Tuesday, April 28, 2015

In which we ask, What's playing at the Roxy?


I have just spent an amazing amount of time collecting the pieces of a home theater and assembling said pieces, including furniture. The 21st Century can be complicated.

When I was a kid, TVs were delivered from the TV store and hooked up by the store professionals to antennas on the roof. If you wanted to turn the TV on, you walked over and turned it on. Ditto if you wanted to change the channel. The range was from channel 2 to channel 13, although I think one or two of those were nothing but static all the time. Every channel was static some of the time. At the end of the broadcast day they played the national anthem and showed pictures of air force planes presumably protecting the ether until the next day’s broadcasting began. Screens were small—thirteen inches would be considered gigantic—and black-and-white. In my recollection, it seemed as if the repairmen visited often. Those old TVs were collections of vacuum tubes that always seemed to be blowing up. There would be a burst and you would smell electronic fire, and for the next few days the set would be out of commission. TV repairmen were the busiest people in town. Of course, no one had more than one set, so you couldn’t just go into the other room, whatever that was, and watch there. And since you couldn’t record shows, if you missed it, you missed it, until rerun season. But as a rule shows weren’t continuous as they are now. Every episode stood alone, so you really didn’t miss anything except that episode, in which nothing earthshattering was likely to happen and nothing that happened would probably ever be mentioned again. Today every show is an installment, and miss one episode and you’ll have no idea what’s going on, but today there’s no reason to miss an episode, and there you are.

I got my first color TV in the 70s when my wife won all 19 inches of it in some kind of office giveaway. She was reluctant to take it, as it seemed too extravagant. It worked fine and never blew up. It was the set to which I plugged a Betamax in 1980. We were among the first to have a videotape recorder. VHS wasn’t even on sale yet. I replaced the Betamax once with a later model and subsequently replaced it with VHS. I was big on time shifting, and eventually owned a DVD recorder, although I never got into TiVo. Just didn’t seem to need it.

In our house, watching TV means watching TV. We don’t do anything else; we just watch what we’re watching. We watch virtually nothing that is, as you might say, “on.” It’s all disks or streaming. As a rule, we do one show a night during the week, which is what, forty minutes? Getting the new HD big screen setup is intentionally directed at watching more movies. I used to breathe movies back in the day, but got out of the habit of going to them during my debate life. Honestly, I don’t think I missed much, because I do believe that movies have not been on some sort of straight line up if the measure is pure quality. There’s good ones, of course, but if you miss, say, a Marvel superhero movie, you’ll probably survive until, two weeks later, the CGI is recycled into another one. Still, I want to watch more. And I want to watch them on a fairly big screen. Yes, I do believe in the movie-going experience, sort of, but not that many movies available around here motivate me to go to a theater to experience them. I just don’t feel like the bother is worth it. Last movie we saw on the big screen was Into the Woods. Have I missed all that much since then? (Sue me: Boyhood put me to sleep, and I doubt if seeing it a lot bigger would have made it a lot better. Interstellar had the same understanding of black holes as the notorious Disney movie, The Black Hole. I have Birdman cued up next; I’m prepared to be disappointed. On the other hand, the TV show True Detective is phenomenal. What can I say?)

The hardest part of setting up the new system was banging together the new stand, which is still only 99% finished because the screws in the last hinge elude me completely. But other than that I’ve got a new cable box, soundboard, Blu-Ray player, the works. And today I threw away the boxes and Styrofoam they all came with.

I think I’ll watch The Honeymooners tonight.

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