Nipkow's Ghost (continued)
Disk 7
DISK 7
—First Day on the Job (JS)
Those first few weeks at the Television Monitoring Agency are etched indelibly in my memory; the newness of everything, all of the fresh and novel experiences, the challenging environment, the many interesting people and working at a real job, earning real money, and doing something that fascinated me. All of this has worked together to freeze these recollections, to lithograph these memories onto my internal hard drives, even a half-century later. It is all so vivid to me.
My overwhelming emotional state at that time was defined by a diffuse sense of social anxiety and a crushing feeling of insecurity, particularly in the face of people that were so much older, and so much more experienced. This state of mind magnified every minute and moment, stretching and reconfiguring this time for me. Getting out of bed and getting to the TMA headquarters was my first big challenge. Even that was not something easy. I hadn't considered the most important matter in giving a good first impression. What do I wear? I knew very little about personal grooming or dressing or about anything else for that matter. I knew next to nothing about the world of men and certainly nothing about women. The opposite sex was a mystery, an entirely different dimension, in fact. This lack of knowledge seemed to undermine my confidence in every other domain. I couldn't really even call myself a man and yet I was being called upon to perform some functions that had national security level implications. I told myself that I was sort of like an elite soldier. They have to go off to kill and be killed before ever enjoying the fruits of this world. So why should I complain? In any event, on my very first day, I was almost paralyzed. I could barely bring myself to look at my reflection in the mirror in my old Bar Mitzvah suit that was a few years old by then. My first few days at work were sweat drenching ordeals that left me shaken and pale. I had jumped nine or ten levels in the managerial hierarchy for no explicable reasons other than Campbell's weird confidence and foreknowledge of my abilities and some likely murky pecuniary side arrangement that Dulcinea had made on my behalf. Whatever, I said to myself, I have my bona fides to prove and I will try my best to do this job to the best of my abilities and to keep my confidence up and to put on a good show at the very least; fake it until you make it kind of thing.
My position was sort of like acting as a pit boss to use a casino analogy. Multiple teams had been established to watch various TV series and shows. Since there was no video or ways of reviewing shows, it all had to be done live and in real-time. This required very fast, agile teams. Already, back then I could see how anachronistic it all was. These methods, all with paper-based forms and reporting sheets, with boxes to check off, and huge, impossibly complex filing systems by way of alphanumeric and Dewey Decimal Classification, were prehistoric. Information, once discovered at such a huge cost, would just end up being lost in these vast forests of filing cabinets.
The system was such that the dedicated teams would look for basic foreign intrusion by way of content substitution, inserts, switches, background manipulation, subliminal stuff and so on. They would then use look-up lists of writers from various intelligence dossiers to see what was up with the writers, producers, networks, agents and financiers. Some teams would look for the use of more sophisticated encrypts and content ciphers, others would look for hidden messages incorporated into content, ideological subversion, and the early use of various gender, racial and ethnic tropes. It all looked so incredibly primitive compared to the massively powerful lexical, semantic and grammatical algorithms that we would use to rip through terabytes of content employing parallel supercomputers rigged together years later. Never mind the Lombroso analyzers, face scanners and the grimace and body language morphometric readers. There was no machine-learning in those early days, for sure. Even without any real tools of any sort these guys really did make freestyle fly. They were hot doggers and top guns. Most of them had been trained by Coke aka. Pusateri and my oh my could some of the guys 'watch' TV. It was truly impressive.
These boys and they were mostly boys, from engineering schools or army technical programs, were real TV rodeo stars, TV cowboys from the Old West. I mean they were barebacking it on wild broncos. Without taking their eyes off the TV screens they would pick up tremendous detail and catch stuff that even the best crews employing advanced AI wouldn't see today; it was something to see and witness. True unvarnished talent. Television watching 70s style pre-VCR, pre-video machines. Down and out in front of the TV glued to the set. Try finding prodigies like that today! They were the last of the last. I will never again see these kinds of prime time superstars. And with no creature comforts like we would have in later years, ergonomic lazy boys chairs with built-in computer consoles allowing for video freeze, slow-motion, fast forwarding, image by image analysis. These guys could pick up four or five fake images running at 24 frames per second. Each watcher had to bring an encyclopedic knowledge of their favorite show to see parallels, complex references, context trails and trajectories and multilayered meaning cascades. Figuring out which writer was ghostwriting for who and detecting nefarious intent that might come from several unknown directions at all once with no warning.
Although I was shaking in my boots or I should say my worn out loafers, hand-me-downs from one of my father's students, I knew that I had to assert myself and show off some of my knowledge and hard TV ‘cred’ if I wished to walk out of here with my head held high. And impress I think I did. My exploration of the computer clean rooms with the technical staff led quickly into discussions of computer clock speeds, storage capacity, power supplies and back-up. I asked pointed questions and found to my chagrin some of the answers lagging so I asked for written reports which left many of the old-timers none too happy. But it seemed to me that the questions that I was posing were extremely relevant. My rather sharp observation was that the Agency was rapidly outrunning its computer power and that this situation would only get worse given the exponential growth of media and television content. How could we cope with the explosion is what I wanted to know. How could everybody be oblivious to the looming data storage crisis? The technical guys engaged me on the subject of different TVs and we got into a long discussion about the relative contributions of various inventors, something I knew a lot about. Who made the greatest contributions to the technology amongst the greats, i.e. Vladmir Zvorkin, John Baird, Philo Farnsworth, or William Bell amongst other giants. I skillfully steered the conversation around to mechanical television and Nipkow's scanning disk, something that I knew a lot about. I could see that my grasp of this crucial technical innovation was recognized and not taken for granted.
I felt a kind of floating consensus that this guy knows his TV ABCs. He's alright. A good dude. A couple of the young hippy types, merely said "cool man," real cool TV stuff. They invited me to watch some classic TV stuff during lunch hours––I obliged. The television watching teams were dedicated to a particular show or genre. This was Pusatteri's idea. Basically, a dedicated TV watching team would be attached to an old or new show, and they would watch each show in a group, each person looking for tell-tale signals of intrusion or interference or political subversion; trivial stuff today but big stuff back then in those days. It seems so crazy and inefficient now but that is how they did it. On top of the show based crews were the teams that looked at the macro-flow of shows coming from each network, and there was an ongoing country by country analysis. Other types of media were also being watched or listened to, including radio.
My first stop was the Gilligan’s Island group, a good cohesive group, about ten of them. They had been intensely studying Gillgan’s Island for a good three years building a narrative and content model, a good analytical approach, good methodology, and good quality control. I reviewed some of their major findings finding nothing particularly dramatic but I did notice that the show that they considered the index episode was mistaken; it was an obvious oversight and something that a seasoned crew like this should not have missed. The flags in the background of the opening scene showed them raised full-mast. I had noticed almost immediately that in the first season the mast in the opening sequence was lowered after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 --the same week that the opening Gilligan Island's show was shot on film. This was a pretty big omission. You can't build a good TV show model without getting the initial state clear. Some sloppy watching here I suggested. The group quietly acknowledged a bit of my edge and astuteness.
This was a moment that was to be repeated with the I love Lucy Group; a team of real old-timers, highly-experienced channel changers (as they nicknamed themselves). Real sharp TV watchers, no slackers here. But again I saw that they were confusing the original show with the reruns. I Love Lucy was not filmed in Kinetoscope but in 35mm. This is basic 101 TV literacy, I figured. The original intro was animated, but the hearts and satin logo was only for reruns beginning in 58. “Come on, guys,” I said. “Lets get on the ball,” I recall saying to some not very amused and hostile faces. But Campbell above in the viewing booth was capturing everything from the hidden microphones that were dotted around everywhere. There was an equally talented Addams Family crew. A pretty smart bunch. A mix of old-timers and some new whippersnappers. The younger guys were doing some pretty fancy hotdog type flashy things while TV watching; acting like show-offs basically, wild yo-yo routines with both hands, juggling four and five balls, and other distracting stuff without missing a frame. But again, my main criticism was that you can't monitor a show without building up a good theoretical model that encompasses all of the shows narrative values and the entire content bandwidth; what's in and out of the camera's scope.
My first obvious suggestion is let's get the source material from the New Yorker and run some tracings and trajectories. This idea landed like a bowling ball. “Why?” one of the guys asked. “Why? Can someone please tell me where the idea for the series came from in the first place?” I replied. Again silence. “Well hasn't anyone told you it was first published as a comic panel in the New Yorker by Charles Adams in 64.” Again, no reaction. I let this slip without comment. “And whose hand is playing Thing to drastically switch the topic?” “Lurch,” someone replied, which was the correct answer. “Good,” I said. “Great. Okay, great, has anyone run some good hand sign language analysis on Thing recently?” Again, complete silence and another slip up. “Anyone know anything about the background of the actor, Ted Cassidy?” As I stood there I quickly saw a particular episode of The Addams Family running on a group of TVs and I quickly asked, “did anyone see that machine in the last scene? What was it?” Again, no reply. Well, is it possibly a mainframe computer? Blank looks at me. I said, “well, I will hazard that that was a mainframe computer. Looks like a UNIVAC to me guys. Well, how in the world did that three million dollar computer get into the scene? Who wrote that into the script? Get me some answers, men. Get me some answers. And by the way what show ran in tandem with The Adams Family and started and stopped at the same time?” I asked. One of the younger guys, opened up, The Munsters. “Yes. Exactly two seasons! Anyone here find that coincidental? Yes. I think it's more than coincidental. Let's find the producers and writers and network executives who worked on the show. Get me the report. Follow the lead gentleman, follow the lead…”
From there to the cultural research group. All fascinating stuff, but again the organization and filing left something to be desired. Lots of research on what the cultural captains were releasing on the hapless public. I suppose we all knew that the implications of all of the cultural inserts and shifts would be profound; the re-emergence of political correctness so dominant in the 50s and early 60s we would trace counterintuitively to the ethic of the folksy television shows and likewise and of equal import the sexual straitjacketing of the current generation would have its indubitable roots traced back through branch-tree logical analysis to police procedurals; haunted, guilt laden Kafkaesque archetypes and deep unwellings from the Jungian unconscious had already imprinted themselves across the entire television saturated populace. Let us map these fault lines and vulnerabilities folks, this is the new psychoanalysis, I exhorted the crew with a prescient and confident flourish. My teams were hot on the trail of this stuff back in the 70s decades ahead of academia and everyone else. Small seemingly innocuous cultural ‘drops’ would turn out to have all kinds of ramifications. I can recall asking the team leader, “when did the first bathroom receptacle get viewed in a television show?” To my surprise, one of the sharper pencils, a young woman with multi-coloured hair chirped up and said Leave it to Beaver, 1958. “Yes, you got that correct but it was 1957 not 1958,” I added, to a round of admiring stares. I threw out a few more trivia questions, just to test the general level of TV literacy, first color TV show, somebody called out The Jetsons, and “what year was that,” I asked? “Yes, 1962. Okay great. And what percentage of TVs were colored in 63?” No replies. “How about 3%” I said, hazarding an educated guess. “Somebody fact check me, please.” This caused a lot of scurrying about as I recall now.
The next stop was the big theoretical group doing deep analysis on the effect of TV on global political movements, ideology, big civilizational types of things. These guys were heavy duty MIT and Caltech graduates, intimidatingly smart. It was not easy to trespass into their sacred precincts so far removed from the hoi polloi. These guys were especially privileged and had their own facilities, their own computers, and dedicated and advanced viewing machines with some limited recording and playback capability. They were building a big model out of what they said was the most watched event in TV history, the 1969 moon landings, something that changed my life and changed my relationship to TV, but was it the right starting point from which to gauge the first major impact of television on the planetary system. A deep analysis of the moon landing would take place decades later using much more sophisticated technology. Who was I to question this elite group of paragons and defenders of TV virtue? They did not look pleased. Rather than contradict them, I said, well what was the TV audience of the Elvis Presley concert on Jan 14, 1973? Maybe some research might be in order. The mere asking of that question sucked all of the air out of the room.
A couple of back of the napkin calculations left me thinking that maybe 1 billion people watched the Presley show. Could this be possible? I left them with this open question floating and departed. Campbell, I could see, was carefully following everything. A couple of the young macho guys, real daredevil types, channel changing surfers, and extreme TV geeks chided me about Destiny. Like "where's Catwoman today?" And did I leave Batwoman in the Bat Cave? And did she take refuge in Transylvania? I met these ripostes simply by asking “who should I say passed this message along?” At which point, I would get a frantic “No, no, no. Just kidding. No messages.” Their hard masculine front collapsed in the face of the threat of dealing with Dulcinea's raw, smoldering and devouring energy. Apart from all of this, I think I saw Campbell through the corner of my eye, up in the viewing room folding and rolling his lower lip under his upper lip while grinning, and making, if I am not mistaken, a slightly, almost imperceptible, up and down motion with his head, as if to say, this kid is going to make it here. Good stuff. I think he can hack it. It left me feeling very positive and reinforced. I needed some positive reinforcement to bolster my spirit.
Regardless of this performance I still felt like a fraud amongst these aristocrats of prime time TV watchers and channel changers as the closing day shift ended. The facility was running 24/7 but over three shifts. Given the intensity of the TV watching and channel changing, our endurance and what they called our 'exposure' was carefully monitored by a medical team. No one was allowed to watch for more than eight consecutive hours and emergency medical teams were always available to revive anyone who collapsed under fatigue or from duress. Campbell from above summoned me upstairs. He didn't say much other than it was an impressive first day and that he got some good feedback from other team leaders. He told me that on Monday all the senior team leaders and the executive management were being asked to submit a strategic outline on the future of the Agency. The theme of the presentation was the “Emerging TV Environment—Threat and Counter Threat.” Campbell was inviting me to give a presentation on Monday and told me to open things up, saying that we are entering a new world, a frightening new world, as frightening as anything he saw in the 30s and 40s and that we had to prepare for it. He told me that it was a long weekend and that was all the time I had to prepare my presentation.
Dulcinea met me at the end of the day looking as spectacular as always, with her long hair in a ponytail swinging wildly as she walked while the wind tunneling down the Manhattan canyons bounced everything around. I told her all about the activities and the upcoming meeting. She wasn't happy about the way I looked, told me not so kindly that i looked like a shlump and said that I should "fur den erflog keliden," --dress for success—and not what she called “dressing for failure.” I told that I had no money and that I could not afford to buy anything, that my mother would pick up a few things for me, which caused her to break out laughing. She said, look, forget about that, we are going to go shopping on Friday. It's a holiday from work. I'll come by Thursday night and we will leave bright and early. I won't be spending the next few days at the library. I've got some 'stuff' to do. “Stuff,” was always her calling card word. She had "stuff" to do, whatever that meant and wherever she went. Her absence always produced pangs of jealousy in me in that I knew that she couldn't go anywhere without attracting attention both good and bad. I suspected she had admirers but who was I to say anything?
Somehow, I managed to get through the next couple of days without incident. Thursday night rolled around and Dulcinea showed up around 8 PM with some Chinese takeout. We had a good evening. And then she retired to her room. But it was not a good night at all.