If obsession arrests you in time Consider me ten, when I turned to mom & said Can we just look in the video store?

It was a schoolnight.

Movies are a Hot medium, says Marshal McLuhan: Hi data, hi def Highly involving, asking little of you.

(To McLuhan the telephone was Cool Imagine)

The video store between 7th & 8th was easy to case Quickly and linger in John Candy on the North Wall, to the East

A room set off by a curtain of wooden beads. I remember thinking, who are you kidding? I’ve seen behind the beads (I never had).

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The cover of Last Tango in Paris: Flesh-colored & steamy, somehow like video itself.

The cover of The Money Pit: A mussed up couple standing by a big nice house. The house was a money pit.

The cover of The Fisher King was such a mystery to me: Just a man laughing

By a pond With a ponytail.

The cover of Steve Martin’s The Jerk was almost too good to be true: The jerk himself

& the night we chose to bring him home I got a little scared.

The cover of Bedknobs and Broomsticks showed Children riding a bed through the sky w/ Angela Lansbury Who’s not even hiding the fact that she’s a witch.            Why hide? There’s a war on & you have these            Special skills.

 

 

 

The cover of I Married a Witch showed a concerned-looking man. I Married a Communist, same. Serial Mom:             A mom             Grinning widely

You had to be careful who you married.

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Mom actually worked at Sesame Street. There were googly eyes scattered everywhere Matted hair of red & blue, reedy puppeteers . . .

Mom, why is the man on the TV pulling apart the calzone?              I don’t know. There’s a lot on TV that doesn’t involve you.

For McLuhan, TV is a Cool medium. It seems right that we, now, should pass the time coolly In a hot context.

The cover of The Good Son with Macaulay Culkin You just knew he wasn’t good.

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Dear Mom,

It so upset you when unwholesome rumors spread about Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Fred was a saint, you said. & we wept

When he addressed the Senate Subcommittee on Communication. Children’s Television as a kind of religion. Often

You could have a Muppet’s carriage, easing through the house Like Prairie Dawn or a rock snail reaching

Sun.            The rare Saturday you slept in I might take out your broom, my broom

While I watched cartoons. Cartoons are Cool media, as you will have gathered by now, for I swept the living room Through them.