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Instant cultural gratification

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Zaphod” offers this quote:

“Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to pour a drink for myself and my wife, and we are going to watch The Magnificent Ambersons. One wonders what Tarkington would have thought of the ability to view nearly any movie at any time. He probably would have viscerally recoiled, and perhaps it is corrosive, allowing too much private gratification, and too easy gratification, both of which erode a society’s fiber. Yet streaming of films does not have the huge drawbacks of much other technology, and allows worthwhile cultural enrichment not otherwise possible, so in this, as in most else, I will not follow Tarkington’s prescriptions.”

I wrote some related thoughts many years ago in this post from 2007 when I had first gotten an iPod (seems archaic, doesn’t it?). I’ll now reproduce a portion of that post here:

Much as I love my iPod, I’ve perceived over time that it has its own subtle drawbacks. When all one wants is at one’s fingertips, there’s a certain devaluation that comes along for the ride. It’s a version of the old saying that familiarity breeds contempt. Well, not really contempt in this case—I still love most of the music that I once loved—but let’s just say that full availability decreases the special nature of the experience.

Imagine back when there were no recordings, and all musical performance was live. How very extraordinary a concert must have been then, how immediate and personal, with no screen between the listener and the music. Records changed all that—and had the result of democratizing music as well, and decreasing class distinctions. Classical music was now far more accessible to all—Caruso was one of the most popular early recording stars—and formerly plebian and relatively local forms of music (regional folk, jazz, blues) were archived and recorded and made popular among those who’d never heard them before.

When I was young, most personal record libraries were far more limited than they are today. During junior high and even high school I listened to the radio for much of my music, and in this I was not unusual. There was a tremendous sense of discovery in listening to music this way, although there was far less personal choice as compared to today.

I remember the first time I heard the very early Bob Dylan on some radio station or other—the strangeness and the power of the experience. I had no control over when I might hear this odd new voice again, although I’d fallen under its spell. The same was true of pop music in general, although that was more predictable—on a certain weekday evening, on a certain radio station, they would do a countdown of the Top Twenty songs of that week.

Talk about suspense! Talk about anticipation! It may seem hopelessly outdated and somehow very innocent, but I’d be on the edge of my seat—while doing my homework, naturally—as the songs were revealed, one by one, in order of ever-ascending popularity. I didn’t always agree with the choices, but the populace had spoken, and I listened in rapt attention.

Later on, at the age of fourteen or so, I acquired an inexpensive reel-to-reel tape recorder. Now I had a new weapon in my arsenal—the ability to produce a scratchy and barely recognizable facsimile of my favorite songs. Finally, I could listen to them at will, although the versions I possessed only slightly resembled the originals, and acted mainly as a spur to recollection.

I love my iPod—don’t get me wrong; Mama don’t take my iPod away! But I valued those old tapes at least as highly, if not more so, than the digitally perfect and almost endlessly varied selections now on my iPod. And I doubt this is due merely to the relative freshness of youth and the jaded ennui of encroaching age. There’s just something about the accessibility of the iPod that decreases its specialness, after the novelty wears off.

Comments

Instant cultural gratification — 36 Comments

  1. I was a kid when I first saw “Inherit the Wind” with Spencer Tracey. This quote has stuck with me to this day (and I’m no kid anymore).

    Henry Drummond: Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, “All right, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote but at a price: you lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”

  2. It may be news to the non-audiophile but over the past 20+ years there has been a huge renewal of interest in vinyl records. So much so that last year, vinyl sales exceeded sales of CDs. Part of that dynamic however is the growing popularity of streaming services with huge online libraries providing ad free access to millions of songs, albums and thousands of artists.

    Vinyl records require much more involvement than CDs and far less when streaming. Many new to vinyl are finding that greater involvement yields greater pleasure. As often you get out of something what you put into it.

    Plus, a not insignificant percentage of audiophiles insist that a well set up vinyl system sounds better than either CDs or file based playback.

  3. Ah… but the ability pull up any random public malefactor’s Early Life section from Wikipedia more than compensates 😛

    Nah… Not really.

    Can remember back in the 80s just how convoluted and slow it was to get a provincial record store to order in a recording of Haydn’s Paukenmesse. And here it is:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_5tgmAwN-E

    And Neo is right that there was something more special about things either hard to find or random. Another time heard Oxana Yablonskaya performing Pictures at an Exhibition (no… SG & S is *not* my favourite bit of that! But not bad :P) live on the radio and that was it for her for decades. Here she is at home:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_5tgmAwN-E

    Appears to have had no objection to Pelmeni despite almost having been a Refusenik.

    And here doing a Masterclass. This is something YouTube is good for which we’d never really have seen before except once in a generation with say Callas: lots of musical masterclasses.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_kbzSolV-Y

    The instant availability of all of music and culture is a mixed bag. Some wonder and joy has gone out of the world along with the complementary frustrations. But then again we were all young back then in the days of relative scarcity, too. Hard to untangle these two.

  4. Are you guys are pissed over the Guttenberg press as well? Piles of books everywhere you look, not like the good old days of perusing scrolls the Library at Alexandria.

  6. @ambisinistral:

    Good nick and goes well with your bad attitude. I wish I’d thought of that one myself!

    Wait until you discover the Archaeofuturists of the likes of Gillaume Faye. You’re in for a treat.

  7. Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it.

    Apropos of progress as represented by the Internet of Things: “The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes.

    The disruption, which began at about 10 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, upended package deliveries, took down major streaming services, and prevented people from getting into Walt Disney Co.’s parks.”

    ” . . . you don’t really need Skynet to collapse your civilization! You just need, like, one single company running your entire house. Then when that company experiences an outage, well. . . .”

    https://notthebee.com/article/amazons-outage-this-week-reportedly-locked-people-out-of-their-homes-and-scrambled-peoples-refrigerators-and-shut-off-peoples-christmas-lights-and-i-dunno-maybe-this-is-a-warning-of-some-kind

  8. Mind you, Movable Type killed several hundred million at a pinch over the years since it was introduced. Ideas Matter ™ as every Neocon Grifter will tell you at fundraising time.

    Instant ubiquitous availability of anything anywhere in video, audio, and text media is likely to better that record.

  9. PA+Cat:

    Take three guesses who makes all those IoT chips and the 5G infrastructure it’s going to increasingly run on and who sat on all the standards bodies.

    I don’t know myself… but perhaps the next fortune cookie will give me the answer.

    Then again, it’s harder to find a fortune cookie in China than a bar of soap in France.

  11. “[B]ad attitude”? No, I just have no problems with availability.

    BTW, ambisinistral invokes a bad attitude to you? Its meaning is the opposite of ambidextrous, meaning having two left hands, or being equally as clumsy with both hands. In other words, it is just a small and obscure joke. Lighten up.

  12. I think you’ve just proved my point, Old Chap.

    We do do etymologies in the parts, you know.

    And entomology.

    *stares fixedly*

  13. Instant gratification takes too long.

    –Carrie Fisher, “Postcards from the Edge”
    ________________________________

    Carrie Fisher was great as Princess Leia, of course, of course, but she was also a wickedly good writer. “Postcards” is a wonderful movie and book. (And about the only time I’ve warmed to Meryl Streep on the screen.)

    I understand she was in demand and well-paid as a script doctor in her later years.

  14. Zaphod, “… it’s harder to find a fortune cookie in China than a bar of soap in France.”

    That’s gosh darn’ed funny!

  15. neo,

    Your essay on the topic really nails the experience for me. Although I love music so much I am grateful for its near ubiquitous availability.

    I doubt New York lacked the radio choices I had in Chicago, on the contrary, I know you had an even wider selection with other, major cities close by.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_Sid#:~:text=By%201941%2C%20Symphony%20Sid%20had%20left%20WBNX%20and,promote%20jazz%20concerts%2C%20in%20association%20with%20Monte%20Kay. “Jumpin’ with my boy, Sid, in the city!”
    But in Chicago I could find a decent amount of Classical, Jazz, Blues, Album Rock, Pop, even Dr. Demento’s weekly show out of L.A.

    With my own record collection I took the approach of buying what was not readily found on the radio. Most of my teen-aged peers had a decent selection from the Billboard Top 100. I don’t think I had anything on the Billboard Top 100.

    Why?

    They play it on the radio. I wanted the stuff I couldn’t hear on the radio.

  16. @Rufus:

    Back in the day when I was rather less reactionary and when the Economist was considerably less woke, they ran a faux-serious article digging up market analyst like all the various metrics to tease out per-capita soap consumption in England and France in order to settle the age-old controversy over which of the two nations is more proverbially filthy. Can’t for the life of me remember what the actual conclusion was though.

    Nowadays I still buy the Christmas edition every year for the word games and puzzles. But much nose-holding required.

  17. I spent my entire working life on a late 2nd shift. When VCRs arrived, mid-late 70s, I bought one to tape TV shows and movies from HBO which I’d never been able to see because I worked when they aired. As the price of tapes decreased I started keeping everything. There are still a couple thousand tapes in the basement but with the new large screen TVs I never much pull them out but have by now bought whatever was on them I liked on a newer format. For instance I have Blade Runner on VHS recorded off TV, prerecorded VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray.

    Later in the 90s I got into Laserdiscs and then DVDs, later Blu-ray. I’m retired now with a huge collection of shows and movies that I can watch anytime. Streaming is just for things I won’t miss if the powers that be disappear them. Biggest problem is deciding what to watch. Lately my purchases have been blues and rock concerts on DVD as that is another thing, live concerts, that is hard to get to live.

  18. Geoffrey Britain,

    I love the ease and accessibility of digital music. I remember dreaming of that when I was young. In the late ’70s? a turntable came out that allowed one to stack albums (already available for decades) and select a list of tracks one wanted to hear off of each album. It had to be in album order, naturally, but you could skip songs you did not want to hear on an album without getting up. I kept a clipping of a magazine ad for that turntable taped to my wall for years. The cost was out of my reach, but I simply loved looking at the picture and thinking about it.

    It wasn’t long after CDs had been introduced that I intuited that computer hard drives would soon take the place of physical, music media. I even did the math on how many songs one could store on an affordable hard drive (over 100) and remember none of my friends believed me.

    To your initial fact; yeah, compression and digitization takes something away. There is something more truly authentic about spinning vinyl with grooves that record an infinite number of wave gradations playing through an amplifier using tubes rather than solid state circuitry, and paper speaker cones that actually vibrate and move actual air, but I’ll take convenience over that nearly imperceptible audio difference.

  19. PA+Cat

    I had a new mattress and bed on order from Amazon supposed to arrive Tuesday. Bed arrived Monday. Mattress never showed yet so tonight they declared it lost and I got a refund. Still need a mattress though. How do you lose something that big and heavy? I wonder how many shipments got fouled up like mine?

  20. Zaphod,

    You really hit a nerve. I used to love the “Economist.” When I got my first, true Executive position and had a line in my budget for periodicals the first thing I did was ask my assistant to subscribe to the “Economist.” No longer did I have to go to the library to read it. I had arrived! I’d rotate the older months off of my office coffee table and bring them home where one of my kids (starting in 5th grade) would read them cover to cover.

    After about a decade I could no longer fool myself into not noticing how abysmal so much of the reporting had become. Haven’t looked at an issue in a decade. I imagine they are quite thin these days.

  21. Zaphod,

    Regarding the actual study, in my experience Americans are rather unique in showering daily. Most Americans also rarely wear the same outfit over two consecutive days. Most American clothes closets are larger than most European or Asian’s bedrooms! Our closets are also larger than their bathrooms!

  23. Rufus,

    I don’t know, I use Roku and have only signed up for Discovery+ since 95% of what my wife and I watched on cable is on it and for $7 per month it’s ad free. I’ll have to check out AXS and see what it is.

  24. Geoffrey Britain wrote:

    “Vinyl records require much more involvement than CDs …”

    Precisely why we prefer COOKING at home most times to eating out. Doing some things for yourself IS much more enjoyable.

    One of the kids loves to mix drinks so he’s the goto guy for that at family gatherings.

    It turns out I love to pull shots of espresso. I love the smell of freshly ground coffee. I love the feeling of milk getting steamed for lattes. I would, however, be a terrible ‘professional’ barista as most customers would fume at having to wait 15 or 20 minutes for their Joe. Plus … doing it 8 hours a day would be … dreadful.

    So I understand how someone could receive a lot of pleasure dealing with vinyl. Especially so, since back in the 80’s we used a Bang & Olufsen Beogram 1800 turntable.

  25. @Rufus:

    “Regarding the actual study, in my experience Americans are rather unique in showering daily. ”

    Permit me to introduce you to the Thais. Showering only twice daily would be regarded as unforgivably stinky and slovenly. The rule is every time you go out and return home – into the shower you go. So as many showers as as many errands plus again before bed and upon awakening. Makes sense in a water-everywhere (well, almost) country that is also very hot and humid.

    In Cantonese the verb to wash has connotations of slosh/drench and in Putonghua (basically Hebei Dialect) it’s more like splash. A lot wetter and hotter in the South than Up North where they used to shiver on their kangs all winter.

  26. Once upon a time, not very long ago, a frequent weekend ritual for a friend and myself was going to used bookstores to browse, then stopping for coffee at a cafe.

    I don’t go to used bookstores or record stores anymore.

    An elegant pastime for a more civilized age.

  27. geoffb, “How do you lose something that big and heavy?”

    Good question for Tom Arnold.

  28. huxley,

    I have spent many, many, many an hour in book, record and sheet music stores. I will miss them when they are gone.

  29. @Rufus:

    You were in Singapore for a while, yes?

    That gigantic Borders diagonally opposite the Marriott is now a Marks & Spencer. Kinokuniya is still going strong.

    I can think of only one English language bookstore in HK that I’d still make a detour to check out if happened to be in the neighbourhood.

  30. @ Zaphod > I’m enjoying listening to the Paukenmesse – AesopSpouse and I sang with a community college choir in Texas because the director invited local community singers to fill out the sound, as there were not that many students – we usually outnumbered them!
    Sometime late in the 1990s we did the Haydn, and I sang one of the solos (my only time, he usually liked to feature the kids).

    In re Oxana – you repeated the Paukenmesse link for her; I would like to see the one you intended.

    Thanks as well for the harp discussion from a couple of days ago.
    I’ve been enjoying those performances also.

  31. @ huxley in re Carrie Fisher, “Postcards from the Edge”

    I read that book a number of years ago; she was wicked funny.
    Also read her later memoir, The Princess Diarist, after she passed away. It was also darkly humorous, but somewhat more serious as well.

    The book included some of her poetry, which is positively reviewed here, although other readers have been more dismissive.
    https://www.vulture.com/2016/11/carrie-fisher-harrison-ford-affair-love-poems.html

    My thought after reading them, and reflecting that she dated Paul Simon for a number of years although they were only married for one, was that it would have been interesting if he had set some of them to music.
    Of course, since they were about her former lover Mr. Ford, that might have been somewhat awkward.

    Wikipedia and other sources have some information on the scripts she doctored. She didn’t have any on-screen credits, but apparently was quite popular in that niche department.

  32. @ Zaphod & Rufus – our culture getting woke happened earlier than most people realize.
    I also had to eventually quit reading The Economist, which was a pity. More surprisingly, in the 1990s, we ended our long-time subscriptions to American Heritage and The Smithsonian because of the creeping insertion of left-wing dogma into stories where it didn’t belong.
    Other than that, the quality of the mags stayed high, but I wish there had been some version of the internet at the time where we could have posted some kind of complaints.

    They demonstrated the inch-by-inch takeover that Gramsci advocated, only I didn’t know what that meant, or where it would lead to, at the time. I was simply irritated at the partisan intrusion into what should have been neutral territory.
    Little did we know…..

    This clip of Jordan Peterson explains exactly why the Gramscian March was so successful.
    https://notthebee.com/article/watch-this-clip-from-jordan-peterson-as-he-explains-how-societies-descend-into-chaos

  33. @AesopFan:

    Apologies for the repeated link. Here’s the missing link (No… not you, Om!) with Oxana Yablonskaya playing at home:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S05N98Aw-pM

    She’s old and wise now, but when I heard her back when, she was pure fire and a revelation — which is why never forgot and then googled one day. It helped that until I listened to her performance I’d had no idea that Pictures at an Exhibition was composed for piano — having only heard the standard Ravel orchestration.

    Have you looked at any of the Regula Mühlemann clips? You might like these too.

    https://www.youtube.com/user/regulamuehlemann/videos

  35. Zaphod,

    I know the Borders you mean, or meant. I still hope to get to spend a day wandering around the inside of the Library of Congress. I need to start working on a scheme to gain admittance…

  36. Just a note:

    AXS is pushing Dan Rather. This means I have little interest in trusting it to have anything worthwhile to say.

    Only an observation, not instructions. 😉

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