Week 0: The Time-Out Corner

In which the podcaster explains his motive and purpose for putting his television in the Time Out Corner for a year, and suggests why that might be of concern to you.  

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Richard Loranger

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 1 - WEEK 0

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Week 0 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

Today, June 1, 2024, I unplugged my 40” flat screen TV, wrapped it carefully in an old black sheet, secured the sheet with packing tape, and tucked it into a corner of my back room. Then I went back up front and unplugged the various video components – the streaming stick, the Blu-ray player, the DVD/VHS combo that I sometimes use to archive old tapes to an electronic format, my beloved PlayStation 4, and the rarely used but not forgotten PS2. Then I sat there for a while staring at the dust silhouette on the old coffee table where the base of my TV sat for years, surrounded by a scattered array of discs and a few cases, movies and games for the moment unplayable, wondering what would happen next.

Why did I do this? To see what would happen next.

See for years I’ve been sitting down in the evening, turning on the screen, and spending hours hunting robots and treasure or solving puzzles or shooting bad guys or zombies or aliens, or watching famous actors hunt robots or shoot aliens or fall in love with the person they disliked at the beginning of the show. Quite a few hours, actually, almost every night except when I have things going on out in “the world” (whatever that is). I’m not even sure how long ago this habit crept up on me. Sound familiar? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure this is not a unique experience. I tell myself my brain is tired and I enjoy those shows, some of them are pretty damn good and I like saving the princess (or the prince) or the galaxy (again…and again). And I have to wonder whether that’s all just bullshit and “my brain is tired” even means – sounds like a lazy-ass side-stepping rationale at best right now, and a lame reason for wasting what little time I have on the planet. What’s that about? 

Okay so I’m a writer, and worse than that a creative writer, which for me means that I have to let language leak out of me in a creative fashion at fairly regular intervals or I hate my life. It’s pretty much that simple. Thing is, poems and stories and short prose things don’t really earn much in America, no not much, so I have to support that habit (it’s really more like a metabolic function) doing something else. For the last fifteen-some years, after resisting it much of my adult life, I succumbed to supporting my writing with other writing – I just couldn’t serve another table or comment on another college essay. In my case that writing-for-pay, that poetry-support-activity turned out mostly to be developing names and taglines and other messaging for new products and businesses. I’m a freelance namer, god help me. Now being freelance, as some of you know, rarely entails eight solid hours of word-work or laptop time or both, let alone paid work on any given day. In fact I sometimes have stretches with no work at all (except the many unpaid hours I spend looking for it). Yet come evening I still repeat those words: “brain is tired, brain is tired” like a corrupt mantra, and turn on the screen and allow myself to be amused, all the while giving myself less and less time for reading and contemplation and creative production and all the cultivation that makes my life feel worthwhile and used to have more of a central role. At least it feels that way. Then one day recently I noticed that you can rearrange the letters in “my brain is tired” to spell, “I’m in a Late Capitalist stupor.” And I thought, that’s it! Why else would I choose comfort over joy and fulfillment? I never used to. So yeah, I think those words are bullshit, or at the very least it would be prudent to assume so, and I certainly want to find how just how beguiling they are.

I wasn’t always prone to being a video drone, despite the unfortunate circumstance of having been born in 1960 amidst television’s grand infancy. As a toddler I would sing and dance around the cathode ray tube to Felix the Cat and Captain Kangaroo and Philadelphia’s own Happy the Clown. (I was even on his show on my third birthday, but that’s another story.) We got our first color set just in time for the first episode of The Brady Bunch, making us (briefly) the envy of the block. So I was trained at an early age in the craft of watching, but as it turned out I wasn’t very good at it, just not easy to mesmerize I guess. I had too many toads to capture and bike trails to terrorize and – mad thing – I liked to read. So I was never too caught up in the television culture of the 60s and 70s. And there were, after all, only three channels. Nobody counted PBS.

In my 20s (the 1980s) I watched almost no television at all, seriously. I don’t think I lived in a single apartment or house that even had one. No wait – I remember one. In the winter of 1987 I crashed for a few months on the living room floor of some friends’ house in Ann Arbor. Long story how that happened, but it was a really happy household and they were glad to have me and there must have been a TV because we’d all get up on Saturday mornings, get righteously stoned, drink the strongest coffee we could make, and gather round to watch Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and yell that secret word, sometime for hours after. Twenty-somethings. We thought that show was revolutionary. And maybe it was.

But besides that, to my best recollection, the 80s were pretty much a TV-free zone. I still had better things to do. I was deep into writing and poetry, I was hitchhiking around the country, deep into New Wave and punk especially and all that anti-pop culture (for a few years, anyway, until it was co-opted), deep into disregarding and subverting ideologies in general. I had a button I wore around for years that said, “No Heroes”. Somewhere in there I read a controversial book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander, who’d spent a couple of decades in advertising and was dead serious on the topic. It’s been a long time since I read it and no, I didn’t research it for this (bad podcaster, bad!) and I don’t know how well it holds up, but a quick check on Wikipedia shows Mander’s core argument to be that “television and democratic society are incompatible” partially because, in his perspective, it’s a powerful tool for instilling and maintaining ideologies and behaviors. In other words, mind control. One part of the book that I do remember, perhaps inexactly, was a neurological argument noting that the phosphor dots that comprised the picture on the old tubes blinked at a much faster rate than our neurons fire, potentially putting our brains in a hypnotic lag as they futilely attempt to keep up. If there’s even some basis of truth there, we might note that pixels in contemporary screens blink a damn sight faster. I wish I remembered that book better, and maybe I should pick up a new copy. Maybe we all should.

Anyway, that screenless era ended in 1990 in a household in Boulder where there sat a sad and dusty and rarely used TV – until someone turned it on to check out this new show called Twin Peaks and we were hooked within minutes. In fact that living room was filled like church every Sunday evening. Damn you to hell David Lynch. Around that time somebody got hold of an old-style top-loading VHS player, and all of a sudden for the very first time we (meaning I) could watch any movie of any type, any time I wanted. Inconceivable!

And that, I’m afraid, was the gateway drug, as I’ve since rented and burned and bought and streamed thousands and thousands of movies and shows. I’m one of those people who watches movies like most people listen to record albums, over and over. I’ve seen quite a few dozens of times, even more. Hell, I’ve got upwards of 3000 dvds and Blu-rays here in my apartment. (I sometimes joke about how popular I’ll be when the internet dies, but of course we all know that’ll never happen, never, never, hahahaha…. But I digress.) I don’t use those discs often these days, but you know, I can’t always find Network or Magnolia or Brewster McCloud on streaming when I need to watch it right now. Because that’s the thing – I absolutely love film and video, love how many ways it can represent how many things, love how many perspectives it can bring into your life, I mean, insert three-month diatribe here. I love it! And I kind of love all of it – well, a lot of it anyway. I can be just as happy with a Peter Greenaway festival or bingeing Rick and Morty. I love studying how social issues are represented in different eras – race in Showboat (the James Whale 1936 version of course), gay themes in the 40s, the “feminism” (as it were) in Dark Shadows. Truth – I’ve watched every episode of Doctor Who from 1963 on chronologically, just as a study in media history. That’s a lot of low production value to sit through especially in the early seasons, not to mention a bit obsessive. I love sci-fi and dramas in space. I love when a film somehow captures the complexities of the human heart. I love discovering and analyzing what scares me – what kind of monsters freak me out tells me more about what I am. Even the worst films and shows reveal something about our humanity.

But film is a double-edged, double-sided, two-faced blade of acetate, isn’t it? Because as much as it can enlighten, enhance, and inspire, or even just ease our daily stress, it can also lull the breath outta ya. Because it is an opiate, after all, as they’ve long said, it’s the opiate of the couch potato and like all opiates it can take control, can be used to control. Convince me it can’t – just try. That’s been obvious for decades, especially in its “home entertainment” form. Mass media has become the ouroboros, the samsara, the Prometheus, the Godot of public opinion – it shapes it, then reflects it, then reshapes it, then reflects it, ad infinitum – or at least as infinitum as the internet, say. I’m not going to go near the question of who does the shaping; I’ll leave that to the real pundits. And that’s not my concern here.

What is my concern here is this: what has the extent of time I’ve spent in front of that small screen, as we affectionately call it, done to my brain? It has certainly lessened the quantity of my writing – and reading –for some time – simply by eating up my time. So has it lulled me or have I needed to be lulled? To what extent has it shaped my world, how I see the world (whatever that is)? Do I really use it to inform my perspective, or is that just another big bloody rationale? Will I sleep better? Or worse? Is there an addictive quality to those flashing lights, a quantifiable dependency? Will I undergo some sort of withdrawal – something I’m familiar with – an LED detox, perhaps, with its dreaded pixelated neurons? Will I lose my shit or go catatonic? Probably not, but truthfully I don’t know, and near as I can tell, there’s only one way to find out. 

So yeah, I’ve put that TV in the Time Out corner, as the sign says, to think about what it’s done. I’ve dismantled the video components of my “entertainment system” and replaced them with a little makeshift writing desk. And I intend to keep it that way for (ahem) 12 full months, until June 1, 2025. How am I feeling about this? Kinda nerrrrrvous, tell the truth. And I’m fucking glad I am.

I do have a couple of rules, by the way, a couple exceptions really. I just want this up front. This is about keeping those pixels out of my home space, where I spend almost all of my time anyway. So I can see a movie in a theater if I want to; I don’t go very often these days so let’s see if that frequency picks up. How bad will that craving be? If there’s another insurrection or 911 or crazy shit like that, I might pull out the laptop to check it out (or see if I need to run). And though it happens rarely, I’m allowed to watch TV if I’m visiting someone and it’s part of our socializing. For instance if I go to see my mom, who lives 3000 miles from me, she’d be bereft if she couldn’t catch me up on General Hospital or The Amazing Race – I mean, that’s part of what we do. But if I find myself stopping by my neighbor’s just to sit on their couch and…you know, you’ll be the first to find out.

So if you’re curious to see what will happen to me or my brain or whatever, or just want to experience this vicariously, please do stop by. I plan to post one of these weekly for now, sometime every Saturday, so you should be able to listen in on Sundays for sure. What will they be about? I’ll try to stay on topic, to focus on whatever effects this fast might be causing, if I can even distinguish them from my own brain chemistry. If it opens up or changes parts of my life, I suppose that’s fair game as well. I don’t have specific ideas or a set length in mind – this feels like a sturdy introduction, but some episodes might be brief, some epic. Because like everything else with this project, I just don’t know what I’m going to do or go through, dull or dramatic. I have no idea. And that’s the point. Unknown territory, which is vitally refreshing, at least to me. I’ve never done one of these podcasty things before, never planned to and I’m wingin’ it here. I’m honestly not sure if I’m posting this to study the phenomenon or just to force myself to do this fast. But here I am regardless. So feel free to check in, let me know what you’re thinking and how I’m doing, because like I say, long as you’re tuned in, you’re along for the ride. Welcome to My 12-Month Video Fast. This is Week 0.

Thank you for listening.