About Last Night

Here are four recent letters to “About Last Night” that caught my eye:

“I doubt there’ll be a time when

Sorry for the slow day around here! We have been stymied by technical problems, and as for your GIC, she is in the foulest of moods today, quite apart from server snits. I wish I had it in me to channel my ill humor into something as hilariously misanthropic as this (when did the Chronicle of Higher Education get a sense of humor, anyway?), but I have vast expanses of other peoples’ prose to edit, and no time to waste venting. Come to think of it, though, editing and venting don’t have to preclude one another, do they…oh, pity the poor manuscripts.

I’m counting on the healing, or at least distracting, powers of art to snap me out of this funk: in a few hours I’ll be attending a preview of 21 Grams, for which I have the highest hopes. I’ll let you know how they pan out.

New Yorkers who subscribe to Time Warner digital cable TV now have the option of acquiring a fancy new cable box containing a built-in digital video recorder (DVR) designed to interface directly with Time Warner’s on-screen TV guide. Translated into English, this means you can record any TV program, or every episode of any TV series, simply by pushing a couple of buttons on your remote control, all for a ridiculously small monthly fee. I got a DVR a couple of days ago, and since then I’ve had to discipline myself severely in order to get any work done at all.

My new cable box does all sorts of cool stuff. Among other things, I can pause a TV show while it’s being broadcast live, then pick up right where I left off. (Please don’t laugh if all this is old hat to you. For me, it’s still a novelty.) But the most important part of the box is the DVR. You don’t have to read the admirably terse manual to figure out how it works: the menu-driven controls are intuitive to a fault. After fiddling with the remote for about 30 seconds, I was merrily clicking my way through the Turner Classic Movies schedule for the rest of the week.

If you own or have read about TiVo, the stand-alone home DVR system, none of this is news. The only difference is that Time Warner hooks its DVR up for you, and the whole shebang costs (as the old commercials used to say) just pennies a day. For this reason, given the ubiquity of cable TV and the rapid spread of digital systems, I can’t imagine that TiVo has much of a future. Everybody to whom I demonstrate my new cable box wants one–right now.

I have no doubt that the introduction of the cable-box DVR will have a massive and immediate effect on TV viewing habits, probably even greater than that brought about by the introduction of the VCR. Not only does the on-screen TV-guide interface make time shifting infinitely more convenient, but it encourages you to view TV programs whenever you please–and to skip the commercials, which is far easier to do on a DVR than a VCR.

I don’t care for the word “empowerment,” but I can’t think of a better way to describe what it feels like to use a DVR for the first time. I wrote the other day about how CBS’s decision to scrap The Reagans was really a new-media story that demonstrated the declining ability of Big Media to unilaterally shape the cultural conversation. Digital video recording is not a new medium per se, merely a technology, but it does have a quintessential new-media effect: it gives the viewer greater power to control the way he experiences network TV. In that sense, you might compare it to the way bloggers use links to cherry-pick the contents of Big Media Web sites, reshaping them into new on-line information packages over which the original publishers have no control–save by shifting to subscription-only access models, and thus taking themselves out of the new-media loop altogether. It’s an impossible choice: do you surrender control to the consumer, or do you walk away from the possibility of reaching younger viewers who are already deserting Big Media in droves?

The more you think about it, the more clearly you’ll see how hard it is to choose between these alternatives, not only in this context but in others as well. One of the Big Media publications for which I write, The Wall Street Journal, charges for on-line access to most of its daily contents. From the paper’s point of view, this model “works”: the Journal Web site turns a profit. From my point of view, however, it doesn’t work. Why? Because no one on the Web can link to my Friday drama columns, meaning that they don’t have nearly as significant a presence in the buzz-generating blogosphere as do, say, Ben Brantley’s theater reviews for the New York Times. (That’s why I post excerpts on this page first thing each Friday morning, even though I’m well aware that it’s not nearly as convenient as being able to read the whole column on your computer.)

What’s more, this isn’t only a problem for me. In my experience, most people out in the larger world of art and culture aren’t aware that the Journal runs any pieces about the arts, much less that it covers them regularly and well. For this reason, I’ve suggested that the paper consider posting all of its fine-arts coverage on its free Opinion Journal Web site, which now carries only one arts-related story each day. So far, the powers-that-be haven’t budged, and I understand why, though I’m still trying….

But I’ve wandered far afield from the tale of my new cable box, on which I have so far recorded five movies and three episodes of What’s My Line?, the wonderful old black-and-white game show which the Game Show Network runs in the middle of the night. (The box will store 35 hours’ worth of programming.) I’ve already watched a few shows in my spare time, such as it is. No doubt some will get watched and most of the rest erased, that being the way time shifting works. What I haven’t done since the box arrived is watch any TV shows in real time–nor have I seen a single commercial. In effect, I have replaced the existing TV networks with a homemade video-on-demand system on which I can watch what I want, when I want.

I wonder whether the people who run CBS, NBC and ABC realize that by doing so, I and my fellow DVR users have brought an end to the world as they know it? Probably not–but they will.

Said a girl who upon her divan

Was attacked by a virile young man,

“Such excess of passion

Is quite out of fashion,”

And she fractured his wrist with her fan.

Edward Gorey

I don’t know exactly what the rest of the blogosphere saw in “About Last Night” this week, but whatever it was, it must have been hot. Our Site Meter got a little weird after midnight, but we seem to have received somewhere between 2,400 and 2,600 page views on Wednesday. Not as many as on Tuesday, but well over twice as many as usual. Presumably some of these transients will settle down and visit us daily, or at least again. To all of you, and to the many wonderful bloggers who linked to “About Last Night,” Our Girl and I doff our hats and tip our wigs. You’re the best.

I only just got back from tonight’s playgoing, and I now have just 11 hours in which to (A) sleep and (B) review Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Violet Hour, and The Long Christmas Ride Home for Friday’s Wall Street Journal, so chances are that I won’t be posting all that much on Thursday. I haven’t heard from OGIC since yesterday afternoon (it is tomorrow, right?), so I can’t tell you what she’s got planned, but I’m sure she’ll keep the home fires burning.

At any rate, it’s more than likely that there’s something here you haven’t seen before, so scroll and browse and check back with us later. We’ll try not to keep you waiting.

UPDATE: Site Meter righted itself and spit out a final number for Wednesday of about 2,650 page views. That’ll do.

I woke up yesterday morning intending–nay, expecting–to spend the day writing a piece for The Wall Street Journal about The Looney Tunes Golden Collection. Then, just as I was gearing up, the phone rang. It was my editor at the Journal.

“You know about The Producers?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Could you write something about it?

“Yes.”

“For tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

So Looney Tunes got put off until next week. Instead, I changed funny hats and wrote about The Producers. Here’s the lead:

The big news on Broadway is the announcement that Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, who created the roles of Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in the musical-comedy version of Mel Brooks’ 1968 movie “The Producers,” will return to the show for 14 weeks starting Dec. 30. A year ago, that would have been news because “The Producers” was still Broadway’s hottest ticket, the musical everyone was talking about. Now, it’s news because “The Producers” is sorely in need of artificial respiration. Last week, it played to only 69% capacity.

Some observers blame the show’s decline on weak replacements for Messrs. Lane and Broderick, others on the fact that the best seats at the St. James Theatre are reserved for premium buyers willing to shell out a staggering $480 apiece. Both reasons are plausible, but neither quite hits the mark. The real reason why “The Producers” is sagging like a dowager’s bosom is that it, too, is out of date–albeit gloriously so….

Believe it or not, this one is available on “Opinion Journal,” the free page of the Journal‘s Web site. To read the whole thing, click here.

“About Last Night” set a record yesterday: Our Girl and I racked up 2,900 page views, most of them courtesy of Lileks
and The Corner, for which much thanks. We also picked up a link late last night from BuzzMachine which will doubtless keep our Site Meter bouncing (and which you should read–Jeff Jarvis has a very interesting take on my posting about The Reagans).

The bottom line is that Tuesday ended up being our biggest day yet–bigger even than the never-to-be-forgotten day that Instapundit linked to one of our postings. We’re still kind of dazed, but mostly just delighted.

To repeat what I said yesterday: if this is your first visit to “About Last Night,” click here to read a recent posting explaining what we’re all about.

If, on the other hand, you’re an old-timer, well, come on in, the blogging’s fine! I’m going to be tied up for most of today (I’ve got to finish a piece about The Looney Tunes Golden Collection for The Wall Street Journal, then it’s off to see a play), but OGIC tells me she has some stuff up her sleeve. In any case, we won’t let you go hungry.

Oh, yes–it’s still absolutely O.K. to tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. Why stop at 2,900? This could be the start of something…well, bigger.

P.S. Andrew Sullivan got into the act shortly after midnight. This joint is going to rock today….

A reader writes:

I can’t be so sanguine about the demise of the album as you are. Yes, recordings were originally short one-offs, but the LP represented a real breakthrough in that it organized the individual tracks in a way that allowed them to speak to one another, and thus increase their impact. A bad song, when thoughtfully integrated into a good album, can be marvelous (e.g. “Within You Without You” on Sgt. Pepper). I don’t think I’m being purely reactionary about this; there is a real beauty to a well-ordered series of songs that will necessarily fall by the wayside if we lose the album as it is now constructed.

To strike a more reactionary tone, I do worry about the ability of people to maintain interest over time. A couple of years ago, the studio (I don’t know which one) sent “Almost Famous” back because it went over their mandatory 2 hour time limit. The resulting cut was a lesser film by any standard (other than brevity), but that didn’t seem to matter; the important thing was that the American viewer wouldn’t have to sit through an overly-long movie (it ended up clocking in at 2:02, so they fudged a little). Unfortunately, I fear that they know their audience well. Reducing the duration of the units of our music would only exacerbate the attention span problem.

Let me suggest a middle road between albums and pay-per-downloads. Perhaps what we will see is the return of the single as a discreet item (or, in this case, series of ones and zeros), but with the continued existence of the album as well. This way artists wouldn’t feel the need to record filler when they only have one good idea, they would simply release the song individually. This could be a good thing. Remember, “Yesterday” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” originally apepared as singles. Then, when a big idea strikes them, they can record a whole album, and even allow fans to only be download it as a whole. It would immediately be pirated on a per-song basis, of course, but it would at least be initially concieved and marketed as an album, thus preserving the integrity of their vision.

I hope I’m right. I would hate to think of future composers being forced to create in snippets.

I actually think something like the two-tier plan my reader envisions is bound to happen. In fact, it’s on the verge of happening already, as individual artists start marketing music through their own Web sites (about which more later–I know about some interesting new sites-in-the-making).

But I do want to take gentle issue with my correspondent’s use of the word sanguine to describe the way I feel about the prospect of life without records. I’m not saying that the album-as-art-object is a bad thing. On the contrary, I’m passionately attached to more than a few such objects (including the ones I mentioned in my original posting). I simply don’t think this kind of mass-produced art object will long survive the transition to a fully digitized, Web-based recorded-music economy.

People often take for granted that I approve of the cultural trends I describe in essays like “Life Without Records.” Sometimes I do, sometimes not. Most often I don’t know what to think about them–yet. The only thing I’m sure of is that they won’t go away, which is why I’m more interested in describing them than judging them. We live in the midst of a blur of onrushing technologies, each pulling its individual train of unintended consequences. I’d much rather try to puzzle out the possible effects of these technologies than complain in advance of having fully experienced them. If anything, I’m temperamentally disposed to be a Luddite, but I absolutely refuse to let myself succumb to that pointless temptation. To be a Luddite, after all, is to renounce all possibility of shaping technology-driven cultural change. I started “About Last Night” for the exact opposite reason: I wanted to try to use a new technology in order to help sustain and enrich the great tradition of Western art.

Early in the life of this blog, I posted an almanac entry by Marshall McLuhan which (allowing for a certain amount of poetic exaggeration) sums up the way I try to look at technological change. It’s worth repeating:

I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening, because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me.

Neither do I.

P.S. Another reader writes:

I’m enjoying this whole topic of the demise of the record, even as I mourn its passing. While I know the folly of remaining in the ostrich position, I have to side with those who would hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even before I tried my hand at recording, I always loved the concept of an album being a collection of material, like a painting or an opera or a good meal. It’s part of the challenge of translating the live performance – making the shape and serving it all up so the listener can enjoy a fuller experience, if that makes sense. kd lang’s Drag album, or the pairing of a specific singer with a special musician or group of players, Peggy Lee’s Mirrors — hell, even Dark Side of the Moon and such. I can’t imagine Bitches Brew as a single. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent too many hours of pleasure listening to recordings alone in a car. Maybe not – a friend just called me and said that he had spent the evening listening to my last CD and felt like it was like an hour of good conversation. So go figure.

(This e-mail comes from one of my favorite singers, by the way.)