Category Archives: Video Clips

Remind me never to get insomnia again

Two nights after having spent the entire night awake in the Children’s Hospital ER with a sick daughter, my sleep routine is completely off. So last night I was awake in bed watching TV until nearly 2 AM. After The Colbert Report ended, and deciding as usual that I was not interested in leaving it on Comedy Central to watch South Park (why, exactly, is that show still on?), I flipped over to MSNBC to see if Countdown or Rachel Maddow was being replayed. Well, no, it was Hardball, but I decided to just leave it on and wait.

First observation: Wow. An hour is a really long time. Although I found moments entertaining, and perhaps a few nanoseconds informative, I developed a newfound understanding for Einstein’s simple explanation of relativity:

Put your hand on a stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

He couldn’t anticipate the third corollary: Sit with Chris Matthews for an hour, and, like Meat Loaf, you’ll be praying for the end of time.

The end of time did arrive eventually, and Keith Olbermann appeared. It was, perhaps, not his best show, but I can’t recall how many times I’ve actually watched an entire episode of Countdown. Usually I just see clips on YouTube. I was glad to see that he (and all three hosts, to be sure) wasn’t going to let John McCain’s Joe the Plumber debacle in Defiance, Ohio (can’t make this stuff up) slip by. Rachel Maddow actually did the best filling in the details of the McCain rally there, though. Nowhere else all day long did I hear the fact that I personally found most interesting (and revealing) about the event: of the 6000 people in attendance, 4000 consisted of the entire student body of the Defiance public school system. The schools were closed for the day, and the students were bussed to the rally. Attendance, apparently, was required.

But the most regrettably memorable moment of the long 180 minutes I spent with MSNBC in the wee-est of wee hours last night, the moment that made me most wish I could be asleep right now, occurred not during one of the programs, but during a commercial break on the Rachel Maddow Show. I saw this:

The first two computers you see in the commercial are Macs. But I knew something was amiss when I saw the woman’s iBook (yes, I can see in a freeze-frame at 0:10 that it’s definitely an iBook, despite having the brand masked over) displaying a BSOD. If it were a MacBook, that would at least be possible — however unlikely, and I will acknowledge that’s at least in part because Macs don’t run versions of Windows before XP SP2, and how often does that BSOD?

Then we see at 0:42 an on-screen notice: “FinallyFast.com is for PC Computers Only.” Well, yeah.

BBC telecast of John Cage’s groundbreaking work, 4’33”

This is the first time I’ve ever seen a performance of 4’33”. It’s a polarizing work, to be sure. You love it or you hate it. Or maybe you get it or you don’t. Or you get it, but you still don’t really get it. Or you do really get it that, really, there’s nothing to get.

Personally, I think it has merit on multiple levels: it forces you to stop and observe your surroundings in a way few of us do these days; artistically, it’s one logical extreme of the various avant-garde movements of the 20th century; it cultivates proper concert hall decorum; and, if you choose to see it this way, it’s a brilliant piece of comic absurdism. The fact that it’s performed in three movements, with the requisite pauses (and opportunities for the audience to cough, adjust themselves in their seats, rustle programs, etc.), is the key to this last perspective. If it were just the performers sitting up there staring blankly for four-and-a-half minutes, who cares? But it’s three distinct movements of nothing, separated by more nothing (of a much different kind).

There’s something deeper to it though. As any serious student of music will tell you, the silence is just as important as the notes. To put it more simply, silence is music, just as much as sound is. So as I said earlier, this is the logical conclusion of a particular strain of 20th century music — the mirror image of the kind of free-form cacophony that was also being practiced at the time. Whether Cage intended this piece as a critique of that movement, a part of it, or otherwise, is a topic best left to the scholars who’ve studied Cage more than I have. Ultimately, I just think it’s a cool idea. Somebody had to do it eventually.