June, 2009
Where are You Going? Where Have You Been?
Apologies. I fell down. I couldn’t get back up.
Over the past three months, every time I thought about updating the website, I froze. I tried and rejected various entries, for a series of reasons that sounded like a new variation on the seven dwarves: Grumpy, Silly, Bitchy, Perky, Sleepy, Melancholy and Medicated.
The thing is, in a world that seems to be offering more and more forms of instantaneous self-expression, a website seems quaint. But I don’t want to join Twitter, although I was interested in this writer’s use of it to tell a long story. (An aside: I know a lot of people are puzzled over why Dan Baum took this story public at all, much less via Twitter. But as someone who once had a bizarre clash at work, it’s my belief that he just got tired of being asked why he’s no longer under contract at the New Yorker.)
What, then, is the best use of this website? I’ve asked a writer I admire to consent to an interview; I hope that happens. Perhaps I will write more about books I like, or even films. Of course, to do that, I would have to go see some films.
Over the past year, I don’t think I’ve been in a movie theater more than once. There are several factors contributing to that drought, once unthinkable for me. In my 20s, I actually considered going to film school, even went so far as to take the GREs. I also routinely drove 100 miles to see double features at the art houses in Dallas or Austin. But now, when my family has time together, we actually like to talk to one another. We also are spoiled, no other word for it, by the deluge of “screeners” that arrive via the mail. We received copies of Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, Doubt and Tropic Thunder, among others last December. I have seen exactly one. Yeah, it was Tropic Thunder.
But this spring, I was asked to introduce a film at the Maryland Film Festival and I chose the under-appreciated Funny Bones. Listening to people laugh and gasp at the movie I had chosen, I realized how much I was missing by not watching movies in theaters. Movies, even television shows, are intended to be shared experiences. And I don’t care if you have a home theater with auditorium seats and a popcorn machine – watching a movie at home isn’t the same as watching one in an auditorium with strangers. If the media is the message – never really understood that, frankly – then the way in which we receive the media is important, too. A book is different from an audio book. (Not better, just different.) A Kindle, too, is different. While extremely convenient and, for now, somewhat cost-effective – the device pays for itself with the purchase of 36 titles, assuming an average savings of $10 per title– it’s not the same as a book. The amount of text per page is far smaller; the fonts are always the same, which creates a seeming sameness in authorial voices. And if anyone can figure out how to toggle back and forth between footnotes, please illuminate me.
Our parents – well, I can’t speak for yours, only for mine – knew that we shouldn’t get what we wanted whenever we wanted it. I like the concept of time-shifting. I like having my own music wherever I go.
I love my DVR, which means I watch only the television I want to watch, but when I want to watch it. But, perhaps, at least once a week, we should experience things as they were meant to be experienced – a television show in its scheduled time slot, complete with commercials, a movie in a theater, a book in hand.
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