Finding Resonance

       By now, I'm not missing TV, really. It's been nearly nine months, and I've had zero TV, except for a portion of some major events: some winter Olympics, part of the Oscars, the decisive NBA match back when, the first episode of House of Cards (on Netflix), and a couple of episodes of Food Network's Chopped, just because I absolutely love this show's creative challenge. I do very, very little cooking, but whenever I watch this show, I get inspired to chop more garlic, or ginger, or both, add more cream, do something interesting with the onions.
       But by and large, I'm sticking to my exercise, and I'm finding it isn't that hard.
       I find that I spend more time on the Internet, which can become an equally addictive waste of time if I don't pay attention. With the Internet, though, I feel I have more control and am more likely to hit on instructive entertainment. For one, I remain fascinated with the Ted website, where I can watch and listen to some of the most intelligent presentations, from speakers throughout the world. How cool is that?
      I also discovered I can watch and listen, live, to any author presenting at my local bookstore (Books & Books in Coral Gables, FL, www.booksandbooks.com). Earlier this evening, I caught the question-and-answer session with Ediberto Román, lawyer and author of Those Damned Immigrants: America's Hysteria over Undocumented Immigration (Citizenship and Migration in the Americas).  Román, I thought, was a little bit combative when answering one of the questions. But for sure, he was unscripted.
      Separately, I ran accross one more message resonating with my TV-less life.  The message came through work, in an unintended way. My boss sent me a link to a page discussing a topic she'd like to see in the corporate magazine. I explored the site, www.newdream.org, and found this message:
      "We work too much, we consume too much, we don’t have enough time for friends and family, and we’re constantly being bombarded with marketers' manipulative messages. It’s time to help Americans live lives beyond consumerism. It’s time to build a society that has transcended an economy based on artificially stimulated consumption and unsustainable growth and to develop instead an economy and culture that are centered on maximizing well-being."
     

      I haven't fully processed the fact that it was my boss who pointed me to this link, which is somewhat incongruous with the commercial real estate activity of the company, an activity that thrives on consumerism. But for now, that's a separate story.
     What is relevant to my exercise is that consumerism is related to TV-watching, of course: "Americans spend more than four hours a day watching television and are exposed to 52,500 TV ads a year—that’s 15.5 days of advertising annually!"
      Okay, I probably was watching half  that much, which is to say two hours. Two favorite sitcoms (it isn't hard to come accross them on any given night) and a favorite one-hour show or news program, and you've got two hours. But if  I found three favorite sitcoms playing in a row, or a re-runs fest, then I could run into three hours. Then figure in the ads that accompany those - at least 30 per hour - and we're still talking a lot of TV ads. 
       To be sure, there are a couple of ways I can think of to avoid watching ads, if you don't mind watching programs after their original scheduled time. Even so, it takes effort and planning to record your programs, or watch through Netflix. So, more likely than not, we're all watching a lot of ads, and that's the price we pay for entertainment or information, in addition to our cable subscription. (Wasn't cable supposed to be ad-free?)
     Then I found a link to this: http://www.screenfree.org/ From May 5-11, this international coalition organizes and sponsors a movement to turn off all screens, except when necessary for school or work. The idea is to organize your daily activities for a week so they don't include the use of any screens.
      Hmm...I might be looking at an interesting, and potentially very rewarding challenge. Seven days, five of them with school and work, so we're talking basically five evenings, and two weekend days. Seems very, very doable. Can I get my 14-year-old on board, she who is thinking she might like to study marketing?
      No Internet, no iPad for my daughter, for one whole week. Can I take it up that one more notch? Let's see: mealtime conversation, maybe a swim, maybe playing some classical music (I can hear her, "Mom! What's that?!), maybe teach her how to sew a hem, go to the bookstore, come up with knock-knock jokes, or invent a new ice cream flavor. 
      Somewhere, somehow, between insanity and absurdity, this seems like a good idea. Mark my calendar.
     

 

While Not Watching TV, I found St. James and Thoreau

   So what is this exercise of not watching TV really all about?  I forbid myself from watching TV, write a blog about it which very few people read, and then what? Self-imposed deprivation of some of our culture's most creative and clever writing...for what?
   I was pondering these questions and considering the option of stopping this blog and looking for something else to write about -- in the end it is a fetish with written words that keeps me blogging -- when I came accross a wonderful book: Simplify Your Life, by Elaine St. James. As happens with most books I pick up randomly at the bookstore, I was drawn to the size (not too big), cover design (simple, with a lot of white space), and last, a bargain-price sticker.   
   The second step is opening it to a random page, which turned out to be a chapter about rethinking meals with friends, and opting to have them out in a restaurant, instead of going through the required, time-consuming preparations of cooking at home. My thinking exactly! (I love it when a published author and I are on the same page.) Goes without saying that having friends over for dinner is always an option, when you're up for it. The point is that if the prospect of having to plan and prepare a home cooked meal will delay and ultimately prevent  you from getting together with friends you really enjoy spending time with, then it's time to rethink the meal part of the get together.
    I took the book home with me and kept finding more messages, beginning with this on the front jacket: "'Simplify, simplify.' That's what Henry David Thoreau urged his fellow Americans to do a hundred and fifty years ago."
    I was a big fan of Thoreau back in my high school days when our English teacher introduced us to him, and here is this 21st century author bringing him back to me in 100 different ways to simplify my modern life. Bonus: None of them require me to go without electricity or hot water or, thankfully, build a cabin in the woods with my own two hands.
    Guess what I found today as I kept perusing randomly through my book? Chapter 25: Turn Off the TV. In seven short paragraphs, St. James goes over all the reasons I decided to take a hiatus, from mindlessness drama to manipulative ads, even as I sometimes miss the good stuff that TV does have. The last paragraph: "If you're addicted to television, kicking the habit will certainly simplify your life. People who've done it say it's one of the best things they've ever done."
    It got me all excited again about this personal exercise. I got Thoreau back in my life, which is to say, I got some insight into why I'm doing this TV-less exercise: Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.
    The house is quiet and dark except for my desk lamp. I hear the hum of the AC, and my daughter already sleeps for her 5:30 a.m. schoolday wake-up. I am but a speck, but I fill the space. What a good feeling to go to bed with.
    

  

Netflix's House of Cards -- Power Too Wrong To Resist

        One peculiar thing about my self-imposed TV hiatus is that sometimes I feel its power even stronger than when I wasn't in hiatus.
        In other words, I had to watch House of Cards, a relatively new series created by Netflix.
        A friend kept insisting, "You have to watch it", repeating this message every time after he  watched it, as if every next episode raised his opinion of the show. A co-worker endorses it strongly. And my boss says she's hooked on it.
       It was beginning to feel like the whole world had come upon a revelation, while I remained in the dark.  So I finally caved and watched one episode, the opening episode.

       The series, starring Kevin Spacey, is about a U.S. senator and his underhanded schemes to gain and exert power, which involve using and destroying others, if that will suit his purpose. His motivation is exacting revenge and getting his due after being passed over for promotion to U.S. Secretary of State. The series is in its second season, and won actress Robin Wright, who plays the congressman's wife, the 2013 Golden Globe award for best actress in a TV series drama.

                             

                                                               

       When people rave about the series, I hear echos of Downton Abbey and Scandal.Those were major hits too, practically until the other day. What is it about these shows that hooks us so?

       For House of Cards, at least part of the answer is a carefully calibrated combination of viewer preferences, according to this really interesting article in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/for-house-of-cards-using-big-data-to-guarantee-its-popularity.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
        Netflix used its accumulation of rental data to arrive at a sure recipe. Not by accident, House of Cards combines three powerful rent-demand drivers: Kevin Spacey (a hot seller, who knew?), director David Fincher (he directed The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo and The Social Network) whose work people love, and, lastly, a previous and similar BBC mini series also called House of Cards, based on a novel by Michael Dobbs, and which had flown off Netflix's shelves. Netflix adapted that BBC production into the U.S. version.
         It's like improvising a cookie recipe by combining Godiva chocolate...(okay, I'm gonna stop this analogy, because I'm also on a diet and if I keep going, I won't be able to resist getting up for the Chips Ahoy bag.)
         So the other night I watched the first episode. Being that it was on Netflix, which is to say without any commercials, it was pretty engaging. It's safe to say that watching Senator Underwood (Kevin Spacey's character) is probably more interesting than any real life political debate about health care or immigration. Underwood is very troubled. So is everything and everyone around him, from his calculating wife to the desperate newspaper reporter who hooks him as a source
         Maybe that's one of the things about TV that hooks us -- how overdone the plots are. People aren't just damaged -- they are really damaged. They're not evil, they are super evil. They're not plain ol' good, they are heroic. It gives definition to the blurry gray areas, inconsistencies and contradictions that make up real life and real people.
         But I think the most resonating element of House of Cards is the root of the drama, which is Underwood's injured pride or vanity, along with a sense of betrayal. All his actions -- and they are not pretty -- are propelled by that injury.
         As I write my silly blog, I wonder if Netflix calculated one more element when creating the series: how powerless we are against someone else's decision to use or betray us. Underwood is the "bad" version of seeking reparation, of setting the score even. He is an anti-hero, and we love him.
         Hmm...Makes me think of another series I've been hearing raves about: Breaking Bad. I haven't watched it, but hear it's about a high school science professor who begins finding it more rewarding, financially and otherwise, to cook up drugs in his lab and sell them.  No more Mr. Nice Guy.
         Hero or anti-hero, maybe we're all tired of getting the short end of the stick and it makes us happy to see Mr. Nice Guy grow fangs.
         I think I get it. One episode will do.