Corporations Possess;
Public Access Is Torn
Télévision Vérité.
Liebography.
by Brianne Schiebler
B: I wanted to make a film that showed how sad
and lyrical it is for those two old ladies to be living in those
rooms full of newspapers and cats.
A: You shouldn't make it sad. You should just say, "This
is how people today are doing things."
-Andy Warhol
And clearly enough, this very triviality of daily
life in late capitalism is itself the desperate situation against
which all the formal solutions, the strategies and subterfuges,
of high culture as well as of mass culture, emerge: how to project
the illusion that things still happen, that events exist, that
there are still stories to tell, in a situation in which the uniqueness
and the irrevocability of private destinies and of individuality
itself seem to have evaporated. This impossibility of realism
-and more generally, the impossibility of a living culture which
might speak to a unified public about shared experience- determines
the metageneric solutions with which we began. It also accounts
for the emergence of what might be called false or imitation narrative,
for the illusionistic transformation into a seemingly unified
and linear narrative surface of what is in reality a collage of
heterogeneous materials and fragments, the most striking of which
are kinetic or physiological segments inserted into texts of a
rather different order.
-Fredric Jameson
In Make Room for TV, Lynn Spigel chronicles the explosion
of television in the private sector in an America fresh from the
war economy of the early 1940s. In seven years, from 1948 to 1955,
television became the dominant mass medium, replacing the radio
of the 1920s and the newspaper of the 1900s and earlier. Central
to television's popularity in the home was its success at entertaining,
or, rather, the apparatus was the vehicle for the broadcasting which
sought to, and certainly did, entertain its audience. Television
watching became the new leisure activity as well as the new focus
of the living room, replacing the spaces formerly taken up by the
hearth and the piano. Television's role as primarily an entertainer
distinguished it from radio and the newspaper, which functioned
primarily to inform.
Television today broadcasts a multiplicity of "entertainment."
In fact, it broadcasts beyond what is entertaining, and has
become so specialized that whatever you find entertaining or even
simply interesting, there is probably a channel, if not more
than one, for it on cable. As the range of television channels expands,
the specialization of each channel to a certain genre is visible.
We started with the relatively simple Music Television (MTV) in
the early 1980s, and we slowly gained the Game & Fishing Channel,
the Cartoon Network, the Black Entertainment Channel, and the Golf
Channel; now we have the History Channel, which may better be called
the Hitler Channel, a second form of MTV (formerly M2, now MTV2),
and the Oxygen Network Channel (the official network of Oxygen,
originally a website, I believe), et cetera ad nauseam. Where the
older notion of television has its roots in the major "networks"
— in America, ABC, CBS, and NBC, which all include in their
names some allusion to America via the Nation or Centrality because
they to speak to and perhaps for the entire nation — the newer
developments in television include cable networks boasting more
than one hundred channels, some more than two hundred channels,
and some with channels that represent web pages. As well, satellite
television enables each viewer with a dish to receive hundreds of
channels, from not only across the nation but also from across the
world.
Although it's tempting to disregard television as plebian entertainment,
something I often do, the fact remains that there are near-limitless
possibilities for challenging and fascinating television "programming,"
for if film and video compel us at all, then surely television,
which can broadcast anything which can be recorded, has just as
much revolutionary potential as any other medium. Television networks
are united in the reality that to produce their often obscenely
expensive television shows and news broadcasts, their programming
must appeal to and support the commercials which break the flow
of programming every few minutes or so to pitch their product to
the populace. In this television game of entertainment and news
(often the same thing), we forget one essential thing: the airwaves
belong to the people. Yet. . . corporations possess the stations.
It is federally mandated through the FCC that each locality offer
public access airspace and funding, and the money for this is skimmed
off everyone's cable bill. In the midst of television's ever-expanding
base, public access networks demonstrate television's functionality
as and ability to be a more interactive medium, for it is out of
the commercial loop, theoretically, at least, free from the need
to offer its airspace to commercials.
Public access television is a general term for community-based
networks that broadcast programs which members of the community
either support or produce themselves. A public access network can
encompass more than one channel, but in smaller communities can
be a single channel. For example, BronxNet is, officially, the Bronx
Community Cable Programming Corporation, which exists from the franchise
contract between the City of New York and the borough of the Bronx.
Many public access networks have free training sessions for the
public to learn the equipment necessary to produce a television
program. Some of the shows featured on BronxNet include Cornucopia
Utopia, which bills itself as "télévision vérité"
and airs every Tuesday and Friday at 5:30 am and 10:00 pm on BronxNet
Channel 70. Cornucopia Utopia is:
a variety show featuring historical documentaries,
video art, performance art, interviews and opinion, emphasizing
the culture of marginalized communities, particularly gay/Lesbian/bisexual/transgenderist
persons of color. The producer and his/her cohorts are queer leftists
of color (many from the Bronx) who document life, art, and culture
wherever they go. They often frequent night clubs where drag queens
and transsexuals perform, thus preserving these eclectic performances
for a wider audience. Hopefully, future episodes will feature
more leftist-themed pieces encouraging the dismantling of the
white heteropatriarchy, especially in humorous and glamorous ways.
BronxNet's four channels break down such that Channel 67 features
call-in shows, public affairs, and cultural and sports programs,
Channel 68 is the arts, entertainment and sports channel, Channel
69 features foreign language programming, while Channel 70 focuses
on government issues, community interests, and religion. As you
can see, the programming for each channel is not very themed; BronxNet's
channel descriptions very much overlap with one another. Cornucopia
Utopia shares time on Channel 70 with such a range of shows
as Church Alive Broadcast which "has a holistic approach
to gospel," Images, Concepts, & Symbols, a program
"made to empower women," and VA Insights where
veterans issues, mostly centered on health, are discussed. Channel
68 features Dancer's Night, showcasing the children and adults
who take classes at the Starlite Dance Studio, as well as the I
am Magic show, featuring "local, tri-state magicians who
are dedicated to promoting the Art of magic among the general public."
To its credit as the foreign language channel, Channel 69 features
El Show de Freddy Lopez, a "bilingual show of freestyle
music." BronxNet also features Liebography, on Channel
68, but only bimonthly since its two year contract has expired.
So enter Liebography, "the drunken cliff notes of history,"
into the mix of network news, Pay-per-view, God channels, and Home
shopping networks via cable public access. Liebography spreads
lies over official Biography footage, with bits of Soilent Green
and A Clockwork Orange edited into the mix. Consider this
official-sounding narrative recorded over VH1's Legends footage:
They started their career as a bat mitzvah band for Donovan's
daughter Ione Skye. Members of the Press were in attendance and
the next day they declared Led Zeppelin to be the hottest thing
to come out of England since Neville Chamberlain's policy of Nazi
appeasement.
I had the pleasure of seeing the Liebography on Calvin Klein
via Rhode Island's public access network. It only takes a few seconds
of watching before it's obvious this is no "true Hollywood
story" and a clever parody of television, pop culture, and
our own fascination with celebrity that is encouraged by mass media.
The show's creators, Jay Barba, Brian Farrelly, and the mysterious
Ezel, weave David Geffen jokes over Kraftwerk's "The Model,"
and reminisce about the summer that Jello Biafra invited us to a
"Holiday in Cambodia" over clips of Ben Hur, Everything
You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex* *But Were Afraid to Ask (the
movie, not the book), A Clockwork Orange, footage of people
fucking that I can't identify, and more while intersecting the Liebography
biography of Calvin Klein with the legacy of Studio 54 and Andy
Warhol. One of the best parts of this program was the repetition
of the censored clip (an otherwise blank screen with only the word
"CENSORED") which, during the Studio 54 scenes, seems
very appropriate.
Liebography is very pleasurable to watch. The clips give
us pleasure, the pleasure of identifying them within our knowledge
base. Besides from sometimes being hilarious, and sometimes also
true, the program affirms our role in this (postmodern) society:
to navigate through this pastiche narrative of cultural knowledge
and fragments and still get all the jokes, I mean, referents. "To
display the virtuosity of the practitioner rather than the absurdity
of the object" is the postmodern theoretician Fredric Jameson's
assessment of the pastiche artist versus the parody artist. Because
we don't actually care about Calvin Klein, in reality he's not even
funny, and we may even acknowledge that his fashion design catalogue
is impressive, that the clothes which bear his (brand) name are
both sexy and comfortable. The Liebography episode isn't
about ridiculing Klein, but about subjecting everything to ridicule,
even things which really aren't ridiculous. Like the bad joke about
Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy: it's not as if late-1930s
politics is something to be sarcastic about. . . but then what else
is there to talk about? We ceaselessly cannibalize the past to create
our present amusements, do we not?
As our objects are almost all mass-produced, the "new"
and the "real" — the authentic, the dream of innovation
— become the signifiers of a past that is increasingly something
for which we feel the strings of nostalgia tugging on our hearts
to only remember that we have forgotten or perhaps never knew in
the first place what exactly is real. "Postmodernism is what
you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is
gone for good. . . Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification
as a process," Jameson clarifies in his introduction to Postmodernism:
or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Jameson, relying
on Adorno and Debord, and somewhere, of course, on Benjamin, writes
that this is the age of the image; we have the capacity for infinite
(but empty) (but fun) representations of things which inspire an
enthusiasm which Jameson notes isn't exactly related to the essence
of the thing itself. Ergo, the ontology of the referent, its individual
truth, or the Modernist promise of its having a truth, is now dead
in this postmodern world. So if we respect the production and product
of Liebography, it is because of the virtuosity of its good-humored
cannibalization of the recent past via cultural remnants/referents
that most of us can identify. Or, that the successful postmodern
subjects among us can identify and consume, perhaps even write a
paper about.
I can't yet locate where and if Jameson offers hope, or if 'hope'
is just another Modernist fantasy, no longer available in this stage
of late capital, this ever-consuming spectacle of postmodern life.
Perhaps this is a world in which 'sincerity' is no longer possible,
or at least in the old sense, and where 'sincerity' now can mean
the virtuosity with which Barba, Farrelly, and Ezel re-weave the
spectacle into their own product, Liebography. Public access,
though, much like the internet, offers a model of interactivity
that network television denies and supresses; you can sign up, submit
some work, and end up with your own television slot. Possibly with
the growth of digital cable and satellite television, public access
can grow to be more national than community-based, something that
clearly limits it from gaining a wider audience. An interesting
addendum to Liebography's public access story is that Jay
received an email from a man in Rhode Island who wanted the program
to show in his state. Ergo, he signed up for a slot at the local
public access station, and lo and behold Brianne Schiebler flips
to Liebography in August in the most bucolic Tiverton, Rhode
Island. This example demonstrates an almost rhizomatic structure
that public access could encourage in order to gain more appeal.
Perhaps after my description of Cornucopia Utopia, someone
will petition for it to come to Gainesville, Florida. Barba himself
likens his work with Liebography to the indie movement, and
public access does allow for an indie-type of distribution, removed
from the television programming dominated by global capital. That
public access is removed from the necessity of commercial funding
does offer a Marxist appeal, and perhaps some kind of model and
hope for mass media not dependant on the corporation. I doubt Jameson
would share my optimism, but perhaps with the rise of the information
age and the Internet new structures will arise to complicate the
relationship between entertainment, capital, and critique.
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