Something's Cooking with Storytelling on Video and New Media

::facetious on::

Silly Tim. You can’t put storytelling on video and new media. “Everybody” knows that.

You know how I know? I look at the miserable failure of COOOKING on TV and the new media. Just like storytelling, audiences must be right there in the kitchenwhen cooking is happening. Just like audiences must be sitting in the tents when storytelling is happening.

Who in their right mind would put something like cooking on TV? For one thing, the audience can’t get the nuances. You can’t smell cooking on video. You can’t even TASTE the food on television. No one would be interested in that: pictures of cooking?

Oh sure, you could see and hear the cooking of great chefs, but you can’t really tell the exact way the cook holds the handles of the utensils or the fancy way they wiggle their eyebrows as they turn the stove fires higher. And, if the camera, moves away at the wrong moment, then you miss things. Cooking is all about spontaneity! If cooks planned when to look at the camera or to which camera they would be looking at, then it wouldn’t be real cooking any more, it would be some type of empty pie-shell of what real cooking is. Video would ruin cooking forever.

Besides, my grandmother used to cook like an angel. You didn’t see her doing cooking on television. Heck, she didn’t even own a TV and her cooking was just fine, thank you. Although, sometimes I wish I had her recipe for making polish sausages. You know, it was the kind made from scratch, ground right there in the kitchen, that only she could do? But she never documented how she did it. Nobody has the recipe.

And your foolish dreams continue- storytelling on video? Let’s think more about FOOD. NETWORK people don’t want to do cooking on TV, there is no money in it. Like a whole TV channel could be about food? The network would have videos and DVD’s for sale? Maybe the authors and cooks would have their own shows? What are you smoking..a turkey? Do you expect that maybe they’d sell more books or get more live appearances, maybe even sponsors? Would more people would start cooking and taking classes just because they saw it on this newfangled new media? Of course not!

Crazy talk, lad. Crazy talk.

I bet you think they should let just anybody watch their TV cooking programs, (where you can’t even smell or taste the food) and maybe even make copies of the shows they didn’t pay for? Downloading their recipes? Tim, stop this silliness. Those chefs would be so broke if they gave it all away.

And even if they were successful, they would tarnish their cooking with all that filthy money they made. And tarnish with with success...and with being able to make a living...and with being able to have a car that works...And with being able to do something about hunger.

If you put storytelling on TV and video, you’d have all kinds of problems. First off, you’d lose all the nuances and the spontaneity of storytelling.

And on this video and new media, how do we know they’d actually be doing Real Storytelling(tm) as officially sanctioned by the Dragon Tellers(tm) of America (tm)? Have you seen what skateboarders do with video? What would happen if kids could just record storytelling and start posting it? It would be like The Moth to the flame, I tell you!Dangerous.

And then, if people could see storytelling on video, they’d download all the stories in the world and then no one would come to any live storytelling events, let alone pay for any live storytelling. There would be no interest in live storytelling because they saw it all on TV. Just like cooking shows would be the end of cooking, storytelling shows would be the end of storytelling. And the end of making any living at storytelling.

But that is okay, because we are artistes! Money is dirty and marketing is only for the
selfish, crazy used-car-sales-like storytellers who use Email (and BLOGS!) to promote themselves. 30 years ago no storytellers even had Email or Blogs. All they had was hay! It is important that folks who like storytelling go back and touch that original hay ‘cuz that is where real storytelling started.

Please, Tim, stop all this dreaming. Cooking and Storytelling just aren’t meant for video and all this new media.

::/facetious off::

Image courtesy of Jacci Howard Bear http://desktoppub.about.com/
::The official blog of Storyteller K. Sean Buvala::