TRACKING...TRACKING...

VHS

Like chicken pox and car phones, The VHS tape has now skipped out of the present and become an idle curiosity, an anachronism. Those hard black plastic boxes, their guts black ribbons of color and sound, litter my closet like kicked-over tombstones. They had a good run. I have a friend who still swears by VHS, his reasoning that no matter how poor the quality of the tape, it will always run (unlike DVD). The caveat contained in that edict betrays the sad truth of VHS: They wear down. Oh, yes. The plastic cracks (or melts, at any temperature above 95F), the black on white logo slapped on the side tears and fades. The box, and we remember those, don't we? Flimsy cardboard that would rip and tear and fold, becoming a thing quite seperate from the tape itself. I have a dozen whose original contents I haven't seen in ten years. And the film itself...Let me say first that I'm not a technophile. The quality of a new, clean VHS tape is quite enough. But it doesn't stay that way. Not one thing in the world is static, and none more so than a VHS tape. To watch it is entropy in action. The sound mutes. The colors fade. The tracking loses its fidelity heartbreakingly fast. The whole enterprise is a stumbling, clumsy mess. I remember VHS. I loved it, or rather, I loved Jurassic Park. I loved Ninja Turtles. I loved the Matrix. I loved a thousand thousand others, when VHS was the only place to find them. But as soon as DVD , flawed though it may be, came onto the scene, I left VHS. VHS was the poor horseman's daughter, but DVD was my arranged bride. And though I may remember VHS fondly, I wouldn't have it any other way.

VHS: 10/20. I'll see you at the crossroads.