In addition to June 13th being my birthday (as well as the birthday of W.B. Yeats, James Clerk Maxwell) the day also marked the first day of post-analog TV.

I recalled how much I used to love pressing those buttons on the back of the old Sony TV that turned the screen to snow when I was a kid.  Even Brooklyn, in the early 00s, I was still using a tinfoil antennae to tune in Charlie Rose.  Something so wonderful about being able to reduce the snow on the screen by crumpling the tin foil on the end of an antenna made me feel so, involved w/ the process.

Photo by, Arnold Chao

So, back to the evening of June 13th.  My birthday and the first day of post-analog TV. Dan and my friends Jill, Ryan and me acknowledged the passing of the analog television era over dinner and red wine which then dissolved into a game of Balderdash.  We drank more red wine and ate Jill’s amazingly, amazing carrot cake—she’d made it from scratch just fer m’ birthday.

Before the game began, Jill’s husband, Ryan –who repairs high-end watches for a living– looked over an old pocket watch my mom had given me a couple weeks ago.  Mom had insisted the watch was a ‘piece of junk’ when she offered it to me cause I liked it.  Ryan opened the back.  The gears were decoratively engraved and, according to Ryan,  number of “jewels” that pinned the gears indicated revealed it was of more value than my mom (who’d purchased it at a thrift store in Massachusetts because the brand, Waltham, beared the same name as the school she first taught at.  Ryan speculated the watch was made around 1910; then offered to try and fix it up for me, get it working again.  “If you’d said it was a precious family heirloom” he told me, “I’d have had no interest.  It was fact that mom had inaccurately deemed it a piece of junk,” he went on to exaplin that made him want to get it ticking again, bring it back to life.

So in Anecdotal Ode to Digital-ness, I created a series of lyrics, designed to be set to a minimalist score of some sort. Which means, I’ve gotta write another series of lyrics now.  Something that would go w/ a minimalist score, presumably.  Only I’m on deadline now for a couple of other things. So I’ll make this ode an exceptionally minimal ode:

When I was a kid
I was always the one up
on Saturday mornings

And starting 6:30 or 7:00a.m.
I would watch the nature shows
on Saturday Morning
and then after that
I would watch the Superfriends, at 8:00.

And in between
I would walk over to
the back of the television set
so I could press that little red button
the little red button
on the lower left corner
on the back of the television set.

Watching the colors on the screen
While the rest of the world was asleep,
Watching the colors on the screen,
and the pixels keep moving and changing.

Then, I would finally let go of the button
and go back to watching
the nature shows
and the Superfriends

And then back to the little red button
and I would try and figure out
what was the color of the screen
I never knew the color of the screen
I simply never knew the color of the screen.

(Hmm, okay, that was –first of all– longer than I expected it to be. Also, kinda reads more like a poem than a minimalist ode, but, oh well.)

Epilogue:

So I just checked it out and I guess the Charlie Rose-sque snow (described previously) is still there on the digital screen.  Just that an antane would no absoultely nothing for it.  Making the song about discovering the TV screen w/ utterly nil and void, I guess.  Although you could interpret the song as an interpolation of post-digital nostalgia…maybe?

.