Day 31 - Veering Off Course

I must confess I watched a DVD last weekend. It was after a long Saturday night, and rather than go home, I went over to a friend's house to watch a Hindi film. It turned out to be a bit much with all the dance numbers, zooms, jumpcuts and loud wardrobing. However I had to admire the Bollywood way of sprinkling in odd English phrases.

The end result though is that in the days since then, as I've passed my local video store, I've gotten some entertainment hunger pangs & had to deal with the urge to rent something. I employed some time-worn AA mantras (e.g., "fake it till you make it") in order to push back against the pull.

In my corner though is all this momentum of not watching. An entire month and only 1 hour of watching TV and a few videos/DVD's. Plus all the polemics against TV that I've been reading and posting here. This fundamentalist demonizing of the medium is a crude approach, but it's helped reshape my thoughts on ways to spend my time.

Sudden Gravity

A Story of the Panopticon: This is not a Television 

Day 29 - What 2000+ Hours of Cable Boils Down To

Some guy named Bill McKibben, who wrote The Age of Missing Information, exposed himself to a huge dose of cable & decoded the results:

If the mental environment we live in has a single distinctive feature, the way that oxygen defines our atmosphere, it is self-absorption. That’s what a mental environment gone awry has produced; that is the toxic outcome of our era’s unique pollution.

Some years ago, working on a book, I watched every word and image that came across the largest cable system in the world in a 24-hour period — more than 2,000 hours of ads and infomercials, music videos and sitcoms. If you boiled this stew down to its basic ingredient, this is what you found, repeated ad infinitum: You are the most important thing on earth, the heaviest object in the universe. From the fawning flattery of the programming to the mind-messing nastiness of the commercials, it continually posited a world of extreme individualism. Even more than, say, violence, that’s the message that flows out the coaxial cable. Characters on television may turn violent to get what they want now, but it’s the what-they-want-now that lies nearer the heart of the problem.

By the way, that's an excerpt from an article McKibben published in Adbusters, which has tried to buy some airtime to get this spot on TV.

Day 27 - God/Good vs. Devil/Evil

If you're in a megachurch mood, steel yourself and go to this site, which is full of imposing upper case fonts and lightning bolts. Found a story there w/ this headline - Newly Launched GOD Channel Scandinavia Introduces New Scandinavian Programmes:

As we at GOD TV in Scandinavia look back on the past 12 months, it is incredible to consider all that has happened - GOD TV has expanded in so many places including our own backyard!...

Following the establishment of a new technical office in Uppsala, Sweden, our GOD TV Scandinavian technician will now be able to easily insert these new programmes into the GOD Channel signal beamed from Israel to the television tower we are using to rebroadcast from in Stockholm...

And then there's Anton LaVey, author of The Satanic Bible:

We can use TV as a potent propaganda machine. The stage is set for the infusion of true satanic philosophy and potent (emotionally inspiring) music to accompany the inverted crosses and pentagrams...

There are television sets in every home, every restaurant, every hotel room, and every shopping mall— now they're even small enough to carry in your pocket like electronic rosaries. It is an unquestioned part of everyday life. Kneeling before the cathode-ray god, with our TV Guide concordance in hand, we maintain the illusion of choice by flipping channels (chapters and verses)...

The birth of TV was a magical event foreshadowing its satanic significance. The first commercial broadcast was aired on Walpurgisnacht, April 30th, 1939, at the New York World's Fair. Since then, TV's infiltration has been so gradual, so complete that no one even noticed. People don't need to go to church any more; they get their morality plays on television.

Turkish TV Turnoff Poster

Day 24 - "I Decided to Stand Up to the Glass Teat"

I'm not like this yet.

Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television
The Onion

CHAPEL HILL, NC Area resident Jonathan Green does not own a television, a fact he repeatedly points out to friends, family, and coworkersas well as to his mailman, neighborhood convenience-store clerks, and the man who cleans the hallways in his apartment building.

"I, personally, would rather spend my time doing something useful than watch television," Green told a random woman Monday at the Suds 'N' Duds Laundromat, noticing the establishment's wall-mounted TV. "I don't even own one." According to Melinda Elkins, a coworker of Green's at The Frame Job, a Chapel Hill picture-frame shop, Green steers the conversation toward television whenever possible, just so he can mention not owning one.

"A few days ago, [store manager] Annette [Haig] was saying her new contacts were bothering her," Elkins said. "The second she said that, I knew Jonathan would pounce. He was like, 'I didn't know you had contacts, Annette. Are your eyes bad? That's a shame. I'm really lucky to have almost perfect vision. I need reading glasses, but that's it. I'm guessing it's because I don't watch TV. In fact, I don't even own one."

According to Elkins, "idiot box" is Green's favorite derogatory term for television. "He uses that one a lot," she said. "But he's got other ones, too, like 'boob tube' and 'electronic babysitter.'" Elkins said Green always makes sure to read the copies of Entertainment Weekly and People lying around the shop's breakroom, "just so he can point out all the stars and shows he's never heard of."

"Last week, in one of the magazines, there was a picture of Calista Flockhart," Elkins said, "and Jonathan announced, 'I have absolutely no idea who this woman is. Calista who? Am I supposed to have heard of her? I'm sorry, but I haven't.'"...

Day 23 - Fight-or-Flight

I've been free of urges to watch TV for 2 weeks now. The elimination of videos & DVD's from my diet has helped enormously. However I do take in copious amounts of radio & internet.

At this watch less TV site they talk about television's stimulation of fight-or-flight reaction through the use of movement on screen by use of scene changes, jump cuts, changes in camera angles and so on. This puts the mind into a passive state where it is waiting to see if it needs to engage the fight-or-flight reaction. Since nothing ever does happen and this reaction is stimulated over and over again, one becomes locked in this passive state, unable to break free. This can also explain the pull TV has even if we are not trying to watch it and engaged in other activities such as conversation.

Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow) published an article Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor in Scientific American a couple years ago. They describe some effects of TV withdrawal:

In experiments, families have volunteered or been paid to stop viewing, typically for a week or a month. Many could not complete the period of abstinence. Some fought, verbally and physically. Anecdotal reports from some families that have tried the annual "TV turn-off" week in the U.S. tell a similar story. If a family has been spending the lion's share of its free time watching television, reconfiguring itself around a new set of activities is no easy task. Of course, that does not mean it cannot be done or that all families implode when deprived of their set. In a review of these cold-turkey studies, Charles Winick of the City University of New York concluded: "The first three or four days for most persons were the worst, even in many homes where viewing was minimal and where there were other ongoing activities. In over half of all the households, during these first few days of loss, the regular routines were disrupted, family members had difficulties in dealing with the newly available time, anxiety and aggressions were expressed....People living alone tended to be bored and irritated....By the second week, a move toward adaptation to the situation was common."

Day 20 - "As if talking to people or getting their emails isn't boring enough..."

A few years ago this was put out as part of eXile's round-up of 2003:

7. Blogs
The Joke: As if talking to people or getting their emails isn't
boring enough...this is the year that Blogs went REALLY big. You can thank the Iraq War more than anything for that. If last year's blog-induced black comedy came from desperate-for-attention geeks, liberals and right-wing freaks pestering you to read the same crap that they do, this year's blogs were taken to a new level of humor...

This applies to a fair amount of what I've seen out there, but I keep running into thought provoking ones like Freakonomics and Syria Comment. As well there's Steven Johnson, who wrote Everything Bad is Good for You. Towards the end of that book Johnson appraises the relative merits of TV, print, email & blogs:

Now for the bad news... It is true that a specific, historically crucial kind of reading has grown less common in this society: sitting down with a three-hundred page book and following its argument or narrative without a great deal of distraction. We deal with text now in shorter bursts, following links across the web, or sifting through a dozen email messages. The breadth of information is wider in this world, and it is far more participatory. But there are certain types of experiences that cannot be readily conveyed in this more connective, abbreviated form. Complicated, sequential works of persuasion, where each premise builds on the previous one, and where an idea can take an entire chapter to develop, are not well-suited to life on the computer screen. (Much less life on “The O’Reilly Factor.”) I can’t imagine getting along without email, and I derive great intellectual nourishment from posting to my weblog, but I would never attempt to convey the argument of this book in either of those forms... You can convey attitudes and connections in the online world with ease; you can brainstorm with twenty strangers in a way that would have been unthinkable just ten years ago. But it is harder to transmit a fully-fledged worldview.

Low Hand on the TV

Day 19 - Bog

I've leaked the url of this page to a few people. One of them wrote me back:

blog-shmog...I want to start a Bog Blog - as in "I'm on the Bog!"...today's update: a smoothe evacuation followed by an easy clean up, slight sweet Curry residual odor leaves me dreaming of Mango Chutney and squatting on an open air toilet... everyday a new Bog!

DAY 18 - Explicit Image of a Box

While cleaning house today, I thought about moving the TV into storage. It's monstrous in relation to the size of my living room. Instead of lugging the damn thing down 3 flights of stairs, I threw a tablecloth over it. At the moment it's a new resting place for stacks of books and CD's.

It feels as if I've zipped up a body bag. As overly dramatic as that sounds, it's true for me on one level, given all the hours of serenity we shared. But in the end it's just a 10-year old FINLUX 5028. I suppose if I miss it I can always look at the new version of the same model.

Day 17 - Cultural Production vs. Consumption

Watched a film online, which strictly speaking goes against my vow of chastity. But it was a short mockumentary made by someone I know, and while admittedly I was entertained, it wasn't on the tawdry level that I'm seeking to avoid. See for yourself and decide: The Infringement: a comedy in one dmcAct

Speaking of friends actually daring to do something out there, last weekend someone else I know put together a Brevkväll/Letter Night. He was inspired by a radio piece from This American Life about one in Chicago that took place over two nights (shaved down to an hour of empathetic cringing & gut laughs - well worth listening to). People were invited up to the mike to read any letter, email, text message or note that they had written, received or just ran across. Any and all subject matter allowed of course, the only restriction being a 5 minute time limit. It took place in a cafe above a small theater and the room was packed. I read part of a letter from a book of James Agee's correspondence, but was all nerves and could barely get through it.

Performing so informally & briefly for a crowd of 50 people shouldn't be that difficult. My first instinct is to blame the godless amount of drone time spent in front of that infernal glass bucket. I know, too easy. But still.

Anyhow, enough whinging. As well as being one of the letter readers, I was the evening's designated cameraman. A couple nights ago when a few of us got together and watched the tape, I felt as if I'd knocked a tiny fraction off my debt from all those years of consuming culture and producing woefully little in return.

Day 16 - DF Wallace on TV

I know it grows tiresome with my incessant quoting of other people's commentary on TV, but it's finally spring after a long lonely winter. I've gone simple for the outdoors, with no patience for chin-stroking in front of the screen.

David Foster Wallace, who wrote E Unibus Pluram : Television and U.S. Fiction (which you can find in his book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) had this to say in an interview when asked about TV:

One thing TV does is help us deny that we're lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship…

…viewers' relationship with TV is essentially puerile and dependent, as are all relationships based on seduction. This is hardly news. But what's seldom acknowledged is how complex and ingenious TV's seductions are. It's seldom acknowledged that viewers' relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound…

…all I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes...

...it'd be pathetic for me to blame the exterior for my own deficiencies, but it still seems to me that these problems are traceable to this schizogenic experience I had growing up, being bookish and reading a lot, on the one hand, watching grotesque amounts of TV, on the other. Because I liked to read, I probably didn't watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me. And I think it's impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to "entertain," give people sheer pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving? Because, of course, TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.

Day 14 - Palahnuik on TV

Chuck Palahniuk has a new book out called Haunted. It includes the short story Guts, which in the course of his readings of it on book tours has allegedly caused dozens of people to faint. Here's snatches of his take on TV:

I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it...

I am socially retarded in that when people talk about The Sopranos or Friends, or Seinfeld or Sex and the City, I have never seen these shows so I have nothing to add. But by the time something makes it to television, it has been through so many committees, so many processes, it is such a commodity, it has been so edited and produced and art directed, that I don't think there's really anything original there.

I want to be talking to people in the Laundromat and on the street and in the airport, and hearing their stories, the stories of the people next to me on the bus. Everyone I talk to has got stories that are so much more compelling and entertaining and hilarious than anything I would ever see on television or almost any movie I could ever watch. And I'm always so much more entertained by real people, even total strangers, than I am by what's on that screen in front of me...

So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They're lived through movies, they're lived through what we watch on television, they're not actual events in our life. And in a way they don't really exhaust or fulfill anything for us because they're just things that we experience in this detached voyeuristic way. We don't have friends, so we watch Friends on TV.

Day 13 - Giving Cable the Boot

That half-baked idea re:more channels/less temptation has been cooking in my head for a couple days now. Pretty weak concept, actually. So I called the cable company, cancelled the upgrade and asked them how soon they could cut off what I already have piped in. The rules say July 1st, at which point I'm downgraded to the basic 3-channel option. On the chopping block: BBC, CNN, Föx, Discovery, Oppna Kanalen, TCM, MTV, etc.

So begins their long drawn-out deathwatch.

Day 12 - No TV News = Good News

Here's this from William Rivers Pitt, a high school teacher turned journalist/activist who runs truthout.org:

…media does not report the news anymore. They create consensus, they manufacture the common fictions under which we are expected to live. With the TV media, this behavior is all the more insidious because TV reaches everyone. Television is the most extraordinarily effective tool of mass control that has ever been invented by anyone anywhere…

During a book tour I did a couple of years ago, I went to a whole bunch of red states: Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Orange County California (yes, that counts as a red state), North Carolina and the recently blueified New Hampshire. I would talk like this about the TV news media, and then I would ask the people in the crowd if any of them owned guns. These were red states, so a fair number of hands went up. Good, I said. Excellent. Go home and shoot your television. They laughed, but I was totally serious.

After almost 2 weeks with no TV news, my perception of world events is less anchored in fixed visual imagery and centered more around what my imagination arrives at after soaking up other forms of media. Sometimes TV news feeds me rare & valuable in-depth glimpses of what's actually happening, from angles that provoke thought. In that sense I'm poorer for missing those moments. But it seems as if my mind is working to compensate for that loss, and is slowly coming up with a more agile form of cognition to supplement & enliven the radio/print I take in. I know very little about neurology, but I imagine if I were hooked up to a CAT Scan it would show that new neural pathways are being opened up in my brain, and that can only be good.

Day 11 - More Channels/Less Temptation

It seems like a corner has been turned. The TV urges sometimes still rear their heads, but they have a more distant and abstract quality. Those characters in the shows that I'd become accustomed to are now shadowy figures that I don't miss. The BBC & CNN anchors/correspondents who were my reliable friends have been replaced by faceless radio newscasters, whose voices project enough personality to make up for their invisibility.

Not sure where I am in my overall relationship with the box. I can't logically explain what I did today when the cable company called today. The guy tried to sell me a 'special' package that involves more channels for a very modest price increase. Recently I've been considering cancelling my cable altogether and going back down to the basic 3 broadcast channels. But I've hesitated to do that, because I can foresee justifying watching those 3 channels using the rationale that it'd be a reasonable vice. In the end, I agreed to upgrade my cable. I'll be paying for 15 more channels that I won't watch.

But hold on, there's a (twisted) strategy behind this: A friend of mine decided to take a month off from his cigarette habit last winter. His method was to have a full & open pack perpetually sitting on a table in his kitchen. The idea being that every time he passed the table, he had to either renew his resolve to not smoke, or smoke. He said that by the end of the first week he had made that decision to not smoke so many times that it became nearly effortless after that.

That's how I'm looking at today's cable decision. On the surface it seems like a waste of money, but I'm looking at it as insurance against future time misspent.

Day 10

Nothing to say. Still wallowing in shame over Day 8's incident.

Day 9 - Back on the Wagon

Yesterday's scandalous binge is well behind me, a youthful indiscretion. Something very cathartic about writing it out for all/myself to see.

Still, I'm chastened. I'll shut up now.

Day 8 - Uh oh

I don't know what happened, but under the pretense of allegedly needing to know how the Sweden-U.S. hockey game was going, I switched on the TV. Hockey has never meant much to me, so this was obviously a ruse on my part to sabotage me.

The commentators were commenting on first period highlights & ads kept running on and on. I got bored. Since I'd crossed into that neverland anyway, giving in to the impulse to flip channels was just a short slide. Or so I rationalized at the time. Within minutes I was engrossed in 'The Wire', some gritty streetwise HBO thing that I knew from the old days, back when I was still using. The characters talked real fast, slangy & smart and there were no commercial breaks. I ordered my logic to do some gymnastics and in no time I concluded that it was just like watching a DVD or video - which I've somehow deemed as okay under my mushy rules governing this experiment. As I explained to a friend last night, with DVD's & videotapes it's me & only me who's determining what and when I get entertained. He wasn't convinced and now I see his point.

The episode ended & I shut it off. An hour of my life, vaporized.

I suppose I do know what happened: I wanted to regress into some primordial womb-state where I was fed by osmosis, no thought was demanded of me, and the outside world was invisible for a finite chunk of time.

Hmmm. This defeat is hard to digest, I feel like taking a shower. First & foremost I ought to tighten up my regimen & get rid of this DVD/video exception. No doubt this paved the way for today's breech. And then of course HBO should suffer, they owe me an hour. Some low-level intern there is going to have to spend some time skimming over & deleting a venomous email for me. That's a couple minutes reclaimed right there, for starters.

Day 7

Another sunny day w/o TV: long bike ride; read some & prowled sites for a school project; made the leap from yahoo to gmail & reignited contact with long lost friends; and rescued a new lamp from the junk room in my building's basement. I might've done all that anyway, regardless of my fatwa against TV. But somehow the course of the day had a richer texture than I imagine it would've had, had I been glued to the news (or whatever) in between bursts of engagement.

A friend of mine wrote me and mentioned that she's reading The Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art by E.H. Gombrich. I poked around and stumbled upon an excerpt of the book where he offers a line from Cicero:

The very things that move our sense most to pleasures and appeal to them most speedily at first are the ones from which we are most quickly estranged by a kind of disgust and surfeit.

Day 6 - Reasons to Not Watch TV

Several Reasons not to Watch TV
excerpted from soundvision.com

You'll waste your life
You could have spent more time with your family and friends instead of watching TV. You could have read more about Islam, improved your commitment to Allah, and gained a better chance to get to Paradise in the Next Life. You could have spent more time studying which could have meant admission to medical school or a scholarship to the college you really wanted to attend, or...I think you get the picture. Wasting time means wasting your life. Most TV wastes your life.

You'll get fat
TV encourages you to just sit there and let your mind more or less go blank. You pick up pounds sitting there night after night, not getting any exercise.Obesity can lead to diseases later on in life. Sitting there in front of the tube is not good for your health. Walking outside in the fresh (or semi-fresh if you live in the city) air is much better.

Your mind will go numb
While TV shows make great topics of conversation amongst friends, future admissions officers at colleges and universities and employers, for instance, will not be impressed with your ability to recite, alphabetically, the cast of your favorite TV show. They will want to know that you are an individual who is aware of the world around him or her. That means someone who is engaged in intellectual pursuits, more specifically reading and DOING things in the community.

You'll get lazy
You will also become lazy by depending on this box to entertain you instead of being creative and finding ways to spend your time more usefully. TV can make you a dull couch potato.

Day 5

Apparently my need to stare at a screen has found an outlet. 2 nights in a row now I've rented something to watch. Tonight's fare wasn't anything to be ashamed about - 'Stolen Nation', a documentary with Philip Seymour Hoffman - but the trend is disheartening.

What's so great about looking at a rectangle filled with other people's lives & ideas?

Day 4 (less bad)

While looking for reinforcements, I stumbled upon this from Wm Burroughs:

...disintegration of self-image often results in image hunger. Billie Holliday said she knew she was off junk when she stopped watching TV. An addict has little regard for his image.

Even with this mantra running through my head, I still needed a dose, so I rented "Lost in Translation". I'd remembered seeing it with my ex/demi-girlfriend (who moved away last fall) in the cinema and feeling its effects for days afterwards. I watched it just now and I think it'll get me through whatever hard times lay ahead over the next few days.

Day 3 (bad day)

Okay, so it's not so easy. Today I spent a number of hours browsing sites in an aimless search for infotainment. It was the moral equivalent of watching teevee. Cheating, basically.

I suppose if this is going to work - enforcing television abstinence by opening myself up to surveillance via this blog - there's got to be fuller disclosure. For deterrent effect, along with these daily entries I'll tick off a list of the more troublesome sites I've visited on a bad day. It would expose how low I stooped to stave off the draw of the box.

Here goes:

http://www.lyricsdepot.com/pixies/hey.html
http://music.yahoo.com/ar-262397-videos--Beck
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/national/29stoner.html
http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/wwp305/index_thumbnails/index.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=withdrawal
http://www.cbc.ca/story/sports/national/2005/04/28/Sports/canada_czechws050428.html

Day Two

Wondering when the pain is going to begin. Perhaps I'm still feeding off the surplus of eye candy last weekend, when some friends & I rented Margaret Cho & Ali G dvd's.

A few perceptible differences: One is that I dawdle & delve more on news sites, and read deeper into a story before moving on. Radio is my new purveyor of passive information absorption, I sense a new addiction to be dealt with at a later date. Another is that I have more time to play with, which leads me to clean out junk drawers, catch up on old emails, wipe the dust off the plant leaves, etc. I even wrote a letter yesterday.

Day One

Easy. Helped by the shining sun that pulled me outside. Plus I'm under a work deadline that, if left unmet, would mean my crucifixion. Admittedly though, listening to radio has become my substitute teat. I've got no problem with that though, it's a start. At least it leaves my eyes free to do something else.