The best thing to do with a television, in my opinion, is to place it on the receiving end of a baseball bat.� Very little that’s good has ever come from TV, and the longer it’s with us, with its multiple channels and opiate influences and passion-draining hypnosis, the worse it gets.� Oh you can make sound arguments for public television and documentaries and certain dramas and sitcoms, but the bulk of the programming is corrosive, the kind of corrosion that is slowly eating at the foundation of our culture, our educational system, and our ability to relate to one another.� This anyway is my opinion, based on years of travel, discourse and observation.� I don’t think it’s an inaccurate one.
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Own a TV if you must, just exercise restraint in watching it.� There’s so much else to experience, to touch, to know.� Television will keep you from doing this.� Your job is to be out experiencing the world, and questioning it, not to become another spiritually numb victim of Madison Avenue.���
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Example:� In 1997 I flew to New York to meet my first literary agent.� I hadn’t been in the city since 1995, and was happy to be back.� I also noticed, with pleasure, that the mood of the place had changed, becoming more sane, and upbeat, than it had been in the Seventies and Eighties.� It was a tolerably civil town again, which both Mayor Giuliani and New Yorkers in general must be given credit for.� Whatever the cause, everywhere people tried to be� considerate, and often even succeeded.� There was a sense of optimism about the town that I don’t think New Yorkers had felt since the early sixties.� Many of the natives, sensing I was an outlander, asked why I was there.� I would tell them, and in every case they congratulated me and wished me luck.� I’d never felt more at home in that enormous, swaggering, frenzied metropolis.
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I rode the subway across town to my agent’s office, and as I did, packed in with the executives and fashion models and Hasidics, I gazed up at the advertising placards.� And there, above me, was Madison Avenue?s whole mission laid bare.� Ads for one of the big networks, they were presenting arguments for why you should watch TV:
�It’s a beautiful day.� What are you doing outside?
�Scientists claim we only use 10% of our brain cells.� That?s way too much.
�Hobbies, Schmobbies.
�Eight hours a day, that’s all we ask.
�Don?t worry, you?ve got billions of brain cells.
�And so on.
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I could almost see the group of miserable souls who, together in some soulless board room, composed these passages.� It was so New York.�
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So if you’re an avid watcher of television, just be aware of the networks’ ultimate values.� It doesn’t matter which network posted those values; in my opinion they’re all interchangeable.�
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Newspapers and magazines are different, yet similar.� We are daily bombarded with information from a growing number of well intentioned, but basically superfluous, periodicals and websites.� If you try to subscribe to too many of these, you’ll wind up being informed on all kinds of issues that you can do nothing about, have no influence over, or any involvement in.�
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Your job as an artist�isn’t to become a master of current events.� Your job is to live outside the world at the same time that you live in it.� There’s nothing wrong with being well informed?I skim through the paper each morning, and listen to NPR each day, but I don’t advise that you get sucked into the vortex of global information.� It’s all too vast to keep up with, and often the way it’s presented is too absurd to bother over.
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A conversation with a new friend, a debate with an old one, a bout of volunteerism, a long jog, a brief swim, an engrossing book, a bad play, or just a good night’s work.� You’ll get far more out of these things, and others like them, than you ever will from an evening of news magazines and canned laughter.�
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