Been Thinkin’ About…Televisions forever

The florescent light was bright in the old store, all cheap wood paneling and thin, green carpet. The Friday evening was chilly and damp and I, following my parents, treaded lightly, threading our way past aging television sets in various stage of disrepair. The shopkeeper was talking about TVs, naturally, and I was doing my best to not step on any cords or spare parts.

I certainly didn't realize it at the time, but I had walked into a moment soon out of time, a television repair store, a strange threshold land between age-old craftsmanship — like a cobbler's shop — and space age technology, all gone too soon. Televisions used to be expensive. Televisions used to be heavy. There was once an era before planned obsolescence, an era when things were presumed to last. Did we buy a television from the man in the old shop? I believe so, although I was only five at the time and so am not quite sure. But I do remember the new TV itself, a massive thing with beautiful faux-wood and a remote control.

Remote controls were nearly brand new; my grandpa and grandma has just gotten their big TV with a remote control just the year before. We were all astounded by the technology. Grandpa liked being able to stay in his big rocking chair and turn up the nightly news as loud as it would go. The talking heads from Des Moines could be heard all the way out in the breezeway, even the garage, even outdoors. Grandpa liked his television loud.

My mom hated television, distrusting the way ideas could be beamed directly into our heads at a moment's notice. She also took issue with the violence and sex that was being beamed into my head with whatever show my dad had happened to fall asleep in front of. Arguments ensued. My dad wanted to relax with his beer, never tuning in too much to any particular idea unless it was related to his career. "Once he gets something in his head, it won't leave," said my mom, referring to me as a boy. She was right about that observation. Compromise meant the new TV with the fancy remote went downstairs, into a basement where my dad could fall asleep in front of whatever programming he wanted. I — and my overactive head — stayed safely upstairs.

Boys will be boys, though, and I still manage to find reasons to go downstairs, still managed to watch what my dad fell asleep in front of, including — but not limited to — “Die Hard,” “Terminator,” “Bladerunner,” “Predator,” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

In “Bladerunner” there is that strange, gritty electro-punk motif undergirded by the assumption that things still get repaired, that shopkeepers still exist, even among all the foggy electronic dystopia. How little we anticipated a world in which every item instead became disposable. Ink jet printers? Cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy replacement ink cartridges. Television sets? They wear out fast and there is no cobbler-esque repair shop in sight. Just throw the thing away and buy a new one. Nothing lasts because nothing is supposed to. Nobody of consequence bothered to ask the lasting questions. For the working class poor, disposable everything hit hard. "Cheaper" doesn't mean much if you cannot afford to buy a replacement every other year. What lessons were being taught without words?

Anything — products, ideas, people — all are disposable given the right time and place. It was a big shiny tomorrow with a lot of promise, as long as you weren't the thing getting thrown away, washed down Orwell's memory hole. 

Back in the old store, we packed up an RCA VideoDisc player as a weekend rental, along with two movies: “Star Wars” (back when there were only two “Star Wars” films and the other was “The Empire Strikes Back”) and a film set in Africa with Katherine Hepburn wearing a long white dress. The TV repair man was still talking, explaining how the VideoDisc player worked. He was a heavy man with a big belly. His thinning curly hair and thick mustache made me think of the villain sidekick in Disney's “The Rescuers.” The man's tightly stretched polo shirt was tan, strangely the same color as the shop's florescent atmosphere, an atmosphere of dark edges encroaching just beyond the mind's eye. It was as though the place itself knew its time was up. The end of the era, and its losses, while unimaginable, would remain unseen, felt only by the omission.

My mom was right, of course, as moms often are. The television was a strange and powerful tool for beaming ideas directly into our minds. The cobbler-esque television shop would close its doors not long after, replaced by department stores and electronics stores and big box stores and then Amazon. Disposability would become the biggest scam in town. And we would, on some deep level, begin to really long for a firm foundation along the ever-shifting pop culture sands, reaching out to touch the solid ground of what little true craftsmanship remained. Too bad so much had already been washed away, more forgotten with each new generation's unspoken omissions.