Author: jameswharris

The Future of Television

I hate to say this, but television has been a major part of my life.  I like to picture myself as a well-read bookworm, but on average I’ve spent more time glued to the boob tube than flipping pages.  And I’m quite sure I’ve spent more time being totally attentive to the television than I have been to my friends, or even my wife and family.  But hey, my wife has no reason to get in a snit when she reads this remark because she watches three times more television than I do.  I should be jealous.

Television is mental masturbation.  Television is a great date for the lonely.  Television makes a boring life exciting.  Television can bring people together, like how American Idol gets so many people talking to each other during their nine to five days, but on the other hand, 200 cable channels tends to isolate us all into tiny special interest groups.  However, television at it’s best, can be artistic and create memorable characters that are featured prominently in our mind’s album of cherished memories.

Think about it.  How many stories can you tell about your family and friends each year at the Christmas dinner table?  And how many stories can you tell about your favorite video friends and family.  I can remember more about Dobie Gillis or Joel Fleischman than many of my cousins.  It’s sad, but true.

Television is changing, and pundits are worried about the future of television, like a recent article in Time Magazine, “Jay Leno Is the Future of TV.  Seriously.”   NBC finds creating five new shows for the final hour of primetime so expense that it’s giving the whole Monday to Friday week in that time slot to Jay Leno.  I find that rather sad, because that’s five possible shows that won’t live in our future memories.  That’s five cast of characters that the lonely of America in 2009-2010 won’t get to fall in love with.  That’s five chances NBC is giving up at creating a memorable show that will go down in TV history.

Strangely enough, NBC and myself have both chosen to go retro this new Fall Season.  They see the new Jay Leno show as an old fashion variety show, and I would applaud that if it’s true, but if it’s just a new timeslot for Jay Walking, I’m going to be greatly disappointed.  I’ve never really cared that much for the late night talk shows – famous people aren’t famously interesting.  Celebrities are only fascinating when they play great characters.  ER or Law & Order are vastly more valuable to popular culture than pretty faces pitching their latest projects.  Hell, I’d even prefer watching Lipstick Jungle or Medium to seeing a soon to be forgotten movie star struggle to be personally captivating between “Let’s take a break” interruptions of late night televised chit-chats.

Me, I’m going retro by ditching cable TV and my DVR.  I’ll have to watch my favorite shows when they are on and with all their glorious commercials.  Who knows, maybe high definition has improved the ads.  My new working hypothesis that I’m testing, is real time is the way God intended people to watch television.  Okay, I am going to cheat some, and watch TV like the Devil, time-shifted on DVD.  If there’s nothing to watch in primetime real time, I’m going to whip out Netflix and watch TV shows from once upon a time.  What will happen if NBC and the other networks give up on producing dramas and comedies?  I won’t have anything to watch in future years on Netflix.

When it comes to television I love nothing better than a new show that gets me excited for next week’s episode.  The 2009-2010 television lineup shows little promise to being a promising TV season, but I’ve got The Big Bang Theory and Lost to look forward to each week.  The most appealing new shows that I will tune into to see on the opening weeks are Cougar Town, FlashForward, The Forgotten and The Good Wife.  I don’t know if any of these shows will be DVD worthy in the future, but I’ve got to hope.  Shows like Northern Exposure, Star Trek and Lost were wonderfully unexpected surprises.  And once in a decade, we’ll get a show like Freaks and Geeks, and feel like Frank Capra directed Clarence the Angel to bless us with something special.

Television, like Rodney Dangerfield, gets no respect, especially in the world of Art.  Future scholars will pen vast academic libraries about the novels and films of the twentieth century, and shelves of books on music.  But how much intellectual cud chewing will be spent on TV?

If you scan the grid on your cable TV, and contemplate each listing you see, ask whether or not it will get the DVD treatment, or even be repeated even once in future years?  Most of the shows on television are like the shows from the early days of TV, when stations televised just about any kind of crap to fill the time slot and sell commercials.  For every half-hour of Leave it to Beaver there’d be eons of time spent on fishing, wrestling, talent parties, or local hopefuls hoping the road to stardom begins by talking to hand-puppets.  Do you see any of those shows on DVD for sale at Target?

Television really is a vast wasteland, and we’re all thirsty travelers hoping to find an hour of video oasis.  TV is really only worth watching if it’s also worthy of reprinting on DVD.   Anything not DVD-worthy is either news, sports, games, reality, talk and other ephemeral broadcasts that will be forgotten soon after the next show starts.  And because of the zillion cable channels, with their divided audiences and tiny revenue, it gets harder and harder for future television producers to afford to create memorable, DVD-worthy shows.  The best TV shows created today are from HBO and ShowTime, networks that have the gold filled purses to be patrons of TV Art.

The future of television appears to be the Home and Garden Network, or The Food Network, or even The Comedy Channel and The Cartoon Network.  If these new venues for the American mind ever produce a hit that shows up on Netflix I might give them a try, but I don’t think it’s likely.  And I don’t expect everyone to be like me.  There are hordes of people turning away from cable TV, but I doubt it’s a popular groundswell.  I wish it would be.  If all the money, time and talent spent on producing 200+ channels of television were spent on just 12 networks, television would be written about as much as renaissance Florence.

JWH – 9/7/9

The Human Family Tree – National Geographic

The Human Family Tree is a 2-hour documentary that explains why race is an optical illusion.  The show will be repeated 09/06/09 at 1pm, but is also available on Netflix now.  Because of the wonders of DNA and genetic markers, scientists are able to trace the migrations of human populations back to their origins in Africa.  Be sure and watch the show until the end, where the filmmakers do a wonderful trick with their participants.  At the beginning of the show, project director Spencer Wells visits a street fair in Queens, New York and his team takes cheek swaps from crowds of people, all claiming to be immigrants from all over the world.  Many people volunteer and their stories get told during the documentary.  Most of these people expect the DNA to confirm their family genealogy that they cherish and has been handed down to them by word of mouth and photos.

At the end of the show the filmmakers meet outdoors in a giant field and have all the volunteers stand in groups based on the prominent markers in their DNA.  The groups are roughly arranged like a map of the world.  Many of the people whose stories were featured on the show are surprised by what their biology reveals, like one black man grouped with the Europeans and one Puerto Rican woman grouped with Native Americans.

The show is full of wonderful computer animation, beautiful high-definition filmed sequences from all over the world and staged scenes that act out what life was like tens of thousand of years ago.  Science really has learned vast libraries of statistical knowledge from combining anthropology and DNA research.  What it shows is racial characteristics are insignificant compared to all the rest of our traits.  Essentially humans are almost identical, far more so than other animal species.  We may look very different, but our DNA tells us otherwise.  In fact, one of the more interesting tidbits to come out of the show is that Africa is the most genetically diverse continent because it’s population is the oldest.

Watching this documentary makes an excellent companion to the book I am listening to, The Evolution of God by Robert Wright, which explores the rise of religion across the globe starting with hunting and gathering societies.  Wright measures the development of religion by how well it deals with ethnic diversity.  Even though humans are all alike, we’ve always been very xenophobic, and the presentation of The Human Family Tree would be in accordance to the highest spiritual development in religious philosophy as explored by Wright. 

It would be fascinating to chronicle the religious history against the histories of the various migrating populations that the DNA markers reveal.  Would it be possible to follow the paths of memes like paths of genetic material in our blood?  The majority of the world’s worshipers in God build their beliefs on the political and social conflicts of one tiny group of people, living in one tiny part of the world, concerning events that happened two and three thousand years ago, while ignoring all the religious practices of vast hordes of people that migrated all over the globe.  But then most of those religions were tied to local ethnocentric and highly xenophobic tribes.  We are becoming global on so many levels.

The Human Family Tree makes social, philosophical and political statements through it’s work with exploring the science of DNA, with implications that are far greater than teaching us about human migration patterns.  As graphically illustrated in the show, everyone has two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and if you follow the math it doesn’t take that many generations until you are related to nearly everyone on Earth.

Most people don’t know much about their ancestors beyond their grandparents or maybe one of their great grandparents, so they imagine their heritage coming from one individual.  But if you go back a few hundred years and had to picture yourself the product of 128 or 256 individuals, what can you claim to be?  It’s hard enough to spot traits you get from two parents, so why imagine yourself to be the product of any race, culture, country, or other identity?  All we can be is the human we are at the moment and any cultural heritage is just silly pretending.

JWH – 9/4/9

The Beatles 09-09-09

Hardcore Beatles fans are waiting for the the ninth day, of the ninth month, of the ninth year, of this new millennium for the remastered Beatles catalog to be released.  It’s been 22 years since the last reissue of the Beatles, when their LPs first came out on CD, when many audiophiles claimed those productions were botched. 

Could this be the stimulus package that the music industry needs to get people to buy CDs again?  My wife and I have been buying Beatles CDs again for the last year, getting them all except A Hard Day’s Night, so now we have to decide if we want to go and buy them yet again.  Of course we both bought all the LPs in our separate teenage lives in the 1960s.  And if we want, we can even buy the remastered CDs again immediately because they are also releasing a special second box set in mono.

Will modern kids who live and die by the iPod be anxious to buy sonically superior versions of the Beatles’ songs?  Especially considering that their collections are probably stolen now?  I can’t Help! but believe that EMI is expecting us Baby Boomers to pay the tab.  And will we?  Susan and I have opted not to get the box set immediately, but I plan to at least get A Hard Day’s Night.  I want to see just how good these remastered songs sound.

The real question is:  How many people still listen to CDs on a stereo system?  I do, and a few of my old fogey friends, but I think the number is dwindling.  I was one of the gullible who bought into the SACD (Super Audio CD) technology when it came out, just about the time the rest of the world was turning to MP3 music.  To really appreciate the quality of the new CDs, they need to be heard on a good stereo, or at least a good car CD player.

I know who will buy these new Beatles CDs, the same 3,000 folks Susan and I saw when we went to see Rain, A Tribute to the Beatles last June, a Beatles cover band.  The hall was full of Baby Boomers and their kids and grand kids, all seeking the perfect illusion of being at a Beatles concert, and damn if Rain didn’t bring a deep kind of nostalgic catharsis.  I recently saw Rain on PBS, and the illusion doesn’t work with TV.  I always thought it was a joke that people loved Elvis imitators, but now I know different.

In the 09/03/09 Rolling Stone magazine, they get Paul’s response to one of the recording engineers talking about the new digital production, “McCartney judges the reissues by an even higher standard, ‘It sounds like it did in the room when you recorded it.’”  The magazine even says the recording engineers on the project claim, “the digital version is indistinguishable from the masters.”  These new discs will be the closest we can get to time traveling back to the 1960s. 

However, they also quote Paul as saying, “I can listen to a record on the radio on the beach and it sounds OK to me.”  He goes on to explain that he and John were never audiophiles, and they originally recorded most of the songs in mono and let technicians make the stereo mixes.  But at the end of the piece they quote Paul again,

Now I hear John and think,’There he is,’ he says, Like, you can almost close your eyes and you can kind of see him, because the quality is so real.  So I like that about it.

Fans who don’t buy the remastered CDs won’t get that close if they listen to these new songs as MP3 downloads, but the quality still might be noticeably better.  I’m anxious for the Beatles’ catalog to appear on streaming music services like Lala and Rhapsody, so I can add their songs to my playlists.

I’ve been listening to my ripped Beatles albums at work and while I write on my blog this last couple of weeks trying to decide which of the remastered albums I will buy first.  Here are their albums in the order of their original British release.

  • Please Please Me
  • With the Beatles
  • A Hard Day’s Night
  • Beatles for Sale
  • Help!
  • Rubber Soul
  • Revolver
  • Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
  • Magical Mystery Tour
  • The Beatles (The White Album)
  • Abbey Road
  • Let It Be
  • Past Masters
  • Yellow Submarine

Strangely, I’ve learned that my taste in Beatles’ songs have changed over the years.  I used to think the later albums were their masterpieces, because of their studio sophistication and the kids had grown into mature artists, but now I’m wondering if The Fab Four were more creative when they were younger, and their songs were silly love songs.  My current favorite Beatles song is “I’m a Loser” from Beatles for Sale.  However, I can click anywhere in my 253 Beatles’ song collection and find tremendous creativity.  My friend Janis interrupted this writing with a phone call, and we chatted for a long time about the Beatles and I played the beginning of dozens of songs for her.  She could hear the beginning of the music, remember the words, and start singing the songs, which made me envious of her talent, because I can never remember words to any song but “Happy, Birthday,” and I sometimes stumble on its lines.  Susan also has perfect memory of words and melody.  I’m so jealous.

The Beatles are considered the musical giants of 1960s music, but there are so many songs from the 1960s that I love much more than any particular song the Beatles created, like “Downtown,” “Stop in the Name of Love,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Eve of Destruction,” and so on.  Their collective catalog overwhelms, but they were mostly competing with one-hit wonders.  Look at their competition: 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969.

I wish some record company would remaster the hits of 1960s on month-by-month CD collections, with each set capturing the top 100 songs for that month.  Wouldn’t it be great to buy February 1964 and hear The Beatles invade the American music charts again, and hear their songs in context to their competition and inspiration.

Recently I finished listening to The Beatles by Bob Spitz, unfortunately an abridged audio book of a great Beatles biography, that has rekindled my Beatles-mania.  I plan to read the full version of the book someday and try to list and listen to all the songs mentioned that inspired the Beatles.  They loved the popular music of the 1950s, and they even named their band after Buddy Holly’s, The Crickets.  Bob Spitz must have interviewed hundreds of people for the biography, and I was most taken with the musical influences that create The Beatles.  An idea of what I’m talking about can be found on John Lennon’s Juke Box.

Another way to discover The Beatles is through The Beatles Anthology, an 8 part documentary from 1995.  Once you start learning about their history it becomes addictive.  I have no idea if young people have much of an idea of who the Beatles were.  An old joke twenty years ago was about a young women asking an older man, “Did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?”

With the release of The Beatles Rockband game and the remastered catalog of albums, will there be a new wave of Beatle-mania this September.  I hope so.  Ask yourself and your friends, “What are your favorite Beatles songs?”  I was surprised with what my friend Janis answered.  She remembered songs that I never think of, but when I listened to them, I thought, wow, I need to concentrate on these tunes for awhile.  It’s so easy to forget.

Maybe people don’t listen to CDs anymore, but they still listen to songs, so lets hope these reissues get the world to go nuts over the Beatles again.

JWH – 8/31/9

Living Without Cable TV

Because I’m approaching my retirement years, and contemplating living the last third of my life on a fixed income, I’m spending a lot of time examining how I spend my money.  One of my biggest monthly bills I pay is from Comcast.  I get cable TV, Internet and local/long distant phone service from them, so naturally the bill is going to be big.  Even after I retire, I know I’ll want high speed Internet, so I positively have to budget $50 a month for that.  For now, I’m not ready to be one of those people who live a cell phone only lifestyle.  So that leaves the $120 a month for cable to consider. 

I’ve already cut $23.90 from my bill by returning the bedroom cable box/DVR, so I’m down to $96.  My plan is to quit cable entirely as soon as True Blood season 2 wraps up, but I want to explore just what I desire from cable TV and how much is it worth, and what I will miss when it’s shut off.

Pros of Cable TV

  • Watch shows in DVR time
  • Excellent selection
  • Elegant integration of DVR and guide
  • Channel guide
  • Convenient

Cons of Cable TV

  • Cost
  • Hate paying for channels I don’t use
  • Overwhelmed by the choice of too many channels
  • I watch too much TV

Pros of Over the Air TV

  • Free
  • Non-compressed high-definition
  • PBS, ABC, CBS and NBC actually cover most of what I watch
  • Simple – less to worry about
  • Will watch less TV

Cons of Over the Air TV

  • Must watch in real time
  • No channel guide
  • No DVR unless I build one
  • Missing 9 favorite cable channels

The worst downside of free TV is watching in real time.  I could build a Home Theater PC, but I’ve explored that idea and there’s a great deal of aggravation involved.  [Note to television makers:  Invent an elegant but simple to use over-the-air DVR turner that works with an online guide via the Internet – but doesn’t require the show stopping $13 a month subscription like Tivo.  A 1gb model for $199 would be a killer product.]

I’ve also explored the idea of just getting basic cable, but at $50 a month I still get far more channels than I want, and most of my favorite HD ones would be lost.    [Note to Comcast:  Offer over-the-air local HD channels and my favorite HD cable channels listed below, with a simple DVR for $30 a month and I’d stay with cable.  And I think a lot of people I know who don’t get cable would consider it too.  Or this setup with high-speed Internet and voice for $99.95.]

Most folks I talk to, hate cable because they feel cheated by the huge bill and being forced to buy far more than they want.  Cable needs to reinvent itself.  Since everyone is moving to digital reception and digital TVs, offer a basic HD package for $25 a month, and provide a la carte selection of cable channels at $1 for those with commercials, $2 for those like TCM, without commercials, and whatever the premium channels think they are worth, and then see what people really want.  Also offer bundle packages for those folks who like to buy in quantity.

Which Channels Would We Miss the Most?

My favorites are:

  • The Science Channel (wished it was HD)
  • Discovery Channel HD
  • National Geographic HD
  • History Channel HD
  • Turner Classic Movies (wished it was HD)

My wife wants to add:

  • Home and Garden HD
  • TLC HD
  • Food Network HD
  • DIY Network (wished it was HD)

If we had those 9 channels with PBS, ABC, CBS and NBC – and a DVR with channel guide just for those channels we’d be in TV heaven.  Everything else, Susan and I could get on Netflix.  And if the documentaries I love from those first four cable channels were easily available on Netflix, I could live without them too.  Netflix and streaming Netflix could be everything for me with just PBS, ABC, CBS and NBC for random watching.  Those are our lucky 13 channels.  Currently we’re overwhelmed with two digital tiers, a bunch of premium channels and scads of music channels we never even flip through.

Comcast and other cable companies need to study what people really want.  Ever since I wrote “Saving Money on Cable TV and Internet” a bunch of my friends have come up to me and told me they were thinking about the exact same thing.  Everyone I know hates paying a big cable bill for so many channels they don’t want.

Living the Simple Life

Our culture forces everyone into living with information overload.  I’m predicting a movement towards simplifying life.  Even the young will burn out from Twitter and Facebook overload.  Kids feel bad if they don’t have 800 friends in their social networks, but the reality is you can’t have that many friends.  And you can’t watch 200 TV channels, and the Internet is just as overwhelming.  There’s got to be some consolidation.

Because I won’t get the a la cart cable service I want, I’m going back to four TV channels:  PBS, ABC, CBS and NBC.  Maybe this makes me a TV Luddite, maybe this is bad for the economy, and maybe it will even reduce what I get to learn about the world, but it might also be innovative for my lifestyle.  There’s that old saying about your life flashing in front of your eyes when you die, well, too much of the life I will see flashing in front of my eyes will be sedentary in front of a TV.  I regret that.

JWH – 8/29/9

Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a concept that I recently stumbled upon on the web that I wished I had learned during my K-12 imprisonment.  I have a wandering mind, with a poor memory, that finds it hard to hold the big picture on any subject, so it was exciting to come across this concept.  Because a video is worth a thousand words each 1/25th of a second, I think I’ll let one do the explaining for me:

Tony Buzan is a modern prophet for mind mapping and promotes the concept around the world.  In recent years mind mapping software tools have emerged hoping to become a new category of productivity software after the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation package.  There’s definitely a lot of information on the web, and plenty of software to try for free, but I’ve yet to meet anyone personally that extols the virtue of mind mapping.  And there’s plenty of companies selling products in the $99-$349 range, all touting that their tools are used in thousands of businesses and schools around the world.  I wonder how I’ve missed this – maybe because I graduated from high school forty years ago.

I have a life-long desire to write fiction, but I have a devil of a time plotting and shaping a story, so I hope mind mapping might help me.  I figure the concept will also be good for my programming projects, and even working out blog ideas ahead of time.  Hell, it might lead to essays that don’t meander about so much.

For a software category that’s been invisible to me, there’s an amazing array of products to use, see the mind map of mind mapping software packages from Mind Mapping Software Blog.  And here’s a Mind Map Search site listing 200 websites devoted to mind mapping.  And if you want to regularly read about mind mapping, try Mind Mapping Blog.

Mind mapping is considered one of many techniques at Mind Tools for business users to expand their career skills, but mind maps are also great for students studying any subject, or for creative people wanting to brainstorm.  If I succeed with short story writing I’ll chronicle how mind mapping helped in a future blog.  There’s a fair learning curve to mind mapping, and it might be an art in itself.  I need to practice a bit before I judge the concept.

After installing a couple free programs, and looking at many commercial sales videos I’ve settled on trying Xmind, available for Windows, Mac or Linux users.  (FYI: if you’re using IE8 be sure to turn on compatibility mode while visiting their site.)  Most of the free cross-platform packages use Java, and I hate Java applications, but Xmind is much better looking than most Java applications I have used, so I picked it for that reason over Freemind.  Xmind was once a commercial product, but now there’s a free version and a Pro version.  The Pro version is a $49 a year subscription service with more professional output options. 

Most commercial mind mapping programs have 30-day trials, but I’ll wait to see how successful I become at mind mapping before considering them.  If you want to give the concept a spin without installing anything on your computer, visit Mind42.com or mindmeister for a web versions of mind mapping.

Another appealing feature of Xmind is their share site, which features uploaded mind maps from around the world to study.  Xmind also uses the concept of workbook with pages to create multi-dimensional mind maps.  I figure I’ll play with Xmind and research mind mapping for a few weeks or months, and then write a post that chronicles my effort.  For now, I’m just curious if anyone I know actually mind maps.

JWH – 8/26/9