today i bid adieu to the first bigass television i had, a magnavox 27“ monster, a monster by the standards of the day when i got it, which was 1991. i had another set, a little black and white that my mother sent me during the gulf war, though that war-for-television ended before i got the tv. that old magnavox absorbed my gaping stares for over 10 years, most memorably coming alive as a theater when i called a late night publicaccess tv psychic to ask her if i was going to be on a canoe any time soon, and i said other crazydrunk things but all i remember of it was the stunned, bewildered, frozenfaced look of quivering horror as she stared out from my bigass television and into the cluttered noiseof my washington heights room, thinking (i interpreted) that this was the only caller she had all night so she couldn‘t just hang up. and then there were the public television fund-raising telethons, those relentlessly badgering intrusions upon television that i have not watched since 1992, partly out of guilt but also out of lack of interest. the guilt comes from those days spent calling the pledge drives and calling and calling until the person who answered my call was shown on the television, at which moment i would scream “I CAN SEEEEE YOUUUUUU!“ or “HANG UP THE PHONE! HANG UP THE PHONE! HANG UP THE PHONE!“ or “FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKAAAAAAAAA!“ and i would see the faces of the humble volunteers who answered these phones and i would not laugh, for i found it exciting, but when i did this performance for my mother and a friend they laughed so hard i thought they‘d get sick.
ah, THE old tv…
add it to the landfill of televisions rendered useless by the as-of-yet useless transition to digital tv. there are ways to rig these old sets to receive dt bradcasts but they are a little too gearhead for me, the ludicrously elaborate lengths one mighht go to to salvage a signal in an antique. aw, heck, i might bring the old tv back upstairs tonight, from the lobby of the apartment building, for to salvage it… to enjoy that curved screen again, versus the boringly realistic flat screen. i think the flat screen ruined television. it ruined the sympathy one has for the story being told within, for the point of sympathy and separation between viewer and explainer/storyteller/narrator. when tv looks too real it is real, and that makes it mundane.
