57 channels

[muckefuck]

Lately I've been bitching to anyone who will listen about the fact that a year ago, monshu and I spent a tidy sum on a glorious and huge new television that we almost never use. At the time, he was in the habit of retiring immediately after dinner and out NetFlix discs were sitting around for ages, but I thought that was temporary. For a while, Ugly Betty brought us together in front of the tv, but then ABC decided to start screwing with its schedule and now he catches up with it (and his new show Glee) on the computer. And for a while I thought that I, unencumbered by considerations of monshu's taste in films, would watch more movies myself, but I found myself preferring to watch Mock the Week and other snippets of British stand-up on the small screen as well.

So now just about the only time we switch the set on is when monshu has some ironing to do. Today he had it on Logo. Now I've bitched before about what annoys me in "gay movies" (you know, as opposed to just movies which have gay characters or gay subjects). As it happens, one of the worst offenders--that one about the Native American guy falling for a visitor from New York, the very epitome of the "gay cowboys eating pudding" stereotype--was just ending. We ended up watching a diverting "hom-rom-com" about immature men with much too much money in SoHo, and then it was a "musical fantasy" set in a private all-boys school.

I got five minutes into this until I began to choke on clichés; if anything it was worse than what I was prepared for. As our sensitive loner heads home after getting a black eye in dodge ball, I found myself saying, "So let's meet his struggling single mom." And naturally we do--though not until after first meeting his wisecracky "alternative" friends (a guitar-picking dyed-hair indigo girl and an African-American who you know instantly has no identity beyond that of a mere signifier). Seven billion stories in this world--why am I watching this exact same one again?

As I flipped to some dire crap on BBCAmerica, I reviewed the cruel math of feature filmmaking and contrasted it with some of the accounts of the economics of fiction writing which I've read in the wake of the Macmillan-Amazon pissing contest. It's no wonder monshu and I find that prose fiction speakers to us more than cinema. Lower barriers to entry mean more choice, not to mention an environment where a creator's vision suffers less at the hands of beancounters who flatten out its distinctiveness in order to broaden its appeal. (Not that I blame them, since a novel which sells a few tens of thousands of hardcover copies is still a success, which is not true of a movie which sells a like number of theatre seats.)

So in the end it's hard to blame monshu for choosing the pleasures of the paperback over those of the tv set. The downside of the book, however, are that unless you've the patience to sit and listen to one being read aloud, they are a solitary entertainment. Instead of giving up on watching altogether, I've simply got to get more creative in my efforts to lure others over to share the wealth.

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[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That's the one with the Mormons, right?