Presented on stage by Sheila Heti at Ryeberg Live Toronto (June 1st, 2010).

1.

“God is dead. God remains dead. How shall we comfort ourselves, murderers of all murderers? … What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become Gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

On this night, 130 years after Nietzsche wrote these words, we’re not talking about whether God is dead. Tonight, there is another death we murderers of all murderers are responsible for.

Of course, I am talking about TV.

And so we say, “TV is dead. TV remains dead… What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?” – Ryeberg Live? – “Must we ourselves not become TVs simply to appear worthy of it?”

The answer is, obviously, yes. We must become TVs.

But before we become TVs, let’s look at what TV was, back before we killed it. Let’s look at it as it was in our childhoods, since that is also where one’s image of God coheres.

There was “regularly scheduled programming” – and then there were also hours when the TV did not broadcast shows; it rested for the night. Instead of “The Cosby Show” or “Kids Incorporated,” there was this:

Or it might have looked like this:

A test pattern – a Ravensbourne Bar – a colour bar. From about one or two in the morning till around five or six in the morning.

I don’t know if you ever got up in the middle of the night to watch TV and found this instead, but I did, and sometimes I would watch it. It was almost like playing a game of chicken with myself: How long can you watch this for? I remember sitting there thinking, Is there anyone else watching this right now? Is there something wrong with me for watching this?

The dirtiness and excitement of this feeling and this question is one of the things missing from YouTube, where you know, whatever time of day or night it is, millions are up watching it, too.

2.

There was something touching about how TV used to stop transmitting, like they wanted to let you down easy. They would make a big production of saying good-night – like they were your parent and you were a child; there was a whole, long, drawn-out, saying good-night ritual.

Here’s how Global did it, in 1993 – right near the end of TV stations doing this…

3.

Then something happened. TV stopped showing colour bars. It started showing infomercials – of which there were many – hundreds. To me, however, they all seem to cohere in this one clip:

Cubic zirconia – it was on Home Shopping TV that I first heard those words.

4.

While all the other TV stations were showing infomercials, Global TV was not. Instead of 1-800 infomercials, and instead of talking about blenders – between 1986 and 1993, from 3 AM till 5 AM, Global showed the best art Toronto has ever made about itself.

This program had a few names: “Night Walk,” in which the cameraman walked; “Night Ride,” in which the cameraman drove in a car….

I find it really mesmerising and beautiful. Too bad there are only clips of it here, with jumps and breaks. Back then, it was on a loop, I think, and would run for hours. I was too young to go out at night, so this was my first exposure to Toronto after dark – and to Toronto after dark as it would have seemed if I was alone, rather than with my parents or anyone else. It had a whiff of danger about it, of sex and glamor – the forbidden. I thought my life would be this way when I grew, and that I’d feel this way quite often – but I don’t.

Still, I love “Night Walk” for many reasons; it doesn’t do that thing that so much art about Toronto does – which is make it into something it’s not, either by building it up or tearing it down. It’s just Toronto. Not Toronto the World Class City; not Toronto the dump one has to escape from – but the singular Toronto I love.

It made me love this city when I was a kid, and watching it today, it still makes me love this city all over again; and by love, I really mean love – because love is not about comparing the object of your love to other things sort of like it and judging it to be the best; I mean love like the real love, where there’s some deep recognition that this thing lives eternally inside you, that it cannot be replaced, and that if it didn’t exist, your world and your self would be fundamentally beyond recognition.

5.

If we have become TV – what does that mean for our lives?

It means that our day is made up of programming and things that happen outside those hours when programming happens. So programming is like seeing your friends, going to work, having breakfast, showering, sleeping. And then there are those unaccounted for minutes or hours where we “do nothing” – those hours beyond the programming – and we can choose what we want our non-programming time to resemble:

- colour bars
- infomercials
- even more programming
- “Night Walk”

I choose “Night Walk” because I want more of that in my life; the feeling of being a solitary wanderer on the face of this earth, interacting only with my physical environment. I want more of life as a long-shot, not interrupted by anyone or anything.

On the other hand, we can not choose, which means that our non-programming time will give us the sensation of all four once: life will feel just like watching colour bars, while simultaneously watching the home shopping network, while watching regular scheduled programming, and also “Night Ride” – a mixture of tedium, commerce, content and art. More to the point, our off-hours feel like the feeling of watching a lot of YouTube: part annoying buzzing, part featured attraction, part commercial break, and part genius. This is the feeling that clutters our non-programmed time, most often. What a TV is in its non-programmed hours is the internet.

Is there a way to change that? Can one become, instead, Global TV circa 1990, in the early morning hours? That my life is not like that often enough is one of my bigger, personal disappointments.

After giving this lecture, a fellow Ryeberg curator named Jeff Warren approached me and told me to look at this clip, for help in that pursuit.

Shinzen Young, “Welcome to New Vistors” (2009)

I haven’t yet watched it, and for this I’ve felt disappointment in myself. I’ve been too busy being cluttered, my insides resembling the feeling of hours of watching YouTube. Should I be disappointed that I’ve had muddiness rather than clarity? What is disappointment?

This last clip, I hope, offers a very good illustration of disappointment. Now that we have become TVs, here is what disappointment means to us:

Surely this is a way toward the serene, enlightened, steady, focused walking through the unknown streets.

- Sheila Heti

I used to care more about my romantic destiny than I cared about having food to eat. Now I don’t so much care about my romantic destiny. Now I care about having food to eat.

It turns out that all those years of thinking about my romantic destiny meant not thinking enough about making money. Now I am left with none. It’s shocking to discover, but the less money you make, the less you have. And when you have a lot less money than you used to have, it’s a surprise to find oneself coveting — like a necklace in a Tiffany’s window — a $3.50 jar of marmalade. Should I buy it? Buy it! But it’s just sugar. It’s not sugar; it’s orange peel — it has vitamin C!

I didn’t buy the marmalade. Instead, I turned to food photos on the internet, gazing at them longingly while eating soda crackers (cheap!), hoping what I saw would enhance the taste of the food in my mouth. First, I turned to FoodPhotoBlog. The pictures were fantastic, but there was a problem. I was using my hands to feed me; I could not simultaneously scroll down the page. So I turned to YouTube: I would watch slide shows of food while eating!

The people who made the only food videos I could find — like the videos below — were not like the people at FoodPhotoBlog, who really are gourmands. They were people with eating disorders — anorexics, sometimes bulimics — people who understood themselves to be hurting their bodies, yet could not bring themselves to eat. They created these slide-show videos of food to share with fellow-sufferers, to remind them what of what they were missing; to inspire the eating-urge, to stave off starvation.

The odd thing is — and perhaps this should be expected of people who have lost all appetite and, I imagine, now connect pleasure with self-denial – the videos are completely repulsive. They do nothing to stir the taste buds. They are not enticing one bit.

Memarilicorice, “Food Porn (eating disorder coping)”

This video is typical of its genre. Memarilicorice titles it “Food Porn (eating disorder coping)” yet it begins with an image of cream cheese on a soda water cracker, topped with shredded carrots. What?! The soda crackers are then followed by an unappetizing purple shake, a disgustingly oversized Reese’s peanut butter cup, a stack of dry brownies… all uniformly gross.

Then, there is no narrative cohesion: there is no move from appetizers to entrees to desserts. It’s just a parade of food, indiscriminate: french onion soup followed by marshmallow cakes, then brownies, then croissants, then rigatoni.

The videos, more than anything, make apparent the way an eating disorder takes away the meaning of food. Food, for most eaters, is tied to ritual. It’s tied to times of the day and occasions: one no more eats rigatoni at breakfast than Easter eggs on Shabbat. But any ordering, classifying or hierarchy is obliterated here. Food is simply classified as Food, as though actual foods have no unique meaning.

thestaabs, “Bestest Food Porn”

Watching these videos made me want to vomit. I realised how important it was that eggs come in the morning and that chocolate comes twice a day — no more. I never before understood that a love of food is tied up with a love of the meaning of food — that, in part, for civilized, healthy humans, love of food is love of meaning.

As for all that time spent thinking about my romantic destiny, it now looks to me like a slide show similar to these videos: one random hope after the next, set to some dismal tune. Now when I flip through the romantic images that seared my brain these past few years, I feel turned off by the idea of a romantic destiny.

I can see my daydreams from the outside: I once thought my fantasies were full of meaning — the most meaning. But in their gaudiness, relentlessness, and absolute lack of order, it was the reverse. They were the fantasies of someone who had lost the thread; who had withdrawn from the genuine love of specific people.

I thought I had crafted my fantasies to entice me toward love, but perhaps, like the people who made these nauseating videos, I actually sculpted them to be unappetizing. Just as they actually don’t want to eat, I wanted to be led not to love, but away.

- Sheila Heti

Ryan Gosling & Rachel McAdams, MTV 2005 Best Kiss Award

This is perhaps the most self-assured public kiss I have ever seen from two movie stars. I know, I know, I am far behind and millions of people from all over the world have already seen the kiss. But I only just saw it today.

At the time of this win, they were a couple. But they are also a couple of actors. Naturally, any couple winning an award would want to kiss to celebrate. But is a kiss by actors who are celebrating a win—before an audience—actually a kiss between a couple, or is it a performance kiss? Is it an authentic kiss?

I watched the clip twice to find out, but couldn’t. It’s certainly a very sexy, slow, well-orchestrated kiss, and both Ms. McAdams and Mr. Gosling seemed to know that she would stay on his hip as he walked to the award table.

Of course, the question of authenticity is all out-of-whack. For of course actors are actors, and so a kiss between actors that is acted is deeply authentic: it is perhaps more authentic for two actors to act a kiss when before millions, then to actually kiss.

If this is an acted kiss, then, but acting requires drawing on real feelings—and sometimes, in rare moments, produces them—a more bewildering question might be: are they, in acting this kiss, drawing on the feelings they had kissing each other in real life? Or are they drawing on the feelings of kissing other people that they drew on to kiss each other when they first started kissing while shooting the movie? Or are they drawing on the performance-kiss feelings of kissing in the movie, to mask what might be their real-kissing feelings in their moment of victory?

I like that last possibility best: that this kiss is a squelching of a real kiss for the sake of good ole showbiz.

When they kiss later, for real, will they—as actors always do—be stepping back from themselves and saying to themselves, “Remember this kiss, what it feels like to be kissing”—so they can use it again?

- Sheila Heti

Tomboyfriend, “The End of Poverty”

This is a music video by my friends Margaux Williamson (images) and Ryan Kamstra/ Tomboyfriend (music). The reason I love it is not only because I think it’s great, but because my friends made it. That is, it’s not only because my friends made it that I think it’s great, but it’s great because my friends made it.

One of the main functions of art, as I understand it, is to soothe the fears or anxieties of the artist by making external and plastic what is ephemeral and inner and haunting — to make one’s feelings about life manifest in a form, in the hope that doing this will somehow tame them.

I know the context in which Margaux and Ryan made this video. I watched Margaux downloading clips of teenagers from YouTube to collage together; I’ve seen Ryan singing in his room. It’s incredibly meaningful to me because the world as I live in it has been made plastic. I talk to these people every day, we pound the same sidewalks and eat in the same shops. We talk about the same things over and over again, in the same ways. I know what keeps them up at night. Their anxieties are my own, and I can see them objectively in this video.

There is something about this art that makes it feel made for me — no less than the art that I make is, in large part, also made for me.

That’s because this is literally true. The art of your friends really is for you. All the art of the world is also for you. But don’t you feel like those artists whose work most moves your heart are, in the most profound sense (whether or not you could or would ever want to meet them) your friends?

All day on Twitter and Facebook and everywhere people have been reminiscing about Michael Jackson, who died on 25 June. A friend who is utterly unsentimental about his friends and never keeps in touch, seems to be crying into his keyboard from Vancouver.

Something interesting happens when an artist becomes a friend; what does it mean for an artist to be one’s friend? I think it means that they share the same anxieties, the same fears as you do. Their art makes it feel like you’ve been talking, like their fears are your own.

Michael Jackson, “Thriller,” (1983)

If “Thriller” wasn’t actually the first music video I saw, it certainly is the first one I remember seeing. And it scared the shit out of me. But I stayed pressed into the couch, a little girl. I knew that the fear it inspired in me was the good sort of fear, without knowing quite what that meant. In retrospect, the good sort of fear is the fear you already have; it’s the fear that great art reminds you of — of all the things that you’ve been hiding, that you can see now clearly for the first time.

In the case of the video above, “The End of Poverty,” the people who made it actually are my friends. But what’s most amazing is not only that this is true, but that it feels like they’re my friends—the same way it feels like Manet is my friend, or Charlie Kaufman, or Michael Jackson. The streets they pound are my own.

Because they had the courage and heart to show it, I know what keeps these artists up at night. It’s what — unbeknownst to me until I saw their work — has been keeping me up my entire life, too.

Update: A friend recently pointed this video out to me: a perfect mixture of Margaux’s technique with MJ’s style:

Moonwalk Tribute to Michael Jackson

- Sheila Heti

Marlon Brando, Screen Test, (1947)

This video of a young Marlon Brando gets particularly interesting around 3:50. He stands there, a rising star in the theatre, perhaps never before tested by the screen, perhaps eyed by the cameras for the very first time.

We see him follow the instructions of a disembodied female voice that bids him turn, show his profile, now can they see the back of his head?

He follows these commands easily, supressing a grin, innocent of any criticism that could be levelled against his beauty. He knows simply, without shame or modesty, exactly what he’s got, and that it’s something no one could find any flaw in. This is not irritating or sickening, but wonderful! We agree with him. Darling, you’re incredible! You’re absolutely right!

Have you ever seen pride expressed as sublimely as it is here? He makes the sin seem like a charming, irresistably beckoning quality; just a happy, off-hand way of sharing the gifts of God’s great earth. If this was all we knew of humans, we’d surely classify pride among the seven heavenly virtues.

But so when is pride a virtue? How does he effect this trick? Can beautiful people get away with anything, like Dorian Gray; be forgiven what the rest of us cannot? Can beauty turn what’s sour sweet? Or is this not vanity on display at all? Is it just the wholesome confidence of an apple-seller who plucked good apples from the orchard that day?

- Sheila Heti

This is a screen test of Dominique Swain, who ended up being cast in the 1997 film version of “Lolita” with Jeremy Irons. As a movie, it wasn’t much, and it certainly wasn’t as good as this screen test at capturing absolutely the heart of Nabokov’s novel.

I would wage this screen test is not only the best adaptation that any film of this novel could hope for, but perhaps the best film adaptation of any novel, period. Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain read from their prepared lines, but what happens between these actors and the director (Adrian Lyne) around and outside the lines could not have been planned, same as the best novels seem to come galloping out of the author’s head as the author, terrified, pulls back on the reigns of this dark horse that even they cannot control or know. This video gives one the same feeling: humans revealing their darkness despite themselves. And the darkness that’s revealed is the darkness of “Lolita.”

Wait for Jeremy Irons hitting Dominique Swain across the face, taking her by surprise. Watch how she reacts as the scene continues, and how she reacts when the scene is done. It’s a kind of horror and truth that the script can’t capture. But it’s here in this video. Also watch Swain, being tested for all her Lolitaness, and how she embodies the part both inside her lines and out.

- Sheila Heti