TV, magazines, books, music, movies - ANYTHING that gave me the hint of a world beyond my tiny, stifflingly conservative, christian town and family - these things LITERALLY saved my life.  When I was contemplating suicide, I reminded myself that these hints had to come from somewhere, and that that bigger world was waiting for me, if I could just hold on a little longer. 
People seriously underestimate how many new ideas come to us even through supposed “junk” culture like TV and magazines.  Don’t they ever wonder why so many fundie kids aren’t allowed access to pop culture unless it’s been previously looked over by their parents and/or the church? 
My life really was saved by Rock and Roll.

I think the problem is that the old folks who want you off their lawn are comparing simplistic tv shows like Leave It To Beaver with new stuff that really does have more content.  “Sitting on your behind” isn’t a good summary of what you did when you watched MTV.  You were challenged with new kinds of music and learned about stuff, even political stuff.

I think at least premium channel TV has better content than movies now, on average, because it can be long-form, more like a novel or series than a short story.  Themes and characters can be developed over time, much like when it takes you days or weeks (or at least hours) to read a novel.

Reminds me.  I was reading a story about how the closing of Borders Books affects small local bookstores
and was dumbfounded by this one bookstore owner:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bs-bz-hancock-book-business-20110731,0,4560007.column#tugs_story_display

“You’re still reading on a Kindle, but you’re not ‘reading,’” says Erin Matthews, who owns and runs Books With A Past, a used-book store in Glenwood in Howard County.

Her customers will say, “I read that on my Kindle,” as if to acknowledge that it wasn’t a genuine literary experience, she said, adding, “At least a quarter of my customers have Kindles, but they’re still my customers.”

What makes a genuine literary experience?  For me it’s when I actually FORGET I HAVE A BOOK IN MY HAND and instead I’m in the story or the train of thought or the description.

Wait, what - Moby had hair back then?

I liked MTV, but I maintain that the best things to come out of that channel are Daria, The State and Jon Stewart.

My radio dial has almost always been more diverse than Mtv.  It’s doubly so now, I have two or three dance stations (the SF Bay rocks) along with top forty in several languages, talk of many persuasions, music from various eras, bpm, and instrumentation.  I can listen to new music from clubs, stadiums, bar scenes, in country, rock, several flavors of latin music.

Of course, when I was a kid I had access to top 40 and CBC stereo; and Mtv was more diverse in musica tastes then.

Alas, video+music seems to have died out as a medium.  I’m not sure why…

I also like the subtle dig of “sitting on your behind”, implying laziness.  Never mind that you’d still be “sitting on your behind” reading Tolstoy or writing a physics thesis…

My favorite two Mtv shows were Liquid Television and Downtown.

First off, I have to say that I’d take any Pumpkins song over Michael Jackson, but that’s a bit OT.  It’s just in some people’s nature to hate on anything that the cool kids/young people enjoy.  So people who who otherwise enjoy TV will act all holier than thou because MTV is too “mainstream” for them.  Of course none of this matters anymore, as MTV doesn’t seem to show music videos anymore.

Hell, people have been hand-wringing about new communicative technology since the advent of the written word:

“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.” - Plato

People who are scornful of someone claiming to have “been raised by MTV” may be thinking only of the current incarnation of MTV, which is (or anyway was when last I saw it) sunk into a fetid swamp of “reality” programming.  Where, I ask, are the excellent music videos of yesteryear, where are the fabulous non-music shows, the biting humor?

It really is not at all the channel for avant art and humor that it was in, say, the 90’s.  I remember it fondly, and regret its passing from the scene.

Most of the snottiness could have been avoided if Amanda had simply said she had been raised *on* MTV.

1.) I totally missed MTVs golden age. We were using “hip as MTV” as an insult in my teens…

2.) I love kindle haters. They know they hate the things, they just don’t know why!

I think people forget that MTV used to actually be interesting and relevant. For example when I was in college I watched a lot things like 120 minutes and liquid television. Its been a long time since anything like that was on the air (it may still be on one of the other MTV channels, but I wouldn’t know since I don’t get those). MTV nowdays is mostly horrible reality shows, like just about every other channel. It did at one point have some interesting documentaries on during the day but I dunno if they show those anymore. I never was able to watch MTV when I was a kid though because we didn’t have cable.

  I don’t think that all tech concern is necessarily concern trolling. I recently finished How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music by Elijah Wald.* In the opening parts of the book, Wald notes that John Philip Sousa was apprehensive about recorded music because Sousa thought that recorded music would end up resulting in a decrease in the ability of the general public to play music or sing. By and large Sousa was right, musical ability used to be much more widely defused than it is at present. Since professional level playing was made more widespread by recorded music, fewer people felt compelled to learn how to sing or play an instrument, which is what people needed to do if they wanted to listen to music in the past.

  *The title of the book is needlessly confrontational in order to grab attention, the Beatles play music. The main focus should be on the Alternative History of American Popular Music, the book is the musical equivalent of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Wald’s basic argument is that most of the past histories of popular music aren’t really histories of popular music but histories of what musical critics thought were important. Wald wants to examine what most people listened to and why. The book is of a particular interest to me because Wald argues that for most of the Twentieth Century danceability was what really determined whether music was popular or not. A combination of factors from recorded music to the growing sophistication of rock under the Beatles divorced pop music from dance music. This thesis is of personal importance to me because I’ve been putting a lot of effort into learning how to dance for a year and half now. Since I’m a bit of a history geek, one of things I started to wonder about was why did knowledge of dance slowly collapse on itself between the late 1940s and mid-1960s. Wald explains a lot of the reasons why.

Maybe I wasn’t typical, but I certainly didn’t “sit on my butt” watching MTV in my teen years! I was dancing! I was trying to moonwalk, and watching the dancers for Billy Idol and Power Station and imitating them. We got MTV in the early years, probably in the first five, and was exposed to so much music that you couldn’t find on the radio. It gave me the courage to have fun with fashion and hair and makeup as a teenager, and when bands I liked said who their influences were, I went out to find those musicians.

MTV added value to my social skills at a time when it was sorely needed.

I love kindle haters. They know they hate the things, they just don’t know why!

It’s the best, purest distillation of technology hatred.

It’s like, things I am angry about: these kids today going around reading LENGHTY NOVELS.

I *will* say the TV when you and I were growing up was worlds less psychologically nasty (in the sophisticated sense—not purient or violent sense).  It just seems like ‘bout round 2003, quirky shows just seemed to die out.  CNN used to be a really informative channel—there is just no comparison between about 2001 and now.  I could watch local news, even with the if it bleeds, it leads focus, but now I can’t stand it anymore. 

MTV used to play cool music videos…

/me shakes head.

I would never let a young kid watch TV by him or herself these days, or, I would make every effort to teach media psychology as a supplement to whatever callouses kids these days get…

#9 Big_Southern- 
Why doesn’t it surprise me that Plato is bitching about the evils of literacy centuries after writing came to Greece. Maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t worry about the memory retention of a culture that still factors an invisible letter from a dead writing system into poetic meter.

Wow those screen shots are pretty awesome.

I think a more pressing issue with technology is the inherent inequality that I think is growing with the internet etc.  Ironically, smart phones might be somewhat reducing this gap, although their continual cost seems to be like a back door Rent-A-Center.  They got you on a hook!

I think the people who are responding to this by saying, “well MTV was better back in the day,” are kind of missing the point.  I mean, I too would rather watch Daria than the Jersey Shore, but I don’t think this is about people who were dismissive of Amanda’s youth culture specifically. 

I have observed that baby boomers do this in a very particular way.  Their self-identity as a generation is strongly linked with youth culture as a concept (a lot of them seem to think that they invented it or something) so they don’t reject it in the same way their parents did (e.g. rock and roll is sinful) but instead by telling younger people that they’re doing it wrong.

I will say that smartphones have ruined bar trivia night

My point being that I think concern trolling is more their style.

@Shah8—not that I spend most of time thinking about the wonders of television, but this from you is mistaken, I think: “It just seems like ‘bout round 2003, quirky shows just seemed to die out.”  We’re actually in a kind of golden age of television right now, it seems to me.  Suitable, since I suppose it may be the terminal age of television, as on-demand media take over. 

What I mean is, what decade prior to now had a run of shows comparable to Breaking Bad, Damages, Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead . . . and you can complete the list yourself, seeing how I am starting it.  Each of these shows is downright literary in one way or another.  A perfectly good reason to sit on one’s ass for a while.

Nothing will ever beat Six Feet Under, sure, but that was just one show.

Michael may have won the battle, but Billy will win the war.  Also Daria rocked!

Ah, Daria.

I’ve been around for a long time, and it always seems that there will be people who will criticize cultural genres/media/etc. simply for their potential to allow a larger number of folks to experiencing something that they don’t want others to experience.  I’m confident that most of you can think of any number of examples of the efforts to promote the previous values through censorship, humiliation, chastisement, et al.  Today’s concern trolling is yesterday’s letters to Ed Sullivan.

he book is of a particular interest to me because Wald argues that for most of the Twentieth Century danceability was what really determined whether music was popular or not.

You can totally dance to Strawberry Fields...if you are deaf. 

And blind. 

And a paraplegic.

I’m a Kindle hater. I mean I’d be happy enough to live and let live, I’m just afraid e-books will replace my beloved physical books. They are already wiping out physical bookstores.

MTV already sucked in the 90s. When it was fucken great was the 80s.

People who said MTV sucked in the 90s were complaining that MTV no longer played music videos. People who say MTV sucks now are complaining that the shows from the 90s and early 00s that replaced their music video programming were better than they are today.

And, honestly, both people are right. Even though I might complain that you could no longer tune into MTV to watch music videos, Liquid Television and Daria were pretty awesome, and their current programming is not good.

Some people hate the Kindle for no reason, but some people hate it because it just means more electronic waste filling up land dumps.  And there’s this weird obsession with having to immediately throw out the old model when a new one comes in, so you get people throwing working shit away every year or two.  Kindles are the new cell phone.  For the record, I don’t have anything against cell phones or Kindles; what I do have a problem with is how wasteful people are with them.

As somebody who has “get off my lawn” tendencies, I can recognize the “Roman Ruin Syndrome” it a lot of this

The Romans were great engineers, just look at that Aqueduct that still standing after 200 years – of course, the shoddy construction and design of the apartment building that collapsed 2 yrs after it was built aint there to see

Likewise the golden age of Hollywood
“Philadelphia Story”, “Gone With the Wind”, Anything with Barbara Stanwyck in it, were far better then this summers crap, harrumph, harrumph

But then again all the cheesy crap that they made in the 30’s never gets replayed so I can forget about it

I forgot how MTV was essentially a pioneer of “reality television.” The Real World was a pretty revolutionary concept at the time, and I would argue it was pretty progressive for its time in its realistic portrayal of gay relationships and what it was like to live with HIV.

People’s reasons for rejecting things - they are new, they are old, they are flashy, they are boring, they are unsophisticated, they are arrogant, etc. - are revealing enough even before you realize that these are also the reasons people give for embracing things.

Very rarely do we pass judgment on external things.  We mostly make judgments about ourselves, only thinking that we are talking about other things.

I think the problem is that the old folks who want you off their lawn are comparing simplistic tv shows like Leave It To Beaver with new stuff that really does have more content

Don’t underestimate the power that LITB and shows like Father Knows Best and The Ozzie and Harriet Show in reruns had for some us.  For me and my younger brother, trapped in a house with parents who most definitely were not June/Ward material, to see that glimpse of what a family could be like was a lifeline.  Oh, and Tony Dow was smokin’ hot. 

A combination of factors from recorded music to the growing sophistication of rock under the Beatles divorced pop music from dance music

Also: the part that consuming vast amounts of drugs like pot, LSD and mushrooms had.  I actively sought out music that was “divorced from dance music” (much as I liked Motown and all that), that in the slang of the early 70’s was considered “head music”.  Do a bunch of bong hits, take a tab of red microdot, put on your headphones, cue up Electric Ladyland or Meddle or Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon and you were set. 

I’ve never cared about the whole “rock music as a tribal ritual” thing and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed an intense dislike for people around me talking all the way through a concert or standing there bored out of their skulls until the one or two radio hits are played (yes, you losers at the recent Echo & The Bunnymen show I went to, I mean you).

I got a Kindle last year and I love it. Of course, the ability to carry a bunch of books in something that weighs less than five pounds rather than giving myself a hernia is great. I never know what I’m going to feel like reading from one minute to the next. But what really sells it for me is the massive amount of public domain literature available from Project Gutenberg, Amazon and other places on the web. I still buy books because, one, not every book is an e-book and, two, I can usually find used books cheaper than the Kindle price, and that’s a major consideration in these tough times. I’m not particularly worried about ebooks replacing physical books, mainly because what’s important to me is what’s actually in the book rather than the book itself.

As for MTV, I grew up without it though I grew up in its “glory days” of the ‘80s. The local cable company didn’t carry it at least into the mid ‘90s, but in any event, I lived too far out into the sticks for cable. We got satellite television in my teens, but my parents only bought packages that showed baseball. I didn’t really care, since all I listened to was then-radio country, ‘50s rock & roll and classic soul. By the time I hit college in Gainesville, FL, MTV had pretty much quit showing music apart from the “Unplugged” stuff and, I think, “120 Minutes”, and by then I was pretty much a blues/soul/R&B snob anyway.

Most if not all of my friends from my mid ‘20s to early ‘30s were “raised on MTV”, and there is definitely a difference between how they view certain aspects of pop culture and how I (and my two-year-younger brother) view it. Our nostalgia filters are pretty different, basically. You all might regret the day “The Real World” figured out it had a money-maker, while we mourn the departure of Buck Owens from “Hee Haw”.

I’ve always had access to radio that was way more diverse than MTV.  Loved MTV- nothing beats a visual to go with the audio, but it was always limited in what it played. 

As for preferring that people are doing/playing/writing vs watching/listening/reading, well, there’s a place for both, but I agree that one gets more out of actively doing than passively experiencing.  That’s not actually a technology waah argument, and playing it up as one is deliberately missing the point.  Soaking in stuff is fine, but without actually working to create your own interpretation of what you just soaked in, you are missing out on most of the experience.

Do a bunch of bong hits, take a tab of red microdot, put on your headphones, cue up Electric Ladyland or Meddle or Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon and you were set. 

I just remember listening to Dark Side of the Moon while tripping my brains out on mushrooms and watching the colored light in bedroom pulsate to the beat of “On the Run” only to have my whole being shattered by the bells at the beginning of “Time.”

Good times.  VERY good times.

I clicked thru the RSS feed to comment on the fact that the fear/disapproval of TV and technology reaches into other areas of your life, such as parenting. And then I saw Shah8 comment regarding how (s)he would never let their children watch TV. 

I support parents making their own choices but I’ve never understood the hearty disapproval a lot of people have for letting kids watch TV.  The TV is usually on in my house, most of the time on the kid channels or the DVR or DVDs.  And I’m so grateful for it!  So grateful for all the choices.  My kids learn so much.  My 2 yo knows all her letters and the sounds they make - just as an example. And I’m grateful that they have exposure to media because they learn stuff I would be incapable of teaching them. But even though it’s on, the kids aren’t just parked in front of the set w/ their eyes glued to the TV.  Right now, the Blues Clues Musical Movie (which is so awesome, RAY CHARLES voices G Clef) is on but my 6 yo is building Lego people and my 2 yo is writing her letters (shakily, admittedly, but still).  They see stuff that makes them think and they ask me a lot of questions.  They run and dance and play together or do any other number of activities.  Sometimes because the program prompts it and other times just because that’s a zany thing little ones do.  I’m not worried about advertising, either.  My 2 yo is going thru the phase right now where she wants everything advertised but the 6 yo has started requesting that I fast forward through the commercials. 

One point of contention in the household is they will ask for a program and then obviuosly pay ZERO attention to it.  But of course, protest when we try to watch adult programming. 

I grew up in much the same environment (with fewer choices of course, it was the 70s and 80s) with permissive parents and a TV that was on much of the time.  Even so, I soaked up media skepticism due to my father yelling “bullshit” during the news.  And I was almost always engaged in something else while watching/listening to TV.  I remember embroidering with MTV playing a dance club show (can’t remember what it was called, it was kind of like American Bandstand).  To this day, I like having something on but I’m not slavishly devoted to TV.  It seems to me children of parents who were really restrictive with TV grow into either TVaholics or they have equally unhealthy views that TV is the root of all evil. 

Just my 2 cents about media concern trolling…

“There’s a little bit of Billy Corgan bashing Michael Jackson, too.  Guess who won history?”

The lawyers, music labels, gossip columnists, comedians, and the owners of the rights of the “This Is It” documentary?

Not sure how Michael’s going to be remembered—genius, freak, dead too soon, or all of the above—but I don’t think he’ll be remembered as a “winner.”  (Not that we have much to go on with recording artists and history.  Somebody ask college kids these days what they know about Frank Sinatra or Hank Williams, Sr.?  I’m guessing you’d find scattered fans, several more people who aware of them, and a whole lot of blank stares, but I’d love to be proven wrong.)

I remember being a teenager and lamenting the loss of the music video medium in favor of shows like Remote Control. But The State was awesome enough to change my mind.

So yes I am in the pro-nineties MTV camp, I suppose. But then again, I do feel like my own severe inability to concentrate on anything for more than twelve seconds is largely due to the fast-pace of all the television I was plopped in front of as a kid. And MTV’s quick-cut videos and extreme “oh yeah” Dan Cortese programming really ramped that up like few things before it ever had. I don’t think we can let television completely off the hook just because some of the criticism directed at it is knee-jerk. I kind of do believe that “the medium is the message,” and that in the TV age, one could argue that the medium’s message is driving consumerism and destroying rational thought by replacing it with soundbites and explosions. And I believe we’re probably 10 years away from seeing that remedied by the better alternatives popping up online. Hopefully we keep our net neutrality until then.

MTV in the 80’s had a much more limited playlist than the radio stations in California at the time. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it actually offered diversity otherwise not available in some areas (“We play both kinds of music: Country and Western.”) but it wasn’t all that good.

Daria was, of course.

  Attn Henry Holland: That was kind of Wald’s point, minus the explicit reference to drugs. Wald argues that the growth of recorded music allowed the mainly male serious music fans/music critics to treat music as a solitary listening experience rather than a communal live activity. Eventually, over the course of decades, they were able to convince the general public that serious music should be treated as a sort of novel/personal soundtrack rather than something you dance and sing to live with other people. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club band represents the culmination of this. The most serious accusation that Wald lays at the feet of the Beatles and company was that they resegregated rock and roll by turning it from mongrel dance music into art rock.

Not sure how Michael’s going to be remembered—genius, freak, dead too soon, or all of the above—but I don’t think he’ll be remembered as a “winner.”

But he’ll be remembered. Ask ten ordinary people who Michael Jackson was, and at least eight out of ten will have an answer. Ask the same people about Billy Corgan and eight out of ten will say “Who?”

And I wouldn’t put too much faith in the anti-Kindle attitude espoused by the proprietor of a boutique used bookstore in a county with lots of disposable income kicking around. Of course she’s going to discourage her customers from owning or using Kindles! Like anyone else who runs a business, she is looking to get paid, and every book someone buys on their Kindle is a book they’re not buying from her.

Amazon destroyed physical bookstores.  People go into the bookstore to get ideas on what to buy, then go home and order them from Amazon.

every book someone buys on their Kindle is a book they’re not buying from her.

Is that true about someone who runs a boutique used bookstore? People who buy books from a place like that are buying books cheaply that they probably can’t find elsewhere. Kindle books are comparatively expensive and aren’t drawn from the collection of obscure, out-of-print titles you would find at such a place. I think the person complaining is just trying to find a convenient target to blame her business problems on.

Another reason why people may dismiss newer media is that they haven’t figured out how to put it into their lives.  They see this Hot New Thing! as just a disruption.

I’m old enough that most of my life was before cell phones were even invented.  I got along just fine without them, and now that my employer requires me to have one, I am mostly aware of the down side—I’m on-call for idiotic questions 24/7, especially to my ex-wife, and it keeps falling out of my pocket at inconvenient times.  No doubt, if I’d grown up using them, like I did land-line telephones, I would consider them a necessity.

The same goes for, say, Facebook: there’s no hole in my life that Facebook fills up, so, even though I have an account and have even posted a few of the minutia of my life, I still can’t figure out why anyone bothers.  So far, all of the posts I’ve seen from my F-Friends are on the order of, “my phone’s out, waiting for Verizon” or “just had a fried egg.”  Evidently, I’m missing something, since millions of people seem to feel the need to log in dozens of times a day (like my F-Friends.)

FWIW, I’m, if anything, going backwards as far as music media.  I’ve lost interest in listening to the radio or buying records (I guess I should say CDs now—or is it MP3’s?).  If I can’t sing it or play it, I don’t bother.  And most of my newer music is dance music—jigs, reels, waltzes, etc.

I guess I’m not just old-fashioned, I’m retrograde!

Comment #6: nico - that is always what I say when I meet the sneer of, “I don’t watch tv, I read.”

I think what the nay-sayers won’t accept is the freedom of new technologies. Freedom of thought and movement. I did a lot of tv watching in my youth, and I still do today. The difference is DVR. In the past I would park my butt in front of the tv and stay there for hours because I wanted to watch the next thing that came on. But, with DVR I record and actually walk away to do other things and come back to watch later. It seems like I watch more, but really I watch better because I have more choice and freedom to watch on my own schedule.

Same goes for e-readers (at least for me). Many books I like to read are very thick and heavy and I didn’t like toting them back and forth between work and home. So, I would leave it at work to read during lunch and not ever read at home since I have a toddler who I have to tend to there. Now with my Nook, I can fit it in my purse and carry it everywhere. I can read while waiting in a check-out line or when my toddler (finally) takes a nap, or while my husband is driving us somewhere. I’m able to read so much more now. So it’s not a real book. Tell that to my hands that automatically try to turn the page.

I am always amused by the grim tenacity with which people hang desperately onto older technology and the pretzels they twist themselves into trying to defend its superiority over the newfangled gizmos replacing it. As someone who’s been in publishing since the pre-Internet (and very pre-Kindle) days, I come across this regularly in relation to books/newspapers and their digital stepchildren. My own take is that the information is what’s important, not the medium in which it’s delivered. I have no doubt that this same type of hand-wringing occurred when clay tablets were replaced by scrolls, and when scrolls were replaced by handmade manuscripts, and when manuscripts were replaced by mechanically-typeset books. Yet I doubt a single person today bitching about Kindle replacing the printed book would choose to go back to using scrolls or clay tablets.

And Tyro, you’re right. The mass-market books that are on Kindle et al. are not the kinds of things a person patronizes a specialty bookstore to find. The rare and hand-crafted books that are the bread and butter of those kinds of shops are desired for their value as collectibles or works of art. Digital versions will never be a substitute and anyone arguing that they will knows little to nothing about the book business.

I wonder how much of this is people (to quote Doc Brown) “not thinking fourth dimensionally.”

To be fair, MTV has never been anything except a corporate enterprise, and even in its heyday it was little more than a visual version of top-40 radio for most of the programming day. However, I know that it used to have a lot of niche programming (not unlike a good college station)—shows like Yo! MTV Raps, and The Headbanger’s Ball, not to mention off-hour programming for alternative videos.  So chances were that there was something on that you liked if you were into popular/rock music.

I wonder how many people turn on MTV today (which seems evenly split between Teen Mom and Jersey Shore episodes) and think “wow, this is total shit” and somehow project that back in time, as if it’s the only programming MTV has ever had on, so that if someone says “I was raised on MTV” people picture a six year old watching Jersey Shore, or an 11 year old girl painting her toenails while watching Teen Mom.

I talked about getting a kindle for my mom or my sister and they’re both pretty invested in the old paper versions. My sister explained that she’s never really grown out of that kid habit of reading a few chapters, then putting your bookmark in, closing the book, and seeing where in the stack of paper the bookmark was and getting excited when you were “more than halfway” etc. 

Neither one of them commute though—reading is something they do at home. For people who live in the city or have lunch breaks they like to read on, I think that the e-readers are a lot easier to sell.

They also both have mortgages. If e-readers had been around when I was still moving every couple of years, I would have jumped all over that shit. Books suck to move.

I love the kindle.  I don’t own one.

My father is 80, and his vision has declined to the point where, even with the strongest reading glasses, he has difficulty with most books.  He’s an avid reader.  The kindle allows him to use a larger font, so he can still read every day.  His kindle also has an audio feature for when his eyes get tired.

For that reason alone, I love the device.

Not sure how Michael’s going to be remembered—genius, freak, dead too soon, or all of the above—but I don’t think he’ll be remembered as a “winner.”

Nothing personal, but I think this is the opinion of someone who isn’t really so much into music as music, because I think those of us who are have seen exactly how this is going down.  In sum, as people, Corgan will be forgotten and Jackson will be remembered as a broken soul and a freak.

But as artists?  Corgan will be remembered as someone who wrote some solid rock music.  But Jackson will be remembered as a genius and an innovator, with his later, inadequate work being marked off with an asterisk, while everyone is out there grooving to “Billie Jean” and “Rock With You”.

History is very interesting.  I am amused when people refer to prior ages or prior levels of technology to be ‘more engaging’ or morally speaking better.  You don’t have to go back that far.  For all the problems that were Iraq, compare it to Vietnam - a war spurred, to a large degree, by the ‘greatest generation’.  Go back to the 50’s and legal segregation.  1850’s and slavery.  Even further to when people were concerned with the printing press and the ability to print, of all books, the Bible in people’s native languages leading to all sorts of problems (well it did, but you’d be hard pressed to blame the technology and not the leaders of the time.)  The media we use to communicate change.  Not all the change will assuredly be good (is 140 characters really a good cutoff point for thoughtful discussion?), but on the net are positive.

My sister explained that she’s never really grown out of that kid habit of reading a few chapters, then putting your bookmark in, closing the book, and seeing where in the stack of paper the bookmark was and getting excited when you were “more than halfway” etc.

Not sure about the Kindle but the Nook has a progress bar on the bottom that lets you see how far you’ve read a book with page counts.

I mean, reading is *nice*, I guess, but nothing compares to sitting around the campfire listening to wandering wise men recite epic poetry about the history of the people and the intrigues of the gods.

Of course she is, Tyro; that was the point I was making. I doubt it’s a question of selection, either—given the relentlessly conventional tastes of most Howard County residents with real money to spend, I suspect there’s little to be found on her shelves which a Barnes & Noble doesn’t carry or couldn’t order. (That’s why I included the word ‘boutique’ in the description of her business; my experience has been that, at least in the context of Howard County, the word means ‘overpriced and pointless’.)

This being the case, her business is indeed under threat, more so even than most other “unique” Howard County bookstores, from the Kindle and its ilk; they’re not only new and shiny, they’re far more convenient than stores like that one could hope to be—especially when that store isn’t even anywhere particularly near Howard County’s acknowledged center of overpriced frou-frou nonsense like designer doggy clothes, and badly made cork-and-feather tchotchkes appropriating in the least respectful possible way the attributes of a culture actually worth taking seriously. If that’s the business you’re in, then the place to be is somewhere within close walking distance of the three blocks of Route 144 making up “Historic Ellicott City”; if you can’t fight your way into a shopfront, upper-story garret, back room, or broom closet somewhere within that radius, then you, like Books with a Past, will forever struggle just to be an also-ran.

I don’t hate Kindles as a concept, but I see them as solving problems I don’t have. I’d be happy to be able to more easily tote a stack of books maybe once a year, when I go on vacation somewhere far away. And I stuck the first four of A Song of Ice and Fire and plus “the Unredeemed Captive” in my carry on for this summer’s vacation quite easily. Plus, I buy about two books per year(from my local boutique used bookstore, because I like it to be there) and get most of my reading from the library. I generally like holding a physical book and walking into a library or a bookstore. I don’t see the extremely limited uses of the device being worth the slight annoyance of reading off a screen or the cost.

Comment #61: witless chum - I was of much the same thought, I don’t travel often, the expense, etc. That was until I learned libraries are now lending e-books. That’s why I did not buy a Kindle, they use a different type of file that libraries aren’t using (yet, that may change).

witless, any e-ink device really is just like reading off of paper, there’s zero eye strain involved. The newer nook is basically just a tablet PC with the same issues for glare and eyestrain as reading off your laptop, so I wouldn’t get that if I were in the market.

For me, I check out most of my books these days from the library (it’s about 3 blocks away), I don’t commute, and I generally read a book once and then don’t read it again, so I don’t think I need an e-reader.

Comment #63: Mighty Ponygirl - Just a nit pick, because I see this a lot. There is the Nook Color which is the tablet like device and then there are basic Nooks with e-ink, which is what I have. Nook also just came out with a new version that is e-ink and touch screen combined. There are lots of other brands though that are e-ink so eye strain is not an issue.

Comment #64: Livi - I’ll add that knowing exactly what the technology is that a person is concern trolling goes back to Amanda’s original post. People concern troll about tv, without qualifying they mean junk tv* not say awesome movies or educational documentaries. People also rail against “today’s music” but they are probably talking about shitty pop music when we all know there is a lot of good music to be found, it’s just probably on playing on a top 40 station. E-readers? “I don’t like to read of a screen” (comparing it to a computer screen) or “I use the library”, making it obvious the person hasn’t spent much time actually learning about them.**

*Of course “junk” tv is different for everyone.

**I made the same mistake and it took a friend buying on and telling me all about it to change my mind.

The conversation about e-readers on this thread reminds me of this comic by Slowpoke artist Jen Sorensen.

MTV circa 81-82 was playing stuff you wouldn’t hear on the radio, but that quickly faded, and it virtually ignored the dozens of underground music scenes sprouting up around the country’s college towns for years until those scenes started producing the hit-makers that they could no longer ignore.  MTV programmers had a distinct pro-corporate bias against anything fast and loud until MTV2 came around.

Like there was anyplace I could watch Aeon Flux?

And as noted above, Daria.

Snobs will be snobs, and these days (thanks to that EEEE-VILE Internet) they can shout their imagined sophistication from the rooftops.  Whatever: Master Suzuki told me beginners mind was best, so I take what I like and leave the rest.

Hell, these past couple of years I’ve been hearing old radio shows that are amazing (Seriously - Richard Diamond was written by Blake Edwards, fer crying out loud, and the Vincent Price episodes of The Saint are incredible).  I’m so grateful - I told my son yesterday that even though I’m poorer than my parents, I feel I am better off, because internet, duh.

Nope, MTV was extremely culturally informative, period full stop.  Keep giving ‘em hell, Amanda.

Replying to comment #40…

I didn’t say that I wouldn’t let children I was caring for watch TV.  I just said I’d either wouldn’t let them watch TV by themselves, or failing that, try to make sure they have some degree of media education.  I can analyze some things very fast, and it has been my perception that broadcast media has become substantially less inclined to serve its audience, as opposed to serving the people that own the stations or the sentiments of their advertisers.  It’s not that TV is good or bad, but that there is much more of a focus on fucking with people’s heads.  Just like with AM radio, for example.  Are Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck useful in the sense that they deliver ears to adverts?  Or are they useful because they get people to think in ways disadvantageous to themselves?  I just think people in this thread are just a bit too distracted by the concept of “Well of course, we remember the good stuff and not the dreck”.  Not really arguing that past shows were better (tho’ personally, I watched much more TV in the 90s, because there were more shows I wanted to see, and remembering them, I’d still want to see them again, just to see if I’d grown up), but arguing that more shows and ads aren’t as innocuously capitalist these days.

Ah!  And contributing to the other part of the thread…This book reader paid $300 to get the very first e-ink reader, the Sony Librie, and I probably have been a pretty key evangelist in the Atlanta area as I was reading that thing on trains, at work, and in the restaurant.  There were lots of comments and questions by strangers, but I’d never thought a pure ereader would have been so entrenched.  There were lots of thoughts that multipurpose devices would eventually take over in the MobileRead forums.  There were definitely lots of thoughts that e-ink would be superceded too.  Didn’t happen.  Only recently have I admitted to myself that I’m something of an early adopter.  I never think I’m *actually* all that early, but looking back, for things like Internet, HDTV and computer equipment, oh hell yeah, I was on this thing earlier than 99% of the people, it seems.

  My main problem with kindle and other e-readers is that a lot of academic history or older and/or obscurer novels aren’t available on them and you still need to track down text versions of them for higher prices.

Bach was just sitting on his behind fingering a piano, no doubt to orgasm.

witless, any e-ink device really is just like reading off of paper, there’s zero eye strain involved. The newer nook is basically just a tablet PC with the same issues for glare and eyestrain as reading off your laptop, so I wouldn’t get that if I were in the market.

I’ve seen them. My buddy at work I talk about books with has one and I don’t agree that it’s at all like reading off paper. I’m sure I could get used to it, but like I said, there’s no reason for me to pay whatever hundred dollars the thing costs to do so. Until they start releasing things I want to read only in electronic formats, which I presume is going to happen.

Is that true about someone who runs a boutique used bookstore? People who buy books from a place like that are buying books cheaply that they probably can’t find elsewhere. Kindle books are comparatively expensive and aren’t drawn from the collection of obscure, out-of-print titles you would find at such a place. I think the person complaining is just trying to find a convenient target to blame her business problems on.

Ultimately, the price of a Kindle (Nook) or other ebook depends on the publisher.  I find that these discussions assume that all ebooks come from the usual big New York commercial publishers.  This ignores ebook publishers like Samhain, Elloras Cave, Loose-ID, Carina, et. al, which specialize in romance, erotica, and fiction with strong romantic subplots.  And which have plenty of loyal buyers (mostly women) who enjoy instant access to many titles, including interesting fiction that doesn’t always fit the big commercial publishers’ mold. And their titles are very reasonably priced.  I suspect a big chunk of the Kindle/Nook demographic is made up of folks who patronize these and similar publishers. (As with print books, romance/romantic fiction continues to be a healthy market, unlike other genres.)

Anyway, my point is, I agree; I don’t think ebooks are the downfall of brick and mortar bookstores, particularly boutique stores. Physical bookstores have been struggling long before ebooks started to take a significant place in the market. (Ebooks, though seeing an increased market share, are still not the norm.  Trust me. I’m epublished and most people, when finding I have a book out, want to know where to get a print copy.) Smarter proprietors of bookstores are looking into ways to incorporate ebook kiosks into their stores, giving readers a choice of format while still enjoying the benefits of going to a store.

MTV circa 81-82 was playing stuff you wouldn’t hear on the radio, but that quickly faded, and it virtually ignored the dozens of underground music scenes sprouting up around the country’s college towns for years until those scenes started producing the hit-makers that they could no longer ignore.  MTV programmers had a distinct pro-corporate bias against anything fast and loud until MTV2 came around.

MTV had a problem in the early days (and artists like David Bowie called them out on it at the time): the music videos they played were often very different from what was popular at the time not because of any desire to show diversity but because they thought people would not watch videos with black artists. Michael Jackson forced the issue on them because of his insane popularity when Thriller was released (and the accompanying videos, especially “Thriller”) and they couldn’t pretend that people really did watch music videos from different artists they heard on the radio or bought in the stores anymore.

but nothing compares to sitting around the campfire listening to wandering wise men recite epic poetry about the history of the people and the intrigues of the gods.

No fucking kidding:

OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about the oral epics of Rajasthan, India, and the storytellers, known as bhopas, who recite them… Writer tells about moving to Rajasthan to work on a book. He stayed with an Indian family at a fortress called Rohet Garth. Rajasthan is a profoundly conservative state even by the standards of India. Many aspects of medieval Indian society remain intact there. Every prominent landholding family inherited a family of oral genealogists, musicians, and praise singers, who celebrated the family’s lineage. While staying there, the writer heard about the existence of several orally transmitted epic poems, which were preserved by a caste of wandering bhopas-shamans and bards-who traveled from village to village, staging performances… Discusses a Harvard classicist named Milman Parry, who traveled to Yugoslavia in the 1930s to research the idea that the works of Homer and Virgil had begun as oral epics. Yugoslavia was the place in Europe where the oral tradition had best survived… In India, an even more elaborate tradition had survived. A friend of the author’s had met a man who knew the Mahabharata (six times the length of the Bible) by heart. The Mahabharata was one of a large number of Indian epics… I longed to know how the bhopas could remember such colossal quantities of verse. Recently, I decided to go in search of bhopas. It would, I felt, be a little like meeting Homer… Writer discusses two especially popular epics, one about Pabuji, a semi-divine warrior, and one about Dev Narayan, the son of a cattle herder named Sawai Bhoj. Describes a performance by Mohan Bhopa. The bhopas use a painted textile called a phad as a backdrop to their performances. The phad was a ford linking one world with the next, a crossing place from the realm of the human to the realm of the divine. Writer notes that Mohan Bhopa’s rendition was nearly identical to a transcribed version of his story from the 1970s… Mohan tells the writer about the great fair of Dev Narayan taking place at the village of Sawai Bhoj, 150 miles away. It was the biggest annual gathering of bhopas in Rajasthan… Writer meets both pilgrims and performers at the fair, which, as much as anything, was an opportunity to trade cattle. Describes the performance of Bhero Ram Gujar Bhopa, who has memorized seven nights’ worth of verses… Writer believes that the religious significance of the epics is what has kept them alive.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/20/061120fa_fact_dalrymple#ixzz1TtYBPhjz

There were a lot of problems with MTV for people who are into more alternative or underground scenes, but championning radio? That’s kind of backwards. Outside of community or pirate radio, radio stations have been even more conservative than MTV in what they play (and payolla is the name of the game). I can see why you’d say radio was better overall as a medium, in that if you are technically inclined it is much easier to circumvent the entranched system on radio than to get your own music television channel on the air, but that’s an issue of control not of technology per say.

Good god, those comments at Double X were the most incredible GIT OFFA MY LAWN display I’ve seen in years! What can you say, haters gotta hate.

I like my Kindle. It saves me from printing out gigantic books like I used to do in college (believe me, it makes a huge difference when your student fees aren’t subsidizing your use of ink and paper). However, I have nearly no paid stuff on it; it’s mostly PDFs and text files of various free items I’ve picked up. I still prefer actual books for most of my book reading.

Both technologies have their place. In my opinion ebook readers are most useful for the stuff I download (FAQs and that sort of thing) as well as fiction books; even the Nook Color isn’t very useful for large-scale photography and art, and although I’ve been known to joke about needing to install HarperCollins firmware for an old Harper and Row book, bit rot (especially because of DRM) is a problem that needs to be anticipated.

@nico #1 - my experience was the same as yours.  i grew up in a remote rural area and it was during my high school years in the early 80’s that my dad got fed up w/ only receiving two (snowy) TV channels and bought a satellite dish.  MTV changed my life~!  all of a sudden new wave bands were in my living room, bands that i would not have any exposure to any other way.  the original vee-jays were so hip and so cool.

The same goes for, say, Facebook: there’s no hole in my life that Facebook fills up, so, even though I have an account and have even posted a few of the minutia of my life, I still can’t figure out why anyone bothers.  So far, all of the posts I’ve seen from my F-Friends are on the order of, “my phone’s out, waiting for Verizon” or “just had a fried egg.”  Evidently, I’m missing something, since millions of people seem to feel the need to log in dozens of times a day (like my F-Friends.)
Comment #49: AMM on 08/02 at 08:27 AM

I’ve been on email lists since the late nineties, and the same thing that goes on there, goes on on Facebook, just a little more quickly and visually.  Sharing what you’re doing or thinking, commenting on what someone else is doing or thinking, news, politics, interesting content on the web.  So I already had a Facebook-size interactive habit that Facebook is now a part of.

There were a lot of problems with MTV for people who are into more alternative or underground scenes, but championning radio? That’s kind of backwards. Outside of community or pirate radio, radio stations have been even more conservative than MTV in what they play (and payolla is the name of the game). I can see why you’d say radio was better overall as a medium, in that if you are technically inclined it is much easier to circumvent the entranched system on radio than to get your own music television channel on the air, but that’s an issue of control not of technology per say.
Comment #76: BlackBloc on 08/02 at 01:56 PM

College radio often plays music and hosts talk that the commercial stations don’t. 

What I find most unpleasant is the rarity of decent local radio talk shows.  First, a bunch of blabbermouth Willy Lomans with their car phones started dominating local talk radio call-ins with their road warrior libertarian ethos.  Then the economy of scale brought us Limbaugh and the Limbaugh-wannabes. 

Don’t know how they have so much time to chat if they’re the empire builders.

Daddy Love: Shouldn’t Bach have been fingering his organ?

Dan: The kids are reading lengthy novels because the government censors cracked down on plays and playwrights.

My main complaint about the Kindle is that the ebooks are more expensive than the used paper books. Sure, they’re more convenient, but I always feel I’m being ripped off. I can even re-resell any used books I own, so the cost per reading is much lower. (If I plan to read a book more than once or refer to it, I’ll often just cut off the spine and scan it so I can carry it on my iPhone.)

Of course, I know I am a dinosaur. Eventually, we’ll be burning old books for fuel when everything has gone electronic. It would be just like the 1920s when the automobile led to the big craze for horse meat.

(“There’s a little bit of Billy Corgan bashing Michael Jackson, too.  Guess who won history?”)

Amanda, That’s mainly because of the fact that, Michael Jackson despite all of his personal faults, was a tremendously talented individual with a long career and track record of musical hits, some of them iconic in the industry and American pop culture. Billy Corgan on the other hand is a huge self-centered douchenozzle who makes me want to punch him in the face everytime I hear that whiny, nasally voice of his singing some paean to teen angst while he shoots his next hit of smack into his arm. I literally want to smash a pumpkin over his head, a nice smelly ripe one.

In the early 2000s I wrote a short story (unpublished and since abandoned) set in 2009 in which a character was reading a digitally transmitted edition of The New York Times on an electronic ink device.

This does not indicate any great genius on my part, of course.

Matt T, 37:

I got a Kindle last year and I love it. Of course, the ability to carry a bunch of books in something that weighs less than five pounds rather than giving myself a hernia is great.

That’s the benefit. On the other hand, I still have to carry around books I already own, or else I have to buy them again, if I even can. If my girlfriend or someone gets a book that I think sounds interesting, or vice versa, the only practical way to share it is to share the physical device—somewhat feasible when it’s someone in the same house, less so when it’s one of my parents. There’s the whole Nineteen Eighty-Four incident. That’s all theory; I have other issues, DRM-related, that might change as the marketplace changes and so are more objections to the Kindle and the Nook in particular than to e-books in general.

On that basis I decided shortly after the Kindle came out that I was not interested in spending money on an e-book reader or asking someone else to spend money on one for me.

I’m not particularly worried about ebooks replacing physical books, mainly because what’s important to me is what’s actually in the book rather than the book itself.

Now there I’m in total agreement. I can’t really get behind the idea of some mystical difference between e-reading and “real reading.”

Some technologies do have changing effects; I think that the movable type and internet inventions are pretty big (although intertubes is too new to know).

I think that the forces of reaction will react the same way to anything new, particularly if they don’t see how they can control it.

Science fiction saved my life. The possibility of other worlds took me away from my sad and lonely world, the hope that was in much of the SF I read in the 70s and 80s carried me through a lot. I think that the life of the mind, whether you find it in books, music, videos, is powerful and can change lives.

(I haven’t gotten cable because I remember obsessively watching MTV when it was an all video station late in to the night. And the music selection was better than most radio, but we did have a college station that helped some.)

Good post.

Attn Henry Holland: That was kind of Wald’s point, minus the explicit reference to drugs

Yeah, I know, I haven’t read the book but I read enough reviews to get the gist.

Eventually, over the course of decades, they were able to convince the general public that serious music should be treated as a sort of novel/personal soundtrack rather than something you dance and sing to live with other people

I posted what I did to point out that in my circle of music geeks, we didn’t NEED to be convinced.  I bought my first record—OK, my mom bought it for me—in late 1966, the second Monkees album.  I was listening to Sgt. Pepper when it came out, I heard Are You Experienced as an 8 year old when it was first released, I had my head blown off by hearing Cream’s version of Crossroads in 1968 (it’s why I wanted to be a drummer and took drum lessons).  I went to my first concert in 1969, Iron Butterfly at the Honolulu Civic Center. Etc. etc. etc. 

The point being, I NEVER was in to rock or any other kind of music as a dance event or as a singalong with other people or as a primal sweatfest where I reveled in Dionysian-like rites or any of that, it was head music pretty much from the get go.  I hate crowds at concerts yelling and screaming during quiet bits, I hate dickheads talking about their fucking jobs or girlfriend troubles while the music is playing, I hate people nearly breaking my toes with their bullshit dances moves, I tolerate all that nonsense because it’s the price I pay for hearing live music.  It’s not an accident that I immediately took to the classical concert experience—sit down, be quiet, concentrate on the music 100%—that so many people seem to dislike, when in 1974 when my awesome Dad took me to hear the great French flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal and a chamber orchestra at the late, much-lamented Ambassador Auditorium here in Los Angeles.

It was *always* a solitary activity for me and the music nerd friends I had.  At most it’d be two of us locking ourselves in a bedroom, getting stoned and listening to records. We were proto-Rob’s from High Fidelity almost 30 years before Nick Hornby wrote his book, more concerned with what bands the members of Yes had been involved in (Hey! Peter Banks was in a band called Badger, let’s go find their albums!) or what were all the clues to why Paul was dead that were littered throughout the Beatles albums and covers/booklets (Oh my god! George is pointing to Wednesday morning at 5 o’clock on the back of Sgt. Pepper, that’s when he died!!!) than going to a club and dancing to a cover band doing Louie Louie or Wild Thing for the 8 millionth time.  I was definitely not alone in that in the late 60’s and early 70’s. 

The most serious accusation that Wald lays at the feet of the Beatles and company was that they resegregated rock and roll by turning it from mongrel dance music into art rock

So? I’m sorry, people like Wald wanted rock music to have stayed rock and roll, to have not progressed beyond 1959.  Well, woops! it did and I for one am really really really glad it did.  Besides, that’s a bullshit, ahistorical argument: rock and roll, that is ElvisChuckBuddyLittleRichardJerryLee and all their clones, was deader than earth by 1959, the next 5 years in America was mostly Annette and Frankie, soppy ballads and teen idols, it was so pale white it was blinding.  The guitar was shunned, the sax was the lead instrument, rock and roll was “resegregated” while The Beatles were gobbling speed to play all night in Hamburg. 

The Beatles saved rock and roll by making guitars cool again, they inspired countless people to form bands even if they didn’t like their bubblegum early stuff and so on.  What were they and Dylan and all the people that followed them after they opened the floodgates supposed to do, just stop in 1966? Pull a punk rock ten years early and say “You can’t do this or this or this or this or you’re not real rock and roll”? 

Answers on a postcard, please.

Godwinning the Kindle:

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Amanda, That’s mainly because of the fact that, Michael Jackson despite all of his personal faults, was a tremendously talented individual with a long career and track record of musical hits, some of them iconic in the industry and American pop culture. Billy Corgan on the other hand is a huge self-centered douchenozzle who makes me want to punch him in the face everytime I hear that whiny, nasally voice of his singing some paean to teen angst while he shoots his next hit of smack into his arm. I literally want to smash a pumpkin over his head, a nice smelly ripe one.

Um, Jackson’s personal faults may have including child molesting. And it definitely included chimpanzee buying, hanging out with Coreys and roll coaster owning, all more douchey than Billy Corgan’s garden-variety rock star self-centeredness. But I liked the Pumpkins in their prime.

The main thing is Corgan IMO wrote one song, “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” to put on the untouchable classic wall. (Maybe “Mayonaise,” too) Jackson did like 10.

I’m particularly amused at the knee-jerk assumption that older forms are automatically deeper and more interesting.

Four out of five of the most common criticisms I hear about television as a medium can also apply to the theater (obviously film, but also the stage).  The foremost is “it doesn’t force you to use your imagination, it just spells everything out for you.”  See also: it’s sedentary/passive entertainment; the content is produced by huge corporations making a buck; the content plays to the lowest common denominator; nobody is producing anything original, they just keep rehashing old ideas.  And so on.

Holy crap, KristinMH, thanks for the jaw-dropper of the day! That was some weapons-grade crazy.

This is for you, Henry Holland, Grace Slick in the early prime of her career.

Thanks, Dark Avenger, seen that many times. What a run they had from Surrealistic Pillow > After Bathing at Baxter’s (my favorite) > Crown of Creation > Volunteers. 

War’s good business
So give your son
But I’d rather have
My country die for me

So much love for Daria, and none for Beavis and Butthead?

Satellite dishheads also had the chance to see MuchMusic from Canadia.

MTV2 started off showing mostly videos, but that faded, I guess.

So much love for Daria, and none for Beavis and Butthead?

There’s appreciating good satire, and then there’s spending significant amounts of your leisure time with the objects of that satire. No thanks.