Sunday, January 31, 2010

Ratio TV

Once in a Blue Moon seems to be more or less now when I write and update my Blog. We got one of those as we entered the 2010 New Year one month ago...I'd like to give Mystical Musings a shot in the arm for the new decade--so here I am one full moon in. The 'Wolf Moon' of January.

I've been musing about the ratio of TV owning/watching people and their main-stream conditioning, motivation, 'change the world' inclination & general contribution to local art venues & economy VS. most of the people I know who are artist-types. Perhaps these creatives work in 'the biz'(production/film/design etc.) and I'm not sure why--but by enlarge don't own/watch TV (they own DVD players & rent a season at a time of any HBO series). I'm some sort of hybrid that has illegal cable (shhh) that otherwise would also not be in this mainstream American habit. It feels like some elite club--although the only initiation ritual is paying for installation and your monthly bill. The point of cable originally was quality programmed television shows without commercials-- and now we get them too. Oh, you can be in 'the club' if you wanted to pay some devil-worshiping conglomerate like T/W Cable only to get a hit of societal surrender of sub-par content that we've been conditioned to think is what we want or what our ADD/ MTV attention spans can accommodate.

Sound like I'm bitter? Perhaps I am just a bit. There's always some thread of apologetic tone I feel with being American and how we are viewed internationally. It's got somewhat better with Obama taking office. Our TV watching habit as a default companion is not new news by any stretch, but is particularly heightened with the Super Bowl next week and leverging new commercials (at a colossal $ cost/second) and messaging to take advantage of the millions of eye balls that will be a captured audience this day.