HBO, TiVo, and history
Mar. 26th, 2004 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dampscribbler
When dh got his annual bonus in January, he decided to get a TiVo with a satellite dish. I'm not crazy about TV, but I agreed. After a few uncomfortable weeks spent staring far too many hours at the screen, we've made the adjustment.
With the monthly dish subscription, we got 3 months of HBO for free. This has been pretty cool, as I've gotten to watch Blue Vinyl, a documentary I've been interested in seeing since I heard about it on Car Talk last summer.
When we first got the HBO, we visited a lot to see what kind of stuff they had. I missed Angels in America, which galls me to no end as I've been trying to see one production or another of it for a decade, now. I saw a lot of commercials for "Iron Jawed Angels," a dramatization of the fight for women's right to vote. It looked interesting, so we TiVo'd it. We finally watched it this week. Disappointing. They did some weird production things, the weirdest of which was probably to add an extremely modern soundtrack (Dido???) to a story that takes place at the start of WWI. Overall, the movie gave me the sense that if I want to know more about Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and their drive for women's suffrage, I should do some research of my own. Still, if it gets people to want to know more, if it makes some young women feel responsible to vote, then it's a good thing.
TiVo has a feature where it recommends movies to you based on what it has caught you watching or recording before. I still haven't figured out how it makes its recommendations. It recommended an HBO piece about the Detroit Tigers winning the 1968 World Series. Neither the hubby nor I could give a rip about baseball, but I was born in Detroit in 1966, and I've been wanting to set a novel there at about that time, so I thought it might be interesting. I started watching it today. I thought it was a movie, but it turns out it's a documentary. And it is rocking me to my soul. I've been fascinated by the Detroit riots and what has happened to that city in the meantime since I started doing a little Internet research after watching 8 Mile last year. In 1967, I lived with my parents inside 8 Mile. In July 1967, the city was besieged by a weekend of riots. Entire neighborhoods burned, and poor people -- whites and blacks -- looted stores clean. White folks with options moved out of that area fast. After the riots of 1967, 8 Mile became the borderline that anyone who could help it wouldn't cross -- until the Tigers started kicking butt in the pennant race in 1968. Tiger Stadium was inside 8 Mile. The entire city became baseball fans, and according to this HBO documentary, the Tigers held Detroit together that summer. When other cities were rioting like mad in response to the Vietnam war and the attacks on protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Detroit was relatively peaceful. This documentary argues that is was the Tigers holding it all together that year.
Unfortunately, it didn't last. I found this site last year, with lots of pictures of Detroit taken in the past few years. It's a fascinating website. The city literally looks like a war zone -- abused and abandoned. I think it was this series that fascinated me most. But there's tons of amazing stuff there, if you want to surf around a while. Ultimately, anyone who could get out of the inner city of Detroit did. Call it "white flight," call it suburbanization. This kind of thing is apparent throughout the midwest, but one of the most dramatic victims of abandonment was Detroit.
Because I was less than a year old when the riots began in 1967, and because I was only 3 when we moved away (to Lansing, briefly, and then to Toledo, Ohio), I have few memories of Detroit. I know that when I was about 8 years old, we drove back by our old house while visiting town for some reason. It, like most of the houses in the neighborhood, was boarded up, plywood over windows and doors. I felt unimaginably sad seeing my first home abandoned, unloved, unused.
With the monthly dish subscription, we got 3 months of HBO for free. This has been pretty cool, as I've gotten to watch Blue Vinyl, a documentary I've been interested in seeing since I heard about it on Car Talk last summer.
When we first got the HBO, we visited a lot to see what kind of stuff they had. I missed Angels in America, which galls me to no end as I've been trying to see one production or another of it for a decade, now. I saw a lot of commercials for "Iron Jawed Angels," a dramatization of the fight for women's right to vote. It looked interesting, so we TiVo'd it. We finally watched it this week. Disappointing. They did some weird production things, the weirdest of which was probably to add an extremely modern soundtrack (Dido???) to a story that takes place at the start of WWI. Overall, the movie gave me the sense that if I want to know more about Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and their drive for women's suffrage, I should do some research of my own. Still, if it gets people to want to know more, if it makes some young women feel responsible to vote, then it's a good thing.
TiVo has a feature where it recommends movies to you based on what it has caught you watching or recording before. I still haven't figured out how it makes its recommendations. It recommended an HBO piece about the Detroit Tigers winning the 1968 World Series. Neither the hubby nor I could give a rip about baseball, but I was born in Detroit in 1966, and I've been wanting to set a novel there at about that time, so I thought it might be interesting. I started watching it today. I thought it was a movie, but it turns out it's a documentary. And it is rocking me to my soul. I've been fascinated by the Detroit riots and what has happened to that city in the meantime since I started doing a little Internet research after watching 8 Mile last year. In 1967, I lived with my parents inside 8 Mile. In July 1967, the city was besieged by a weekend of riots. Entire neighborhoods burned, and poor people -- whites and blacks -- looted stores clean. White folks with options moved out of that area fast. After the riots of 1967, 8 Mile became the borderline that anyone who could help it wouldn't cross -- until the Tigers started kicking butt in the pennant race in 1968. Tiger Stadium was inside 8 Mile. The entire city became baseball fans, and according to this HBO documentary, the Tigers held Detroit together that summer. When other cities were rioting like mad in response to the Vietnam war and the attacks on protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Detroit was relatively peaceful. This documentary argues that is was the Tigers holding it all together that year.
Unfortunately, it didn't last. I found this site last year, with lots of pictures of Detroit taken in the past few years. It's a fascinating website. The city literally looks like a war zone -- abused and abandoned. I think it was this series that fascinated me most. But there's tons of amazing stuff there, if you want to surf around a while. Ultimately, anyone who could get out of the inner city of Detroit did. Call it "white flight," call it suburbanization. This kind of thing is apparent throughout the midwest, but one of the most dramatic victims of abandonment was Detroit.
Because I was less than a year old when the riots began in 1967, and because I was only 3 when we moved away (to Lansing, briefly, and then to Toledo, Ohio), I have few memories of Detroit. I know that when I was about 8 years old, we drove back by our old house while visiting town for some reason. It, like most of the houses in the neighborhood, was boarded up, plywood over windows and doors. I felt unimaginably sad seeing my first home abandoned, unloved, unused.
