson is right — his NYTimes article, ”Emma Thompson Is Right: The Word ‘Content’ Is Rude”.
Physical media rules. I’m less convinced that the New Yorker’s Richard Brody is right about everything here, but I do share a lot of the same feels if not all the conclusions in his article, “What We Lose When Streaming Companies Choose What We Watch”.
And that’s it for this month’s edition. Have a good one.
jf