Even Aeschylus Got Started at Hallmark Once....

 

One day, the cultural boundaries of social media will no doubt predictably expand to allow us, one and all, to meet the communal expectation of sharing in real time-live action video what were at one time in our anthropology human life’s most intimate routines.  Like consuming our food over the sink or at the kitchen counter, or perhaps our time in the rest room. While limited, obviously and agreeably to head shots, depicting nothing too visibly obscene or graphic, much as some modern prophets once presaged, for those inclined, our most intimate lives are going to become some kind of inside-out Maysles Brothers-Fredrick Wiseman-reminiscent documentary, composed of some lesser-cultivated mounds of self-cinematographuzed surveillance footage. The more pretentious among us will opt for black-&-white.

Like any cultural norm on the horizon, its advent exists in pronounced traces. The earliest trace will be inarguably defined in social media’s initial effects upon the communal celebration of birthdays in the common Judeo-Christian culture.

To the day this passage was written, social media has, amidst the scorn and reprimand, been lauded as the extended family conduit, allowing the detached and lonely among us to more easily share and cultivate couches of friends and loved ones, with whom we can express our most immediate thoughts and feelings, and hence never be alone.

Intimate relationships of any sort work both ways. Those whose lives rebuild upon the welcome change of such constant personal connection are forced to become re-socialized to accept the responsibility of both acknowledging and receiving perfunctory greetings upon one’s most ambivalently held personal dates. The most common of these would be birthdays.

What makes the treatment of birthdays on social media such a precarious matter is that while on-line virtual communication is so rife with capability for video linking, picture-sharing, creative graphics and the like, there exists among our electronically cyber-social population, a vast amount of gregarious Facebook participants over the age of twenty, who hold their birthdays, for better or worse, as a mostly non-celebratory event. In kind, to those adults they know and hold dear, they may see fit also not to openly laud any grand well-wishes, but rather keep their knowledge of their friends’ awareness of their acknowledgment silently tacit, and greatly respected.

To many, it isn’t really about an abject “fear” of aging, or even some excruciating discomfort.  But maturity installs certain mental structures within the level-headed citizen.  As a boy of fourteen, I thought nothing was more outrageously hilarious than the shock humor of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and their jokes and bits referencing death, gags that played on their old BBC programme to howling studio audiences.  Many of the humor-loving grownups around me at the time though, people generally of my current age, didn’t find those death gags so funny. As a kid interested in humor-writing, I couldn’t really understand why, though I knew there had to be a reason. One time, with my most liberally-outspoken middle-aged aunt, one who really did appreciate the bluer side of that Brit TV humor, I shared a common Python death-joke reference, to which she sourly growled…..”Not funny….”

It would take me that golf-swing distance from that moment in my teen life until now to understand why it wasn’t.  It was essentially for the same reason that obligatory birthday greetings for too many are not necessarily something arbitrarily celebratory.

Okay, why..?! What’s with us Debbie-Downer-buzz killers…?? Why can’t we just be happy in the face of the uproarious Facebook birthday greeting avalanche and just dive in like a kid into a pile of shoveled fall leaves, instead of moping around like a confused and alienated Dustin Hoffman during his celebration party in The Graduate…?

My aunt didn’t like to think or even joke lightly about death. Elders of mine who cut their comedy-loving teeth on the likes of Sid Caeser, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, were the same ultra-Jewish God fearers that knew the gothic and very direct dangers of that thing dating all the way back to the ancient Greek societies: Hubris.  I learned it to be that forbidden closet of celebration and irreverence that directly provokes personal tragedy. For one thing, you couldn’t write a play or a TV show without it. 

Birthdays of course are not meant, in our culture, to be directly associated with one’s passing.  But as one veers through different time zones in the human life personally for the first time, despite the blessed presence of kindred souls, the internal response will always be one to negotiate.  No time spent with any therapist, psychiatrist or social counselor in some attempt at articulation may resolve it either.  And it just might not be thoroughly conducive to a barrage of the most well-meant Facebook greetings, memes, foolish aging jokes, cake illustrations, and what seem on many levels like some obligatory ritual by every distant one of your mostly invisible 697 Facebook “friends” to post a “Happy Birthday”.  Birthday night means a lot of acknowledging “like” clicking before bedtime.

A friend of mine, a fellow I precede by a decade or more, thanked his friends for all the social media greetings on his birthday, which he cites as getting less celebratory as years move forward.  He’s a pretty upbeat and successful guy to begin with, and my inner response to his comment was, “Y’know, a birthday isn’t supposed to provoke a scratch-off winning ticket response. !”  To yours truly, a birthday, for this grownup anyway, is to be a day of utter and solemn joy.  No, it’s not a nine-year old’s anticipation of a Lego set, a new Bob Dylan 8-track tape, and presents at a party later…It’s not some twenty-year old’s keg party.  For a mature grownup it’s a precious, inarticulate day of appreciation and thanks for the care and safety God has shown you, through the presence of others. It’s an annual time out for some quiet self-observation, to get real about what you’re really letting yourself get upset about unnecessarily, for some self-inflictive and pointless reason, and appreciation of how much you’ve successfully overcome, a decorated veteran of this thing called Life.  Yours need not be the book you will author, or the blog you’ll create, or story you’ll cathartically share with others.  But it’s your honored badge nonetheless, to wear with pride.

It's a little hard sometimes to try and maintain that austerity when you’re the birthday-greeting-recipient act on this Facebook Gong Show.  But that’s when you realize. Off stage, when the set is shut down and the cheering studio audience gone, you really are the recipient of that respect, the respect the virtual on-stage celebrity panelists and their wild barbs know you share with them.  They’ll know it even when the internet is down worldwide, indefinitely.  In the interest of hubris, let’s not even discuss it any further.

 Noah F.

Let’s Not Exactly, But Establish Something Equivalent To Say We Did...

 

I recently had the thrill of an epiphany marking the circle of history, a moment in media time that might have only best been appreciated by the likes of Marshall McLuhan or maybe Andy Warhol over sixty years ago.  It was in real time, and it really happened. The atmosphere around me almost turned sixteen-millimeter black-and-white.

Hearing some predictable little bullet interview with some self-proclaimed startup-business sage, amongst his top recommended ingredients necessary for the successful startup, he cited in passing the importance of having a published book. When the interviewer began asking about the type and nature of the book, and how thorough its content need be, the subject flatly denounced its significance.  His response was that the book’s existence, it’s handsome jacket and its retail existence on Amazon was all that was relevant on the startup interview frontier. The man’s own alleged multi-million-dollar success was nothing to sneeze at.  Although I’ve not acquired and read it, his own book must be one hell of a read.

With no disrespect to the business sage-author in that teensy little interview maybe no one heard but me in that avant-garde fly-on-the-wall moment, that glistening molecule of the irony of our society commenting on itself, the fellow interviewed was no less than the oracle at Delphi, the Greek chorus, stating very much simply what is our accepted media culture. It was the un-fakest news I’d heard in a very long time.

Watchdogs are pronouncedly all over the place. While we need them now more than ever with regard to personal products, environmental, food, medicine and the like, there really isn’t too much time and attention available to police, apprehend or shut down the theoretic or occupational liars that build their so-called credibility on those light, pliable, good looking blocks of painted styrofoam.  Though our culture is way more litigious now in a world of precarious credibility, buyers are expected to be even more wary and won’t get too much legal sympathy for their romantic inclinations of belief.

The bottom line is, if it looks good, do it.  Fewer and fewer today will bear even the intent to question one’s props.  We are existing in a world predicated more and more by the minute on presentation.  If the success of a blind date rests on how you look when you show up at first sighting in that restaurant lobby, multiply that exponentially with regard to an investor meeting or even a corporate interview, and you know what’s what.

Naturally, you won’t get that far or any further if you don’t know the respective “ropes”. But you’re meeting with people grading you not on what got you to the meeting, but on what you can impress them, and potentially others with, at face value.  A fake book is obviously a great start.

How did our culture arrive at one, business and otherwise, where “fake” is in too many ways tacitly acceptable..?  It seemed over one hundred years ago that no one took that irreverent, underground business known as the “moving pictures” to task for its handsome but fictional representation of wars or train robberies. Sixty or seventy years hence, when local and even network TV news divisions fell under fire for their “live-on-the-scene” captures that sometimes were not all they purported to be, the upheaval remained mostly within industry confines, viewers on the whole remaining untraumatized, and generally numb to a relatively accepted finite level of credibility within the media circus.

I won’t soon forget the week that something revolutionary called the Cable News Network, a creation of that Atlanta TV mogul Ted Turner got unveiled.  My mom and I were not rich enough to afford cable TV in 1980, but we did acquire the TV Guide with the gatefold listings for Premiere Week.  All of twelve, and already a heritage TV viewer, I was fascinated.  How much newscasting can they really churn out for twenty-four hours…..constantly..??  My mom offered that maybe they’ll have to start inventing news.  A prophet, she was.

It's not so much about “all the news that’s fit to print”, or abundance with the lack thereof anymore.  Maybe it used to be.  In times since that handsome reprimand, we’ve shifted focus to another criteria.

There may be less human operation in media now, and more “AI”, to any extent. But the audiences reached by these processed foods are in fact real humans, and make no mistake about it, audiences catch on.  If the object of the ball game drifts from accuracy and credibility to entertainment value, they will quickly understand, and grade accordingly. 

And entertainment value, as News Patriarchs of Milleniums Past once in their decline feared, and demonic creatures like Network’s Diana Christensen implored, is now, in a world drowning in available media, the only pliable and measurable value to anything.  Even information.  Even the relevant kind.

It’s the relevant part that actually for the first time ever begins to cause a problem. It reached some affecting levels when the whole COVID thing happened.  Naturally, there are many who question what a lack of spread in the existing media would have done to temper what became a psychotic scare.  Unfortunately, that one’s too big to untangle.  But it does question the fearful corporate-government manipulation of the media we see and hear.  All of it.

That whole odyssey has only served to further our more intelligent awareness of the eroding accountability of the available media.  There’s exponentially more of it now.  And inversely less of it on the whole can be taken seriously.

So who’s to blame for this..?  Corporate interests..? Government..? The late, great Ted Turner…? William Randolph Hearst..?  Rupert Murdoch..?

Maybe we need to harken back to that profound truth once quoted by the late, great Edward R. Murrow during that crisis known as the McCarthy Era.

In unveiling the veneer of the Senator, Murrow stated that maybe the greatest wound inflicted upon us Americans is the ones we inflicted upon ourselves, our false beliefs and fears, ones we submitted to in our embrace of cathartic ignorance.

Could today’s angered cry of “fake news” be the pain of a self-inflicted wound..?

Every day, a new website is built.  A new domain is approved and bought.  A new “news feed”, a new podcast.  A new book comes out, on line or on kindle. 

Some of these are actually at some point read or listened to by someone.  Some, like this little piece on this little blog, will be posted by the writer and read by no one.  But it sure does look handsome.

We don’t open newspapers anymore, we log on and scroll.  And those scrolls are no longer the elite product of hired writers, columnists and trusted scribes.  Podcasts, those available presentations that are reviving the medium our great grandparents knew as ”radio”, are now this very commonly approachable venue that does not require employment by a news or program director.  One need not meet with the likes of Frank Stanton or Ed Murrow to become one’s own Elmer Davis.  Just buy your equipment, voice your tirade, and upload..!  And now we can share and share alike.  We may have grown up in a world where our elders would growl at that idiot, Howard K Smith at the end of his ABC News editorial each night.  But in the adage of “if you think you can do better…”, the complaining ends and the doing begins..! Isn’t this what America is really all about..?!?

In some ways, perhaps it is. And too many of us are having a good time cooking and serving to even worry about who’s sampling our offerings in what is an overcooked buffet table at the most gluttenous event ever. We are obese with publicly presented matter in an egocentric world of people too entertained by the sound of their own voices and sight of their own words to even effectively share in one another’s company in one’s very own, exclusive sandbox.  I don’t really know too many people who read too many blogs or actually listen to too many podcasts. Most people are now too busy presenting their own.  And as far as successive accomplishments, if you can have the platform, do you really need the credibility…?

Less than fifty years ago saw the harvests of talk-show satire on TV. Programs like TVTV and Fernwood 2-Night consisted wholly of the pretend wallpaper predicated on the jokefulness of how easily credible any of that guff could sound. Today, that very guff is the real thing.  Not only do we know it  We’re buying it.  Guff is great, and you’ve got to admire the presentation..! Heck, I know the guy who did that podcast..!  No more six degrees of separation.  We all know these people.  What more credibility do you need..??

A musician I knew years ago once talked of the night he played with his twelve-piece band in a club one night where “there were more people on stage than in the audience”. And in his opinion, they gave the show of a lifetime.  On the once-presaged information superhighway now, there are many such presentations.  The real gift of it all is being the lucky patron in that club, that intelligent, alert, appreciative audience of one, who doesn’t really care how real it is, how credible it is, or even how long or short it is.  That one patron just wants a damn good show.  I hope one day, one quiet night, I’ll get to be that very patron.  In a world so full of it, it’s the best one can wish for.

 

-Noah F.

 

 

 

"I Can Be Impervious To It Now...."

Is the modern social demon known as The Internet capable of vindicating that overcriticized demon of our past..?

“You can’t go home again…” was the phrase credited to the late, great author Thomas Wolfe, citing an all-too admissible condition: No geographic pilgrimage, no imposed socialization, not even in many cases a reunion with a set of particular artifacts, nor a fondly enjoyed food or treat of our youth or a prior time, will conjure the instant immersion in that Walden Pond of the immensely craved nostalgic experience, that mad dash to our teen-hood, childhood, or pre-adolescence. Hearing an old record for the first time in decades might do it for a nanosecond, when that arrangement hits our ears. A stroll past a childhood corner still remaining amidst unidentifiably changed stores and homes might drudge up that Hal Holbrook Our Town moment for a second or two. But all too conscious of our current surroundings, the emotionally displaced grownups among us are, let’s face it, prisoners of the modern world.

We can’t start blaming the world for that. Would we have taken the atmosphere around us for granted as such when we were kids if we knew it would come to this..? I don’t see why not. Back then, it was the only world we knew, much like the one we take for granted today. Living in it means you may not be able to treasure it the way you will forty or more years later. That’s just plain science.

The fact is though, there is a very nostalgic component, ripe for the capture, that can in fact provide that missing puzzle piece that will for many of us fulfill the only organ within us that can generate an empowering, nourishing and comprehensively emotional journey home. That organ is the soul.

If you’re curious, look it up, but enough has been written about the nature of the soul as the human compass, short of reviewing it all here. From Thomas Moore to the late, great Father Paul Keenan, and many other prolific scribes in-between, the concurrent dictate is that the soul is the “G.P.S.” of the mind and body.

How do we reach the soul..? It’s a case-by-case thing. No two humans are quite alike. If none of those trappings listed above will do it for you, maybe it’s one of the key domestic ingredients you haven’t yet added. And only now is that key ingredient starting to become available.

What would it take to develop a “time machine” ? I was maybe about twenty-one when a same-aged close friend of mine and I waxed nostalgic for a good long time one late night in 1989, lamenting as we were on the horizon of the Generation X “Grunge Era”, about how we’ll never be able in this desolate world to return to those days and nights with the collective and profoundly memorable television backdrop that scored our earlier lives. An excavated stack of genuine period issues of TV Guide was admittedly as close as we knew we’d ever come to the surrounding cathode-ray sights and sounds of our harmless, innocent youth. We verbally, vividly and cathartically recalled in some unified thrill the phrases, jingles and announcer mantras of the local television continuity that were the defining décor of our most impressionable era. How many times did we used to hear that same announcer in 1979 say “Tomorrow on the 4:30 Movie..!!”, or that one nameless, distinct voice on Channel 11 say, “Available at Bradlee’s”, right at the end of that product jingle..? Those very ubiquitous knick-knacks were the most recognizable icons of our predominantly fond childhoods, and our night concluded with the gratitude of remembering it, for we’d never see or hear them again.

The evening’s talk raised the fantasy thought of how great it would be, in that pre-internet, VCR age, if some enterpriser would see fit to restore and combine some of the more obscure full-length TV shows of the 1970s with their original commercial breaks fully preserved as well. The going consensus was that almost nowhere would anyone with a high-priced VCR in the last ten years have recorded or preserved anything that included those dreaded commercials and station break scraps. If one made such an investment in a home unit and those pricey cartridges, they were cautious enough to tape only the viewable portions, and leave the crusts behind. Years later of course, here’s these two nostalgic boys realizing that the crusts are in fact the most defining portion of the sandwich.

The crusts, in all their refined splendor, are over thirty years later seeing restoration, and feeding a home-starved population.

The household staple of the last fifteen years, YouTube, has provided a precious and publicly accessible display case for the treasures being unearthed in recent years, by tape-rolling civilians of long ago, and industrial-tape archivists alike. Despite any lofty ideals held in the 1970s and 80s, plenty of VCR owners were just too overwhelmed with the potential task of trying to avoid the appearance of commercial breaks on that NBC Monday Night At The Movies they taped in 1976. So on the cassette they stayed eternally. Until the tapers or someone close to them saw fit to take that dusty relic off the shelf and carefully dub the full two-plus-hours of content onto a YouTube file for all to enjoy, the way the owner and many viewers did on their TV sets that very night in history, prime-time promos, Tomorrow show teases and all. Is there any allure in such pedestrian viewing..?

If you have the desire to literally return for a couple of uninterrupted hours to an evening in your younger or childhood past, it’s precisely that kind of restored matter that may take you there the way nothing else can, certainly if you’re of the “TV Generation”.

Being of the “TV Generation” is by no means a current-day classification. Anthropologically, the “TV Generation” cites a specific, twentieth century population of children who in many cases and in many homes maintained the presence of the TV signal as literally their interior décor, the sort that the late Professor Marshall McLuhan would certify as such. As significant as the avant-garde, tart-colored wallpaper and the shag carpet rendering the living room a veritable cornfield, that wood-grain foundation with it’s rainbow-hued glow defining the room was the main ingredient, completing the ensemble at usually any and every moment.

There’s no established corporate agenda or manufacturing dictate or missive behind the benevolent efforts of the folks excavating and uploading, and probably no forseeable profit motive. What there is however, is the labor of love in the restoration of these lengthy video treasures. Sadly, in what is yet an un-zoned online world, there are some watchdog figures who need to maintain the unfriendly task of obliterating those video scraps or portions thereof whose inclusion violates commercial rights of any sort. No doubt about it, the corporation will always padlock the playground. Often though, in an internet video-scape mostly ungoverned, the intent uploaders will find way before long to re-emerge their treasures. While probably no one’s interested in violating any rights in the process, the reason for the constant renegade efforts and the popularity of these fully restored broadcast files is clear. For an undeniable many of us, these uploads are at last our precious journey home.

A three-hour continuous broadcast file of CBS News coverage on Election Night 1976…..NBC World Series coverage, 1975, Game Three, commercials and all…..The ABC Friday Night Movie with Jaclyn Smith from November 1979, complete with Clairol ads, News-at-11 teases and the rest.....it’s that fourth wall that once defined our earthly existence……damn those sociologists of the 1970s and their crusade against television...!

The irony of course, about that era’s outspoken authors, Jerry Mander, Marie Winn, and Frank Mankiewicz among others, is that these renown television hate-baiters had yet to see or even conceive of this thing called The Internet, the advent of social media platforms, and the neurological decay and psychological harm their innocent technological capabilities would ultimately render. In contrast to a time when adults of mature age could be relied upon to always correct the young in matters of judgement and behavior, we are in an electronic-driven culture that has for many compromised proper mind. It has in many cases farmed into a brand new substance and addiction syndrome, mitigated by abstinence and twelve-step therapy for some who’ve never imbibed as much as an ounce of wine in their lives. For a good many, the internet is not a friendly appliance. When used incorrectly or irresponsibly, like any valuable household power tool, the results can in fact be life-damaging.

And it’s this noted deadly and inescapable force, the source of artificial intelligence, predatory activity, random thievery, deceit and disparagement, that from within also comes the precious connection that restores the souls of so many, providing no less than a healing solace in a cathartic and necessary visit to a place we can no longer go, but to one we can very gratefully for just a few quiet hours return, commercials, annoying little promos, announcements and all. Who cares what’s on..?

Noah F.