The City of Glass

Every new generation will have to build its own cities, re-establish the capital’s of know I edge and the fringes of secondary information. Outside those limits is the chatter of trivial pursuits, gossip, lies and untenable science. Television as an extension of the original “machine for living” has effected a change in the sensory profile of an entire planet. A profile now predicated on a cathexis of information, where the ‘‘mind touches matter and lives its every intensity’’.7.

Extendable games of knowledge like Trivial Pursuit have complicated notions of passivity and inertia by enabling, even compelling, each individual to become a live-wire in network of knowing, remembering, recognising configurations. Trivia or tertiary information, acknowledges the incontrovertible disciplines of science, letters, the arts and so on while at the same time escalating them to logical and astronomical reaches. The new Hermes in these outer limits of knowledge is Jack Palance, host-narrator of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Jack plays messenger of the God as well as being himself god of persuasion and cunning, patron of thieves and commerce, the guide of souls on their way to Hades; and as Hermes Trismegistus the founder of alchemy, he produces gold from base information, fascination from discarded news items and the bizarre from the mossy side of stories so well known we think we know everything about them. The log line of any particular episode might run like this: Jack informs us of the proper terminology for designating a specific unit of species, a pride of lions, a sloth of bears. a knot of toads, a troop of kangaroos, a drift of hogs, a murder of crows and a crash of rhinoceroses; Jack re-enacts, in period costume. Edgar Allan Poe’s greatest fear, the fear of being buried alive: we meet a man who creates art by throwing buckets of paint into the powerful exhaust of a jet airplane, a skilled art lover who reproduces famous paintings at the rate of three every twenty minutes, an order of monk devoted to the nurturing of Ostrich and we learn the story of a young German composer whose life was cut short by his favourite snack food- spiders.

But Ripley is nothing new. It’s been around in newspaper cartoons and bubble gum wrappers for quite some time. And it all began because December 19, 1918 was such a boring day. With nothing much happening in the way of current news or sports.

The sports cartoonist of the New York Globe, Robert L. Ripley dashed off three items from his file of newspaper clippings of sports oddities; a man who walked across America backwards using a mirror to see where he was going, a Frenchman who stayed underwater for 6 minutes and 29 seconds and two men who ran 100 yards in eleven seconds in a three legged race. At the height of its popularity (which probably coincided with height of power of the print media) Ripley’s feature appeared in 300 newspapers in 38 countries with an estimated readership of 80 million. In his quest to document the strange, the bizarre and the unexpected Ripley became the most travelled man in the world and amassed his own private collection of unique objects, the strangest of which, according to his housekeeper, was Robert L. Ripley himself. The same might be said about Jack Palance, whose role as semi-demonic host ranges from fireside storyteller, to actually being the protagonist of the story in question (playing the Nazi who attempted to assassinate Hitler, Rasputin refusing to die after being repeatedly poisoned and stabbed, Poe buried in a crypt) to undertaking unspoken dares by drinking snakes blood, eating spiders and hallucinogenic ergot bread and lastly demonstrating practical and easily repeated magic tricks.

And so it is that as the form of Ripley’s Believe it or Not appears in the nightly news, in the successful box game Trivial Pursuit and so on, the question is nervously posed: “What is happening to the boundaries of valid enquiry?’

The Third Millennium

The imagined decline in stature of the great European peoples lead to an exodus of Utopian cells to the New World in the 19th century. To this very day America continues as a vital laboratory of community experiment with some of the original schemes still surviving. Even the great “American Dream” can be seen as an individualist’s version of Utopia. But outside of those Arcadias there’s trouble in a Babylon, a kind of social distemper that somehow remains invisible to Americans but is clear to the Canadians who live in the original twilight zone, a fringe of peripheral vision that feeds the great blind eye of the United States. So it’s no coincidence that Marshall McLuhan, David Cronenberg and Brian Oblivion should all be Canadians. When those Canadians see, when they see, they see. A conversation between them might go: Brian Oblivion: “ battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena” 9.  Marshall McLuhan: “Television is in the business of reprogramming the sensory life of North America”. 10 

Network Sevens motto runs.’ People come together in the moments that they share”. Marshall McLuhan: “One of the peculiarities of a totally involved society is that everyone is totally responsible”. Broadcast television, unlike most other cultural product in circulation, guarantees that whatever you watch has been shared with a significantly sizeable audience, some of whom you will be able to share discussion with. Brian Oblivion: “Watching television helps patch people back into the world’s mixing board”. Marshall McLuhan: “How does one conduct oneself in the midst of a mass of totally involved and metaphysically merged entities?”

Brian O’blivion: “Soon all of us will have special names……we will have to learn to live in a strange new world, where reality is already half hallucination , . . where reality is less than television’’. On the other side we dip into a vast forment of genre and symbol, In Poltergeist the television is the first site of rupture from one dimension into another, the spirit world punches through into our reality through the video interface. In Videodrome television is both interface and signal that induces a “new flesh”, enduring video traces that exist independently of that singular space we call the real - Sounds pretty ominous but only because those films mentioned play the game in the register of terror and the malign. In another register television and video related technology might seem the next logical phase in an ongoing process of miniaturisation and condensation of information, the neatest solution of the contemporary imperative to produce more and more goods from fewer and fewer resources. To make good places out f no place at all.

Footnotes

1. Including the Papal state as part of Italy.

2. Those informational segments enhanced by video design. For example Byrant and his guest are at times contained in adjacent boxes lined with red borders. floating over a graphic that suggests the topic of conversation, say a dollar bill for economics or two flags for International affairs, and all this on a deep blue background with a grid disappearing into the distance. 

5. Some of Today’s greatest moments are when Byrant and Jane just rap.

4. David Thomson, “TV Weather”. Sight and Sound, spring 1980.Vol.49.No 2.p87

5. German for total ‘work of art’ as uttered by Wagner. Probably a nineteenth century dream of the perfect combination of sound, image and text. An idea elaborated by Jan Bruck in his lectures on Mass Media at the UNSW, May 1985. 

6. Marshall McLuhan, “ Television in a New light’’ in, The Meaning of broadcast television, edited by S.T.Donner, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1966.pp87 and 107.

7. As quoted by John Young in his introductory essay in Life of Energies Catalogue, Artspace, September 1983.

8.  A character, very similar to Marshall McLuhan in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome

 9. All of Brian Oblivions quotes come from lines he speaks in Videodrome. 

10. Marshall McLuhan quotes are ibid pp 93,95 96-7 respectively.

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