pre-digital

In the mid 1970s I was living in a large house in Portland Oregon with a group of friends. Five or six of us lived there permanently, but at any time there were as many as 10 people crashing on the couch, or porch, or in the attic, and there were other friends who had their own places but came over to hang out with us. This was near the dawning of the digital age and mass electronic consumption, but at this point in time no one had ever even heard of a PC. There was no cable internet, satellite TV, iPods, iPhones, cell phones, Xbox-64, Blackberries, Pay Per View, TiVo, On Demand, DVD Players, Flash Drives, BlueRay, Netflix.... We had 1 TV set in the entire house, and a couple stereos that played vinyl of course. It all sounds so quaint 35 years later, but we listened to radio and albums at night around the fireplace. We had a ping-pong table that we used religiously, and every couple weeks on Saturday night the ping-pong table would be converted to a poker table. On summer evenings we often played volleyball and drank beer . . . or we played music on the front porch and drank beer . . . or we drank beer . . .

The TV set belonged to my friend Mark and was located in his bedroom instead of a shared communal location, which was actually preferable.to some of us literary anti-vidiots and emerging Luddites. Mark liked to watch TV until late at night and he didn't mind other people stopping in to watch a show as long as he wasn't sleeping. I usually skipped viewing on weeknights but occasionally I may have been visiting, or eating a late dinner and confess to watching -- yes -- "Welcome Back Kotter" or later in the evening, "The Rockford Files" or "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" but I usually didn't stick around for more than an hour or so.

But weekends were something else, more of a social event.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7S_XWuKpHc

On Saturday night we would watch "Saturday Night Live," which was only in its second season at the time, and felt like revolutionary television. A group of us would gather in Mark's room sitting on extra chairs or the foot of his bed, drinking 3.2 beer (Olympia, Bohemian -- no one touched Rainier), smoking cigarettes or maybe a joint or two if someone had pot. In this same year, we saw an episode in which Paul Simon hosted and his guest was George Harrison. Simon and Harrison played some of their songs as a duet and that was quite wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P88kd3coahE&feature=related

And it's interesting that the first clip above with Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin is discussing nuclear power plants in light of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan and how these events have mandated the U.S nuclear power industry reexamine the safety of its earlier power plants.

Funny, that point-counterpoint parody was actually a segment that appeared at the end of "60 Minutes" with the liberal, Shana Alexander, and the conservative, James Kirkpatrick. On Sunday nights, after we had ordered pizza or picked up Chinese food, my friends and I would sit in Mark's room again and often watch "60 Minutes" Afterwards we'd usually go for a long walk, or work in the vegetable garden, and then later on, at 9:00 we'd settle down again in the TV room to watch "Masterpiece Theater" usually "Upstairs-Downstairs"  I may not have watched any other shows with my friends for the rest of the week, but Saturday and Sunday nights in 1976 and early 1977 had become something of a ritual.

During this "Dark Ages" I recall a conversation with a friend in which I had said that we shouldn't be at the mercy of network programming---what they made us watch---and that in the future you would simply be able to choose and order the movies or programs you wanted to see on television at any time. It was hardly a brilliant prediction: Early cable service was in the offing and thousands, maybe millions of folks were already sharing my wish. But the fact that the choices were so confined and narrow unintentionally led most of us to some positive, non-isolated moments worth mentioning here.