When I was but a wee lad, I would get up early in the morning and turn on the television. Fifty years ago, that whole process you just imagined looked quite different than it does today. You actually hit a button on a large piece of furniture, and it whirred a bit while it warmed up. Other buttons and knobs were used to change the channel and adjust the volume. And good reception might well depend on how you held your tongue just right while adjusting the rabbit-year antennae on the top of the big piece of furniture.
Flickering into the early morning darkness, with the volume set really (really) low because the rest of the family was still asleep, the image of a test pattern would come into view. It was probably just before 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning, and broadcast TV programming was not yet, whaddyacall, broadcasting. Me and my box of breakfast cereal (eaten dry by the handful) were waiting for the Sunrise Seminar.
Sunrise Seminars were a series of college courses that were broadcast at 6:00 or 6:30 AM, usually discussions that were way, way above my head about philosophy and literature, but I was a wee lad in the late 1950s, and television... well, television... in the words of Arthur Adams, President of the American Council on Education, in 1960: "To report on the use of television in teaching is like trying to catch a galloping horse." Somehow, it was not assumed that people were stupid, 50 years ago.
The quote is from a UNESCO report, where a guy named Henry Cassirer was assigned to the United States for 6 months to observe and study first-hand the development of educational TV. I love this one, from the preface:
"Educators everywhere are faced with the challenge of a rapidly growing school and college population and the need for a new approach to the content and methods of teaching. Television may provide one of the answers to their problems."
I mean, really, 50 years later, people are still saying exactly the same thing every time a new technology emerges. Why, when we ought to be worried about the nutritional value of the groceries being delivered to the market, do we spend so much of our time focusing on the delivery vehicle?
Hang in there, I have a point.
So after the Sunrise Seminar, there was Jon Gnagy's Learn To Draw show (check YouTube) or any of a number of drawing and painting programs where artists talked you through what they were doing. Gnagy was hawking the stuff he sold at his art store in NYC, and these were produced for the NY TV audience, which basically did not matter to a kid watching a TV in Massachusetts. It was programming.
I was fixated. Lying in front of the TV so I could hear it at the low volume, crunching out of my cereal box: listening to these smart people on the Sunrise Seminar... watching these artists go through the motions of their expertise.
Watching Gerhard do his thing when he shares these details is equally (and still) fascinating. We mere mortals do not understand it when people like him do not understand why we think what they can do is so special.
I was thinking about all of this after watching this week's installment of CerebusTV. I've been more or less ambivalent about this programming, but lately Dave has been defaulting to letting us watch him work rather than spending any time on the often-weird scripted stuff. Lovely. Intimate. Authentic.
Episode #106 (Season 3 Episode 22, I think) might be the best one I have ever seen. It's an artist sitting at the drawing table, talking through his work. It's not quite yet available at cerebustv.com, but it is available here: http://www.youtube.com/simteevee at least for a little while.
I'd give my left, er, whatever, to have some videos of Dave and Ger working through the production of some Cerebus pages back in the 1980s.
As I was watching this, I had the strangest urge to go buy a box of Cap'n Crunch.
Some of the good stuff:
With only a little bit of this stuff:
