SelfAbsorbed.ME : ‘It’s Your Life, We Just Write it Funnier’

I consider myself a self-appointed Friday Night Lights missionary. I actually consider it a personal and spiritual responsibility to convert as many people as possible into devotees of the show. Recently, I took it upon myself to convert my father by showing up at his doorstep with an empty stomach, season one on DVD, and a rehearsed lecture about the program’s critical acclaim.

We made dinner and twenty minutes into the first episode he said:

“Wow. Traditional television must seem so boring to you.”

He was referring to the show’s quick pace, which I didn’t even notice as quick because I’m an excessively over stimulated Gen-Yer who’s used to working, IMing, Gchatting, checking facebook and throwing out a tweet in the course of 60 seconds. But he’s right.

Watching even past greats like Seinfeld is tortuous to me. Compared to current TV sitcoms, the pacing is so. painfully. slow. Currently, on an episode of your average teen drama, two characters break up, get back together, and commit a crime, while someone else is diagnosed with a disease and finds out they have a secret family before the writers do a dramatic reversal on the whole thing in 42 minutes. We’re conditioned to take in so much, SO fast. The kids who are tweens now and growing up expecting things to be this rapid, might combust at age twenty. Or things will just get even faster. It scares me to think how.

A musician friend of mine and I got thoroughly depressed Saturday morning when we paused over brunch to truly analyze the state of entertainment in our society. It’s driven by this younger market (our generation is guilty as well) who can’t stand still, must multitask, and given a Blackberry, would probably be Wikipedia-ing stuff in the womb.

“No one listens to an album anymore,” my friend said. “No one even buys CDs! Tower and Virgin in Union Square are both going out of business.”

As someone who’s musically challenged, I never really stopped to think about how an album, the songs in specific order along with the insert and cover, is a true piece of art. A soon-to-be-extinct piece of art thanks to iTunes. And yes, I’m guilty! I think the last CD I physically owned was the Dirty Dancing soundtrack given to me by the Tooth Fairy at age eleven.

“People only buy your top song now,” he continued, “or top two songs. It’s all done virtually. Everything’s in their iPod. Often, they don’t even listen to the whole song, just the first 30 seconds before they skip onto the next.”

I’m guilty of that too! But I started to get pissed. If we equate an album to a book, I’d be more than angry if readers only read my most popular chapter and nothing else. Nothing would make sense! Skipping through songs is like skimming, not even reading a writer’s story or even sentence. This is enough to make an artistic person suicidal.

Suddenly the sky was falling over me and my omelet. What was the world coming to? The worst part is that in an effort to please our over stimulated, never satiated selves, the entertainment industry’s money only funds faster, pop-ier, bubblier, more attention getting things, regardless of whether or not they have substance.

Who cares if anything has substance when you can bank on the fact that whoever’s watching will have changed the channel or clicked through on their iPod before any kind of plot or melody can even develop.

Am I the only one paranoid that we’re going to end up as pod people with intense ADD?

How will true art ever get funded? Or made? Or appreciated?

By the end of our meal, it had gotten so bad that we were envisioning a split in society in which artists and people willing to take life at a 1980s-esque pace took over a Canadian province or an area in America’s Midwest to live a separate, Utopian existence. This may be extreme, but I guarantee you there will be an anti technology movement at some point in the next twenty years, and I just hope I’ll still be sane enough to be a part of it.

Until then, we have Friday Night Lights. It may be paced at Gen-Y speed but has substance, and the acting and cinematography rival the majority of movies released in theaters.

Maybe there’s some hope. It did just get picked up for a fourth season.

Oh, and for everyone who’s made it all the way through my rant, here’s a hot pic of Riggs as a reward.

Photo Credit: weblogs.baltimoresun.com and www.serieslive.com