We're Pretty Close to Being the Jetsons -- Media Wise, At Least

The other day I drove to our local Borders bookstore because I had heard that there was a liquidation sale going on and everything in the store was at least 25% off. Borders is going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and needs to close a bunch of shops and sell off as much product as they possibly can—incidentally, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Best Buy might be next. My family and I walked around the store, I got something and my oldest daughter got a few books and we left.

I’ve always been a big fan of going to book stores, browsing the aisles and picking up a tome or two but this exercise is something that might be going away in the near future. While I don’t think that all book stores are closing tomorrow (people will always want to buy books and thus there will always be a spot for the mom-and-pop store), but it is beginning to look like the large brick and mortar book stores are becoming extinct.

And people like me might be part of the blame.

There are a few reasons for this, with main reason one having nothing to do with me. The Borders in my store is two stories and is pretty large. More than half of the first floor is devoted entirely to DVDs and CDs. And they’re not cheap, a CD is about $17 and a new DVD is more than $30. Even with the 25% off, it was be cheaper to go to Newbury Comics or Best Buy to get what you want. And who pays full price for DVDs and CDs any more?

Borders not recognizing a shift in paradigms when it came to music buying is simply ignorance. What the store is selling isn’t hard-to-find CDs, you can find the new Coldplay album anywhere. The same goes for a new movie. Why would I want to spend $35 at Borders for “Iron Man 2” when I can go to Best Buy and get the same flick for $20?

The other two things that are murdering places like Borders is Amazon.com, which sells books at cheaper prices—not to mention cheaper music and movies and people switching to eBooks. There’s nothing that Borders could do about Amazon.com, the web site just doesn’t have the overhead that Borders has and can slash prices to a bare minimum and still make money.It looks as if Borders tried to combat them by selling books on line too, but why buy from Borders online when you can get it cheaper at Amazon? Much like being unable to recognizing the death of CDs and online ordering, Borders was even slower to react to eBooks and didn’t come out with their own Kindle-type reader (the Kobo) until it was too late. By then it was another product in an over-saturated market. It may be the cheapest eReader on the market, but who cares? I’ll spend the extra $40 for a Kindle.

And that last sentence is something that I never thought that I’d say. Not so much that I’d spend extra amount of cash for a brand name, but that I’d even consider buying an eReader. At home I have three book cases chock full of books. It’s my one indulgence and for every Christmas and birthday I get at least one $50 gift card to Barnes and Noble. I've always surrounded myself with books and ever since I was a kid I wanted three things in my house: a bubble hockey game, a bar (my uncle had one in his house and it was awesome) and a library with shelves built into the wall stacked with books and a few comfortable, high backed, leather chairs in which to read.

But the reality is that I’m not going to own a home that I’ll be able to have my own library. I guess when my daughters move out of the house in 20-25 years, I can take over one of their rooms as a library but that’s a long time to wait. And in the mean time where am I going to store all of my books? And there in lies the rub, to quote Shakespeare. My wife and I don’t fight much, but the one thing that we have always butted heads on are my books. Her argument: they take up too much space, you’ve already read them and books aren’t decorations. My argument: but they’re my books.

Jerry Seinfeld once said this about books, “"What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses like they're trophies. What do you need it for after you read it?” And to be honest, he and my wife have a point. I have no idea why I keep half the books I own*. It’s not like I need them for research or anything like that.

It's like the 20 years of Sports Illustrateds that I have in my basement. I have no idea why I keep them, especially now that Sports Illustrated has all of their magazines archived online, but I know that one day I'm going to need them.I just don't know for what.

I guess I have this secret wish that someone will come into our house and just stand in front of my shelves, mouth agape and just gasp at the collection I amassed. “Have you read all of these books? You must be a genius! And what a collection! So diverse, so eclectic! You are easily the most interesting person ever.” This has not happened. Yet.

So with the ever-growing book collection that is now taking up space in our guest bedroom, I’ve come to a conclusion that I have one of two choices: stop buying books or find a way to store books cheaply and without taking up a lot of space.

Enter Amazon.com's Kindle. Apparently this eReader has enough memory for over 3,000 books. And it doesn't take up much room, the reader itself is very thin. No larger than a hardcover, and slimmer than a pamphlet. Anyone who I have talked to about these things universally sings its praises: My life will be forever changed. It’s easier. It’s actually made reading more enjoyable. Reading in bed is a breeze. You can purchase a new book instantly as long as there is a WiFi connection and some Kindles don’t even need that. The only negative that I’ve heard is that airline stewardesses make you shut it off ten minutes before take off and landings.

And the price on the hardware is coming down too. I read an article in the New York Times last week where Amazon.com’s CEO has pretty much said that soon they’re going to give the hardware away (I think that he was being factious about the $0 price tag, but not the price coming down to virtually nothing) because the money isn’t in the Kindle itself, it’s in the books. It’s a brilliant strategy. Amazon still charges “normal” physical book prices (up to $15) for something that isn’t physical at all. So if you can get the hardware into people’s hands for a limited price, you’re going to make 10 times that amount when you sell them products that you don’t have to store, don’t need someone to sell and won’t ever go bad.

It’s literally the perfect item. It’s almost as if you’re selling air.

And that’s what I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around. When I purchase something, for the most part I like to be able to tangibly hold that object. When I buy an eBook, I’m really just buying the rights to the book. Yes, the book is mine, but at the same time, it doesn't really feel like it is. It’s hard to explain, but it almost feels like I’m just borrowing it. Even though I realize that's not the case, it's what I'm having trouble with.

It’s also why I haven’t completely dropped the CD habit either. I don’t buy a lot of CDs any more, maybe five or six a year at most. But when I do buy a new CD, I want the CD. I’ve purchased a bunch of singles from iTunes and have downloaded a bunch back in the day*, but I’ve never downloaded an entirely new album. Again, I think it’s the whole tangible thing.

* I was on the cusp of downloading music 10 or 12 years ago. My friend showed me how to set up an FTP connection through my dial-up and while it was fun, it was slow as hell (15 minutes for a song that could break up if you get a phone call). Then when Napster and Limewire and Kaaza came out, it was like Christmas. I got booted off of Napster thanks to Metallica or Dr. Dre, but a friend supplied me a patch and I was back online within a week. As sad as this sound, I don’t download any music because there’s nothing I really want. I suppose if I sat back and thought about it, I can think of a few tunes, but even though it’s easy and would take a few minutes to get comfortable with the software, it’s a hassle and not something that I miss too much.

Put it this way, we have a new TV that can go on-line and we have streaming Netflix. Aside from the myriad movies, there are a ton of seasons of different TV shows. For the last two weeks, I’ve been watching a few episodes of MTV’s “The State” every night. I was thinking of purchasing the DVD set, but what’s the point? As long as I have my Netflix membership, for all intents and purposes I own the set. I can watch it any time I want. But I always have a nagging feeling that the service is going to go away and one day I’m going to watch an episode of “The State” and won’t be able to.

I know that this isn’t the same as actually purchasing an eBook or a song off iTunes, because I actually own it. But I don’t physically own it and while today the Kindle is a pretty cool piece of machinery, in 15 years is it going to be this decade’s 8-track player? And if so, what happens to my books then? Will they be nothing but binary code that I can’t crack? At least with physical books, unless I get bumped on the head and lose my ability to read or a flood or fire destroys my house, I am guaranteed to enjoy them for the rest of my life.

And another thing is the social aspect of trading books and CDs. Some of the best times I had was going over my friend Shawn’s house in the late 90s to burn discs. He literally had an entire wall full of CDs (he bought his first disc at the dawn of the technology in 1989) and had thousands of CDs. It was cool to go over his place and spend an afternoon drinking beer, going through his catalog, finding something and making a CD* of it. Shawn has great taste in music and I’d walk out of his house with an armload of new mix CDs or tapes.

* Usually these CDs were called “Good Songs” because they were good songs that I liked—I’m very literally. But there were sub genres too such as “Hairy Velveeta”. These hair metal bands ironically chosen in the late 90s, but unironically enjoyed. And there were a few Good Songs CDs that I would play while on dates. Don’t laugh, my wife was impressed with the CD mix that I had playing during our first date. She especially liked that I included a Jeff Buckley track—his death was for naught, as I seemed deep (like the Mississippi).

It’s hard to do that now with iPods and MP3 players. Sure you can flick through a screen of CD covers, but it isn’t the same. It seems very sterile and uncluttered, sort of like the glimpses of the future that we get in movies and TV shows.*

* Quick tangent: did you ever notice that in the future there is no more clutter or mess? Everything is very neat, very orderly, very clean. All of the surfaces are a polished, immaculate metal. There are no extraneous things and everything is given to a person with a touch of a button. It seems to me that with the reduction of clutter (like books, DVDs, CDs, etc) and the housing of our media on clouds, we are moving toward this view of the future. BTW, ever since I started watching “Hoarders” I think that this is a very, very good thing.

In the end, I’m not bemoaning technology—I work in the technology field—and these new innovations really excite me, but I guess I’m just a bit hesitant about making the change because it seems we're trading in something.Books haven't really changed in a thousand years and it's good to have that connection to the past. But just because it's old, doesn't mean it's good. And it's not the vessel that's important, it's the message inside that vessel whether it be book, DVD or CD.

Progress must move on and like anything else, once the change is made I’m going to wonder how on Earth I lived with books, music and movies that took up so much real estate. So while my library dream might over, I hope that nothing ever takes the place of a home bar or bubble hockey.

32. The State

As I've talked about in the SuperRock entry* MTV was at a crossroads in the early to mid 1990s. On one hand, it seemed that it wanted to keep their FM-radio-on-TV-anything-goes type of vibe, but on the other hand Madison Avenue was banging on their door trying to figure out how to market their products to teenagers. Essentially, the network was a victim of their own success.

Predictably, they went the way of the marketers and started to segment their music and begin showing programs that were more easily targeted to the advertising folks. And I'm not anti-marketing (how could I be?) or anti-advertising. Companies need a return on their investment and pushing new Coke to a group of people that only wants to drink beer isn't a good way of spending cash.

* I find it interesting that when you type SuperRock into Google, my Blog is the first entry that comes up. If you type in my name, 19Thoughts doesn't come up first. Also, I go to an outside site to check where readers come from and at least three or four times a week I'll have a reader being directed to my site after looking up SuperRock.

MTV had already successfully introduced a reality show (“Real World”), a ton of game shows (“Singled Out” and “Remote Control”) and was unsuccessful in spinning off comedies and dramas. The question was, what is a cross between a sitcom and a reality show? A comedy sketch show.

Since MTV was still green when it came to producing their own show, they had to go with unexperienced comedians. Luckily, there was a troupe of 11 New York University graduates who were familiar to MTV and their audience, but weren't completely overexposed.*

* At MTV overexposure wasn't a bad word, everything successful was shoved down the viewers' throats ad nauseum. With that in mind, I'm surprised that an MTV sketch show didn't star Dan Cortez, Pauly Shore, Kennedy, Bill Belamy and Jenny McCarthy.


After the members of the State left NYU, they put on their act throughout New York City gradually building an- audience while honing both their writing skills and stage presence. By the time someone from MTV discovered them, they were already a well-oiled machine.

The first MTV show that they were apart of was called “You Wrote It, You Watch It”. Basically this show consisted of viewers writing down wacky situations and different groups of comedians would act it out. The guys from the State were the most popular of the players and while YWI, YWI came and left quickly, MTV realized that it had something in the State.

MTV also realized that it had something in the host of YWI, YWI as Jon Stewart was given a nightly talk show that was completely different from what he's doing now.

“The State” was recently released on DVD during the last month and there have been a lot of things written about the show, one article explained how much autonomy the group had when it came to their bosses. State cast member David Wain told the Onion AV Club that MTV basically gave them their space and told them to pretty much do whatever they want to do. And they did.

If you get the DVDs and watch “The State” now it seems pretty pedestrian. But when they first started popping up on the channel it was mind-blowing; especially considering the state (no pun) of sketch comedy at the time. “Saturday Night Live” had lost many of its older, stronger cast members (Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers) and began to lean heavily on the David Spade, Chris Farley and Adam Sandler crew. While these guys were funny, they seemed to lack any sort of comedy trailblazing and imagination, it was the same old skits with the same catch phrases week after week after week. Even bringing comedy veterans like Chris Elliot or Michael McKeon or Janeanne Garofalo couldn't break the comedic malaise.

The only other televised sketch comedy choice was “In Living Color”, which was even more of the same old, same old except that none of the funnier Wayans brothers (Keenan or Damon) were around and Jim Carrey had his eyes on Hollywood. If you like hours of Tommy Davidson and David Alan Grier playing the same characters spouting the same things over and over again, than this was your comedy nirvana. Not even the addition of Chris Rock could save this mess.

Despite the popularity of comedy (stand-up comedians were dominating the ratings on network sitcoms) the traditional sketch show was at an all-time low in terms of laughs and creativity. It's not hyperbolic to say that “The State” rescued televised sketch shows.

The sketches on “The State” weren't like anything on television at that time. They rarely had reoccurring characters and they didn't have much in terms of catch phrases. Ironically, this type of familiarity was something that MTV wanted and that the troupe fought hard to stay away from. MTV eventually got their wish and a character named Louie was created, that was so obnoxious and so loud, that viewers were able to pick up the detest that the writers had for him. Louie was a one-trick pony played by Ken Marino. He had slicked back black hair and wore a short-sleeve dress shirt. He would always yell, “Can I dip my balls in it?” no matter what the scenario was.

One example of this is when Louie was depicted as one of Jesus' disciples and attended the Last Supper.

It was no dumber than the myriad catchphrases that was being passed off as zingers and found a home with the viewers who were “hip” to what the writers were trying to do and the folks who loved the phrase on face-value.

But the true greatness of the show came from the anonymity of the cast; who were these guys? Where did they come from? Why did MTV give a show to these dudes, they look like they could be in my dorm. And there's only one woman, who's going to play the female roles?

Add these questions to the sketches that were shown week to week and you have a show that went from cult worthy to a success in an instant. MTV does something very, very well: once it finds out what their demographic likes, it will shove that show down it's throat through endless marketing and hours of show marathons. With “The State” it wasn't like that. Sure, they would show weekend marathons, but I don't recall an all-out media blitz. They seemed to take a very hands off approach and continued to let the group churn out its off-beat brand of humor.

While MTV left the show alone, it's corporate partner CBS did not. In 1995 CBS wanted to get younger, most of their shows were geared for the geriatric set and that's not where the dollars are. The prime age group is 18-34 because theoretically the people in this age group have disposable income and are more apt to buy stuff. Part one of CBS' plan to get younger was to use MTV as a minor league team and their first call-up to the Big Leagues was “The State”.

From my recollection, CBS entered into an agreement with “The State” sometime in the beginning of that summer. That meant that they weren't going to produce any more new episodes for MTV and their focus was going to be on CBS, which gave them a big budget (bigger than MTV's anyway) for a Halloween show. As Halloween drew closer and closer, it has been reported that CBS got colder and colder feet about “The State”. Absolutely no marketing was done and to make matters worse, the Halloween show was going air on Halloween at 10:0 PM, which was on a Friday that year.

“The State's” major audience were high-school, college and young 20 somethings, all of whom would have something better to do than to sit around on a Friday night and wait for a show to come on. Especially when they were used to seeing that show running around the clock on MTV. Factor in that Halloween is among the top two biggest party nights of the year and it was no wonder that “The State Halloween Special” was a complete and total bomb.

After that debacle, “The State” sort of went underground for awhile. Every once in awhile you'd see one of them in a commercial or as a guest on a TV show, but there wasn't much going on. At the end of the 90s, Comedy Central aired a few seasons of “Viva Variety” which starred about half of the original State crew and it was a take on how Europeans translate American culture all whipped up into a variety show. It was pretty funny.

Then most of them got back together for the feature film, “Wet Hot American Summer” which was a spoof on the early 80s summer camp movies and while it wasn't a blockbuster, it did develop a very large cult following. After that, Comedy Central dabbled with members of the state for “Reno: 911!” which spoofed reality shows like “Cops”. This was probably the biggest hit post-State as it was on air for six seasons.

Comedy Central's partnership with members of “The State” continued with “Stella” an amusing send up of the traditional sitcom that starred Wain, Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter. Although it was really funny (my favorite thing that any State alumni have done since the original show) it failed to catch on.* Showalter and Black were brought back to Comedy Central for a latest go-round with “Michael and Michael Have Issues”, which is pretty awesome.

* My neighbor grew up with David Wain and has remained really good friends with him through the years. In December, he got me tickets to see “Stella” live. It was really, really funny. Showalter, Wain and Black know each other so well that it seemed less like a comedy show and more like a bunch of friends sitting around trying to crack each other up. Their Comedy Central show was a lot like this except it had a framework of a plot.

What did "The State" wrought? One could argue that it did change television sketch comedy as in 1995 Lorne Michaels completely blew up the cast of SNL and started from scratch with a completely anonymous cast. A year or two later HBO also started their own off-beat sketch show called "Mr. Show" that was able to take what "The State" had done and go even further.

Would these shows have existed or changed without "The State"? That's debatable. I'm sure the Michaels was sick of the drek that was being pumped out by Sandler and Rob Schneider; but the 1995-96 season had a different edge to it. They weren't copying "The State" but one could sense the influences.

As for myself, after watching a few episodes of "The State" it occurred to me that comedy isn't about the name of the performer, it's about the set and how hard the performer works to get your laugh. Catch phrases and familiar characters are easy, you already know when to laugh. But getting a joke perfectly crafted or writing a tight scene isn't easy and it's not supposed to be. "The State" opened my eyes to that.

I guess that this is the point in the Blog where I list out my favorite sketches and defend them and their hierarchy, but aside from a few there aren't a heck of a lot of sketches that I remember. It has been about 14 or 15 years since I last saw the show. I haven't purchased the DVDs yet, but when I do I'm sure that I'll enjoy it again.