THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
09/14/01 -- Vol. 20, No. 11
Big Cheese: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Little Cheese: Evelyn Leeper, evelyn.leeper@excite.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
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Topics:
HDTV (comments)
BODIES IN A BOOKSHOP (book review)
===================================================================
TOPIC: HDTV (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
THAT ITCHY, SWEATY PALM FEELING? IT'S HDTV. So blares an ad in a
magazine for a store that specializes in electronics. Of course
the ad is hyping High Definition Television. It is reaching out
to anybody who gets really excited about advances like HDTV.
But I have to admit that though I am really into movies, I am
not all that excited about the advent of HDTV. I do not get
sweaty palms thinking about it. But why am I not excited?
Let us just take another look at that name, "high-definition
television." You have the adjective "high-definition" and a noun
"television." It is really just an enhancement on television.
Consumer television came along in the late forties and early
fifties. We are just passing the half-century mark for the
introduction of devices to bring pictures that move into the
home. Go back another half century and you are to the point
that a reasonable technology for creating moving pictures had
come along was first taking hold. Now that was an innovation
that justifiably gave people itchy, sweaty palms!
There are some that say that the motion picture was really the
completion of an art that goes back to cave paintings. Certainly
early in representational art the artist became dissatisfied
that his paintings were fixed in time and what he saw in the
real world moved. In a sense all still painting is a lie, or at
the very least unrealistic. When Rembrandt painted a person he
wanted to capture that person on canvas. But he had to remind
the person to keep still and not move. To get a realistic
portrait of the person the subject had to behave unrealistically
still. Modern photographers still have the problem. They pose
people and then tell them not to move. People and things in the
real world move and change. They have motion. But oil cannot
move on canvas so the painting is a misrepresentation.
It took until the early 1900s for there to be a viable technology
to put motion into art. And the very earliest commercial films
did not even have a story. They were just pictures of things
the photographer saw in the world around with that super-special
new added feature, movement. Note we still use the words
"movie," "motion picture," and "cinema" [from the same root as
"kinetic" or "moving"]. This is true in spite of the fact that
we are a long way past the point that promoters of this summer's
blockbusters want to emphasize is that they ACTUALLY MOVE and
are not just still pictures. This was pretty exciting stuff a
century ago.
Fifty years later was another watershed in communication of
moving visuals. Again itchy sweaty palms were in order. You
could bring a picture with motion, if not a motion picture,
right into your home. The difference was a lot like the
difference it made when computers could be brought into the home
and just ordinary people could own them.
Now 50 years later we are moving into the era of HDTV. Another
big leap forward? Hardly. As the name indicates HDTV is a
refinement on television. The problem is that you reach a point
of diminishing returns with what new technology buys you. HDTV
is a big investment and it brings you a better picture than VHS
and even a somewhat better picture than DVDs give you. HDTV is
a medium for the person who says the glass is 3% empty, not 97%
full. HDTV will moderately improve the experience of seeing a
noisy special effects movie like ARMAGEDDON. It is not clear it
offers any real advantage at all in seeing a great film like
TWELVE ANGRY MEN. In that film the value is in the dialog and
the acting. It was a story originally written for the tiny,
black and white TV screen and that is about all it requires.
HDTV may be a medium for someone who enjoys a film like
ARMAGEDDON, but it will do little for the fan of TWELVE ANGRY
MEN who does not need to hear Jack Klugman in eight channel
stereo or to see a crystal clear image of Jack Warden's face.
HDTV is a refinement on existing technology. TV has come a long
way since the 1950s. The picture is color, a lot clearer, and
the shape of the picture is less dictated by the shape of the
vacuum tube. But if there is an improvement somewhere out there
of the magnitude of the invention of the motion picture or of
television, I am missing it. Perhaps technology has slowed, or
perhaps it really is out there I am just not recognizing it.
Perhaps innovations fusing the motion picture with the Internet
will eventually have a big influence. But I think that fifty
and a hundred years ago there were a lot of people who were
excited about changes in the representation of motion in art.
Today the next sweaty palm experience is running behind
schedule. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: BODIES IN A BOOKSHOP by R. T. Campbell (Dover, 1984
(c 1946), trade paperback, $3.95, 178pp) (a book review by Evelyn
C. Leeper):
Let me just quote the first paragraph
"I don't know what came over me. It wasn't as if there were not
enough books in the house to begin with. There were books on the
floor, books on the beds--and in the beds if one wasn't careful.
Only that morning I had removed three volumes of Curtis from my
room. How they came to be there I would not know. There seems
to be a plot between the old man, Professor John Stubbs, and his
housekeeper, Mrs. Farley, to dump anything they like in my room.
So far as I am concerned this is fine. I like books. But I have
books enough enough and mess enough of my own."
Then two paragraphs later:
"Having made up my mind that I wanted the life of Robert Boyle I
started going round all the bookshops I could find. This was
fine, but I kept running into others books I wanted. I spent the
devil of a lot of money. I said to myself that it didn't really
matter very much if I failed to get the 'Life of Boyle,' I had
gathered enough to keep me reading for at least a fortnight."
(Okay, only a fortnight's worth of reading on a book trip is a
bit light.)
Anyway, the narrator finds two dead bodies in a bookshop off
Tottenham Court Road, His off-hand comments would seem to
indicate that this is not the first time he has stumbled onto
deceased persons, though Dover doesn't indicate any earlier books
in a series. The deaths--murders, of course--are all tied up
with the London used booksellers, trafficking in stolen rare
books and in high-quality pornography.
It is all vaguely reminiscent of THE CLUB DUMAS crossed with
84, CHARING CROSS ROAD, and if all this doesn't get you to want to
read it, nothing else I can say would help. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Virtue has never been as respectable as money.
--Mark Twain
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