It’s been a year since my conversion to a cable-less life. I started this experiment with relatively straightforward goals, like saving money, practicing what I preach in forging the digital revolution, and trying to eke out a more aesthetic and spiritual existence at home in the hours after work and during cold weekend afternoons. (While the first two goals have certainly been achieved, I’m not exactly reading Tolstoy on Tuesday nights with the classical station humming in the background).But what’s interesting to me is not so much the changing patterns of my media consumption (currently heavy doses of AppleTV for movies, TV shows, and music), but the type of content I’m consuming.  For someone who has spent the past decade in the belly of the New York independent film beast (a beast that probably wears glasses and drives a Volvo), there’s some incongruity with my movie rentals.  Take my December 2009 iTunes rentals, for example: “The Hangover,” “Taken,” “Hitman” and “The Taking of Pelham 123.”  Not exactly “Russian Ark” or “Summer Hours.”

It’s not that I’m disillusioned with independent films these days, but I’m certainly a different consumer now than I was a decade ago, when I was logging dozens of hours a month at the Angelika and Film Forum. Hanging out in the lobby before a show-time, smugly thumbing a Village Voice, I felt an integral connection to the industry and its established process of theatrical consumption. Now, I’m much more inclined to wait until those movies are available on iTunes, and even then, lo and behold, Sundays at 9:00pm I’m drifting to the Top Movies section instead of Independent or Documentary.

True, I watch several independent films a week for my job, and that’s not an insignificant factor in my decade-long shift towards certain content, but I see far fewer movies theatrically than I used to.  FAR fewer.  (And don’t get me started on my non-industry friends, who go to the movies about as often as they go to museums, and these aren’t exactly former film majors I’m talking about).  Two of the maybe four or five movies I’ve seen theatrically in the past six months, “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker,” are obvious choices.  But why didn’t I see “Antichrist”?   Maybe I’m like a lot of people these days: when there’s more and more options available for more and more types of media, for things I’m willing to pay for, it better be a sure thing.  Even if that thing is shutting my mind off for 90 minutes – “Taking of Pelham 123″ was awful.  But I couldn’t have cared less.