xian TV

Have I mentioned I’m going to be on television today on “The Screen Savers” airing first at 7 pm, on whatever cable channel, digital or otherwise, you get your Tech TV network on. It repeats at 10 pm and then again some time tomorrow. I don’t know when I appear on the timeline, as we taped it last week. Typically I show up around 25 to 40 minutes in.
I’m still kind of jazzed about this. New medium for me. Lots to learn. The first time I was stiff and anxious. First time for anything I’m that way. But even by the end of it I became more animated, as I got into our little semi-rehearsed, semi-real dialogue (more on that later). I learned right away (seeing the tape is key) the well known truth about TV being a “cool” medium. It does not like deadpan. You have to show some enthusiasm.
The trick, and I don’t think I have the hang of it yet, is finding your own path between two unacceptable extremes: (1) just being yourself, and (2) falseness.
Just being yourself doesn’t work because one’s ordinary demeanor is not optimized for televised viewing. You can’t dwell on the potentially million-large audience to the point of catatonia but you have to deliver something beyond minimal couch-inertia interest to the viewer. I’d love to think that my own free-from ramblings would make great TV but working with professionals teaches me that they know what works for them and it’s up to me to follow their lead and learn the steps.
Falseness doesn’t work because TV watchers have a finely tuned sense of bullshit-detection, except within a narrow vaudeville-derived ham tradition.
I’m not acting in a soap. I’m appearing as myself explaining something geeky. I have to reveal enough of myself to avoid falseness, but also work at kindling the energy and spontaneity that makes an experience worthwhile, live or recorded.
I suspect that blog wrtiing for me has similar straits. Self-revealing writing not perfectly polished creates comfort and credibility, while the effort exerted sifting through various inputs and deciding whether they belong on any RFB channel provides a degree of coherent usefulness that balances out the risk of self-indulgence and tedium. We hope.
So, back to TV, I’m still a beginner, learning, but I’m enjoying the ride. Meanwhile, the Amazon rank of Dreamweaver Savvy spiked after the tutorial went up on the Screen Savers site, and the topic ties in with the charter of this blog (the “being about blogs” thing) as well as a book I’d like to write.
Traffic is high today from the tutorial page and there’s a growing number of (disturbing) Google searches for phrases like “megan morrone nude.”