Thursday, October 5, 2017

"It's Just TV"

                           "Of course it's not real Bobby. It's just TV ya Dummy!"

I know I shouldn't watch, but TV especially local TV's reaction to our latest massacre is typical for the times. In a nutshell as I just watched:
"Are Mass Shootings good or bad for the country?"
"...what do you think? Call our hot-line # at..."
Yeah not literally that, but close enough. For Comic relief we have the Secretary of State calling the Resident in Chief a "Moron". With that hours of serious debate by talking heads on the subject.

Gimme a break of course he's a "Moron".

The whole world, and two thirds of this country say so everyday. All this to show how stupid dumbed down the media has become.
That, and the endless deranged play grounds for fanatics. Namely the information platforms like the one you're on right now. We were better off with three networks, and three or four local channels,...we were so much smarter when we had to think for ourselves.

I love the old media. Top 40 radio playing fucking Little Richard the Beatles. Great rational, and or insane talk radio. Kid's TV shows that showed classic 1930's 40's cartoons, and taught basic morality. As opposed the surreal in a bad way murderous selfish static they crap out now.




News programs, again there were three national, and zillions local that at least 'tried' through their bias to tell the truth. That, and the commercials were stupid, and funny. As opposed to stupid, and insidious.




Btw yes I do go to the Library more often now. It's one of the last islands of cultural sanity...threatened though they are. I so recommend them while they last. If your card lapsed no problem they'll make you a new one on the spot...five minutes.

As long as these neat places are around there's Hope!

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Libraries are secret temples to the Muses and a sure sign of civilization.

Television is the electronic altar and talking ghost of mammon. Mammon is Moloch, and requires human sacrifice. The invisible hand of the market is that of Moloch.

I absolutely agree that we were better off with the more limited television offerings of yesteryear, back when it was typical for a show to have *one* commercial sponsor, explicitly identified as such.

Cable was the beginning of television's ultimate corruption. Remember that old fantasy flick from the early 80s, "Time Bandits"? In it a sinister TV game show emanating from the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness is called Your Money or Your Life, and is filled with cruelty and sadism. That was a prophetic foreshadowing of "reality" TV.

I love the bookmobile. We should create more of them.

Z

uncle1950uncle said...

I've been going to my Main Branch in Brooklyn People's Republic of.

The damned thing is built in the classical Egyptian style. They were funny that way in the 1930's. I'm always tempted to ask if there are rooms for special clients to sleep over. Yeah I could be very happy living there.

In the manner of 19th century gentlemen taking "rooms at the club".

There's Italian Chinese, and Indian take out right across the plaza.

What more could one want?

Anonymous said...

Yes, live at the library! Like the Phantom at the Opera, only without the disfigurement and funny mask. I've long thought it would be delightful to live in the bedding department at Macy's, slipping discreetly into a secret breakfast nook during business hours. Only this would be better, & more cultivated. I'm sure there must be some modest yet commodious apartments upstairs. Rooms at the club indeed!

I'll have breakfast in bed, Nestor.

Z

uncle1950uncle said...

Maybe I'll write a story about a Queer teen taking shelter in a large say Midwestern Library. Shelter from what we know is out there for him. Perhaps this is a few years from now when Queer hunting is codified legal, and applauded. As it is already in some parts of the world.

Perhaps he's aided by the secret "Free Association of Librarians".

This secret society which goes back to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. They've been keeping the light of literacy knowledge, and history alive for more than 2000 years. That, and giving shelter the persecuted.

Their community gave aid, and escape to the Jews of Europe through the long centuries of persecution. They hid runaway slaves in America, and now in the middle east Russia, and eastern Europe. The hide, and help escape battered women children, and elderly.

The "Free association" holds the torch of knowledge, and kindness in world, and eras that have gone mad.

Our young hero is just another soul under their ancient protection.

There's an outline.

Maybe I'll do a short episode.

Actually this counts as Episode One of "Sheltering Leaves".

Anonymous said...

"This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

Anonymous said...

I love it!

Z

uncle1950uncle said...

Eh,...so I shouldn't write the story?

Anonymous said...

@ Anonymous - that may have been a problem in Schopenhauer's time & place, & maybe even with some contemporary Ivy League types; but current American stupidity consists chiefly in valorizing ignorance.

Write it, Sidney!

Z

Anonymous said...

"People believe that if you abandon the discourse of reason, you fall into the black night of passions, of murder, and the dissolution of all social life. But I think the discourse of reason is the pathology, the morbid discourse par excellence. Simply look at what happens in the world, because it is the discourse of reason that is in power everywhere." - Félix Guattari, Chaosophy

Anonymous said...

"I think I ain't never met a normal, I mean normal, man who wasn't crazy! Loon crazy, take 'em off and put 'em away crazy, which is what they would do if there wasn't so many of them. Every normal man -- I mean sexually normal, now -- man I ever met figures the whole thing runs between two points: What he wants, and what he thinks should be. Every thought in his head is directed to fixing a rule-straight line between them, and he calls that line: What Is. [...] On the other hand, every faggot or panty-sucker, or whip jockey, or SM freak, or baby-fucker, or even a motherfucker like me, we know --" and his hands came down like he was pushing something away: "We know, man, that there is what we want, there is what should be, and there is what is: and don't none of them got anything to do with each other unless --" The bartender was shaking his head."-- unless we make it," Hogg went on anyway. (p. 121)
- Samuel R. Delany "Hogg" (p. 121)

Anonymous said...

"The dissemination and dilution of literacy in our time has led not to a wider let alone a deeper appreciation of the best efforts of the past and present, but to a widespread appetite for and consumption of tripe." - Daryl Hine

Anonymous said...

That's some great comeback, Anon; very literate of you.

Z

uncle1950uncle said...

About the story my fantasy,...it's part of the problem? Am I are we?

uncle1950uncle said...

Btw I always thought Delany's "Hog" would make a most informative, and entertaining cartoon series. Full disclosure. I was slightly aquatinted with Mr. Delany at the time he was writing this historic document.

It was early in my Queer naked Angel books career. I met him at the print shop where some of us were planning a Queer comic book title.

Padraig said...

I like the living in the library notion.

My Mom and Dad, and may God bless them for this, supplied their children with many books. One of my favorites was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg. It is the story of a brother and sister who run away from home and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The older of the two children, Twelve-year-old Claudia Kincaid, who ran away because she thought her parents did not appreciate her and did not like it, was my hero.

The Met as nice as it is does not have the comfortable reading chairs a good library should have. My own favorite library will not bother you if you fall asleep in one of their excelent chairs, neither will they bother you if you spend your whole day reading and writing. The place is staffed with excellent people. One of my favorite librarians is a member of the ACLU, which seems about right.