Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Our TV-worshipping neighbor
When I first moved to Shanghai I thought I’d made a grave mistake. The spy-plane incident had set off demos all over China and when I first stepped out into my first neighbourhood for a walk I got a shock.
It was a cheaper area next to a large industrial estate and was literally teeming with people. I couldn’t walk from my apartment to the shop to buy milk without passing 300 people from which at least 20 would shout ‘haallooooo’ or ‘laowai’ in the form of a racist taunt.
Then time passed. I got the language down and got a promotion at work. Half of those teeming masses, who didn’t have correct Shanghai permits, literally dissapeared over night. The number of ex-pats here went through the roof and local attitudes were changing. Finally I moved to a ‘nice neighbourhood’ when we opened a school branch there I was appointed manager.
I recently moved within that area, Xin Hua Road. I’m on the ground floor of a local , smaller building. A lane around our building is quiet and filled with seniors sitting in wicker chairs, perhaps playing a game of cards on a fold-out table.
The family next door have a 5 or 6 year old child. A cute little girl who always says ‘Hello’ (in the sincere way) when she sees me. The family are unaware of my grasp on Mandarin but still are careful what they say- so careful in fact that after 6 months they’ve not said a word to me. By now they must know as a I often speak to the local kids on my way in, using Chinese, and I then hear them running home to tell there parents all about it.
The funny thing about living in the nicer neighbourhood is that on somedays the sweet litle kid will accidentally blurt something out from inside their apartment as i’m opening my noisey metal outer door. This might by something like “Mother, there’s the foriegner, he seems nice, I dont think he’d steal anything.”
And that’s when I realise that I’m the immigrant next door in the polite neighboorhood.
Postscript: I have lots of local friends here who are kindred expendables. It’s just a story about neighbours who fall into the same 80% we have in every country. For a glimpse into cool Shanghai check out this link to the underground music scene.
Posted by Andy on from Shanghai 03/07 at 06:10 AMJames, it’s works (from yesterday). I like that caption. Yours gets my vote.
I’ve got a neighbor two floors down who’s got three dogs that bark constantly. They bark at night often. I’m a pretty heavy sleeper once I’m out (getting to sleep is another matter), so I usually sleep through it, and other times I’m just too tired to get out of bed and do anything about it.
But once I couldn’t take it. I went down and pounded on his door as his dogs growled viciously at me from inside the window (he’s on the ground floor). It was an interesting conversation, me speaking mostly English with a few Chinese words here and there and him speaking mostly Chinese with a few English words here and there, and plenty of nonverbal cues to boot. It was quite a lengthy conversation, but here’s the short version:
Your dogs are too loud. I can’t sleep. You need to control your dogs and keep them quiet, especially at night when people are trying to sleep.
Well, they bark because people are walking outside. They bark at people going by.
I don’t care why they bark, I responded, I just care that they bark, because it keeps me awake. Just shut your dogs up.
They bark because people are walking by.
I don’t give a shit. Shut them up.
What can I do?
What can you do? What can you do? You want me to fucking tell you? Get a muzzle for your dog. Put them in another room away from the window. Buy curtains for your window so they can’t see out. And if you really can’t control your dogs and keep them from barking at 3 in the morning, then you’re just too irresponsible to own dogs and you need to fucking get rid of them.
You can call the police.
You want me to call the police? You don’t care that your dogs are so loud they keep people awake at night? Are you really that big an asshole? You really want me to call the police? Because I will, and I’ll call the animal control center and complain that you can’t take care of your pets and have them taken away from you.
No, I like foreigners. I want to be a good neighbor.
Hey, me too. I don’t want you to hate foreigners. And I want to be a good neighbor. Have I ever given you any problems? No, I haven’t. Now, you want to be a good neighbor? Then shut your dogs up so I can get some friggin’ sleep.
Well, that’s the abridged version. You get the idea. And guess what? I went back to bed and didn’t hear his dogs again that night, and I haven’t had to go down there again because I couldn’t sleep since.
Then there’s my upstairs neighbor, the old man who hammers at 3 in the morning because he’s so deaf he can’t hear himself and is convinced he’s not making any noise no matter how many times we go up there and tell him to shut up and no matter how many times we call the police on him, but that’s another story....
Posted by Jeremy on from Taipei, Taiwan 03/07 at 06:34 AMI was unpacking boxes last night (getting rid of most of it - why did I pack this stuff up to begin with, I wonder), stuff I hadn’t seen since I packed it up last July, and I came across yet more bumper stickers. I never put bumper stickers on my truck, and I can’t see myself putting stickers on it in the future, yet I seem to have collected a few stickers anyway. The one I uncovered last night is one I might just put on my truck, despite myself. “Kill your television.”
I hate TV. I hate the crap that is on it (and yes, I know people will watch the hitler channel and whatever other channel and actually learn and...I hate it regardless), I hate the laugh tracks, I hate the commercials, but most of all I hate what it does to our social interactions.
When I was a kid, we had one tv and one stereo. I love music. I would be playing music and my dad or brother would come into the living room and turn on the tv. They’d give me a dirty look after realizing that the music was *still* on despite them turning on the noise-maker that they thought should have automatic priority. They’d turn the TV up. I’d turn the stereo up. They’d finally say, pissy, “could you turn off the music? I’m trying to watch TV.”
Never once did they ever ask, since I was listening to music first, if I *minded* if they turned on the tv, and could I put in my headphones. Every single time I ever asked them if they could turn off the TV so I could listen to music they flat out refused. Even if they left the room and left the tv on, and were off doing whatever somewhere else, they’d be back in a flash if I dared to turn off (or down) the TV.
This pattern was repeated by my first college roommate, and in every place I’ve lived with a TV.
So I hate TV. I refuse to live with one. I have never owned a TV.
A coworker in Denver was also TV-less. He was funny, the way he’d describe it when people realized he didn’t have a TV in his living room. He said their eyes got huge, and they’d start looking around and around his living room. Finally they’d meet his eyes, a little scared. “That’s right, in my home conversation is required.”
Morning all!
Posted by Deb on from NoVa 03/07 at 07:27 AMGotta run out to work, but I have to say I just love “That 70s Show”. I think it’s hilarious and I won’t apologise.
But I refuse to pay for cable and so have to wait till episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica come out on dvd.
Posted by James on from Hell's Kitchen 03/07 at 08:49 AMWe don’t watch TV, but we do watch a lot of movies. So we recently decided to get rid of our TV and we bought a projector (it plays DVDs or you can plug in your game system or computer, etc.) and screen. So now we basically have our own home movie theater. It’s awesome.
Posted by Jeremy on from Taipei, Taiwan 03/07 at 09:03 AMI’ve been both the offending neighbor with the noisy party and the wet-blanket complainant who has to get up the next morning for work. Once, when I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, there was a wild party going on late at night in the apartment just above ours. I went (was sent) upstairs to ask them to quiet down. It took a few knocks on the door to be heard above the music. When they opened their door, I was pulled into a Somali wedding celebration of about 30 people. Apparently their country was in a war at the time, and I was handed literature from their side. They made room for me in their circle, in the middle of which people danced. Nice people. So there I was, in the middle of the party I was sent to shut down.
I miss New York sometimes.
Posted by louisemichel on from Maryland 03/07 at 10:21 AMexcerpt from one of my favourite essays, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” by Philip K Dick”, on pernicious effects of television:
But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.
rest of arteeculo here: http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm
Posted by owen on from sea turtle massage parlour 03/07 at 10:31 AMI’ve happily fallen into a subculture in which people seldom if ever watch tv. When I’m with them we make bread, music, art or some other homemade form of entertainment. Of course there’s Youtube but I like to watch riots in other countries and other political stuff occasionally. Maybe that counts as a form of tv. I used to watch dvds at home but now like to hang out with other hominids at the local theater. And now we can drink beer during the movie thanks to a recent law change.
My neighbors rock! On one side live an older (80) extremely active couple with their adult son and on the other side live their daughter and her teenaged son. The older woman has lived in the neighborhood all her life and knows all the history. She literally welcomed me to the ‘hood with open arms. They also own the two lots behind mine where they garden-nothing’s ever been built on them despite our location deep in the city. We share two cats who decided they didn’t want to live with their original owners up the block.This may not last so I’m enjoying it while I can.
Posted by 'soup on from li'l beruit 03/07 at 10:40 AMwow...it’s like reading a novel this morning in the Expendable comments section. There is only one show worth watching on TV in my opinion:
Posted by JOS on from Chicago 03/07 at 12:32 PMHere’s my story about a former neighbor of mine that I want to turn into a short story as it does not really work as a poem:
There was a witch
on Court Street in Brooklyn
that would curse
me every time
I walked byShe was about four feet
ten inches tall
at least she was
about fifty years ago
the last time she could
straighten
her hunched backshe had the pointed nose
and greenish skin
that was thickly wrinkled
her eyes were wild
and her hair like
black strawshe’d spot me walking
out of my apartment
while she ineffectively
swept dust off the sidewalk
with her broomshe hated me
though we had never met
I mean pure hatred
so vile
that fear and anger
would engulf me entirely
as I drew nearI stared her down
every time
but she always won
her cackling curses
mumbled at first
would start to come clearer
to my ear and
send me over to the other side
of the street
to safetyPosted by JOS on from Chicago 03/07 at 12:52 PMHey Jos, nice poem. I stuck my latest on my blog yesterday, have a look. You have to read down through some boring stuff about a kung fu book ... all in the same post though.
http://www.andy.twoboysandtheiregos.com
Yeah, nice stories and nice captions before that. Keep it up everyone.
Posted by Andy on from Shanghai 03/07 at 01:21 PMThere’s nothing better than a poem about a Pirate’s life, Andy...I enjoyed it very much. Thanks for sharing it…
Posted by JOS on from Chicago 03/07 at 01:37 PMBono’s Red campaign is a fucking joke...spent $100 million marketing it, it brought in $18 million:
http://adage.com/article?article_id=115287&rf=23m
“ambitiously set out to change the cause-marketing model by allowing partners to profit from charity.”
Posted by JOS on from Chicago 03/07 at 03:03 PMOne more thing for now...how great is it that my poetry website came up when someone typed these words into Google:
Posted by JOS on from Chicago 03/07 at 03:11 PMHello Expendables...from snowy NYC. Very, very busy today so I just got to read everything now. This was as good a day of comments as we’ve ever had here.
I’ll try to be back later to say something more substantial.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 03/07 at 03:17 PMTelevision. I try to avoid it, although for one reason or another I haven’t been doing such a good job lately---my girlfriend is working in London now.
I hate television and I hate the idea of television, but sometimes I like to not be here, not be anywhere, not be anyone, and television facilitates that. Which is why I hate it.
I was brought up on television and always had unlimited access to anything I wanted to watch. There were always multiple tv sets in my parents house growing up. Now that all their kids have grown up and moved out, my parents have no less than six working tv sets in the house. I tell you at least one of them is on at all times. Loud.
When I was six years old we got cable. Back then it was 32 channels, including the national networks and local cable access. I remember when my father announced to the family that cable was coming to the neighborhood I thought he meant cable cars. I thought each house would get its own cable car, to be hung on the telephone wires, that would transport all the daddies to the train station for work. Before television killed it, I had an imagination.
Posted by Keir on from the hague 03/07 at 05:00 PMI remember the 32 channels, Keir...ahh the memories...or should I say the fake memories beamed into my brain through the tv screen.
Also, I do remember that my uncle rigged a neighbors line so we got it for free.
Posted by JOS on from Chicago 03/07 at 05:28 PMI’ve been trying to post to the site from my work computer and it won’t let me...doctors, don’t you know, are tres conservative and don’t allow such goins-on as are around here on their computers.
Here I am in the library. I hope it works this time....
Not typing too much, just a fast hello I love you won’t you tell me your name, and then out.
Cheers
Posted by Mudge on from Toasty AusTex 03/07 at 07:08 PMThere is some kind of wierd acoustic thing going on with the tv in our apartment. We can have the volume so low we can hardly here it when not more than a few feet away.....and yet, in our bedroom, which is 15 feet away with a wall seperaating it form the livingroom, its really annoyingly loud. ? No idea whats going on there. Im still wondering if the tv is really watching me....even when its off. Am I just paranoid? or what?
Posted by frances on from british columbia 03/07 at 09:15 PMAgain, I’m sorry I couldn’t join in today. Very hectic. But what a day of comments (and welcome to the newcomers, too)...not to mention a cameo from Mudge.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 03/07 at 09:54 PMOh my god it really was Mudge! To celebrate, here’s this, which might explain a lot:
Posted by James on from Hell's Kitchen 03/07 at 10:30 PMMudge! Let me jump in your game!
Posted by JOS on from Oak Park 03/07 at 11:41 PMI recommend sharing your favorite Web Sites with him. As he reads them and gets into them, he will need to turn the TV down to pay attention. Eventually he may lose interest in the TV.
You’ll need to be creative in helping him understand why he should try the internet.
Maybe the noise makes him feel less alone or helps drown out his inner screaming voices.
Perhaps he is not be creative enough to know how to better use his time or lacks reasons not to be so passive.Perhaps he’d enjoy martial arts?
Posted by Neal on from San Francisco 03/12 at 04:54 PM
Next entry: "Stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe"
Previous entry: Nothing Left? (a caption contest of sorts)
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