The Film Lover's Diet

I have for a long time consumed media to a prodigious degree. It began with books, and that continues, but my intake matured with the addition of movies. For years, I made due with a movie or two once in a while when the family made a trip to the video store. I still have memories of visiting the one at the mall near our house of the time. I would bound in with bare feet, taking in the confines with wonderment. At that time, the stores carried VHS and Betamax. Once a houseguest mixed them up, and we were left wanting for an evening. A video store in the neighborhood we moved to later became something of a second home, only to close in advance of those which fell victim to one of the current sources of my fix. Netflix I believe I have spoke of either in passing or at length. Either way, it needs no further discussion.

What I'm so fond of these days is something which I've had tastes of all too fleetingly in the past: the beloved and precious public library. In my youth, it carried only books, periodicals and cassette tapes. CDs came in after a fashion. Somewhere around that time, VHS tapes also entered into common circulation. I did partake of them when the opportunity would arise from time to time, but was regretful that it should do so most seldom. That changed in concert with my transition from a fairly nascent charter school to one which was so early in gestation that it had no home. In between meeting in a conference room at one parent's office park and acquiring a permanent home in a humble strip mall, we met in a series of library meeting rooms.

Almost better than the incredible if totally undocumented education I was receiving was the fact that I spent every day of the week in a library. I could, and did, bring home a passel of books and movies every day, absorbing all that I could from them. There were Roger Moore-era Bond films, there were Hitchcock thrillers and there were novels and non-fiction tomes of quantity and disposition now impossible to account for. It was a paradise of the kind that only the very best sort of people would recognize when they saw it.

After a time, I left that arrangement and found myself in public high school. I made the most of the school's library, and still believe I may have been the only member of the student body to check out any materials out of personal interest. They carried, to the best of my recollection, no audiovisual materials to speak of, and had little which did not pertain to common high school lesson plans. Even so, it was a place which I gravitated towards often and held in quite high regard- most unlike the middle school library, which I entered only when taken there for class or to attempt entry into the exclusive world of Magic card cames.

I employed the junior college campus library in the same way I did its high school counterpart, continuing to get movies only occasionally from the video store and public library. I was then turned on to Netflix at this time, however, and it promised to re-open the spigot. I have used it most of the time since then. Coming to Los Angeles offered me a opportunity to supplement it. This fair city's library has a generous lending policy and a remarkable collection of DVDs, and I take full advantage. Lately, I have been checking out as many as they permit every time I go over there, which is once every two or three days. It's a real blessing.

For about the first time in my life, profitable endeavors and normal social interaction take precedence, but when I have free time, I have no desire but to make another pilgrimage to the people's depository of recorded knowledge for a few more films and books.