by Arthur Black
Once I saw a young couple in an intimate bistro sitting at a table adorned with a candle and a lovely white rose in a vase. Very romantic. Except they were not holding hands or murmuring sweet nothings to each other. They were each bent forward, peering into their handhelds and text-messaging . . . who? Who the hell would be important enough to talk to at a moment, in a situation, like that?
How has such a tiny piece of technology come to have such power over us? We should have seen it coming.
More than a hundred years ago, when the clunky old telephone was a brand new invention, a forward-thinking Frenchman had one installed in his château, then invited the painter Edgar Degas to dinner.
He also pre-arranged to have a friend phone him during dinner so that he could impress Degas.
Dinner was served, the phone rang, the Frenchman rose with a flourish and talked on the telephone for a few minutes, then returned, glowing with pride to the table.
“So that is the telephone,” Degas said gloomily. “It rings and you run.”
Caution: Future Dead Ahead
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
—Anon
Indeed it ain’t. I’ve just learned that the Nickelodeon cable network is preparing to launch a new block of programming whimsically entitled “The 90s Are All That.”
Yes, it’s TV that recycles a decade. No, they’re not talking about the 1890s.
I can’t even remember the 1990s—and I don’t drink or do drugs.
It’s not that I’m nostalgia challenged. I feel a distinct sense of mourning for family farms, elm trees, ten-cent coffee and drive-in movies.
I miss milkmen, gas station attendants, paperboys and telephone receptionists.
I long for the heft of a real typewriter, metal hotel room keys, vinyl records—and I’d swap my flimsy plastic cellphone lozenge for a good old clunky rotary job in a heartbeat.
But that’s not the world we live in anymore. Today, trends pop up on the far horizon and then disappear with a whoosh in the rear-view mirror before we have a chance to hiccup.
It took Tolstoy six years to write War and Peace. The media phenomenon known as “Shit My Dad Says” went from original Twitter feed to YouTube sensation to bestseller to hit TV series in just six weeks. I grant you, in terms of quality there is some distance between the two works, but still . . .
Last year, in a moment of lemming-like consumer delusion, I briefly considered lashing out eight hundred bucks for a brand new state-of-the-art iPad. Good thing I resisted. The launch of the next state-of-the-art iPad earlier this year has rendered the original hopelessly obsolete.
It’s not just iPads—have you got an iPod? Put it on eBay, pal. The iPhone was a dagger in the back of the iPod, the sales of which have been sagging steadily for the past three years.
While you’re at it, dump your discs. I’m not talking about LPs and 45s—they’ve been extinct for eons. I mean your floppy discs, your mini-discs, yea, even your CDs and DVDs. iTunes and Netflix are pushing them off the cliff even as I type these words on my laughably out-of-date laptop (two years old and ready for the scrapyard).
Those CDs still make nifty drink coasters, though. And if you string a few of them together and hang them in the garden they might keep the starlings away.
Some old technologies refuse to lie down and die.
Fax machines, those mastodons of office communication, lurk on desktops everywhere—right beside the computers and scanners that were supposed to replace them.
Film cameras are supposed to be dead and buried—the world’s last roll of Kodachrome colour film was processed at Dwayne’s Photo Service in Parsons, Kansas, not long ago—but diehard purists insist that digital photos lack the “soul” of old-fashioned film. Wishful thinking or not, you can still buy film for your Kodak Brownie.
Back about the time North Americans were first getting used to the idea of telephones and electric lights there lived a nephew of the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse named Red Fox. He was a chief himself, a learned man and an early advocate for aboriginal rights. In his autobiography he wrote: “I met Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and many others who impressed me as great people, but pride in them and their achievements has not over-awed me, for I am not convinced that the comforts and advancements which they have brought to the world have made people more content and happy than the Indians were through the centuries on the mountains, prairies and deserts of the primeval, virgin continent.”
A few years ago a tourist in Washington, DC, was riding in a taxi past the National Archives and noticed the legend carved in granite across the front of the building. It read: “WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE.”
“What does that mean?” the tourist asked.
“It means,” said the driver, “that you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
I fear that both Chief Red Fox and the Washington cabbie were right.
Hears to Us
I’m sixty-six, I don’t have perfect hearing, and if I listen to loud music or go to gigs I do tend to get tinnitus. DON’T WE ALL????
—Pete Townshend, on his blog
I read that trivia pearl to my partner. She grunted, “So what’s your excuse?”
That’s a two-pointer in my household. She not only nailed me for being hard of hearing, she managed to work in a reference to my lame guitarsmanship. She’s good.
But she’s at least half-wrong. I’m not deaf. I went to an audiologist and had myself checked out. “Your hearing is excellent for someone your age,” she said. I told her my partner wouldn’t agree. The audiologist smiled and said, “Well, there is a phenomenon known as ‘selective hearing.’”
Related THAT little nugget to my partner. Two-pointer for my side. I think.
As for Pete Townshend, he is the poster boy for self-inflicted hearing loss. Pete’s in the Guinness World Records for being onstage at what’s been called “the loudest concert ever,” at a London football stadium in 1976. Add to that his years of playing lead guitar for The Who, standing between amplifiers as big as boxcars and cranked to the max and yeah, it figures that Pete might have hearing issues from time to time.
For most of us the fear of going deaf is only a notch down from the fear of blindness but a lot of hearing-challenged humans have done all right. Thomas Edison had serious hearing problems but managed to invent the light bulb, the phonograph and over a thousand other devices. Lou Ferrigno, a.k.a. the Hulk, has impaired hearing. So do Halle Berry and Rob Lowe.
Musicians seem to be particularly vulnerable. Aside from Pete Townshend, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and George Martin, the famous Beatles producer, did some of their best work under an aural handicap.
Can you imagine trying to create classical music with faulty hearing? Fauré did. So did Boyce and Smetana. The great Beethoven went deaf as a kumquat but went right on composing masterpieces—even though he would never hear a single note of them.
According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, 30 percent of us over the age of sixty-five will experience hearing loss, but it probably won’t be Ludwigian in scope. For most of us it will be grumbling about those news announcers who all seem to mumble the news, or wondering why cocktail chatter has turned into a wall of sound.
Not catastrophic. More . . . amusing.
A man sees me straining to follow conversation in a restaurant and says, “You should get a hearing aid like mine. Light as a feather; almost invisible. Cost me twenty-five hundred bucks.”
“Really,” I say. “What kind is it?”
The man says “Half-past four.”
Two Winnipeggers bump into each other at the corner of Portage and Main, the coldest crossroads in Canada. “Windy, isn’t it?” says one.
“No,” says the other. “I’m pretty sure it’s Thursday.”
“Me too,” says the first guy. “Let’s go grab a beer.”
Ma
king light of a disability—blasphemous? Nah, laughter’s always good for what ails you.
I say: “Hear, hear.”
The Good Old Hawking Game
Remember the last NHL lockout/strike/labour action/five-on-five power play? The one that went on for umpty-seven consecutive weeks?
A nation yawns.
It is hard to work up enthusiasm over a back-alley donnybrook in which millionaires face off against billionaires. Vincent Lecavalier, captain of the Lightning, a team that plays out of that hockey hotbed Tampa Bay, didn’t get paid during the lockout but he’s probably got enough stuffed under the mattress to get by. Vincent has an eighty-five-million-dollar—yes, you read right, an $85,000,000—contract to chase a rubber disc in various arenas for the Lightning until 2019. He’s by far the best-paid NHL-er but the rest of the players aren’t living on table scraps. The average salary tops out at just under 2.5 million simoleons a year.
I stopped seriously following NHL hockey about four decades ago when the average salary was twenty-five thousand a year. Star players like Bobby Hull and Gordie Howe did better—they were up in the hundred-thousand-a-year range—but tears must cascade down their heavily scarred cheeks when they hear that today the most tangle-footed, knuckle-dragging bench-sitting goon in the league makes twenty-five times as much as they ever did.
How can NHL owners shovel out that kind of money for salaries and still manage to be rolling in dough? The answer’s a simple one: advertising. In 1972 all teams in the NHL played on a rink surrounded by blank white boards and the single sponsor was Imperial Oil. Check those boards now. They are festooned and bespackled with ads for insurance companies, hockey gear manufacturers, banks, mortgage firms, department stores, beer, deodorants and cough medications. Likewise, the telecasts are splattered with ads for everything from snow tires to potato chips.
That’s why each year media moguls go into vicious feeding frenzies trying to outbid each other for the privilege of putting hockey on TV—and by extension into the living rooms of millions of hockey fans, a.k.a. consumers.
The fans pay the ultimate price and not just for the blitz of blurbs, plugs, jingles and thirty-second spots that plague the at-home viewer—those ads dictate the pace of the game. First-time attendees at a live NHL game are often stunned at how often the on-ice action is unexpectedly halted for several minutes, during which the players from both teams skate around in aimless figure eights, waiting for a daisy chain of TV commercials to cycle through the broadcast.
The NHL holds no monopoly on hockey advertising. During the aforementioned hockey lockout a photo in the sports section of my newspaper showed Boston’s Joe Thornton streaking up the ice, but not in a Bruins uniform. Instead he was wearing the colours of HC Davos, a European pro team based in Switzerland. Thornton, along with dozens of other locked-out NHL-ers, was trying to stay in shape by playing overseas for the duration of the lockout.
But it’s not Thornton’s uniform that caught my eye—it’s what was plastered all over Thornton’s uniform. Advertisements. I could decipher logos on his skates, on his hockey stockings, his hockey pants and gloves. There were at least a dozen ad patches on his hockey sweater and undoubtedly more on the back of it. His helmet carried a banner flogging Skoda automobiles. Thornton looked like he just skated through a garbage bin full of advertising flyers.
Ironically, in the same issue there was a picture of Paul Henderson holding up the hockey jersey he was wearing when he scored the most famous goal ever—the one that gave Team Canada its triumph over the Russians back in 1972. The jersey features a large red abstract leaf, Henderson’s number, 19, the word CANADA—and that’s it. No ads, not even Henderson’s name.
But that was four decades ago. Back when hockey, not advertising, was the name of the game.
My Name Is Art. I Am a Shopaholic
The year’s still young, but I’m putting my money on James Livingston for Bonehead Title of the Year.
Mr. Livingston has penned an article for Wired magazine called “Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul.”
Pow! As titles go, that’s right up there with “The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush.”
Livingston enjoins his readers to “ignore what the economists, journalists and politicians would have you believe . . . Go to the mall and knock yourself out.”
Or you could just wait until the Visa or MasterCard bill comes in at the end of the month. That’ll knock you out.
We live in the age of Homo consumeris. Our highest civic calling is to buy junk we don’t need with money we don’t have. Our day of worship is, well, every day, really, but our High Holy Day is Black Friday, that twenty-four-hour feeding frenzy just after American Thanksgiving, when shopping malls and big box stores slash their prices and, in anticipation, salivating shoppers mass at the doors like hordes of Visigoths at the gates of Rome.
On a recent Black Friday a shopper in Los Angeles pepper-sprayed fellow shoppers in order to get at discounted Xbox consoles. A riot broke out and blood was spilled over two-dollar waffle irons in Little Rock, Arkansas. And a woman was shot near a Walmart in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, as she carried her goodies to her car.
The insanity continued right up until Christmas Eve, when Nike put its latest line of retro basketball shoes on sale. Police had to be called in more than a dozen cities, including Charlotte, North Carolina, where shoppers smashed glass doors to get at the product.
We’re talking about running shoes, folks.
Somebody once said, “The American consumer is not notable for his imagination and does not know what he ‘wants.’” Maybe not, but he wants it now, and money is no object.
Those Nike shoes? Two hundred dollars a pair.
We’re still talking about running shoes, folks.
There are one or two beacons of hope in the blitzkrieg of berserker bargain hunters. For one thing, the thrift stores are thriving. People from all walks of life, unmoved by advertising campaigns to buy fifty-dollar T-shirts, one-hundred-dollar warm-up vests and, yes, two-hundred-dollar sneakers, are heading down to the thrift shops to get barely used goods at a fraction of the mall price. The proceeds from the thrift stores I frequent go to the local hospital and to a women’s shelter. Where’s the downside?
Another ray of hope comes from Elvis Costello. The famed musician (and husband of jazz diva Diana Krall) made the news recently when he publicly urged his fans NOT to buy his latest CD/DVD compilation.
Why? Too expensive, that’s why.
Costello says the price tag of two hundred dollars “is either a misprint or satire.”
“All our attempts to have this price revised have been fruitless,” says Costello on his website (www.elviscostello.com/news/steal-this-record).
But if you really want to get a very special CD for your sweetie, Elvis has some helpful advice. “We can whole-heartedly recommend Ambassador of Jazz,” says Elvis. “It contains TEN re-mastered albums by one of the most beautiful and loving revolutionaries who ever lived—Louis Armstrong.”
“Frankly,” adds Costello, “the music is vastly superior.”
When’s the last time an advertiser advised you to buy his competitor’s product—because it was better?
Finally—truth in advertising. Good on ya, Elvis—see you down at Value Village.
