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Three unrelated (I think) fragments

(1) In a curious extension of the dialogue (happily not a monologue) here on neophilia -- to adopt Ed Ward's fine phrase -- I stumbled upon Michael Hirschorn's essay in the back of the March Atlantic on the future of television.

Under the headline "The Revolution Will Be Televised" Hirschorn, a writer for TV himself, writes, in part:

"The traditional TV-viewing experience doesn't have to die..., but to save it, the media-industrial complex will have to act in nontraditional and uncomfortable ways -- and will also have to rethink what 'TV' is. Currently, it means watching a professionally produced video program -- passively -- on a television console that is fed with content delivered as part of a subscription to a cable or digital service. In the future, TV will mean a cacophony of professional and amateur short- and long-form content shipped via a variety of platforms to a variety of devices, only one of which is the Sony BRAVIA taking up too much space in your living room. Then, that content will be edited, poked at, commented on, parodied, and rebroadcast by you the former viewer -- now 'user' -- to whomever you choose. Who gets paid by whom to deliver what to whom in this new dispensation is, as in every moment of grand tectonic digital shift, the $60 billion question."

Yes, it is.

My wife, who has neither read nor heard me discuss this piece, is already talking about wanting on-demand downloads to watch whatever TV she wants to watch. We are, of course, talking about mitigating our hideous cable bill as we contemplate living with less income in the coming months. But it's easy to watch TV patterns change; we have a garage apartment which is sometimes rented, but which does not have cable (nor broadcast, because we live in a holler) as an option. Our last tenant simply signed up for Netflix and watched her TV a season at a time. And movies. And whatever.

That said, I can't imagine wanting to spend any amount of time watching amateur television -- the professional stuff is bad enough. And, anyway, my interest in the cathode ray tube is principally limited to sports and news.

Hirschorn's piece springs nicely from the implosion of the music industry, and continues:

"...The flip side of the music business's obstinancy is a kind of we -need-to-be-down-with-the-kids type of herd mentality. It dictates that unless you throw everything online, you don't "get it." But "getting it" does not necessarily mean giving in to the braying of the digerati, especially when you will destroy your business in the process....
"But as the music industry learned very quickly (and the newspaper industry before it), this model swiftly turns you from a business to a charity, undermining the value of your product even as it brings your content to a larger audience."

Interesting piece, anyhow.

Somehow I am reminded of the dozens of laser discs my older brother has, a product of his years as a rising executive. I suppose they were an imperfect technology, in that movies had to be stopped and flipped and such, but they were expensive and better than video tape and he has a lot of them. And they're worth nothing on the day that his player quits working. This is the problem the digerati have got to work through: We can't keep suckering consumers into buying music or TV or eBooks or whatever and then make their investment useless in five years.

At some point our threat to disconnect from the TV entirely will begin to make sense.

My thanks, by the way, to all who have expressed interest in and a vision forward for our website. The problem we keep banging into is, Where does the money come from? If anybody knows the answer, please let us in on the secret.

(2) Jed Hilley, executive director of the Americana Music Association, forwarded this blog my way: http://www.the9513.com/jumping-ship-reflections-on-americana-music/
It is a curious argument, made by a writer named Ben Cisneros (whose name is familiar, though I cannot place it). Here's an excerpt:

"The official establishment of an Americana music genre has been devastatingly counterproductive to the cause of advancing worthwhile Country Music. The artistic haven they set out to build has ended up to be nothing but a ghetto, where old acts go out to pasture and new acts languish as non-starters. Gary Allan has called Americana "the starving side" and he's right. In building their fool's kingdom, the AMA made sure that there was a place for Nashville to send all the music that was too mature, too honest, too bold, or too groundbreaking to fit into their plans to be America's foremost providers of musical junk-food."

As one of the 30 people who sat in the room and agreed to form the AMA, I should like to assure Mr. Cisneros that, first, no cigars were involved (although I seem to remember a jar of moonshine). And that, really, our discussion had nothing whatever to do with mainstream country music. We simply wished to build a viable community around music in which mainstream country music had no interest, and was going to have no interest. With the rise of Garth and Shania and the rest, mainstream country moved irrevocably from being a niche business to being a form of pop music. The economics changed. No longer were artists able to sustain careers selling hundreds of thousands of albums; they had to sell millions, or be dropped. We believed -- and I still believe -- that this is a foolish business model. And so we sought to create a trade association for good music that wasn't going to be pop music.

Never was it our job to save country music from itself.

As a byproduct of that, we created a kind of haven for artists who weren't young and beautiful, and, another time, I should like to dwell on the importance -- to me, about to turn 49 -- of fostering the notion that good work can be done by and for people who are of more mature years.

(3) The inevitable political digression. I am struck, as an occasional visitor to Daily Kos, by how vituperative the Obama v. Hillary camps have become. It seems like Senator Clinton has created this dynamic, and it is potentially destructive. And silly.

One of the arguments being made these days is that Obama is too young, too inexperienced, to answer the red phone. But if my math is correct (and it may be a year or two off), if Obama were to take office next January he would be roughly the same age Bill Clinton was when HE took office. At the end of the cold war, with loose nukes all over the place. It's a weird argument to make. That said, if we end up with Obama v. McCain we'll have a generational war on our hands that isn't going to be pretty.

And then there's the NAFTA thing which seems to have won Ohio for Hillary, though it also seems likely she was going to win it anyhow. Apparently, again, if the blogs on Daily Kos are accurate, Senator Clinton's campaign actually had a much more direct dialog with the Canadian government indicating that her NAFTA comments were mere politics, and then had the unmitigated gall to turn a similar but even more muted discussion between Obama's folks and the Canadians into a debacle.

Now...Obama's crew didn't handle the attacks well. They spun the 3 a.m. ad quickly, but probably not hard enough. And they didn't deal with the substance of the NAFTA debate, nor turn it back on Hillary. He's going to have to demonstrate the capacity to deal with the Swiftboating world, and he's going to have to reveal some sharp elbows at some point, or lose this thing.

But, look. They HAVE to figure out a fair way to deal with delegates from Michigan and Florida, and it's not going to be honoring the "votes" which took place in January. Only Hillary campaigned (and Obama wasn't even on the Michigan ballot) in either state, and everybody understood those delegates weren't going to be seated. Now, those are probably Clinton states anyhow, but by what margin remains to be demonstrated.

Somehow -- and without the intercession of the super delegates -- the Democrats have to pick a nominee without pissing off the women who support Hillary and the African Americans who support Obama. And the young people who suddenly are inspired to believe in this weird, wondrous process. And the Democrats have to figure it out in about 48 hours.

Posted by grant on March 7, 2008 6:03 PM | Permalink