UPSTATE NEW YORK IN SATELLITE DISH-GUISE

Satellite dishes, which until lately I had mostly seen rising like high-tech statuary amid the shrubberies of the information-hungry in Southern California, appear in a summer’s travels to have become the new item on the American landscape.

A few years ago I’d been struck by the sit-down lawn mowers that seemed to be spreading grass like a green tide around farms that were no longer being farmed.

This time, driving the back roads through the quiet hills of the Finger Lakes, I find the dishes at every turning, on the lawns of Victorian houses in the villages, attached to house trailers stashed in wood-lot clearings as far from town as you can get, out where the rent is right, or non-existent.

In these settings, the dishes look less like sculptures than like giant upturned toadstools (they tend to be flesh-colored) with extraterrestrial implications, as in a science-fiction fable.

They’ve obviously spawned a new breed of local entrepreneurs, who sell them not only from village stores but from roadside barns and stands, along with the fresh corn and blueberries.

They could be seen as a frivolous luxury, standing alongside houses that give every other sign of hard times. But even in the Upstate summer it is easy to remember the Upstate winters with their subzero temperatures and knifing winds. A few warming options for entertainment would make a lot of difference on those hilltops where the unaided Syracuse signals come in frail and flickering.

What there is to watch amid all the signals the dishes fetch home is as good a question in Branchport as in Encino, but there is nothing like having the choices to make, at least. And what the dishes and the local cable systems are doing is breaking down still further whatever pockets of difference there are among us.

We are ever more the teleculture: homogenized, emulsified, standardized, joined at the hip by a constantly expanding body of shared information (in the sense that “Dynasty” and “Murder, She Wrote” are information too). There may still be some boondocks but I’m no longer sure where they are, except possibly in Carlsbad Caverns and other caves the TV signal can’t reach.

It is not quite Topic A here, yet there have been approximately as many questions about Rock Hudson’s ordeal as there had been in Los Angeles before I left--and as much sympathy, which suggests that the ongoing fascination with Hollywood outside Hollywood is perhaps not so quickly judgmental as it used to be.

If the satellite dishes are an observable new phenomenon, the decline of the motion-picture theater is another and probably related phenomenon. Corning, home of the glassworks and a busy small city, has evidently not had a walk-in cinema for several years, and a friend complained that there isn’t one between Elmira and Rochester.

The Park Theater of my youth is long gone, an early postwar casualty. The Babcock in Bath held on longer, trying at last to split its weeks between adult fare and family fare, but it too gave up the ghost and has left no trace on Liberty Street. There is a drive-in, but it is abundantly clear that movies here are what you rent on VCRs, or catch on cable or the dish.

It takes a heroic effort to pack off to Elmira and see a movie live, so to speak. I find this hugely depressing, because there is still no substitute for watching films in the theater. Whether the tide of history is inexorable, or whether a little entrepreneurial energy and imagination might make a movie house work again in the vicinity is a good question; I wish it a positive answer.

At that, a visit home reminds you that change is the rule of the game, and if you are fortunate the changes on balance come out positive rather than negative.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Hammondsport has acquired a basement bar-restaurant, the Wine Cellar, quiche a specialty, and with live jazz on weekend nights. Whether these frolics will survive the winter is not certain, but they would have answered the wildest dreams of my own young summers, even if I could only have listened at the door.

On the other hand, the Gent’s Club, combining pool hall, tobacconist and barbershop, founded in 1916, was no more--replaced by a gourmet food shop called The Cinnamon Stick. I found out later that the Club (and its revolving barber pole) had simply shifted into what had been Sherm Wright’s Sunoco garage, over by the creek on the way to the lake. It offers haircuts at $5, hair styling at $6.50. Ed Percy had come out of retirement to spell the new man. We talked about old times and I noted that the customers are still asked, “Wet or dry?”

The other night the Empire State Ballet, out of Buffalo, gave a recital on a traveling stage under the stars on the valley floor alongside the Taylor Wine plant. It was one of series held in recent summers and funded by the winery, the state and some private foundations.

Several hundred of us sat on folding beach chairs we’d brought with us and enjoyed a complimentary glass of wine at intermission. There were birds wheeling in the sunset sky, and jet contrails high above.

Listening to a Tchaikovsky concerto (recorded but stirring) and watching the young dancers performing very nicely indeed, I thought of Glenn Curtiss, who was trying his rickety airplanes on the same grounds 80 years earlier. I can’t be sure what he would have made of it all, but I think he might have agreed that change isn’t half bad, if you work it right.