A Day In The Journey

Sorry about the migraine. They are hard to deal with. I found about 20 natural remedies that I try for my sinus headaches when I get them, but I don't know if they'll work for you. Some are hit and miss.

Interesting point about the small screen. I think many complaints against it may be issues of control.

Pretty heady stuff here.

As for your television remark, I just read a quote by a fairly well-respected actor who pronounced the death of the movie medium and the rebirth of television. My problem with television (and it's not dogma) is the how fractioned it is. The longest segment you'll catch is usually only 8 minutes, further shattering the human attention span. The result is mass of people who can't spend more than a few minutes thinking about a problem; any longer and frustration sets in.

The other problem (and I certainly don't want to be a hypocrite) is commercialization. I understand, it's the way things work these days. But everything is so driven my numbers and cash that presenting anything artistically challenging is alot less likely. That and every storyline is severed and filled with short films about tampons, hot sauce and financial institutions.

I figured the commercialization issue would come up. But how many people stop to think that much of what we consider great art was a commercial venture at the time. Portraits of nobility, putting the nobility into classical scenes, paiting classical characters with the faces of patrons, even the Sistene ceiling was a "commercial" venture--though the wages were continued membership in the Church rather than actual money. Of course, actual commercials are more distracting, but do they necessarily detract from the skill of the writers? Or does their presence cause the writers to be mroe creative and hold the attention of the veiwers over the span?

Hmm. Issues of control. That's some food for thought.

Jon Secada?

Thanks for commenting. I posed a question in response- to go further down that Covenantal path. :)

Ren, this is an interesting question about which I have thought a great deal (hence the long comment that follows).

I think that the disdain for television and elevation of the silver screen goes back to the earliest days of film. "Great" directors such as Murnau and Fritz Lang propogated (sometimes consciously) the notion that a film, like a novel, was the handiwork of an inspired Auteur. Since then, (particularly since the 1960s and 70s with the advent of the New German Cinema and the French art film movement,) film has been seen as a medium for creative innovation and ideological exploration. Television, on the other hand, has been (perhaps unfairly) perceived as a primarily commercial enterprise, a collaborative effort, a partnership between business support structures and creative individuals. There is no grand Auteur behind the television camera, but rather a soap company or automaker. Strangely enough, this snobbery seems to be a fixation increasingly particular to American audiences. In Europe, where most television networks are now directly subsidized through government culture ministries, the small screen has become an acceptable, (and sometimes preferable) medium for experimental storytelling. Television producers have even been at times more daring than their filmic counterparts. In Germany, for example, the late Heinz Schirk, who wrote and directed the first feature length narrative German-language film about the Holocaust (the Wannsee Conference, 1984) but had to do so in collaboration with German and Austrian television networks, since the film studios were spooked by its unrelentingly realistic depiction of the Nazi henchmen. In America, this would have been christened a made-for-TV movie, and accorded the disdain commensurate with such a title, but in Europe, the film enjoyed a brief wave of enthusiasm.