media & me

double whammy last night of dinner w/ another ESL teacher and watching "the office" w/ alison. dinner was at this great South Indian restaurant on lex and 27th - yummy dosas & Brooklyn IPA and good conversation about students and politics and timespace patterns. so cool to fall into the conversation you knew you were going to have with someone who is essentially a perfect stranger: he said "it's doesn't matter so much whose mouth it came out of but the fact that it came out of someone's mouth." in other words, it's all the same thing - the same thought-impulse coming out of the human organism.

and then watching "the office"- or rather, a kabillion minutes of advertising and "the office." first, i'd like to make the obvious observation that perhaps the popularity of "the office" and "officespace" and related comedies/sitcoms makes a strong case for Western society's dawning recognition that people aren't designed to work in offices. and to take this to its logical conclusion, most of the way we live our lives today is based much more in convenience (mostly economic and social) than it is in any fulfillment of our spiritual or emotional needs. (of course i'm not saying anything that hasn't been said before, and - the worse offense - i'm taking the spiritual fulfillment stance, but this is what i see.) watching television is a difficult undertaking for me. on the first level, i'm expected to interact with a story line and a cast of characters that i don't know, whom i know don't really exist. at the next level, i can't help but to constantly interpret them through the filter of my knowledge that it's someone's job to create these people and situations, that testing has even been done to ascertain what will give me or someone like me the most enjoyable television-watching experience. and thirdly is the "me or someone like me" awareness - all of a sudden i'm part of this gigantic entity of Americans who watch "the office" on thursday night, and of every person who thinks like me and sees it for the media machine it is, there are three people (a generous estimate) who buy it whole hog, who probably aren't able to discern their buying it from enjoying it.

because most people like to watch television. most people come home and "unplug" from their work by plugging into the TV. it has become, for better or worse, our fantasy playground, and i suppose that in a lot of ways we need it. i used to think that the entertainment industry was complete fluff and it boggled my mind that billions of dollars are spent on nothing more than making up some stories, but now, after having digested some good ol' Jung, i see that we desperately need our fantasies. (we must, right? how else could the benefits of making another shitty dane cook movie or "reality" TV series versus, say, feeding or vaccinating a few hundred thousand people be explained?)

but here's the thing: i'm not sure if my fantasies look like those ones. i'm reading this kind of dull book right now called "object lessons" which, as far as i can see, centers around one woman poet's experiences discovering what it means to be a woman and a poet at the same time. her thesis is that women and their lives are the object of a poem but are only now becoming the subject of it, and as such we have only been seen from the outside and romanticized or objectified. while this seemed a little facile to me at first, or even untrue (perhaps because of having come into consciousness in the post-women's lib generations), what she writes has begun to sound a deep chord in me, at least when i'm watching NBC on a thursday night. those stories - most of the stories that can be found in mainstream media - don't do it for me. i want to really be entertained - i want real stories. and perhaps the only way to get them is to make them for myself.