HD!!

I saw my first movie in HD – well, about 30 seconds of a movie – maybe five years ago when I went over to a guy’s house for a poker game. I got there early and he was sitting in his recliner in front of a huge screen on which Clint Eastwood approached a door and knocked. The wood around the door frame needed paint. I found myself ignoring Clint and studying the frame. Was it part of a set, painted well enough for a regular movie but not for HD? Was it purposely shabby, to make a point? Or was it just what it was because it was, and now I could just see what that was, whereas in the past it would have looked like a plain old vanilla white-painted door frame?… The guy in the recliner had a bookcase full of DVDs next to him, a collection which as we conversed I could tell he directed a serious attitude toward. That is the night when I first realized that there was/were a growing number of folks with DVDcases in the living room instead of bookcases. E.T. instead of Hawthorne. Schindler’s List instead of Dreiser… So now I’ve had my second HD experience, sitting on the couch at my son’s house watching a World Series game with him and my nephew. None of us had sat in front of a sporting event in memory, alone or with other guys, and maybe we were a bit unsure about how to handle the expected manly, yee-hah, Apatow, Rogen aspects of the situation. The HD though: there is a lot of spitting in baseball, of spittle, sunflower-seed shells, tobacco juice. It was all there on the big screen, along with sweat sheen, sweat spray, sweat drips, open pores, and endless shots of morose fans. Note to self: avoid porn in HD at all costs.