The Last Predicta

The Last Predicta TV

22 The Last Predicta TV Martians, for instance, in their metal Frisbee appeared from no less immaculate chrome borders themselves spit-shined like Art Deco mirrors. A Pyramus and Thisbe for the increasingly illiterate, packed in shotgun houses like shelves, 1959 and ’60 carried their cargo of oracles and relevant trivia: the Philco model 4371 sported a sixteen-inch screen swiveling on a smug, Chevy-like chassis, while the sports trivium of baseball-football-baseball won over even wives and pimply teens hungry as they were for barlight, green men, no-hitters: in short, anything that shines, anything that makes things easy, seamless, slow to burn. Picture my father, the sort that buys a car and keeps it, whines over nothing save his lawn and engine pings, only eighteen when the last wheel turned 23 on the Predicta assembly. He’s looking into the future of TV, a future continually there an hour before he arrives with popcorn, soft drink, and me, or some version of me, in the aperture. We’re a seam that wants to tear, he and I, that Predicta, and the lives blooming there in Technicolor. For each new generation a new genus and the genius who named it, who foretold the dangers the widely cultivated horror of solid state circuitry would be to us who lived by the conduit, cast in the die of predictable strangers. ...