Ghosts of Video Stores Past by Keith Phipps

My first jobs, apart from those I got through my undergraduate university, were at video stores. This is how old I am. I have outsized affection for those bygone temples of commerce that transformed the accessibility of movies, so I’m extremely excited to watch Videoheaven, the Alex Ross Perry documentary that prompts this piece by Keith Phipps. The article effectively gets at the intense appeal of video stores, and yet there’s still so much more to be said about what it was like to patronize those places, much less staff the counter for hours on end. It’s also strange to consider how briefly dominant this business model was in the culture (grocery stores and gas stations had walls of rentable video cassettes) only to be all but extinct a couple decades later. This article is published by The Reveal.

What Almost Famous can still teach us about music criticism by Sam Rosenberg

Writing for AV Club, Sam Rosenberg examines Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous through the lens of its commentary on music criticism. I can’t help but think of Almost Famous as a recent release, but Crowe’s best film is more than a quarter-century old, and its already-wistful remembrance of a different time in music journalism looks all the more quaint up against the current capitulations to pop star superfans. Rosenberg looks to the film as an accurate, maybe aspirational depiction of the symbiotic relationship between art and criticism.