Blockbuster goes out of business, it's the end of an era, I never even subscribe and now I have the uncomfortable feeling of being one of those drifted by the zeitgeist. Heavens! Have I ever been part of the flow or did I always remain at the side? It's hard to tell when you're tasting the spirit of your times instead of just sheeply following trends… afterall the two things are never completely apart.
Anyway, Blockbuster was bad and ugly, and there could be some joy in its demise if it didn't happen by the hand of far worse monsters, so here comes the revenge: living at the edges of the flow, especially now that it couldn't possibly be a self emanation of a collective culture - more likely a wicked stream of trends enforced by marketing masterminds payrolled by the uber-hated and never too reported capitalist elite, it's more than ever a personal pride.
It all buckles up to the same old dilemma: "are you in or are you out? and if you are, why are you and especially do you know you are?" It's always better to be in and aware. Old fellow Andrea Pazienza knew it well, and for a short while, he was.
Oh.... how I agonized in the 90s, as an average FM radio listener, when following contemporary music, forced to suffer through shit over shit stashed in piles in the exhausting wait for what still was barely listenable. That was the incubation period for the musical disaster yet to come in the following decades and I used to be rather unsettled… nowadays, at least on that front, my anxieties are more noble.
What's the looming moral for the young man struggling with the most difficult of his battles? The answer may lie in a bizarre Japanese term ...