I learned from kottke.org
that someone has
blogged 24 hours of watching MTV.
I'd
be impressed except I've already read Hugh Gallagher's "Seven Days and
Seven Nights Alone with MTV" from Douglas Rushkhoff's Gen
X Reader (1994).
Compare
and contrast:
6/21/2001
02:59:49 PM
Chris Connelly on MTV News, and it turns out that
Destiny's Child is gonna record a Christmas album! Hope they don't wuss out
and make it all boring ballads: if there's any pop microgenre that needs a
major formal ass-kick, it'd be the slow jam.
Michael Daddino (e-mail) (link)
Wednesday,
December 30, 1992 4:10 A.M.
An unsettling "MTV News"
interview with U2 has been in rotation today. The band does not appear in
flesh but chats down to Kurt Loder from four enormous TV screens. Projecting
the measurements of their head size, if Bono and friends were released from
the TVs, they could King Kong through Times Square, singing "One" as
they toppled buildings and crushed fistfuls of screaming citizens. They loom
magnificent over Kurt the mortal - pathetic in his need to urinate, his desire
for a ham sandwich.
That's what happens after heavy enough rotation on MTV: You shed your body and
become a spirit in the videodrome.
Hugh Gallagher, Seven Days
and Seven Nights Alone with MTV
(Oh whatever
happened to Hugh Gallagher? He was the Malcom Gladwell of his day - his "college
entrance essay" was reprinted in Harper's ; he was a Sassy
"One to Watch", he wrote for Dirt,
Rolling Stone (which was
turned into a movie), WIRED,
Flash Art and Playboy, he made
an album... I hope his
novel was worth this absence from the magazine scene)
And
while watching 7 days worth of MTV is an impressive feat, in 1992 Bill
McKibben spent 24 hours alone with Mother Nature. Then he watched more than
1700 hours of television (24 hours of each available channel from his cable
company) for comparison. Then he wrote The
Age of Missing Information.
Now
that's impressive.