Image: Tina Tiller

Pop CultureNovember 14, 2022

Video collections deserve more than a sentimental RIP

Guest writer

Image: Tina Tiller

The very last of the video stores are falling and to most people those piles of videotapes are just landfill. But some feel like they’re a link to a history worth preserving.

For the last eight years or so, two stories about video stores have been repeated in the media: “Meet the Weirdos Running the Last Video Stores” and “End of an Era as Video Store Closes For Good”.

Andrew Armitage of Wellington’s AroVideo is proposing a different narrative: given that his video library can no longer be feasibly sustained as a commercial business, he’s looking to transfer ownership of the nearly 30,000 titles to an as-yet unidentified trust which would maintain it as a “working archive for the foreseeable future”. He admits, though, that the idea is “complex and has no precedent”. I take great interest in his idea.

Andrew Armitage of AroVideo. (Photo: Supplied)

A couple of years ago, I wrote and performed a solo theatre show called The Best Show in Town is at Your Place Every Night (first season sponsored by, I am proud to say, AroVideo). The title came from a large sticker on a window of Kilbirnie Amalgamated Video. (Here’s their “end of an era” story). My show used video stores as a metaphor for the things Wellington has seen and lost over the last 40 years or so. Except it wasn’t just a metaphor. It was very specifically about video stores.

Early on in the show I would give an ex-rental videotape to an audience member, telling them it was “a link, a bond. Something which endures. Something real. Something which can be held”. Near the end, I would ask another audience member where a particular tape from a particular store was. The implication was that nobody – in our present – could possibly know. The tape had served its purpose and gone from being something with value to something without value. It was – it is – useless, forgotten, missing.

If I had wanted to make a misty-eyed, as-I-remember sort of a show, I could have reminisced about walking down from my first student flat to the Aro Street Video Shop, which was by then already a Wellington institution. I could have recalled how much those rentals – Superfly, Badlands, Pink Flamingoes, Fritz the Cat, Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies – affected me then, and how the films and the circumstances around my first viewings of them are still churning around in the back of the brain as both personal history and creative mulch.

You can pass an evening talking with great fondness about going to the video shop on a Friday night to choose your five for 10 bucks. But I don’t think it’s enough to look backward, feel a little wistful, mutter “end of an era” and press on any more. We are at a critical juncture. The last remaining commercial video collections are under threat. Netflix has just released a sitcom about a late stage chain video store, and called it Blockbuster. It is a sanitised, warped and untrue sliver of negligible content which will be many people’s first and last exposure to video stores.

Jonny Potts performing his solo show The Best Show in Town is at Your Place. (Photo: Supplied)

In a way, it’s fitting that the Netflix show is so crass and awful. Video stores paved the way for streaming. They are products of the 80s, a decade synonymous with extravagance, poor taste and greed. Home rental made watching movies a private event, in step with the individualism of the times. But there was so much more to the industry than that. The period gave us films shot on video, lurid box cover art, and film commentaries. These are now relics of a defined period of film history.

AroVideo still exists. At the time of writing, you can walk in there and browse the finely curated collection of tapes and discs. It is a part of Wellington’s history and it is worth preserving. Not because we have warm, vague memories of renting tapes from the collection, but because it is a link, a bond. Something which endures. Something real. Something we have a chance to hold on to. If the collection cannot be saved, it will be reduced to “stock” and “assets” to be “liquidated”. It will be dissolved. It will evaporate. The collection is no longer commercially viable. The question is whether or not we believe it has inherent value. Now, says Armitage, “those who care about it need to share the custodianship”.

In my lifetime, it was common for three or four video stores to operate on the same city block. Nobody will ever see this again. A parallel I kept in mind while writing my show was the story of the passenger pigeon. At one time it was the most abundant bird in North America. There are eyewitness accounts of flocks of passenger pigeons blotting out the midday sun. They were hunted to extinction. When they were plentiful, people saw them only as food, and exploited them. If a single one of them were found alive today, its significance would not be that we had recovered a protein source. It would be that we still had a passenger pigeon.

You can pledge support for the preservation of the AroVideo collection here. And you can tell the Ministry for Culture and Heritage that it’s worth saving here.

Keep going!

Quite literally the only turntable you will ever need. (Photo: Supplied / Design: Bianca Cross)

Pop CultureNovember 14, 2022

The turntables that turned me into a Dad DJ

Russell Brown

Contributing writer

Quite literally the only turntable you will ever need. (Photo: Supplied / Design: Bianca Cross)

For the last few decades, digital technology has played a huge role in our lives. In partnership with Panasonic, we’ve written a few odes to some of our favourite pieces of home tech. Here, Russell Brown celebrates his trusty turntables.

I tried being a digital DJ, I really did. I got a controller and a Serato licence, but it didn’t take long to realise that I was doing the thing I already do all day, the thing I was trying to get away from: staring at a computer screen. This made me sad.

It’s not that I think being a digital DJ is actually bad. Good friends of mine make their living that way and they have skills I couldn’t dream of. But for me, I needed something I could get my hands on. I’m rubbish at woodwork and gardening and I cook nearly every night anyway, so messing about with records was it for me. I bought one direct-drive turntable and a mixer, then another turntable. I became a Dad DJ.

It helped that there was a place to play. One of our crew found a pair of classic Technics SL 1200s (my home turntables are of less exalted heritage) and a mixer, in their own road case, for our local bar to buy. It was a good place to learn by doing.

What I do is certainly not mixing, but I’ve become pretty competent at getting from one record to the next. Often that’s by dropping in on the beat using the slip mats. You cue up the record, hold it, then give it a little push on its way at the right moment. It’s a physically satisfying thing to do and it sounds great when you get it right. When you don’t get it right, at least it’s over quicker than bad beatmatching.

When it’s your turn to step up to the decks, you learn to quickly get your needles on, balance the tone arm just-so then set the tracking weight to the manufacturer’s specification. Sometimes I’ll even haul out the spirit-level app on my phone to make sure the turntable’s level. It’s a level of manual adjustment quite absent from my daily working life. You also learn to bring your own slip mats, because new records are expensive and other people are grubs.

Styluses need looking after. In his warm and relatable, if occasionally bleak, book Long Relationships, the English DJ Harold Heath writes about the experience of having fluff build up to the extent that the needle slides across the record and onto the label, a sound that “will be amplified through the pristine 12K club sound system to the abject terror of everyone in the place.” Even in the local bar, that sounds pretty bad.

But apart from that, there’s not a whole lot that can go wrong with an SL 1200. They’re literally and figuratively solid. Unlike mixers. Mixers age disgracefully. Even good mixers can become grumpy old bastards. The faders get dirty and stick and every now and then one will suddenly start processing signals in the manner of someone who is drunk and needs to go home. Cheap mixers are basically born drunk and only need provoking.

Ultimately, playing records is a thing anyone can do. Last year, the local bar began a regular open decks night called Spin Class, where anyone can be shown the basics and have a crack. The organisers and at least half of the people who turn up are women, because there has long been silly gatekeeping behaviour around men and turntables. The basic technical skills of DJing records are real and learning some of them will make you sound and feel better.

But, really, the key skill – the magic – is in your head. It is, and will always be, knowing which record to play next.