Beyond Pinwheel

MTV was not allowed in the house when I was a child. I am now thirty one, a married lady with her name on a mortgage and a television set she bought her own self. And MTV is still not allowed in the house.

It might actually pop up every now and again, were it ever to actually play videos again. Now there's the digital 80's station for that--a step back in time, static pictures superimposed over the warm-blanket music of my childhood... the synthesizers, the over-electrified guitar, the backbeat. I keep my back to the screen and type. And when this song crops up I turn my head, even though I know there will be no Annie Lennox sporting angry orange hair.

Cable television, I once thought, was strictly confined to Pinwheel, Today's Special, and a blessedly pre-commercial breaks, pre-marketing juggernaut Disney Channel. It was a Nickelodeon green slime world, emanating from the heavy pedals of the wood cable box atop the television set. Changing the channel involved crossing the room and a degree in electrical engineering.

But across the street, where our babysitters lived, two sisters who were the great awe-inspiring ages of thirteen and sixteen, MTV was permitted. The place smelled of cigarettes and last week's dinner, and I stared over Vicki's shoulder at a woman in man's clothing as a bass spring ricocheted across the living room.

"What," I said, "is that?"

"A music video," she said, bent over her homework, which seemed to involve a great grown-up spiral notebook and loopy cursive handwriting. What a world this eighth grade must be.

I currently understand the video every bit as much as I did as a six-year-old, which is to say not at all. There were icy eyes and quick cuts and splashes of weirdness and... the cows wandering through the conference room, for some reason, I do not recall. I seem to remember cooler colors, ice and water, there in the world of "Sweet Dreams," but then, MTV was always a trick on the eyes.