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Story time
We came across two provocative commentaries concerning time, a very limited quantity these days, and the power of story telling:
1) A book introduction…
Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don’t do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other’s stories once again.
Most of the stories we are told now are written by novelists and screenwriters, acted out by actors and actresses, stories that have beginnings and endings, stories that are not real. The stories we can tell each other have no beginning and ending. They are a front-row seat to the real experience. Even though they may have happened in a different time or place they have a familiar feel. In some way they are about us too.
Real stories take time. We stopped telling stories when we started to lose that sort of time, pausing time, reflecting time, wondering time. Life rushes us along and few people are strong enough to stop on their own. Most often, something unforeseen stops us and it is only then we have the time to take a seat at life’s kitchen table. To know our own story and tell it. To listen to others people stories. To remember that the real world is made of just such stories.
Until we stop ourselves or, more often, have been stopped, we hope to put certain of life’s events “behind us” and get on with our living. After we stop we see that certain of life’s issues again and again, each time with a new story, each time with a greater understanding, until they become indistinguishable from our blessings and our wisdom. It’s the way life teaches us how to live.
When we haven’t the time to listen to each other’s stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the kitchen table, the more how-to-books appear in the stories on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone’s lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants.
Taken from “Kitchen Table Wisdom” by Rachel naomi Remen, M.D.
2) A newspaper article…
Steven Bochco has seen the future of television, and it doesn’t include the twenty-somethings marketers covet.
“It astonishes me to the extent that young people don’t watch TV anymore,” said the Emmy-award-winning writer and producer of groundbreaking dramas “Hill Street Blues,” “L.A. Law” and “NYPD Blue.”
Those young people still watch some television, of course, but at the same time they check out profiles at Facebook, watch last night’s opening from the “Daily Show” on YouTube or engage in multiple instant-message chats.
It’s a trend called “content snacking,” and it is wreaking havoc among traditional media providers. So, like a showman of another era, Bochco’s going to where the audience has focused its attention: the Web.
His newest project, Cafe Confidential, launches Monday at video Web site Metacafe.com. The premise is “deceptively simple,” he said. It is just someone in front of a camera telling a story. There are no whiz-bang graphics or background mood music. The only embellishment: hand gestures and facial expressions. And while the roughly two-minute clips lack the emotional punch of Bochco’s ensemble television dramas, they are far from dull.
Bochco simply lets the young adults talk. They chat about their first sexual experience, their weird families, the times they had too much to drink, and how they’ve screwed up at work.
“For the last 10 years, there’s been a pretty consistent reaching out to the entertainment community to do something” on the Web, he said. “What always struck me about those conversations is that they looked at old models of TV shows,” like a 30-minute sitcom or an hourlong drama.
“That’s not what young people are looking for today. They are looking at the Internet for a distraction. In between homework assignments, they may say `I’m going to spend five to 10 minutes on the Web.’-”
“It’s a sea change,” said Bochco of how open people have become online, calling it “a significant cultural shift. People are willing to tell you anything.”
If there’s one aspect of Bochco’s project that intrigues him besides the willingness of ordinary people to be so open, it is that the videos reflect a tradition the Internet is not good at preserving: storytelling.
“I grew up in a generation of storytellers,” said Bochco, born in 1943.
For more details chicagotribune.com ©2007 Chicago Tribune. Story by Eric Benderoff.
Maureen Adams
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