"articles may not be exchanged"

Adorno is always good for an aphorism, and in today's perusal of Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2002), I found the following astute perception:

"We are forgetting how to give presents... The decay of giving is mirrored in the distressing invention of gift-articles, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to." (42)

Now, this could be read as a plea for more presents, and, in a way, it is. But in the same beat, I'd like to make mention of one of the best gifts I ever recall receiving: for my twenty-first birthday, S. gave me a three-page list of movies I simply had to see. If I had seen any of them, I certainly don't remember it, for my overwhelming impression after the first read was sheer novelty. And I am still working my way through the list to this day. No only did it rescue me on more than one occasion from rental-store paralysis (a pathology dying out in the wake of tailored "recommendations" from the likes of Netflix or Amazon), but it also opened up a whole world of cinema that had, due to my family's peculiar relationship to film, remained resolutely closed to me. (In my childhood, we went to the movies once a year, inevitably to our great disappointment, but we saw a film every night thanks to the invention of the VCR and always one from the Silver Screen.)

To repay her for giving me Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep and Atom Egoyan's Exotica, I gave her, for her birthday some two weeks later, a similar list of classic Hollywood films that were, until the intervention of her gift, exclusively my daily bread. Now that I am living in Basel, divorced from the independent and revival theaters in Hamburg with their 4 euro student prices, T. and I are thinking twice about going to the cinema for 18 CHF a pop and have taken to frequenting the local video rental store. This is no cause for (utter) despair: I am capable of fetishizing the rental experience almost as completely as I am the movie-going one. This often begins with a profoundly empathetic relationship to the man (always a man, always a little nerdy) behind the counter - a heady cocktail of pity, adoration, and self-pity.

I was a little shocked that T. had never seen a Hitchcock film in its entirety (after an aborted viewing of my copy of Vertigo on one of his return flights from Boston), so it seems we're doing a little mini-retrospective these days. Last night, we saw Foreign Correspondent, which immediately sent me off to make a list - one that had Strangers on a Train, Notorious, and Rebecca but also All About Eve, Laura, and Sullivan's Travels. And while I was furiously jotting down a movie list for him, I said, "maybe we should have an Ingmar Bergman retrospective too." To which he replied, "between Stephen Colbert and French and Saunders, I think I already got one."

Which doesn't mean that I won't make him see Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander with me too.