I can tell you why we buy "movies" represented on various media format. It is 'cause of the kids. They can watch the same movie 12 times in one day, then get pissed when I shut them down on #13, like they have never seen it before, and will never get a chance to see it again. I have rented the same flick for them 8 times in some instances. At that point I realized that, economically, purchasing the movie was a better choice. Plus I can avoid going down to the video rental place, which is one of my least favorite tasks.

The hands-down worst movie rental place I've ever been to is the Hastings in (Not So) Great Falls, MT. It is right on 10th Ave, which is the main "strip" in the town. Not a downtown area, just an long cluster of casinos and chain stores lumped in with old run down shit-shops. Anyway, the Hastings is ridiculously busy at all times, which makes the parking area a nightmare to get in and out of, especially with kids in tow. By far the worst part of this place is the interior. All the movies are arranged in what is best described as a hallway. Racks of movies are set up in a "library" rack assemblage, with the hallway like space between them. The problem is that the racks reach almost to the ceiling, and the walkspace between them is at most 4 feet wide. So what happens is that every time that you need to move down the aisle, you have to walk around someone else, usually having to brush by them and whoever they are with. You get a couple a large people in the aisle, and you are done. No movement until they clear out. Add to all this the fact that the interior of the store is hot and stinky in the summer, and what you have is movie rental hell.

Yeah, I guess forgot about the kid facet of movie purchasing. That is a nice thing about kids is that they'll watch the same thing over and over. I guess I should reserve my judgment of this guy in Best Buy until I know his story. That place puts me in such a bad mood though, that I have to start capping on everyone I see.

Also, I do agree with you that going to movie rental places is a major bummer. Stressful and annoying, especially on a weekend night. They have this new service in Denver and Boulder where some guy on a scooter delivers movie rentals and food to your house. And the next time you order more movies, they pick up the old ones. Sounds like a sweet deal, but they don't have it where I live. Somebody in Missoula should jump on that shit.

I love that phrase "shit-shops" that you used. It sounds very appropriate for a place in Great Falls.

There used to be a outfit like that in Missoula, but it went belly-up. I think it was around for a year or two, in the early 90's. Even if a place could offer the drop off service, and you returned them yourself, it would be a good deal. The return end of movie rental is easy enough. If they could couple the service with a online ordering/inventory database, it would be real sweet. You could log on, see what is available, order, pay, and sit back. Then return the movie in a couple days. For a guy like you, Yale, this no human contact method would be ideal.

I don't know about the guy you saw, but anyone purcahsing "Little Nicky" sounds like a dill to me.

Holy moly, you gave me a lot to write about today, Yale. Best Buy & Hastings = fucking hell.

So when I first moved to NYC, the whole dotcom thing was peaking, and Kozmo.com just ruled. You could go online, order a movie and a couple of pints of Ben & Jerry's for yourself and your girl, all delivered within an hour by one of those superhipster bike couriers. It felt like a revolution. Jobs AND convenience. In a place like Manhattan, that kind of thing was totally viable, but of course they spread out to every place in the country and went belly-up within about 16 months.

Eventually I settled on a spot in New York called the Video Place. What it lacked in name grooviness, it made up for in selection and efficiency. I paid $48 up front for 13 rentals of 2 movies. The store was 3 blocks from my apartment so I never really took advantage of the delivery and PICK UP service provided by high school kids on BMX bikes, but I thought that was really cool. Rather than having 500 copies of Reign of Fire or whatever the new release was, they stocked all kinds of weird old movies along with the newer stuff. Documentaries and foreign, etc. My favorite part was the complete lack of computers. Instead of an expensive cash register system, they had smart people working there, and used 5x8 note cards to keep track of what you rented and how many rentals you had left. It was beautiful, and I miss that place a lot since I moved to Los Angeles.

But now, I have Netflix. I pay ‘em $20 a month and set up my movie list on the Web site. They let me have three DVDs at a time, and I just mail them back whenever I want to, in the postage-paid envelopes they provide. As soon as they get that movie back, they send me the next one on my list. It's just genius. I love watching movies, and I hate rental shops, and this makes me sound like a god damn commercial for Netflix.

Finally, two timely titles I have recently watched which comment heavily on many issues discussed on Yalestar: Network and How to Get Ahead in Advertising. Check ‘em out.

Yo, I was totally just about to ask whether anyone had tried out the Netflix service. It sounds like a winning business model. They could not have possibly made movie rental any easier. That's 20 bucks a month well spent, I'd say. Too bad the BMX kids couldn't make a go of it. That's way more practical than the web-based grocery delivery service or some of the other goofball schemes they were trying to get going during the Internet Gold Rush years.

I don't know about the guy you saw, but anyone purcahsing "Little Nicky" sounds like a dill to me.

Damn straight. I was housesitting for my neighbor last summer. Kind of a pretty-boy and a dork, but a nice enough feller. We just kind of exchange pleasantries but never really hang out. Well anyway, whilst housesitting, I noticed that he had Little Nicky in his DVD library, and I haven't been able to take the guy seriously ever since. I had the misfortune of paying money to see that "movie" when it came out (against my will, mind you). Now, I don't see a whole lot of movies, so I'm sure there's worse ones out there, but I've never seen a movie be so fucking stupid that I felt like someone dunked a broomstick in Tabasco and rammed it up my ass as I did with Little Nicky. I wouldn't watch that felch-fest again if you put a gun to my head.

The only thing I have heard about Kansas City comes from a young gentleman I consorted with for a brief while. He said he, his dad and his brother were on their way from Montana to Memphis and stopped in KC to get some gas. While dad was filling up, a car full of maniacs drove up, rolled down their windows and started spraying the poor sucker at the next pump with gunfire. (By the way, isn't live ammunition in the presence of gas pumps a total fire hazard?) Needless to say, the guy was dead on the spot and in the ensuing chaos, my friend and his dad drove out of there as fast as they could, not even bothering to pay. On the way back, they picked a different city to gas up in.

In defense of Lil' Nicky's star I'd like to posit that the film Punch Drunk Love must be one of 2002's overlooked sleeper hits. What a fucking movie! Great news, there. I enjoyed the hell out of it and think that ol' P.T. Anderson has officially turned around the Dud-Rocket that brought us Magnolia. Damn, if Sandler didn't just act up a freaking storm in that thing.

Even the sticky floor and lone, rattly 15" woofer that counts as a 'sound system' at the Cine-3 didn't deter me from what can only be described as a Total Experience.

KC, eh? May have driven through the place way back when visiting the Vaneks of Saint Louis, now deceased. Now their barbecue style is vinegar-bathed?

KC point counter point:

I know a missoula girl, moved to KC married and African American gentleman, has a few kids now, totally digs it.

KC is supposedly famous for BBQ, so get your chicken and ribs on yo.

Congrats on the job promotion, Yale! Hefty increase in the salary department~that rocks! Too bad it sounds like it's in a shitty area. I have the reverse scenario-I like the location of my job but the pay is abysmal.

PS-I believe we saw some of "Little Nicky" while holed up in a hotel room on Kuta Beach. It was pretty much the movie channel, BBC (you can only see the same stories so many times) or go outside and get hassled mercilessly by peddlers.

Cap'n Jep will get you high tonight, just a little push and you'll be flying.

Congratulations to Yale.

Having been a neighbor in his cube land I fully appreciate the effort and perseverence. The place truely is as numbing as being hit in the head with a large hammer. The folks believe that being a rebel is wearing a tee shirt with other than the Denver Broncos on it.
But Yale was the drummer in a punk band, Nuff said.

I would suggest the Savers shopping experience. Nice mix of lower income types and wanna be hipsters.
Note on KC. it was the first place I ever dined in a Denny's.
appologies to William Joel.

Note on KC. it was the first place I ever dined in a Denny's.

Weird! My first Denny's experience was in Santa Cruz. That was where all the UCSC punks and hippies hung out to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee during the wee hours. We didn't have a Denny's in Missoula, MT until '94 or so. And before it was a Denny's, the building had a long life as a Sambo's. Anyone remember Sambo's? And between being a Sambo's and a Denny's it was a Budget Tapes & Records.

I would suggest the Savers shopping experience.

Yeah, I've wanted to check that place out. Like most men, I have exactly five work outfits. Five plaid shirts, one for each day of the week, and one pair of jeans that get worn every day. I have one standby short-sleeve plaid shirt in my rotation, but it looks like something a shop teacher from the 70s might wear. In summer I switch to slacks on account of we all know how uncomfortable jeans are in 90-degree weather.

One nice thing about working at Quark is that you could show up in a tank top and sweatpants if you wanted. I really dug wearing shorts and t-shirts to work, but I felt like a slob when I walked downtown for lunch amid all the well-dressed Beautiful People. I guess the downside to being able to show up in a tank top and sweatpants was that a lot of people did just that. You'd go into the kitchen and there'd be dudes who hadn't shaven all week, hair all fucked up, and smelling like they'd been sleeping in their clothes for days. Sort of made for an unprofessional work environment.

I'm trying to unearth the fundamental difference between movies and music. I mean, why don't movies stand up to repeated viewings the way music does listening? I can listen to an album every day for a month, but I couldn't sit through even my favorite movie more than once in the space of a month. Am I different from most adults in that way? Are there adults that watch movies over and over (aside from porn), finding new and wondrous new tidbits upon every viewing? Is the fundamental difference the fact that movies command so much more of your immediate attention?

Is the fundamental difference the fact that movies command so much more of your immediate attention?

In short, yes. I think people can retain visual images more easily than audio. Our world is so overwhelmingly visually driven, I think people are just naturally predisposed to that, and tire of images more quickly.
On a related note: Audio on the other hand is way different, for people who see, hearing is a secondary sense. The general public's hearing capacity for music is the shits. If you listen to commerical radio, the music production, and I mean the fidelity separate from the performance, is all standardized in a very narrow dynamic range due to excess compression during mastering and playback. What this has done has tuned people out to a lot of good music, that may have been recorded with less expensive gear or in a more transient less compressive analog nature akin to pre digital recording...because they cant interpret music outside the modern narrow dynamic range.
To all the engineers and mastering techs out there: Let it breath for fucks sake, its only Rock n Roll, quit squahing it.

Sambo's

Hell yeah. Every Sunday night 80-84.

I would have to agree with what stets says here about the general state of lameness of the vogue recording/audio trends. New rock music is generally dynamically flat, as stets describes. Basically the best way to describe it is that it is sonically sterile. Yeah it has huge low end, good balance of frequency from top to bottom, but has absolutely no air in the mix. None of the 3D sound you hear in good recordings.

The only thing that I would argue here is that this sound is not an artifact of the digital recording process itself, as much as it is the engineer's penchant for that type of overall sound. There are a lot of good/vintage sounding, dynamic recordings out there completed almost entirely on digital equipment. The way tho get a realistic sound, regardless of media format, is by using good mics, having a good "live" room, using combinations of close and distant mic'ing, and mixing it to sound open. Then when mastering don't squash it down, and crank the volume, to kill dynamics for the sake of overall volume. I think a lot of good recordings are ruined during mastering.

The most appealing aspect of analog recording is use of it's saturation tendancies to get "the goods" out of sources and the overall mix. This is compression, but a dynamically and harmonically rich version of it.

The other thing that sucks about hearing music on the radio is that stations compresses it even further, so that it sounds nothing like what it was intended to, regardless of how it was really mixed/mastered.

Hey, Folks...

You have GOT to check this shit out. Watch Georgie shake his groove thang!

http://www.dancingbush.com