Spirit Of Salt

It happens to me somewhat frequently that I’m blown away by some technological miracle that has quietly become commonplace. I ponder sometimes whether this is more a factor of the age I’m living in or just my age, but I seldom write about it because it always seems that the subject has become just that, commonplace.

A couple of nights ago I found myself in the now rare circumstances of being alone in my house at night, disinclined to wander very far from these circumstances, and I got the idea in my head that I’d like to check out Terry Gilliam’s version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas again.  I saw the movie in the theater when it came out and didn’t exactly like it.  Part of this is doubtless the relationship I have with the book: it is one of a handful that set a hook in me and over a period of years I read it again and again.  Right off this sets any retelling at a disadvantage because every break with canon (particularly evident in a narration-heavy book) bangs this little discordant gong.

But particularly with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I was also jarred by how different the tone of the movie seemed to me than the book: darker, more enmeshed in delirious drug visuals, the whip-smart and mordant humor of the text dulled by Johnny Depp’s slurred and deadpan impersonation of Thompson’s characteristic voice (silent forever, alas, alas).

But I thought from time to time (my serial reading habit for the book having gone by the wayside) that perhaps Gilliam’s was the fairer interpretation of the work: strip away Thompson’s more polished literary voice and what remains is a tale of nearly nihilistic, drug-fueled mayhem.  At some point I thought I’d have to give the movie another viewing.

I don’t really do video on demand.  Actually I’m generally hopelessly behind the technological times.  I was late getting a CD player, a computer, way behind the curve on the mobile phone. I caught up with the broadcast version of Lost once, having gotten partway via DVDs (having arrived, late to the party, at Netflix) but didn’t care for watching television on the computer.  The Netflix on-demand option won’t talk to my computer or the Tivo and while I’m sure Comcast has a host of options they’d love to place at my disposal, I have avoided this additional time and money drain by the expedient of just not bothering to figure it out.  I have to press enough buttons to watch teevee as it is.

But a friend recently made me the generous birthday gift of an iPod Touch  and I thought I’d check out the iTunes Music Store experience of renting a movie (such bad branding, call it the Media store or something) and the brave not-so-new world of portable media at the same time.

I recently maligned the hell out of the iTMS but like a hypocrite I continue to go there when convenient (it lives in my damn music player! It’s evil genius!), demonstrating maybe that getting someone to set up an account with a recurring pay option is the true holy grail of online selling.  It is easy: the reasonable $3 rental option made it easier still.  That’s a cup of coffee (and not a fancy one).  I was not impressed with the download time or the time to transfer to the iPod, but these days I can never tell how much of any internet-related lag is my ridiculously obsolete computer, so Apple dodged a bullet there.  Beyond time, the process had what I have generally found to be the Apple appeal: it pretty much did itself, download the movie, plug in the iPod, and there it was. Ready to watch.

Sometimes it’s not so bad to be technologically remidial: I was very much the old world ape at that moment, astonished and delighted as the magic stone in my paws opened up a business-card lozenge and entertained me with moving pictures.  I thought the movie held up well, and I enjoyed watching it a lot, despite the pint-sized format. (I could get into the fact that my primary television box cannot talk to the media center on my computer, despite being connected to it by an ethernet cable, but Tivo will have to wait another day for my lash).

I discovered that “rental” is a magic word that makes DRM not mean squat to me, which may be an ethically inconsistent position, but my relationship to intellectual property is nothing if not ethically inconsistent.  Honestly the fact that it vanished after a day seemed like a feature: rental without the return trip.  I still can’t dredge up much interest in the all-access, no ownership model of music delivery, but then I never wanted to rent music in the first place.  I wouldn’t say my life has been revolutionized.  But I did enjoy bringing my movie with me to take a pee.