Image and Word

It just appeared one day last week, wedged between Bravo and the National Geographic Channel. Johnny Cash, it showed me, on a hunting trip. He had shot at a crow but had not been accurate, and the bird fell to the ground injured but alive. Johnny picked it up and carried it with him, inspecting its wounds, laughing when it nipped at him with its sharp beak. For one long sustained shot, the pair simply sat on a rock while Johnny crooned to the captured crow in his gravelly voice.

OvationTV this wonder called itself and I was enthralled.

Since that time the unexpected and magical channel has showed me Elvis in his early days, Kurt Cobain in his final days, and Martin Scorcese contemplating the films that have most influenced his own work.

It is like the anti-MTV with movies and dancing thrown in for good measure. Not single moment of the station seems audience-tested or edited with the assumption that us modern folk simply don’t have the attention span we used to (see above re: crow serenade). You know those nights when you can’t sleep and, flipping through your hundreds of television stations you happen across a bizarre and wonderful old movie or archival documentary that seems to your fatigue-addled brain to be somehow revelatory? That is what every moment of Ovation is like: somehow wrong, somehow out of step with all you have been taught to expect from modern TV, and yet, somehow, so very, very right.