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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Waste Land

May 31, 2007 by Doug Ramsey

Flying east, two experiences melded into a thought around a phrase. Forty-six years and ten days ago, Newton Minow spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters, the organization of people who ran television and radio in the United States. Minow was the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcasting. Today broadcasting seems to regulate the FCC, but that’s not my point. Here’s the section of Minow’s speech that contained the phrase.

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and loss sheet or rating book to distract you — and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

A wasteland. The waste land. Hardly an original construction. It’s in the bible, and it’s in an eighty-five-year-old poem.
My flights from Seattle to New York City and New York to Rochester constituted an agreeable first experience on Jet Blue. That airline is still often called an upstart, although its startup was years ago and it is quite successful, give or take the occasional snowstorm snafu. One of Jet Blue’s points of pride is its seat-back television sets featuring forty-one channels transmitted to the plane from a satellite. In preparation for a book group discussion later this month, my plan for the trip had been to read T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, along with an analysis of that nearly impenetrable1922 poem. After an hour-and-a-half of Eliot, I was ready for something simpler, so I watched television. Full disclosure: I made my living in television news for twenty-five years, but life is full of other pursuits, and I rarely watch TV.
I agree with Minow’s first line about television. When it is good, it is magnificent. At the time of his speech in 1961, color television was six years old. So was the TV version of Gun Smoke. Video tape was even younger. Viewers could still see live drama on television. The Andy Griffith Show was brand new, years away from perpetual reruns. The Huntley-Brinkley Report and the CBS Evening News were fifteen minutes long. They delivered the news of the day; the misdeeds of people famous for being famous were not on the menu. The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents were among the prime time dramas. All of those programs were, to apply Minow’s strict standard, good. Yesterday on Jet Blue’s seat-back console, I found nothing of those programs’ quality. Nothing. That includes newscasts from the BBC and CBS. It includes the prime time series, which were uniformly centered on fiery deaths, incest, in-your-face adultery, summary executions at close range and, for comic relief, now and then a car chase. The Daily Show and the Colbert Report showed flashes of wry intelligence, but little that matches the penetrating wit of Sid Caesar, Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, or even of George Gobel.
The shows devoted to standup comics were beneath criticism. These people claim to be descended from Lennie Bruce? Give me a break.
Eliot’s The Waste Land is a difficult poem. It is packed with references and allusions to the bible, Greek mythology, Chaucer and Fraser’s The Golden Bough, among other sources reflecting his classical scholarship at Harvard. He tried to explain parts of it in a series of notes, some of which merely muddied the waters. Some critics say that the poem is Eliot’s effort to purge himself of the desolation he felt when he contemplated the state of humanity following World War One. In any case, its forecast is of a world whose prospects are for further moral and spiritual decay.
I tend to be an optimist. Nothing I saw on Jet Blue’s screen last night encouraged me, but a long time ago I decided not to let television define the world. On the return trip, I’ll ignore the seat back monitor and read a book.

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Comments

  1. Brian Owen says

    June 1, 2007 at 10:10 am

    It seems that because of the plethora of choices available, the networks have opted for whatever is most shocking. Perhaps they assume it’s the only way to grab an audience. But that’s no way to keep an audience. It’s a shame that quality is an afterthought, if a thought at all. There are definite parallels to the music industry in your post as well.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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Doug’s Picks

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Recent Listening: Harry Vetro’s Northern Ranger

Recent Listening: Harry Vetro’s Northern Ranger A generation of Canadian musicians is coming to prominence in their youth and making substantial impressions. One is drummer Harry Vetro. After he was graduated from the University of Toronto Jazz Program, the 23-year-old spent much of last year exploring his country as it celebrated its 150th year of […]

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Weekend Listening Tip: Maria Schneider & The SRJO

Jim Wilke tells us that his Jazz Northwest broadcast on Sunday will present Maria Schneider conducting the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. The program comes from his recording of the second of Ms. Schneider’s two concerts with the SRJO early this month. Her work has brought her five Grammy Awards, victories in many readers and critics […]

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Monday Recommendation, A Day Late: Atlantis Quartet

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Monday Recommendation: Bing Crosby, Continued

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Monday Recommendation (Unavoidably Delayed)

Wayne Shorter, Emanon (Blue Note) Although Wayne Shorter’s saxophone artistry and that of his quartet need no enhancement, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra shares the first disc of this three-CD collection. As always, the Orpheus is impressive for the precision of its musicianship, but the combination plods compared with the exhilaration of the second and third […]

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More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

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