How I Learned to Stop Worrying Abut the End of the World and Love Pirate Television

BY Badly Licked Bear

PREFACE

“...this is the sixth straight day of airstrikes and we are not able to get out to recover the dead.”

Vadym Boichenko, mayor of Mariupol, Ukraine, March 5, 2022

What follows is a story about how one survives the disintegration of the rhythm of one’s world during two years of a sense of helplessness to change the conditions of that disintegration, in this case, a global pandemic that has, to date, killed around one million Americans, alone.. It is about the worlds we build when the world we know falls beyond our reach.

It is a story that seems naive in comparison to the sudden outbreak of a hot war on the other side of the globe that has displaced over one-and-a-half million Ukrainians from their own homeland, a scattering cruelly mimicking past scatterings from that same land. It is a story whose context changes with each hour, each change a darkening of twilight, suggesting midnight. As each Cold War plane crashes to the contested and frozen soil of winter, the charred skeletons of metal wings remain to haunt a generation – readymade memorials.

Despite all our American, survivalist paranoia, despite the lines around the block at gun shops as the United States inched its way to an election where the words “civil war” became common, then banal, as Americans died by the thousands upon thousands in the pandemic for lack of planning and care, the buildings in my neighborhood still stand, shockwaves of artillery do not shatter my nights or my windows, and I still live above the surface of the Earth, and not in the bowels of my city, sharing body heat and knowing glances with strangers in Metro tunnels.

This makes the following a story carved into yielding stone, so to speak. It is still a story about survival, notes from the diary of a survivor (thus far), told with one eye turned towards the falling apart of things and of centers unheld, towards anarchy loosed, toward our future.

HOW I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED TO LOVE PIRATE TELEVISION 

Part I: SICKNESS AND DEATH

The virus is like a vast octopus through the bodies of the city, mutating in protean forms:  the Killing Fever, the Flying Fever, the Black Hate Fever. In all cases the total energies of the subject are focused on one activity or objective. There is a Gambling Fever and a Money Fever which sometimes infect the Painless Ones – eyes glittering, they draw in the money with a terrible eagerness, trembling like hungry shrews. There is also an Activity Fever:  the victims rushing about in a frenzy organizing anything, acting as agents for anything or anybody, prowling the streets desperately looking for contacts.

 William Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night, “A Cowboy in the Seven-Days-A-Week Fight”

It was the winter of 2019, no, 2020, many years ago, now, two to be precise. The disease is called COVID-19, but the year of it is 2020.  Everything before 2002 is another life. One million Americans have died. Three hundred and thirty million more Americans have died a psychological death, the kind that divides what came before from what comes after.

For two years, now toeing into the third, we have lived a different life, unable to gather in number. Birthdays pass and passed in lackluster silence. The sick vanished and vanish into hospitals and die alone. We still attend work in a simulacrum that takes the tragicomic form of an expanded version of the three-by-three grid of the Brady Bunch intro, every participant a talking head – or a suggestive void. A generation, the Zoomers, is forever named after this spectacle in which each one of us takes turns as talk show host or talk show guest, between stints as Audience Member.

As we tried to keep things from falling apart, there were Toilet Paper Panics and Sourdough Starter Fevers. Political subcultures rose and fell like empires in an ant farm, fueled by boredom and fear. As the disease visited itself upon us, upon our very breath, we lived and worked in masks, our faces divided and concealed, only our eyes visible, gazing outward, vision creatures.

Though our bodies live, we have walked the paths of the dead, through the underworld, towards our after-the-pandemic-afterlives. There are physical deaths and psychological ones, too. For most of us, nothing will ever be the same again – maybe it shouldn’t be. It is 2022 and we don’t know what comes next, what rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem. We know less with each hour that passes.

It is the 21st century. Our underworld is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The shadows we watch are held in our hands, scrolling, or flat walls that reflect dreamworlds and empire or both. Trapped in our caves, quarantining, lockdown-ing, and waiting, waiting, waiting, we doomscroll and binge on shadow until the surface world becomes less real, its dramas more distant, more surreal.

In Wim Wender’s 1991 film, Until the End of the World, the technology to capture the brain’s experience of seeing exists - contained within something not unlike a bulky and bulbous VR helmet. After much adventure, in the film’s third act, isolated in the Australian Outback in a community of scientists and the local Aborigines, Claire, who is nothing so much as her own muse, holds a device in her hands, a blocky HD mini-television.

On this bulky, primitive gadget, Claire watches a hazy recording of her own dreams, seeing herself as a child, or her imagination of herself as a child, walking on the beach. She watches herself over and over again, like Narcissus, eventually slipping into silent catatonia, a spell unbroken until the device is torn away from her, ejecting her from nostalgia into the present, into her own future.

1991 was also the year that the Soviet Union collapsed, and the year when the first website went live, and nothing was ever the same again, after.

It is 2022, arguably the future, year three of the pandemic. We are afflicted not only by COVID-19, but by the Endless Screen Fever. Mourning not just the loved ones who have disappeared, one at a time, but also by the tens of thousands, but mourning ourselves, marked and marred by degrees of Cabin Fever.

It is 2022, and we are all Claire.

Part II: THE CHAT IS EVERYTHING 

I’m no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates.

Because I want to live forever in wonder.

The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this:  when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plan, by rowboat, or by book. Or by dream.

I do not see, for there is no I to see. This is what the pirates know.

There is only seeing, and in order to see, one must be a pirate.

Kathy Acker, “Seeing Gender: Adult,” 1995

There is a universe just next door. More specifically, there are an infinite number of universes next door. You, yourself, are one, for example. But, for our purposes, we’ll be talking about worlds that live on the wire, to borrow a phrase. These worlds are the independent networks and channels that can be found on the net, each a pirate utopia, playing by its own rules, carefully avoiding that most capricious authority, copyright law.

While the television networks have mutated into streaming services, each one competing for precious subscriptions, outside the white hot corporate gravity of hundred million dollar television seasons at the galactic core lies a periphery of islands in the net. These islands form an endless archipelago, communities connected by shared interest. Many of them are on Twitch, so technically, the backend is all Amazon’s servers, but it still feels like a periphery out here. No one seems to be watching, at least not too closely.

These islands range from the tiny outposts of hermits like individual streamers Miss Molly Rogers, whose Sunday night stream has a particular knack for capturing the cable television chaos that was the 1990s, to whole networks like the Museum of Home Video, which considers itself a whole network, with regularly scheduled programming blocks by a number of hosts. Within those blocks, a community of stringers provide feature content. I’m a regular special guest on MOHV, myself. The Museum’s Tuesday night stream has been the one fixed place I have to be during the last two years.

Some streams just show movies, like Sickovision, reaching out from Australia to capture eyes in the Northern Hemisphere. Some run a database-controlled mix of vintage television content on a single subject, like the Old Tmey Computer Show, devoid of any human presence or hosts, and feels appropriately robotic in its execution. Meanwhile, the folks at Media Meltdown have taken the bar to the web, with hosts Franzia Kafka and Pirahna casually reigning over a monthly, live, digital drag night where dollars fly into the Venmo accounts of performers putting it all on the screen. I will never recover emotionally from the nerd joy of Dune drag night.

At the edges of this periphery, sometimes on signals bounced around the globe, are other networks. Cathode TV pumps out a near-daily, tightly programmed, 24-hour stream of film, like the greatest, deepest cut version of classic cable. You want Mexican independent film? Here’s a whole dozen. What’s up tomorrow? 70s sleaze. What’s this rated? Who cares? What’s on to comfort me in the silence of my 4am insomnia?

Cathode started on Twitch, shuffling account names and IP addresses, before being forced into exile, probably for content. Twitch is American corporate media, and while you can simulate the intimate moments of the brutal war of your choice and stream it to cheering fans, our sexuality is usually off limits. Wanna play sniper in the simulated ruins of Chernobyl? No problem. Want to make love to another human being? Verboten.

In the far periphery, beyond Cathode, there are further waystations, each more niche than the last. Even if it only has two dozen hardcore viewers, someone has built a television network, demonstrating that whomever you are and whatever you love, you are not alone in this world.

As our relationship to film and television has changed to ordering entertainments off of a menu instead of watching live broadcasts or cable streams, a dilemma has emerged that can be summed up, easily as: “What to watch?” We are forced to choose, pushed to make certain choices, and our choices are further limited by the media territorialism of long tail revenue potential. Netflix comes off like an Incredible Shrinking Video Store. TV Guide is only one thing that’s been vaporized by the endless now we of the 21st century.

Once upon a time, you could just watch “whatever’s on.” Now you can, again, thanks to video pirates, and it’s all about the chat.

The chat is what separates all of these streams from what came before. It’s where the action is.

The chat is everything.

Most of us now watch television at home with a second screen, our smartphone, the annihilator of our attention spans. Our engagement with everything is active, and we are all exhausted from it. In the world of semi-pro television production, the second screen has been merged to the first. Twitch and everything like Twitch, thrives on hybridity, and this hybridity is the chat bar, where the hardest core vidiots get their fix, and is the keystone to survival during the pandemic.

In the chat are your new friends. Every one of them is a ribald wit, a yarn-spinner, or a screaming, face-painted fan. Freed from our bodies, words run free in the chat. The chat cannot be shamed, it’s where private lingos are born and die. In a world without social events, where we hunger for touch, the chat can be shamelessly, relentlessly horny. We are all beautiful people in the chat. We are all celebrities at the world’s greatest dinner party or monster truck rally in the chat. It’s Studio 54 by way of reruns.

It’s also a place of deep care, of COVID-19 diagnoses, of tales of heartbreak, where passings are mourned as ghosts play out on screen. A community is defined by births and deaths, and the chat is no different. In a time of death, community is everything. If the world feels dead, we can live.

Every chat grows its own insider slang, but across all chats, “HWG” is universal. Here We Go. It’s going to happen. In a world gone silent, SOMETHING IS ACTUALLY GOING TO HAPPEN. HWG. Chant it with me. HWG.

My peers are in the chat. So many of us work in the media, and this pirate universe is Our Media and Our Medium. If television and film is a sprawling, anarchic bible, then we are a play the part of rowdy apostles, spreading personal gossip turned gospel. Like the dude in the now ancient Maxell’s 1983 commercial for high-fidelity tape cassettes, your hair will get blown back in the chat, way back.

Networks like the Museum of Home Video have paying members who support the channel, who have access to video archives and, usually, A Discord server. One of the clear divides between members is who watches the archive recordings of prior broadcasts, and who doesn’t. I don't. I’m here for the chat that’s been my life support system through two years of half-life. If you ask Bret Berg, MOHV’s founder, he’ll confirm this divide – there’s a sizable population of us that view the live chat stream as essential to the stream.

Without the chat, event-based streams like Media Meltdown’s drag nights would be as sterile as the broadcast of RuPaul’s drag race, popcorn content, neatly cleaned up for the straights. Media Meltdown also has an archive, but they also have the loudest chat in the game - an audience of Queer folks whose real world archipelago of bars and clubs has been silenced, or who live in towns too small for those safe havens to be survive.

Every time a Queen emerges from the digital backstage, the chat roars and money falls to their virtual feet. Here, on this island in the void, survival is not just figurative, the material survival of Queer community and Queer bodies depends on the energy of the chat. Voyeurism is participation, and active voyeurism is promiscuous in its joy. Even now, as real world drag shows have returned, Media Meltdown’s continued presence in the void makes it a lot more than a digital drag show. It’s a digital life support system for those who cannot return to the world as we remembered it or for whom that world only exists in dreams.

No chat, no show. No show, no life.

William Burroughs, writing from exile in Tangier to Allen Ginsberg, a correspondence becoming increasingly meta, incorporating the larval material that became Naked Lunch, a book grotesquely adapted for film by David Cronenberg, a director whose Videodrome casts an ominous, fleshy shadow over all media pirates, Burroughs ended his June 24, 1953 letter:  “Let’s get on with this novel. Maybe the real novel is letters to you. Love, Bill.”

Let’s get on with our lives and our loves. Maybe the real channel is the chat.

PART III: LIVING (AND DYING) UNDER THE ARTICLES

“I was there when the Racers attacked and dethroned cinema.”

Viewer Sebimeyer, 12/19/2021 ~3:55 PM GMT, in the Racer Trash stream chat

At the heart of piracy is the articles. The articles are the arbitrary rules that pirates choose to live by, the democratic heart of anarchic lives, at ship, at sea, or in the stream.

For most of the folks in the pirate television archipelago, the rules revolve around the liberation of media. We’ll steal anything that isn’t nailed down. We’re thieves with hearts of gold. With a few exceptions, like MOHV’s Fasterpiece Theatre and Doublefaded, most of that media lives its liberated life much as it did before its freedom, selected, programmed, and screened.

But there are exceptions, places where the spacetime rules of visual media disintegrate, and video pirates live under strange articles. Racer Trash was one of those places.

At the beginning of 2022, Racer Trash, sometimes referred to as a “radical editing collective,” crashed and burned. It had been coming. Ambition and permanence don’t mix. No one but the Racers really knows why – maybe there’s just too many rumors to pick the right one. Racer Trash was a fifty-plus collective of highly skilled editors who went one step beyond shuffling content and liberating familiar entertainment formats from their historical bounds. The Racers worked under the unofficial mission to “attack and dethrone cinema.”

In the end, it looks like they won, and made off with cinema’s treasures by making cinema’s treasures their own.

What if films were divorced from narrative and aesthetics? Could films be liberated from themselves? What are the limits of cinema’s empire and can cinema be dethroned? What would it take?

Racer Trash dethroned cinema with a relentless commitment to vaporwave aesthetics and software abuse. Hacking, and then hacking again, the Racers transformed film. The Wachowski Sisters’ Speed Racer becomes Speed Vapor. Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut becomes Vibes Wide Shut. Soundtracks are sawn off like the roof of a Toyota Corolla turned convertible for one long college summer, and replaced by mixtapes. Then the whole thing gets a dayglo paint job in uncut CMYK. Then you glitch the paint, and then you glitch it again. The end result is a speedball cooked down from nostalgia and hypnosis.

Where other video pirates are best thought of as liberators and culture bearers. The articles of Race Trash were an ideology of aesthetics that demanded that the holiest and the lowest cinematic gestures be transgressed against without restraint, that cinema could abandon movies and become waves, cut loose from their running time, color, sound, space, and story.

You can get drunk on a wave. Try and change the channel, I dare you. It’s the closest thing to Videodrome yet cooked up in an underground lab. In the internal darkness of the pandemic, pink light illuminated my dissociations, my body limp on the couch, chat bar off, moving in and out of sleep, waking up in the middle of the night, comforting me, a blanket woven in cyan and magenta.

In January 2022, a series of four final streams, each almost 24 hours long, ran, a farewell tour. An alert would come in from Twitch: “RacerxTrash is live.” Everything else would come to a screeching halt.

On January 29 and 30, during the final stream, a steady crowd of increasingly sleep deprived video mutants grew increasingly agitated, the chat flowing between ecstasy and catastrophe. Conversations about pirate recordings of pirate recordings went on for hours, as Racers, drunk on fluorescent fumes, spasmed in fits of in-group lingo and references.

The energy took on an eerie quality when, in the early morning of January 30, the stream began to broadcast Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet, a “sleepwave” that often marked the end of a Racer Trash broadcast. Characterized by its audio, a loop of an anonymous man singing the gospel song of the same name in a haunting tone, recorded originally by composer Gavin Bryars and set to footage from Jim Jarmuusch’s film Down By Law., overlaid with graphics from BBC’s Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The whole piece’s running time varies from about 75 minutes to 90 minutes, depending on the edit. It echoes mortality. The end was here, and no one knew exactly the moment of the end.

When Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet faded, Racer Trash didn’t go off air. Instead, Racer Trash imploded, and you had to be there.

Numbers in the Impact font counted down to 00:00, hovering over flames. At zero hour, the rules got broken one last time. The stream came back to life, but the signal was overlay upon overlay upon overlay, all of the waves from the final stream were laid on top of one another, a pink and purple vapor-haze leaving only tiny windows of recognizable media, as the soundtracks faded and blended into one another. Racer Trash had gone from psychedelic to psychedelic-on-psychedelic action in a wake that defies all explanation.

No one knew how long it would go on for. Someone certainly has the master, and bootleg copies must exist in the personal archives of viewers. For hours, my screen descended into madness, and, along with the chat, I struggled with the limits of visual comprehension, looking for patterns in the void, looking for maps to new territories.

Some hours later, the screen went black, and I was reluctant to close the window. I let it sit there for hours, and the chat rolled on, even after the end. The chat became the credits, slowly cooling, like the nightmare heart of a nuclear reactor.

Some art must be experienced to be seen. Like the 1987 hijacking of broadcast television in Chicago by a still unknown individual in a Max Headroom mask, it is impossible to understand how radical and transgressive and universe shattering it is to see your television suddenly liberated from your Regularly Scheduled Programming, unless it happens to you.

It’s even more staggering when it’s the fulfillment of your innermost desires.

Racer Trash died as it lived, on television. It went out screaming. It went out experimenting, per the articles of its own pirate utopia, the ship scuttled, mainsails in CMYK flames, the crew swimming away in all directions, scattered, bearing stories and scars and the treasure of cinema’s stolen crown.

“The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.”

Professor Brian O’Blivion, speaking in a pre-taped interview, from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome

Some art must be experienced to be seen.

Do you take your experience raw?

Are you experienced?

What are the articles that govern your experiences?