The Poison of Mediums without Messages
The perils of art, content and expression without urgency, originality and poignancy.
“unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.”
― Charles Bukowski
Explaining things to your children can often force to you articulate concepts and notions that you’d not previously given much time to. Driving down the freeway, I was cornered into a conversation regarding the enormous, ebulient faces that peered down at us from the billboards. There’s a string of them we pass every week, presenting themselves to us on first name basis, attempting to characterise themselves with some quirk or charm that would drive us the listen to their morning radio shows. The business is apparently lucrative enough, and the competition stiff enough, to warrant these enormous billboards plying their patter.
I explained to the kids that they were presenters on the radio. Presenters charged with the curious task of talking about nothing that mattered particularly much, for hours on end a day. They weren’t talkback radio presenters that grappled with news and issues that might affect us, but drive radio hosts that prattle on about what they watched on television, or how their wives annoy them, or the celebrity that was caught doing something with someone or other. They played music that bears little resemblance to anything that issues from an actual instrument, performed by undead mannequins and figurines that are in and of themselves, a mockery of music and musical ability.
The presenters debate trivialities, mundanities and obscenities, trading their anecdotes with fabricated exuberance and the familiar illusion that personality and extroversion supposedly trump creative, original and intelligent thought and exchange. They banter, shriek, guffaw, pause for the assault of an ad break then continue to expound on familiar obsessions with excrement, entertainment and exposure.
When my kids stared back at me, baffled by my stumbling through an explanation, second attempt reiterated the basic contention that ‘those people up on the signs, they talk too much and have nothing to say.’ The kids accepted this explanation and returned to debating the fundamental qualities that distinguish a Sith from a Jedi, but I couldn’t let it go. I still can’t let it go and every time I pass the billboards I shake my proverbial fist and decry the poison of a medium without a message.
Now each to their own, I get that. There are thousands upon thousands that feel energised, or numbed into a bemused stupor, by the people on the billboards. Somehow it makes mornings easier, or tolerable, or some kind of fun to listen to drive shows and their ilk. If there wasn’t a market for it, it wouldn’t exist. But I’m plagued by the sense that we become desensitised to banality. We lose track of meaningful, relevant, thoughtful exchange, becoming poisoned by other people’s obsessions and trite observations about the plumber, or their mother in law, or what they ironically call reality television.
It’s not healthy to immerse yourself in the superficiality and triviality that these shows thrive on, because it adversely affects your notions of conversation and connection. Your new normal turns on a different axis, where dialogue is driven by the most outrageously inconsequential and nonsensical musings, stripped of anything truly meaningful, affective or original. The same challenge can arise when we use social media as our key source for reading and exchange. We become attuned and oddly attentive to a log of bizarre trivialities: what people ate; who they saw; what they bought; what they found funny; or even how they managed to distract themselves from paying attention to anything that really matters.
It can become a guidebook to a pervasive, superior form of alienation and loneliness, when we’re surrounded by noise and personal pageantry, without every truly experiencing something meaningful, with someone who truly means something to us and the world around us. Hypnotised by colour, light, notification and repetition, we lose track of ourselves and what it means to truly encounter an idea, or another human being.
The fundamental issue is the crisis of mediums without messages. When you create a circus, fill it with clowns and expect them to discuss banalities for three hours a day, it will inevitably dissolve into exchanges that are superficial and transient. The problem is having predetermined canvas, a time and space to fill, regardless of whatever inspiration or impetus drives you to action. The medium of drive radio is based on the assumption that these people have something interesting, funny, poignant or pertinent to share with the world, for literally hours a day. Perhaps their exchanges are punctuated with debilitating sensory assaults to keep the consciousness primed, alert and unarmed to think straight enough to change the station or turn it off.
There is a place for simple entertainment, good storytelling, wit, observation and playful banter. There is a place for laughter, community and solidarity. There is a place for hilarity and simplicity. But for the sake of your sanity, your intellect, your humanity, turn away from mediums without messages. Turn away from anything created to fill time and space, without the urgency of intelligent, critical or creative thought. And furthermore, don’t fill the world around you, the pages in front of you, with meaningless, banal, superficiality and spuriousness.
When the time comes, speak, write, paint, play, create. When you have nothing to say, stick with the good works, the silence, the beauty around you. Your own works, your own words, will come it due time. When they do, when they mean more than the blank page you put them on, share them with the world and see what it brings you. The work in itself has as much value as anything anyone else will bring to it.
I promise.