I want my MKV (Or the art of collecting nothing)

Collecting is such a bitch. I mean amassing actual things. Things with, uh, “thingness.” Things to fill the empty room you live in.

First you start with vinyl records and then CDs. You forage far and wide for that ECM, Stax or Blue Note you’ve always wanted to see spinning on your battered Technics, and later on that inherited Bose system. You journey by starlight to Cubao or Makati Cinema Square, subsist on gin instead of beer just to hear those Fender Rhodes by Return to Forever, or that burning bush of a voice on Otis Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long. Violate your ears with Black Flag and Fantomas. Reach for absent lovers with Mr. Hathaway and Miss Winehouse.

Music, there’s nothing quite like it. Your shoes are badly in need of retirement. You are okay commuting. You need to upgrade your friends. But as long as Patti, Tina, Yoko, Nico and Hedwig are around…

You ask a carpenter to build you a special book slash CD case. Bible black for effect. Arrange the CDs — biographically, at first, (so very High Fidelity) but settle with a banal chronological order. You’re like a librarian with nose-cancelling earphones.

Everything’s there. Within reach. You extend your arm, like the old man in the Hemingway classic, and come up with the blue marlin of Yes’ “Fragile” or Radiohead’s “In Rainbows.” (Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, get it?) The thingness is obvious. Plastic jewel cases that crack easily, album jackets designed for dwarfs, discs that you handle oh-so delicately (you don’t want to hear Dead Flowers skipping like Keef running out of smack, er, gas).

Things are disappearing, now that you’ve started collecting bytes and nothing but.

Now, you have a terabyte or two of MP3s. Entire discographies. Out-of-print records. Live bootlegs. Anything searchable. Can. John Zorn. Godspeed You! Black Emperor. You sign up at Apple or Amazon and, suddenly, you have no reason to search fruitlessly in the sad excuse for record stores we have in Manila. (You don’t want to hold the line up for buyers of Juris’ or Princess’ latest radio fodder). You get to keep your MRT card in its holster.  

Instead of buying discs, you buy storage. Bible-black Western Digital hard drive. By giving up things you amass more things.

Your movie collection is the next to go. From VHS tapes to DVDs to Blu-Ray, changes are always afoot. There is action forever, what with Technology having fiery ants in its pants. So your assets of things become obsolete in a matter of years. (LaserDiscs, anyone?)

Now, you got an entire virtual library of MKV (or Matroska Multimedia Container) movie files floating around in space, foreshadowed by the blind Argentine author of Labyrinths. I won’t mention his name because you ought to know him.

And the picture clarity is astounding, the color contrasts are stunning — makes you want to put on makeup and nice clothes, make your teeth gleam, become an endorser, smile for the director, and sell your soul to the evil empire of consumer products. Buy. Download. Buy again. Download more.

Your downloaded MKV or MP4 files of Pan’s Labyrinth and El Orfanato are crisper and even more evocative than the DVDs you bought at cutthroat costs, and your compendium of Terry Gilliam, Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch (dare I say, Lynch whose name should have a “TM” somewhere) makes you see those classics in another light — brighter and more piercing. With more ultra-violence.   

Thus, you never venture into that room where your DVDs and CDs are gathering dust and cobwebby days. You turn your room into Neverland Ranch, buy a better and faster media player (a tossup between WD and Seagate), even ask your brother for his old Acoustimass setup, and wish that no one would darken your doorsteps.

Just imagine your complete universe is in that black box. Don Vito Corleone is fondling a cat just a couple of sectors away from where Colonel Kurtz quotes T.S. Eliot, where Terry Malloy laments how he could’ve been a contender, and where someone else makes good use of butter.

A small hard drive that sums up a large chunk of the celluloid history of world. Just press “Play.”

But one day, you wake up and that black box of yours gets corrupted. A mysterious virus has eaten away your Blade Runner, The Alien Quadrilogy and Videodrome in the night. Just like The Blob. Your Chiquito’s Estong Tutong and Tito, Vic & Joey’s Working Boys display that “Unsupported” prompt. Gigabytes upon gigabytes of movies siphoned away just like that. More flicks follow the next day. Elvis on AVI has left the building.

What now? What the hell now?

That’s the problem of having an entire collection of cinema and music made up of bytes perched precariously on bad sectors. You never really owned anything in the first place. It’s like having a relationship with a woman made of ether. 

Maybe the thing is to be Max Cady in Cape Fear. As Cady exits prison, a guard reminds him of his books. “Already read ‘em,” he says. So, there: Once you’ve experienced art, it is downloaded forever. You know that Bruce Willis is already a ghost in Sixth Sense. You know that Kevin Spacey simply made Keyser Söze up. Nobody can corrupt that hard disk inside your head.

Unless you go smacking with Keith Richards.