Tonight I watched TV for the first time in two weeks. I did it as a social act to discuss the show, as it was happening, with my daughter. It's a design show where people are tasked with creating a different fashion each week, and at the end of each week some one is voted out of the studio. The modern day equivalent to the gladiators or court jesters, only with a capitalist ~ entrepreneurial twist; when the last designer is standing there is a large some of money and machinery to launch their own business.
The episode tonight was at least very creative, where the task at hand involved not using fabric but rather Hallmark Cards. The looks created went from hoodie to wedding gown. What I find fascinating is that people watch people who are actually creating something ~ a wearable product ~ over the course of an hour (or in tonights case 90 minutes).
I wonder how that would work for screenwriting? Give fourteen young and talented, some what proven, screenwriters weekly prompts and see who comes up with the best script? Maybe they could make it interactive and have the audience send in the prompts and be involved, in realtime, with the edits? Sounds like fascinating viewing, right? No? Well it could be, with reality-show backstories, side stories and in-the-moment voice overs while there are writing in a cubicle or cafe by themselves. Or they could have to write in groups, like a weekly variety show, and start off with the Comedians, Dramatist, Memoirists, How-To-Folks and PopCultureVultures! Slowly the teams would be whittled down to one member from each "tribe" and there'd be a new genre write-off : A Tragedy!
Or a political speechwriter show.....not just West Wing or Newsroom Sorkin stuff, but real from the trenches, three campaigns ago writers (a certain Republican and Democrat husband and wife team come to mind). Would the youth of today stand for such construct? They could if it had a live Twitter and Instagram feed to the show and uploads of phone video clips for the man-on-the-street eye-witness?! Imagine if the citizens actually created the news?
Which leads me back to the original thought...while I've NOT been watching TV, I've gone back to my habits of writing and reading. Two that have served me well over the long haul. I think TV for me as a kid was a self-soothing tool, and I know during various parts of my adult life, it has been, too. Where some folks might have a beer or a glass of wine, I might watch what I call "Bad TV" of the bus-accident variety. You know it's awful, you know you shouldn't look, but you do and can't stop.
Now I've been remembering, as I've been writing a great deal about it, the years on the boat where I didn't have TV and then we sailed to St. Croix and all the films there were several years behind the Main Land, so I basically didn't rely on passive consumption of entertainment for a solid year. That feeling of trusting your inner voice and creative juices starts to rise up when you're not plugged in.
I know it's very typical during a vacation season for people to want to take "information vacations" as well. I certainly do it during most school holidays and longer breaks. But there is the Pop-Culture-Vulture gene, Science geek and Politically Curious impulse that get the best of me, so I'll turn on the radio to hear what I've been missing, usually in my car, but sometimes at home. If one is not tapped into the every growing "global consciousness", which is becoming more and more interwoven each minute, then there is the real chance you might miss a political seismic shift or subtle change that sets a chain of dominos in a new direction. I've always had great antenna for those trends, but the fractured nature, combined with the fast pace of change, has made it harder to track the pulse of prominent new tracks.
So people go to the fear or desire (the old Orwell vs Huxley view of American Capitalism played out in Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death) which also drives everything for sale in America. So I guess I'm going to go back to boycotting TV for a while, maybe another two weeks, and see how I feel (I'll let you know here). Right now I find more satisfaction with engaging in my life in the NOW than passively letting canned programming bounce in my direction. I'm more into creating and being than consuming and bowing down to the few companies that control most of the media.
Goodnight, perhaps I'll be able to catch the Perseid Showers later tonight, if the light pollution isn't too high and the clouds aren't too low, Goodnight!
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