Quality Matters

I go to the movies a lot, and I'm disappointed by them a lot. Sure, I rarely say really nasty things about them, but I usually have some great expectations for a movie (otherwise I wouldn't go) and usually they are not met. I try to empathize with a movie and how it is made, arguing in my head that the things that went wrong did so the way we all go wrong in life, and not because of a certain callous lack of creativity or horrible stupidity.

But one thing that I will not abide or make excuses for is the exhibition of a movie. We live in an age of amazing advances in technology. Most of the stuff we hear about is about digital technology in computers and their programs. They make such cool stuff. But we've also advanced with mechanical and optical technology, too. There should be no excuse to sit in a movie theater and not be awed by the show. I don't care if the movie stinks like yesterday's garbage, it should be shown with amazing regard for the exhibition.

What do I mean by this? Sight and Sound. Can you see it clearly and well? Can you hear and feel the sound it makes? Do both of them excite you? If not, then the theater is not doing it's job. Given the right equipment, I'm sure you could make even the HUAC hearings exciting to watch, if only for five minutes. Movies today are made with huge levels of difference in budget and skill. But so many are made with so many skillful people. The sound design team of even a mid-level budgeted movie consists of a dozen people or more. What about the camera? The post-production work? The visual intent of the director? These are all important things to be mindful of when showing a film. If I made a movie and I was attending the screening of it, I would be damn sure to talk to the projectionist and go over the equipment in the theater first, just to make sure it looked and sounded like I originally made it.

So, what's my beef? It's these poor-quality theaters. They are run like businesses, like candy stores. I understand they need to make profits to stay innovative and successful, but they aren't doing that. They are maintaining a stranglehold, and nothing else. They like the lack of competition in their markets. They don't innovate unless they think it will sell more sodas or popcorn. They think that their product is given to them and so the only thing they can focus on is the ancillaries. That is wrong.

Almost every theater I go to is staffed with teenagers who want a fun job, but who then realize that working at a movie theater is depressing and the equivalent of working at a swimming pool. I haven't met or seen any evidence of an employee who is enamored with the cinema, who loves the history of movies, who finds it a duty to make sure that people have a great experience to go with their memories of a movie. What if the projection is poorly lit? What if the some of the speakers don't work? What if the chairs are broken and the floor is sticky? Oh well, if enough people complain, then we might go in and fix it.

I'm not just harping about customer service, either. I'm pissed that the quality of the exhibition experience is so lacking. I live in one of the ten-biggest cities in the country. I haven't been to a theater here yet that has satisfied my desire to have a clean, classy, artistic, loud, capable experience designed to do the one thing we purchase tickets for - see a movie on the big screen. The owners and management need to focus on the main things, and then tighten the experience up with some well designed supplements. Did you know that selling popcorn and candy was just an enticement to get people to go during the depression? They had to do something because people were so poor that the prospect of seeing a film just wasn't enough. They needed cheap popcorn and cheap soda to liven it up. Now those things aren't cheap (to us, anyway).

Why do we put up with this? I'm, by far, the worst of anyone I know. I'll repeatedly grumble but still plunk down my debit card and be charged outrageous ticket prices for a mediocre experience. I have no other choice. I can't switch to a competitor, because they are all C-students. I could complain, but I don't have the heart. I need that heart. I need the muse to send letters telling them that I want, desperately, to pay them money for a wonderful experience. But I don't have the wherewithall to withhold my money when they don't measure up. What's to become of us when we don't get what we want in the marketplace? It's like the big companies keep buying up the little companies and get together to cooperate in giving us lousy service. Some industries aren't a monopoly, but they are close. For example, I have three choices for an internet provider. All three are lousy with service. What to do?

This just points out that we are ripe for wanting excellence. If someone would just give it to us, then we would eat it up like the Japanese at a hot dog-eating contest. Could that someone be me? No, I don't think so. I'm too busy complaining.

This is some guy's home theater based on the Nautilus in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. C'mon!

Waiting for the inevitable

In the second of a stunning series of posts that include the word waiting in the title, this time I'm talking about Death (not the election). My job as a librarian forces me to help people with their information problems. A strategy we have to combat these problems is to use communication techniques, like asking questions and giving fact-based answers. One of our tactics involved in this strategy is to approach people whose body language appears to be saying, I don't know what I'm doing and I need help or I'll start crying. Since they are too proud to come to us, we'll magnanimously go to them and ask, "Is there anything I can help you with?" Aside from ending a sentence in a preposition, which never starts off a conversation well, we are assuming they have a problem. I know I hate it when salespeople do this to me in a store. It's like they want me to have a quick, hassle-free experience with personalized attention. Don't they know I'm just wasting time looking at khakis I'm not going to buy while my girlfriend/sister/mom looks at purses or shoes for what seems like forever? [To be fair, they have to do the same thing when I'm looking at books or movie scores.]

Well, despite my internal conflict with roaming the library asking people if they are OK, I do get to observe people who don't normally approach me at the reference desk. When we roam around, trying to see if someone has a problem with printing, a computer, finding a book in the stacks, or where their classroom is(n't), sometimes we see things we aren't supposed to. Contraband prevails in the upper floors. Drinks, chips, cookies, people talking on their cellphones, fun of any kind. Cellphone conversations aren't banned outright, but only when they are the inane ones where someone is bored and can't stand the thought of passing the next ten minutes without talking to someone, anyone, who cares to listen about why they're pissed at their boyfriend/girlfriend.

Aside from the naughty things people do in the library, which I mostly let ride cause I'm cool like that, I get to see how people spend their hours in the library. Many of them study dilligently, many sleep dilligently. Many stare at their book or laptop, hoping and praying that a light will come on. It's sort of like looking at your refrigerator and expecting it to stop that horrible humming sound all by itself. You might have to do something or call someone. Desire won't get it done by itself - I've tried that. Besides all of the typical students sitting in our nooks and crannies, I saw an older woman who I recognized as an employee from downstairs in one of the university admin offices. What was she doing?

Waiting for death, it would seem. She goes upstairs in the library everyday for, let's say, probably 4 to 6 hours, hoping he will come by. There are several reasons I suspect this: she sits alone at an empty table, never a carrel; she always has a magazine open in front of her, but never looks at it; she doesn't write or talk or draw or do anything but sit; her glasses are usually off and laying on the table. It's possible that she could be really bored with her job and uses many excuses to say she is doing work that no one will ever check on and instead wastes her day in the library. But the way she does it is so heartbreakingly sad.

It's one thing to play hookey and do something fun, like get some Starbucks, buy and axe from the hardware store, and see what happens. But it's another to sit all alone with nothing to do but wait out this life, hoping for the end. Some compassionate person might think it prudent for me to carefully approach her and ask if she needs some help - of the emotional kind. Librarians have learned from painful experience not to get involved in that arena. When someone wants to talk it over, and they find a unsuspecting dogooder who has no escape, then they will latch on like a tick on a dog. So, I'm not about to say mum to this lady.

I could, however, find some books on the topic of "what to do with your boring life when all you have left to do is think about why you have arrived at your current situation and aren't having fun like those other people on TV" and lay them ever so casually on her table and then forget to pick them up again. She usually has that thousand-yard stare, so I might have to cough or trip or something to break her laser-like gaze into the fourth dimension. It's like she can see her future where she is sitting in the same seat at the same table and finally has that coronary her doctor has been promising for a while now.

I realize this seems very sarcastic and negative, which it is, but I do want to end on a positive note. If you ever find yourself in this situation, please try to break out of it. Life is for living, because we don't really know what else to do on the planet while we're here. Libraries aren't a bad place to be in a glum situation. They have vessels of knowledge from all parts of human discovery. Many times, if you can still use your imagination, a person can derive ideas and thoughts that could turn into fun and productive ways to spend your precious little time on earth. If you sit there waiting for something to happen in a library, it probably won't. They're really boring and will just make it worse. And death isn't allowed in - we have a permanent tresspass warning because he is always talking loudly on his cellpone to his broker.