You get the picture: I have a distinct preference for a live experience when it comes to my entertainment. I have a TV; I watch it. It's a 19" Magnavox, boxy little number. But I don't find it all that compelling.
Anyway...I think I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday. I was over at a neighbor's house for morning bagels and coffee, and we started watching GPS on CNN. And we watched it on a HUGE HDTV, with amazing sound, and using TIVO. Holy cow...
Have you seen Fareed Zakaria in HDTV? And heard that voice in enhanced sound? And skipping all commercials?
Now, I watched some of the election debates at the same neighbor's house, but I obsessed on things like the wrinkles in Joe Biden's shirt, and how you could see each one. And a little on his shiny teeth.
But Fareed...that's a completely different plane of experience. Those eyes...
My conclusion? The live performance experience is, in fact, threatened by home theater. No question. When Fareed is on, that is.
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I must admit, I love my TiVo and my HDTV. And I was skeptical about both, at first. Those doubts vanished almost immediately.
With TiVo in particular, I think the misapprehension among skeptics is that TiVo only enables one's obsession with the Idiot Box. But in my case, it's the opposite. It enables me to choose, with surgical precision, what I watch and when, so I waste a LOT less time channel-surfing and zoning out on garbage. I watch what I plan to watch, then I stop and do something else.
I’m writing this while watching “Dancing with Who Exactly is that Anyway?” on ABC. My television screen displays a ghost of the future—a faint background image of what will appear in the foreground in approximately four seconds.
You see, in light of the economic crisis we scaled our cable service to the bare minimum—the level of service needed if you live in a cave or a canyon or like to watch school board meetings on public access channels. We decided we could live without Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert (though only after confirming that we can still watch episodes of the latter two on the laptop). Then we discovered that we still receive Comedy Central, but only if we bypass the digital box provided by C*mcast. (The asterisk is to prevent that dastardly monopoly from monitoring this comment because they also provide our internet and phone service and are watching our every paranoid move). Of course bypassing the box means that network programming comes with the ghost of the future, which is not a problem, except on Thursday nights when I reroute all the cables to ensure clear reception of “The Office” and “30 Rock.”
All of which is to say, screw you and your HDTV and your TiVo.
Oh, when I called C*mcast to cut back the cable service, I asked if they could help out a poor man by trimming the phone and internet service fees. The service rep said, "Sure, how about if we knock $10 bucks a month off each?" I replied, "Done!" I didn't promise not to tell everyone I know.
Just to clarify to my colleagues: When I say, "screw you and your HDTV and your TiVo," I mean "I want to go to there!" (Quoting Tina Fey)
Yes, I admire Fareed Zakaria whether he's in hi-def or not. But I've been meaning to ask you: do you agree with all the murmurs that Twitter is now passe since it has been explained to "old people" on NPR and the Today Show?
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