The Times They Are A Changin’…

I remember meeting Bob Dylan in a folk club at Brighton in the south of England in 1964, just when that song was the most talked-about song in the under 25-years-old English speaking world. I got to spend time quite a bit of time with him on  that occasion because I operated and owned the folk club in question, along with a close friend, Terry Masterson, who then lived in Twickenham, in Middlesex. Now here I am, 46 years later, reflecting on how appropriate and prophetically relevant his words still are today, when I'm now part of the "older generation" as my parents were then, tempted to criticize and condemn what I can't understand…

Mind you, the range of possibilities for misunderstanding and simply not understanding at all is so vast nowadays that my focus on things that outrage me changes from week to week, and my feelings of panic multiply each time I watch and see an eight-year-old kid doing things on the computer that I can barely comprehend, let alone perform…

This week I'm  fighting against becoming obsessed by streaming downloads and cascading bit torrents… Believe me, I know that sounds bizarre . . . to me, writing it, it even looks bizarre. But there's a reason, in this particular instance, for my rushing in where Angels fear to tread…

My wife has a widowed friend whose son recently installed some kind of magic box on her HDTV that allows her to download movies, music, and entire seasons of prime time TV shows, including backlogged seasons, and store them on her computer. She can then play them easily, commercial-free, whenever she wants to. So of course, actively encouraged by my urgently probing spouse, She Who Must Be Obeyed, I had to find out what was happening and what was involved… And that, as I'm sure most of you smiling readers out there know, was the virtually undetectable start of what promises to be a very steep (would you believe vertiginous?) learning curve. I have entered a whole new world involving gadgetry and jargon that I never dreamed existed.

First thing I learned: I couldn't use the same setup that my wife's friend has, because of cross-platform differences. She uses Windows technology, whereas we, chez nous,  are Apple users. So someone suggested to me that I might want to check out Apple TV. I did, and I couldn't believe my eyes. Of course, it all devolves upon iTunes, (he added, not wanting to appear to be a totally irredeemable or irremediable Doofus,) and as it happens, I use iTunes quite extensively, and I've built up a very pleasing (to me) Classical music library, most of which I've transferred to my iPod, for which I bought a docking device that works really well. With Apple TV, though, it turns out that I can play directly to my TV sound bar from my Mac, as well as from my iPod . . . Now, I know everyone reading this knows practically everything there is to know about this amazing technology, but I'm still in shock over it, because I didn't even know the stuff was out there! And the music bit's the no-brainer part of it all…

So now I know, through diligent inquiries and far-ranging explorations, that I can rent and buy movies and TV shows directly through iTunes. But it seems there are far richer cornucopias of downloads out there than are dreamed of in my philosophy… Weird and esoteric names like Boxee and Transmission Bittorrent are swirling in the eddies just beyond the edges of my consciousness. But in order to access those, it seems you have to learn about bit streams and torrents and leeches and file exchanges and terabytes of other things that are all learnable by eight-year-olds while standing on their heads, but for a guy my age, they're . . . shall we say less accessible? And so I'm sworn to learn about such things, a little bit at a time. Thank God there's no hurry.

I would be delighted to read anything anyone out there has to offer by way of encouragement, or even dissuasion. I wonder if Bob Dylan is into major downloading?