Saturday, December 26, 2009
It Isn't True That There Have Always Been So Many Commercials, Such Loud Commercials, or Permanent Commercials in the Corner of Ongoing Programming
Just as billboards should be attacked as pollution, television commercials should be attacked as harassment. Ubiquitous repetitious interminable ever-higher volume commercials are not just insulting, are not just stupefying, are not just undermining critical faculties on which democratic citizenship depends for its flourishing, but they amount to criminal harassment and should be litigated and regulated as such. The logic of short-term profit-taking is literally incapable of putting the breaks on this development, and hence this deranging demoralizing degenerating trend simply will not stop, stall, or slow, let alone reverse, until there are laws to see to it that it does.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Dear Dale, I have many questions about this lovely lil' quip - but I am more interested in why I didn't pick up any visual artists (especially film makers) on your list of "people who made me like this?" Novelists, one playwright, I think Nabakov might even be called a screen writer... Sagan could be argued as a TV element. But Seriously, haven't films just as completely formed "you" as novels? Which ones?
Yeah, I know. If I included the film-makers the list would suddenly be five times longer without being five times more clarifying. I shouldn't have included novelists and playwrights, but the novelists were for the most part also essayists who had an impact apart from their novels (I care enormously about considerably more novelists than just these), and the simple truth is that playwrights like Coward and Orton were so influential in making me who I am, and in ways that might easily be overlooked, that I felt compelled to mention them (again, I care enormously about considerably more playwrights than just these).
SO you did add film makers and a few artists! And it is clarifying and furthermore delightful.
Teshigahara should have been expected, but a surprise to me nonetheless.
Affectionately,
J
Post a Comment