j a c k *

You Make a Grown Man Cry...

Our ReplayTV is dying.  We bought one of the first units available around 1999, back when a “digital video recorder” was a concept tech reviewers approached with skepticism and well before the word “tivo” had entered common usage as a verb meaning “to digitally record television shows for later viewing.”  We have since replaced the hard drive on our obsolete box, and now we have to replace the motherboard as well.  We’ll do it –we can’t live without it.

Back when my wife and I were dating we used to schedule activities around broadcasts of Start Trek: The Next Generation, which I refused to miss, among other things.  After we were married we experimented with a rotating set of tapes that we cycled between a recording VCR and a playback VCR so that we’d always have something we wanted to watch.  But the technical glitches with VHS tape, combined with the user interface nightmare of printed TV schedules, VCR programming and cable network unreliability made it largely more effort than it was worth.  When we read a teaser article about ReplayTV we knew we wanted it, and as soon as we could we ordered one with the lifetime service contract.  For a couple who likes to watch obscure TV shows, and with a demanding infant it was a dream.  Its still formative user interface was far better back then than even the more ubiquitous systems sold today (which is why we have resisted “upgrading”).  But it changed our lives most significantly in a way we never expected.  We stopped seeing commercials.

The ReplayTV has two buttons on its well-designed remote that get worn out before any of the others.  One is a 30-second skip forward and the other is a 7-second skip back.  When a commercial break starts you tap the 30-second skip button a few times – or several times, or a whole lot of times, depending on the network – skipping over approximately one commercial at a time until the show reappears, and then you tap the 7-second back button a few times to get back to the end of the final commercial.  The show resumes and you missed nothing.  The gesture is fast, accurate and nearly reflexive.  It’s better than fast-forwarding which requires considerably more attention, so much better in fact that broadcasters threatened legal action until the manufacturer removed the 30-second skip feature from later models.  TiVo has made the feature available only as a hack to advanced users out of fear of the same pressure.

So TV commercials were gone, removed from our lives like surgeon might remove a gall bladder, and as such we lost part of our contact with popular culture.  Admittedly we were never very into pop culture – neither of us has ever seen an episode of Friends or even the more acclaimed Seinfeld – but it was surprising how much of what we knew came from commercials.  I would be driving down the road, for example, and find myself doing a double-take at a bizarre new car model.  Probably if I had first seen it perching on a bluff over the Grand Canyon I wouldn’t have found it so hideously ugly.

We’d also find ourselves having conversations with friends which ended very quickly:

FRIEND: Did you see that new commercial, the one where the guy…

ME: No.

FRIEND: …there’s this guy…  What?

ME: I don’t watch commercials.

My wife, I think realizing that she might actually be missing something social, has started wanting to watch commercials sometimes.  Rather than immediately skipping she’ll allow the commercial to start playing, and if the remote is not within snatching distance she will ignore my pointed hints that there’s a commercial playing and we don’t need to be watching it.  If it’s John Hodgman I let it slide, but for anything else it just sets my teeth on edge.

It’s important for you to know all that before I comment on the topic of hit songs being used to score television commercials.  On the one hand is the argument for purity and artistic integrity – that if the musician doesn’t take their work seriously then why should we?  On the other is the argument that motives don’t matter – if the artist wants to make the most money possible from their creation, how can that affect whether it’s good art or bad after the fact?

My humble take on this is that context matters, not for the artist but for the audience.  If I enjoy a tune or a show or an image it doesn’t matter to me what the people who created it are like or why they did it.  It’s foolish to believe that good, sincere, authentic art can only be created by good, or sincere, or authentic people.  Many talented artists are selfish, money-grubbing jerks in person; Hollywood thrives on that fact.  No, the problem is that if I like Start Me Up, for example, then I have certain associations with the song – what was happening when I heard it, what it meant to me at the time – all the attendant contextual circumstances and emotions.  If I then hear the same song in a totally different context it causes all the reasons that I thought I liked the song to disconnect from the song itself.  I still have my memories of the song, but it acquires a new meaning, a parallel set of associations.  If the new context is especially inappropriate it can overwhelm the old one and kill it.  The reality is I don’t want to rock out to Microsoft Windows.

Artists have to be sensitive to this when making their licensing decisions.  They have a brand linked to a certain type of listener and experience, and they have to defend that brand.  Despite their saturation of our culture, commercials are largely devoid of redeeming value.  They have the power to debase anything associated with them.  Artists need to keep that in mind.

- jack*

Huzzah for Boosterism...

The “magnificent P-Zed” Myers, uncompromising howler for science, most militant of the militant atheists – has finally surpassed even himself.  Dismissing the straw-man demand for “incidents” that characterize the “sins” of Christianity against science with a simple “Bleh”, Dr Myers – or perhaps more appropriately his superhero alter-ego Pharyngula dispatches his worthless foe with a Power Punch to rival any atomic-powered cephalopod.

His twelve “objections,” numbered casually after the Roman fashion, are fit for nailing to any church door.  The everyday observations of a working professor of biology approaching finals are worthy of any dedicated Reformer, except that … jeez … how does he do that?  I mean honestly, I could work for years on carefully crafted posts and once in a while I might stumble on something as insightful as this.  But every day?

Let me get to the point.  Professor Myers has encapsulated the problem with religion so exactly in this post that there’s really very little to add.  If I could figure out how to do trackbacks this would be the time to do it.  To the scientist, religion is not simply a set of assertions, most of which are errors.  It isn’t just the major facts that the religious (and more generally the “spiritual”) have wrong.  If that were the case we could just hash out our disagreements and come to some sort of consensus.  But the difficultly is much deeper than that.  The problem is that those who are religious/faithful and those who are secular/rational use entirely different criteria for measuring truth.

This is not shocking to anyone who has studied the issue.  A reasoned approach to any subject – the existence of God perhaps – will be countered in the realm of faith by simply asking: “perhaps reason is wrong.”  The notion is absurd.  Of course a particular given reason for any belief can be wrong, but to be able to show that it was wrong the challenger would have to give reasons.   The faithful wish to sidestep that altogether and reject the notion of reason itself.  How are they going to do that – without giving reasons?

I only wish I could put it as clearly as Dr Myers.

- jack*