The nightmare is over. I have finished moving … and can barely move.
I just want to burn the now-smelly clothes I was wearing all weekend (though in reality I will probably wash some and discard others).
Next I have to start sorting and discarding – since that step got skipped by necessity.
I’m wearing a T-shirt instead of my usual bundled-up winter attire as I write this – either because my new apartment now has less empty space to heat, or because my overworked body is just radiating heat energy. Or both.
The three years I spent in my old apartment were eventful to say the least. I’m relieved to see the end of 2008, but in my mind I had to finish this move before I could truly start living in 2009.
Recently I’ve come across a few additional reasons to kiss the past goodbye. One is that VHS is now officially dead. Just over ten years ago we were still editing on VHS (S-VHS, actually) at RIT, and having to explain, to anyone who received copies, that you would have to set your player to Mono so that the two student-produced audio channels would mix properly and become audible. The low-tech grubbiness of VHS seems to symbolize all the qualities that Gen X-ers consider “authentic”, so it’s perhaps fitting that it should finally fade away.
Another is that Cineforum has closed. What is Cineforum, you ask? Well, every time I visited Toronto, I would see these handmade, ‘zine-style flyers posted all over the city announcing the latest movie screening at Cineforum. One time it was “The Wizard of Oz” played in sync with the Pink Floyd album that supposedly went well with it. Another time – at least twice, actually – it was a program of “uncensored” cartoon shorts from the Looney Tunes era. Or it would be a marathon of old horror movies on Halloween. I was so intrigued by these fliers that in my latest movie, for a scene set in a Toronto video store, I decorated the location with fake Cineforum fliers in an attempt to add convincing detail.
But alas, I never actually went to any Cineforum screening, as my weekend schedule never seemed to coincide with the screenings being advertised. I did at least walk past the building once, on my way to something else in the city (it seemed to just be somebody’s house with a neon “Cineforum” sign in the window), but that’s as close as I ever came. I always vowed that on my next trip up north I would check it out. Now I never will. Cineforum, curated by some dude named Reg Hartt, seemed to be the kind of quirky public venue for old or obscure movies that used to mean a lot before DVDs and torrents made this stuff easier to find. Yes, you can get the films themselves more easily, but there was something about gathering in a funky hole-in-the-wall with other die-hards that I will miss. Oh well.
