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tetsabWon't be doing The Classic catch-up lifey thing DruWriNi post tonight. I've tired of that shtick for this night (even though I still have plans to do them some other night). Nope, tonight as I drink my quit-gift cragganmore from my quit-gift crystal glasses, I'm going to talk about bygone television, as you can still get at it today.
The primary way I get at my bygone television is through the remarkable good fortune of living within the 5km or so rabbit ear broadcast radius of one of Canada's perhaps only known remaining pirate television station, Star Ray TV. Star Ray is an excellent source of student films, NFB pieces, streetcar documentaries, and b-movies (last night they aired Bela Lugosi's last full film, The Black Sleep and tonight it's When Worlds Collide). The night before that they showed McLuhan's Wake.
Wake
Wake
Wake
It is painful (not in the style of this IMDB reviewer) to watch McLuhan talk about the media environment from today's vantage. It's almost worse to see the discussion at the end of the film about UofT chucking out all his work (though Wikipedia does say something about eventual protests about closing his 'Centre') a year or so into the stroke that killed off his speech and, eventually, him. This ouch is enhanced by knowing that the President who hired him (Bissel) would eventually give his name to the building that housed the Faculty of Information (AKA the home of archives) I graduated from. (There's a small ouch reduction in knowing that there was still a place for McLuhan there when I was around, even in a library -- at a library school -- they were actively slicing to ribbons as I was there).
His work / that doc uses Poe's Descent into the Maelström and this stuck out extra heavily for me this week, as reading Poe is what I've been doing since Monday as my seasonally appropriate activity (no time for carving or costumes this year -- too tired from a work project that even ended up haunting my Halloween night for 40 minutes and, in part, screwing up my sleep the rest of the week). This night, of course, is also a seasonally appropriate activity.
Here I'm using 'seasonal' in its rhythmical sense (turn, turn, turn) and not so much its weather one (though I'm only having this scotch now as it's sufficiently cold outside -- the last time there was An Occasion for it I didn't want to crack it open as the weather was wrong for it). Another rhythm that matters here for bygone television is the weekly one and that I was reminded of by TVO showing a hour long doc yesterday about Elwy Yost and Magic Shadows / Saturday Night at the Movies. (They were very unfortunately showing this as key rhythm of theirs -- 8pm/11pm -- is currently fully broken by the ongoing strike).
Magic Shadows I missed entirely (not in the country for it) but Saturday Night at the Movies mattered a fair bit to me as a teen.
On the one hand I'm sorry these things are gone but on the other they aren't fully (and this is very much what I meant by 'as you can still get at it today' in the opening paragraph) because I'm calling this 'bygone' and yet each of these elements I was able to access in the past 24hrs (and as I write about them here, barring geo-fencing, I'm able to pass viable links to some of these things on in this very post).
Realistically you can say I'm still more connected to all of this 'past' (and even watch it on a cathode ray tube) than I am to the new world of casting / streaming. I have the occasional second-hand exposure to Netflix accounts and when I visit my family in Pickering I can see that cable remains near on the exact same cesspit it's been since I moved here in the early 90s when I could not stop marvelling that in going from 4 channels to 200 that there was so much less you'd actually want to watch!
The closest I get to that is Hoopla/Kanopy and YouTube docs (where I'm very happy things like Trash Theory exist, even if it always feels like the more I know of a subject the more I gently errrr at them). :)
In the past decade much of what used to be TV time wound up supplanted by Casual Video Game Time and I'll end this by marking the final death of http://www.die2nite.com/ on November 2nd, though even it remains undead through the community who loved it trying recreating it as a labour of love at https://myhordes.eu/. And, in the end, that's how these things all still go on: in community, in communication.
The primary way I get at my bygone television is through the remarkable good fortune of living within the 5km or so rabbit ear broadcast radius of one of Canada's perhaps only known remaining pirate television station, Star Ray TV. Star Ray is an excellent source of student films, NFB pieces, streetcar documentaries, and b-movies (last night they aired Bela Lugosi's last full film, The Black Sleep and tonight it's When Worlds Collide). The night before that they showed McLuhan's Wake.
Wake
Wake
Wake
It is painful (not in the style of this IMDB reviewer) to watch McLuhan talk about the media environment from today's vantage. It's almost worse to see the discussion at the end of the film about UofT chucking out all his work (though Wikipedia does say something about eventual protests about closing his 'Centre') a year or so into the stroke that killed off his speech and, eventually, him. This ouch is enhanced by knowing that the President who hired him (Bissel) would eventually give his name to the building that housed the Faculty of Information (AKA the home of archives) I graduated from. (There's a small ouch reduction in knowing that there was still a place for McLuhan there when I was around, even in a library -- at a library school -- they were actively slicing to ribbons as I was there).
His work / that doc uses Poe's Descent into the Maelström and this stuck out extra heavily for me this week, as reading Poe is what I've been doing since Monday as my seasonally appropriate activity (no time for carving or costumes this year -- too tired from a work project that even ended up haunting my Halloween night for 40 minutes and, in part, screwing up my sleep the rest of the week). This night, of course, is also a seasonally appropriate activity.
Here I'm using 'seasonal' in its rhythmical sense (turn, turn, turn) and not so much its weather one (though I'm only having this scotch now as it's sufficiently cold outside -- the last time there was An Occasion for it I didn't want to crack it open as the weather was wrong for it). Another rhythm that matters here for bygone television is the weekly one and that I was reminded of by TVO showing a hour long doc yesterday about Elwy Yost and Magic Shadows / Saturday Night at the Movies. (They were very unfortunately showing this as key rhythm of theirs -- 8pm/11pm -- is currently fully broken by the ongoing strike).
Magic Shadows I missed entirely (not in the country for it) but Saturday Night at the Movies mattered a fair bit to me as a teen.
On the one hand I'm sorry these things are gone but on the other they aren't fully (and this is very much what I meant by 'as you can still get at it today' in the opening paragraph) because I'm calling this 'bygone' and yet each of these elements I was able to access in the past 24hrs (and as I write about them here, barring geo-fencing, I'm able to pass viable links to some of these things on in this very post).
Realistically you can say I'm still more connected to all of this 'past' (and even watch it on a cathode ray tube) than I am to the new world of casting / streaming. I have the occasional second-hand exposure to Netflix accounts and when I visit my family in Pickering I can see that cable remains near on the exact same cesspit it's been since I moved here in the early 90s when I could not stop marvelling that in going from 4 channels to 200 that there was so much less you'd actually want to watch!
The closest I get to that is Hoopla/Kanopy and YouTube docs (where I'm very happy things like Trash Theory exist, even if it always feels like the more I know of a subject the more I gently errrr at them). :)
In the past decade much of what used to be TV time wound up supplanted by Casual Video Game Time and I'll end this by marking the final death of http://www.die2nite.com/ on November 2nd, though even it remains undead through the community who loved it trying recreating it as a labour of love at https://myhordes.eu/. And, in the end, that's how these things all still go on: in community, in communication.