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December 26, 2003
TT: A Christmas story
In case you're just joining us, I'm blogging this week from Smalltown, U.S.A, the southeast Missouri town where I grew up and where most of my family still lives. My sister-in-law, who lives in Smalltown and reads this blog from time to time, e-mailed yesterday to inform me that she and my brother now have a high-speed modem, thank you very much. (I had previously mentioned in this space that I was having trouble getting used to the dial-up connection at my mother's house.) Of all the new wrinkles that have come to Smalltown, U.S.A., since my last visit home, that one might just be the most significant.I haven't gotten around to replying to Felix Salmon's recent comment on what I wrote about the Metropolitan Opera's radio broadcasts, but it's relevant here, so I'll mention it now. In case you didn't see my posting, I was writing in response to an article by Tony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic of the New York Times, in which he explained why it was a bad thing that the Met broadcasts, which have lost their corporate funding, might be in danger of cancellation. I begged to differ:
[T]he future of classical radio lies not in what has come to be called "terrestrial radio" (i.e., conventional radio broadcasting) but in satellite and Web-based radio, which make it possible to "narrowcast" a wider variety of programs aimed at smaller audiences. I suspect that's where the Met really belongs--not on terrestrial radio. And if I had to guess, I'd say that the Tony Tommasinis of today would be more likely to listen to the Met on their computers than on high-quality radios bought by their parents.
(In his original piece, Tony had reminisced about how he'd discovered opera by listening to the Met broadcasts as a boy.)
Here's part of Felix's response:
The Met radio broadcasts reach 11 million people – vastly more than will listen to classical music on their computers worldwide over the course of a year. Tommasini makes the point that the broadcasts "have been a cultural lifeline for generations of listeners, both those who live in places far removed from any opera company and those who may live just a subway ride from Lincoln Center but can't afford to attend". Teachout, it would seem, would restrict them to the lucky inhabitants of the affluent side of the digital divide, those with satellite radios and broadband internet connections.
One of Felix's correspondents went even further, calling my post "unseemly and elitist...The idea that only people who have broadband ‘deserve' opera is ludicrous." (Quotation marks notwithstanding, the word "deserve" appears nowhere in my posting.)
I didn't reply at once because what Felix wrote seemed to me so comprehensively wrong-headed that I didn't quite know where to start--and as for what his correspondent said, I thought it was just plain dumb. Now I think my sister-in-law has taken care of it for me. After all, you never could listen to the Met in Smalltown, U.S.A., at least not via terrestrial radio, but you can now have a broadband connection to the Web at an affordable price. If broadband Web access is available in a tiny town located two hours from the nearest medium-large city, it'll soon be available just about anywhere in America--and if ordinary middle-class people like my brother and sister-in-law think it's worth having, the rest of the country will surely follow in short order. So perhaps the time has come to stop talking about high-speed Internet access as a luxury available only to those on "the affluent side of the digital divide" and start thinking of it as the coming norm.
I wouldn't say that everything's up to date in Smalltown, but I can report a few other things that are worthy of note. We have two McDonald's, for instance, and we're on our second Wal-Mart, this one a 24-hour "supercenter" (and yes, it was jammed to the eyeballs today). You can't buy the New York Times in Smalltown, but there are two coin boxes selling The Wall Street Journal, one next to the post office and one in front of the newly remodeled grocery store on the north side of town. Not that it matters, since I read this morning's Times (see below) on line, the same way I read it each morning in Manhattan.
Here's a one-hand-other-hand story about cultural change in southeast Missouri. After we opened our Christmas presents yesterday afternoon, I drove my mother up to Collegetown, U.S.A., to look at the holiday lights. My plan had been to take her to dinner, too, but I'd been away long enough for it to have slipped my mind that folks around here don't eat out on Christmas. Every restaurant in Collegetown, even the ones next to the motels on the highway, was closed up tight as a drum--except for the Chinese places. Now, I don't make a habit of eating Chinese food in southeast Missouri (I get more than enough of it in Manhattan), but desperate times called for desperate measures, so I took my mother to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, fully expecting the worst. I've eaten some pretty horrendous Chinese food in the Midwest--in fact, I'm old enough to remember the days of chow mein and egg foo yung--but this place served perfectly adequate versions of all the usual dishes, and the sesame chicken and hot and sour soup were actually pretty good. We stuffed ourselves and laughed all the way home.
I saw my first episode of The Simple Life the other night, and the thought occurred to me that it might be interesting to spend a year living in and blogging from Smalltown, U.S.A. I'm sure life here is a lot more complicated than it looks, and I'd love to be able to scratch the surface more deeply than usual and find out exactly how people in my home town really feel about such puzzling cultural phenomena as Paris Hilton and Howard Dean. (Which reminds me of a one-liner I saw on the Web last week: did you hear about the town so small that all the Episcopalians were straight?) As it stands now, I never get to do more than sniff the air and do a little light eavesdropping. Maybe Smalltown is actually throbbing with undigested modernity--or maybe not. Either way, it's a nice place to visit, at Christmastime or any other time, and most especially in the middle of an orange alert.
UPDATE: Lileks is rocking this week--now he's got a posting on his father's new satellite radio. Take that, Felix Salmon!
Posted December 26, 2003 4:11 AM
