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Fear of television

Under different circumstances, the quotation with which Peter chose to introduce his piece on the Weepies might have been a provocation, but he wasn't trying to poke at the grumpy bear on the next computer, not this time:

"I don't differentiate all that much between movies, music, TV -- it's like all these companion pieces that go along with your life," says Steven Tannen.

Not my life.

We weren't raised with television in my house, not until dad and I took to watching football at the home of an economics professor who also owned a vineyard, which I imagine led to mother's relenting and finally acquiring a 12-inch black and white and hooking up the cable. To this day I cannot walk into a room with a TV on and ignore it, and this may explain -- this and a timely chainsaw accident -- how I came to watch the entire Watergate hearings.

My co-editor had a more normal raising, which doubtless reveals why he found it necessary to thank "Gilligan's Island" in the staffbox of our first issue.

Apparently, if you are a musician, television is the new lottery ticket that buys your way out of the day job you just lost. Apparently, if you are a fan of unknown artists, it is necessary to watch "Grey's Anatomy" or "Scrubs" to hear needle drops of new songs that radio is too ossified to play. It is one of the few ways musicians are well-paid in the new economy, but I refuse to watch either show because they bore me to tears. As does the music they play, which is chosen for its ability to serve as supporting wallpaper to a scene, not for its lasting creative merits as a song.

Same with movies. Or film. None of which is to minimize the virtues of good music placement (I still remember a short-lived '50s detective series that Joe Jackson did music for, and the fun I had realizing he'd placed Link Wray's "Rumble" atop a barfight), nor of being paid for same.

But the narrative structures of film and television are different, one from the other (so is the screen dimension, though that appears to be changing somewhat), and music is too important to me to allow to become nothing more than the supporting tear jerk of an already over-calculated screen moment.

Blame it on radio. They quit caring about artists, quit back-announcing songs, and were so busy buying and selling each other that they owe the bank so much money that music is only fit in among commercials and satellite-fed banter from absent DJs.

Blame it on MTV. Do I have to write more than that sentence? I didn't think so.

Blame it on the decline in record retail.

But it does little good to assign blame, for it changes nothing, fixes nothing.

There has to be a better way. There has to be a way to re-establish communities now linked only by their ability to type at each other from great distances. There has to be a way to sustain the work of musicians without whoring out their songs to film and TV and commercial spots because that's the only paying work, and the only way to be heard against the din of this over-plugged society.

I know all this writing about chickens seems obscure and remote to a great number of readers. "Green Acres" and all. But it's real. It's a beautiful day today, filled with bird calls and green everywhere and the smell of things growing which one day we will eat, except for the chicken shit. I am not nurtured by text messages and knowing where the moment's most important blog is to be found, what everybody else is listening to or thinking about. What fabulous new widget might be used to spend even more time playing on the computer.

Television is this stupid box in the livingroom that I sink into when incapable of anything else, or when there's a football or basketball game on. It's not my life. It's not real life. And real life is where art comes from.

Posted by grant on May 4, 2008 10:26 AM | Permalink

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