The idea came in a flash while I was on a barstool in Bed-Stuy’s Do Or Dive. The bartender snapped off the music to swap in the Jeopardy! theme, but I couldn’t find Trebek until I followed my fellow bargoers' gaze to the top of a fridge, where the smallest black and white TV I’ve ever seen rested. In no way was it an appropriate size to show anything, but for a show based mostly in audio it worked fine enough. I wanted my own right away.
I went to eBay, steering clear of those with DVD players because they felt wrong, and eventually finding one with a VCR built-in because that felt right. It was from Sylvania, with a whopping 9-inch screen, and came with a power source that hooks up into your car’s cigarette lighter for when the grid goes down and we’re fucked. It cost me $120, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever purchased.
I’ve had it for over a year now, but a few months back when I was tuned to the local news, there was a story about the guy who blew up a Cybertruck outside Trump Hotel in Vegas. They mentioned he'd used ChatGPT to learn important facts like the "amount of explosives he would need" and "where to buy the fireworks." I snapped a quick photo, posted it on Formerly Twitter with a short quip, and didn't think much else about it.
A million views later, the responses fell into two camps. About 10 percent were about the actual ChatGPT revelation, the rise of AI-fueled terrorism. (It is kinda crazy that he did that though, right???) The other 90 percent concerned my beautiful television, either making fun of it (me??) or logging it as the coolest thing they've ever seen. Both are correct reactions.
Here’s a video compilation I made of some of the responses:
This all got me thinking about what it is I find so enticing about my tiny TV/VCR.
There’s definitely been a recent cultural drive toward returning to “old media”—cassettes are being sold at indie shows again, more actual film cameras are popping up at parties—and while that may just be some acting form of feeling nostalgic, it might be that we’ve actually lost something with flat-screens hooked up to the internet.
I’ve only used the VCR a few times—I played a Goodfellas VHS I found in the street, and a great moment was checking out the old tape my high school friend group made when we explored a long-dormant mental hospital complex—but by far the best part of this investment was hooking it up to a broadcast TV. To get it going I had to buy a digital antenna ($25), and also a converter box ($30), but it’s absolutely worth it. There’s something about playing the low background drone of a meaningless football game, or tuning into actual people-at-the-newsdesk news when an earthquake hits New York City. But what I love most about it is that, here in this realm, I don’t have to program anything myself.
Before everyone cut their cords for streaming, the normal down-time routine—save for actual “appointment television”—was flipping through channels and letting the programming wash over you. You’d enter the slipstream at some random moment, tune in for a brief period, and move to the next, on and on, until you got sucked into one. Now, I don’t know if this was “good,” but it felt better than streaming, where there’s an endless selection to choose from, but you still have to choose it. (It also felt way better than the algorithmic churn TikTok and every other social network has become.)
Having media curated by an actual person is a pleasant experience, and why radio will always be better than Spotify. It’s one reason why people go to bars. But there’s something else that feels lost in our shift from live broadcast to everyone watching whatever they want whenever they want.
With our absolutely varied channels of media, as well as our ability to start when we want, there can never be a single broadcast where we all tune in. A few finales over the years (Game of Thrones?) felt that way, but really only the Super Bowl comes close, and even that feels differently because people aren’t locked in. This is what locked in feels like:
The finale of M*A*S*H in 1983. Everyone had been so focused while watching that final two-hour episode—an estimated 105.9 million viewers in all—that, in the minutes after it finished, the sewers in New York City experienced an unprecedented surge of water. An extra 6.7 million gallons of water, enough to represent an additional one million people using the toilet. Everyone had been holding it until after the show was over.
A million people in the city, maybe a hundred million throughout the country, all holding it in so they could watch Hawkeye chopper out of camp. There’s always been something beautiful to me about that.
And while the creation of this particular Sylvania long post-dates the airing of the M*A*S*H finale, or the Cheers finale, or even the Seinfeld finale, or lying on the ground in my childhood home’s living room with toes on the channel buttons because the remote was too far away, or Svengoolie and his rubber chickens coming in through the kitchen counter TV after we’d finished our homework, or the faint memory of my dad watching an episode of the original Star Trek at the old condo where we moved away from after I’d turned five, or any other countless memories near the flickering tube, perhaps my perfect tiny TV/VCR is just some conduit to all of that again. It’s not just the background noise and the five o’clock news, but a physical portal into personal nostalgia, and maybe a stolen moment or two in a technological place that feels increasingly to reach today.
All that for $120. Bargain of the century.
