Parenting & Family Quote by John Zorn

Zorn frames media history like a bedtime story that ends with a punchline: the “progress” of access. The cadence is conversational, almost nostalgic, but it’s also a sly flex of generational perspective. He’s not arguing about aesthetics; he’s talking about logistics - and that choice matters. By tracking the shift from theater to TV to home purchase, he reduces a century of culture-industry upheaval to one simple variable: who controls the clock.

The subtext is a quiet celebration of autonomy. As kids, you submitted to the ritual of the theater; with television, you submitted to broadcast schedules and scarcity (“midnight” is doing a lot of work, implying both desire and deprivation). The present tense flips the power dynamic: now you “buy it” and “watch it whenever you want.” Zorn, a composer whose career spans analog, tape culture, and the explosion of DIY distribution, is pointing at a real cultural rewire: the audience no longer needs permission.

There’s also an implied trade-off he leaves hanging. Convenience sounds liberating, but it shrinks the social dimension of viewing. The theater was a public space; TV was a shared domestic event; ownership turns culture into private property and solitary consumption. Zorn’s phrasing doesn’t moralize, yet the simplicity invites you to ask what got lost when we traded collective experience for on-demand control. In a world where access is nearly frictionless, the scarcer commodity becomes attention - and the “whenever” is both freedom and a new kind of burden.