Author: colter

The Death of Niche Cable

I think it started with MTV’s The Real World. That was when MTV realized that it could make more money with shows that have a clear demographic than it could with just random videos all day long. This inevitably led to our current state of affairs wherein actual music videos on MTV are as scarce as hookers in Times Square. MTV is even saying goodbye to TRL, the last outpost of daytime video programming on MTV.

I’ve noticed an alarming number of cable channels finding greater profits in programming that violates the channel’s name and mandate.

VH1 was quick to follow, eventually packing its schedule with reality shows and instant nostalgia programs. The name VH1, for those who don’t remember, once stood for “video hits.” Like its big sister MTV did with M2, so VH1 begat VH1 Classic, tasking it with doing the chores VH1 was too busy making money to bother with, namely, playing video hits.

Next up, Bravo. Once a channel dedicated to actorly pursuits like Inside the Actor’s Studio (itself now a show featuring stars rather than actors), Bravo now boasts a schedule packed to the gills with reality shows of questionable relevance to its original charter of focusing on film, drama, and the performing arts. It should be noted that Bravo’s Canadian twin, Bravo!, never made this transition.

More recently, AMC, a channel whose name once stood for “American Movie Classics,” launched in 2007 its first original drama series, Mad Men. At least they’ve violated their namesake with a really good show.

The lesson here is that there may not be any money in niche programming, and as soon as there is, the niche is the first thing that dies. I’m once again reminded of that Eric Hoffer quotation, “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Maybe that’s a natural consequence of the old business adage: “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

Link Inventory

I’ve had a glut of fun links that I’ve sent around to various people recently. After a certain critical mass, I realized I should just drop them all onto the blog for everyone to enjoy. Also, if you’re on Gmail, I’ll be adding fun links as I find them to my status there via Snurl, a service for making really long links into tiny ones. My intake of new blogs and articles has multiplied exponentially since I added The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Wired and New York Magazine to my Firefox bookmarks toolbar, and here are some of the results:

  1. ClapClap’s history of the long, slow rise of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which began its pop-culture life as Jeff Buckley’s cover of John Cale’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s tune, and now, given its apparent pervasiveness, seems poised to become the next “Amazing Grace.”[1]

    ClapClap’s Michael Barthel talks about how the song gets used on Scrubs and The OC as an easy and cheap emotional shorthand. This made me realize how easily a legitimately emotional piece of music can easily become banal through overuse, the entropy of art. Classic rock stations have the same effect. But Barthel disagrees:

    “This is the beauty of the pop song: it’s an artistic hooker with a heart of gold, always willing to be used. It can become a tool, but a song isn’t a Matisse—if it’s used as a washcloth, just wring it out and it’s good as new.”

  2. McSweeney’s deliciously satirical sendup of Ayn Rand, updated for the new financial crisis.

  3. And speaking of economics, I’ve read in several places now that economic downturn is bad news for libertarians. The Becker-Posner blog says it best:

    “The financial crisis has hit economic libertarians in the solar plexus, because the crisis is largely a consequence of innate weaknesses in free markets and of excessive deregulation of banking and finance, rather than of government interference in the market.”

  4. Completely unrelated to anything else thus far, here’s a story about a woman with completely perfect recall. She can remember every detail about every day of her life. Why the Greek tragedians never thought of this, I can’t say.
  5. And, for dessert, cupcakes from John Mayer.

I should mention that a few of these items came via Andrew sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic. I’m addicted. His range is wide, his diction and syntax elegant, and his politics reasonable. I found it very interesting when Michael Barthel of clapclap said, “when you mainly get the world through people who share your filter, it strengthens and hardens.” Incidentally, Andrew Sullivan is a conservative, gay, Christian British guy. So he’s nobody’s echo chamber. Everyone should check him out.

1.) We’ll have to wait about 50 more years to really find out, though.

Noel Murray Nails It

The AV Club’s yearlong feature Popless, in which Conway’s own Noel Murray takes a sabbatical from all new music listening to focus on weeding and reviewing his entire collection, is wrapped up, and I had to pass along this elegant crystallization of what it means to move into parenthood from mere adulthood:

And I’ve got no problem at all with music that’s soft, pretty—even wimpy. I’m a middle-aged family man. I have nothing invested anymore in being thought of as a badass.

This may be the very reason why my musical tastes are all over the map: I have nothing invested in being thought of as anything other than someone whose tastes are all over the map.

While I’d like to admit that I’ve never much cared for what people think about the music that I like, somewhere in college, as I was transitioning out of metal and guitar wizardry[1], I think I subconsciously was guided by the desire to be known as someone whose music collection had no borders, someone to whom nothing was musically off limits. Working at a college radio station, I saw a lot of people putting limits on what they could or should listen to or not. Indie/college rock demands that you not listen to a lot of things: 80’s rock isn’t cool, jazz fusion isn’t cool, mainstream pop isn’t cool, thrash metal isn’t cool[2]. I certainly wanted no part of that hierarchy of badassery. If loving Huey Lewis and the News and Megadeth is wrong, I didn’t want to be right. And I still don’t.

By the way, I cannot recommend more highly that you go back and read each and every weekly Popless entry to learn about a lot of music you’ve probably never had the time or inclination to listen to – here is the first installment of Popless. And here is the index of all the articles.

1.) Or more specifically, “being thought of as someone who was a guitar badass.”
2.) Except Slayer, because there’s a certain hipster credibility to Slayer, because Slayer is the scariest band most indie rockers have ever heard.

Thanksgiving

Thursday I attended the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Thankfully the weather was as nice as it can really get in November in New York. And I’m also thankful that Heather was able to make it to town on her way back to Arkansas from Boston. We got there around 8 and found a spot to stand, around 67th street. Shortly after our arrival, a gentleman by the name of Alan (and a friend of his whose name I didn’t get) came through and set up a table with bagels, tomato juice and vodka. He said he and his late wife have been doing this for 35 years. So we watched the parade, ate bagels and drank Bloody Marys. Here are the floaty highlights:

Ronald McDonald
Smurf
Spongebob
Snoopy
a big guitar
Sesame Street gang

Then Heather and I went to Whole Foods to grab lunch. We also had a nice turkey dinner in the jazz room at Blue Water Grill in Union Square.

President-Elect Denounces Yappy Dogs

Now we’re getting somewhere. This is the sort of hard-nosed policy declaration I can fully stand behind, and I’m glad to see that it’s already on the president-elect’s agenda: Obama is staunchly anti-little yappy dog, and firmly pro-big rambunctious dog.

My apologies to my right honorable colleagues in the pro-yappy dog community, but I’m sorry to say that conscience demands I take a stand. We’ve had far too much of your tyranny these last 8 years. We’re going to get back on track. This crap has got to stop; we’ve got to get back to serious business.

Strange Linguistic Coincidences

These things catch in my brain and require comment:

Evan Longoria is the 2008 American League Rookie of the Year.
Eva Longoria is a star of ABC’s Desperate Housewives.

Keller Williams is both a real estate company based in Austin, Texas, and a singer-songwriter from Virginia.

Tucker Max is a fratboy humor author from Georgia and “Tucker Max” is also the shorthand for Tucker Maximum Security Correctional Facility in Arkansas.

None of these statistically unlikely matching sets are in any way related.

Death of an Inanimate Friend

In January of 2004, I went to the old Gateway store on Chenal Parkway in Little Rock to purchase my first digital camera. Having no idea what my needs were, and with about as much experience taking pictures as your average 11-year old, I chose the camera that was easiest to conceal and carry.[1]

I bought a Minolta DiMAGE X. Over the last almost 4 years, I’ve taken the camera across 33 states and two foreign countries. It’s responsible for nearly all the 1,624 pictures I’ve uploaded to Flickr.[2] Here is the first batch I ever took.

I knew this day was coming soon. It’s been on its last legs, losing screw after screw to the point where I can physically separate most of the chassis. The last time I took some videos, the screen went wonky, but it was temporary. Today, though, as I was trying to switch to video mode to catch a leaf-and-trash tornado in Ft. Green, the screen went blank and the camera could not be resuscitated.

Goodbye, trusty sidekick.

1.) Apparently this trend has continued over the years, as I’m now seeing digital cameras that are roughly the size and thickness of a credit card.
2.) Not to mention the 6,304 pictures I haven’t.

The Electoral College

This season’s electoral landslide highlights once again that the Electoral College is a device of questionable political accuracy. How are we supposed to interpret these particular tea leaves, these apparently random numerological phenomena? Does it make a cohesive statement? Can we say with confidence that these United States have definitively spoken, and with a greater than 2 to 1 electoral margin at that? As much as I’d love to say it’s true, I fear it’s not.

The defenders of the EC say it’s a marvelous device for preventing tyrannical majorities, but in the absence of any such tyranny either way, what purpose is served? One thing this country seldom produces is a strong majority. The defenders also say that it gives greater representation to individual states, allowing the little guys to get a piece of the action, but I say that’s irrelevant today. I think that the mass media and culture of the United States produced by the 20th century has tied the country together as a cohesive entity. I can ask myself if I am an Arkansan or a New Yorker, but it’s irrelevant because I’m an American first. Even McCain’s campaign slogan was “Country First.” Not “States First.” The US always comes first in the minds of nearly every American. We wear our state citizenship as a sort of alma mater, secondary to our federalist identity. We even label ourselves with the misnomer, “American,” because it’s too weird and untrue to say “United Stater.”

Contrary to the randomly drawn borders of the US map, the needs and minds of Americans generally fall into two socio-economic camps: urban and rural. The red state/blue state map is a crock. Name me one major US city that voted McCain[1]. Even Tuscaloosa, Alabama voted Obama 62% TO 38%! I’ll repeat that, TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA VOTED OBAMA. It has a peculiar rhythm to it that I think nicely underscores the unmitigated glee behind the words.

Looking back over past blog entries, I’m reminded that Heath had some great links on the Electoral College, and my rant from four years ago is still pretty applicable. I stand by it: city mice and country mice are we. I say it as a born country mouse.

1.) It’s so hard to find them because everything is county oriented. I wish somebody would compile a list of major US cities by vote, no suburbs or rural outlying areas added.