Entertainment vs Reality

As I re-read some of the things I posted, as in yesterday. I realize that sometimes my emotions get the better of my editorial sense. What is a momentary thought gets quickly translated into this document and then sits there for a very long time. That is the problem with this new instant media. It doesn't allow personal thought to be personal long enough to decide it is not worth the typing time.
One would think that I had learned that lesson, but it is not something that seems to be solved by only a few bad examples. What I really want to do is tell stories, funny ones hopefully. Unfortunately for the last week I don't see the humor as clearly. This will pass.
I have been following the Dr. Conrad Murray trial via the internet feed. With the time change making it a little later here in Rochester, it is perfect afternoon entertainment for me before the show. I don't know what fascinates me about a high profile trial, I got just as hung up on the Casey Anthony trial when it was happening. Which was coincidentally during the last Rochester run. The most fascinating thing to me is not just that it is a story told in a very plodding and some what random way, it is that these are not actors. We are so used to watching good actors pretend to have emotions or thoughts we forget what it is like when we see it for real. There is disingenuous quality to reality because we have seen only the depiction of reality so often in dramatic entertainment. We tend to disregard a persons feelings as untruthful if they are not showing the emotion that an actor would in a drama. How weird is that, art not just imitating life, but actually defining it.
When we hear a story of how someone reacted in time of tragedy, if it is not in the dramatic way that we think it should be is seems wrong. The truth is an actor is just portraying how they think a person would react. When an individual is really faced with the situation there is no specified way to react; they have never faced this before so how can they know how the will react? I suggest that the more bizarre, the more real because an emotional event short circuits every cell in your body. Chaos is chaos and is defined by its unique randomness.
Especially today we want a black and white differentiation for anything we comprehend. There is a good guy, a bad guy, a right way and a wrong way, a Republican way and a Democratic way. Life is not so easily parsed. As in art the grey areas give us the depth. The shadows which are neither dark nor light give us value. You can not take a pencil drawing with shades of light and expect that it will photocopy correctly. The camera decides the value. If it is darker than it really is the camera makes it black. That is not the reality... that is a mechanical decision.
We know that the pixel number on a digital camera will make the picture more clear and distinct. The greater the number of values the more beautiful the picture. Why isn't that metaphor more accessible to our every day living. The more information, the more elements, the more sides the more depth one can add to a situation the better perception we have of it. The more divergent sides to a problem the better the solution can be.
Media is still broadcasting in Black and White. To cover a new story you get two pundits touting their extreme sides and they yell their differences at one another, because it is entertainment. They are not broadcasting reality, the pundits are no more representative of a consensus of ideas than Little Red Riding hood is a study of wolves.
Gather it all in especially those you don't agree with. Try to see them as not all right nor all wrong or all left. The true picture is defined by the shades of subtle differences in the two while not really being all of either.
All this to say, the negative things I wrote yesterday have no shading... no reality... it was a dramatic story that I thought was reality...it is not.
As you were,
Jay