#5 The Cathode Pope

So all the way to #5! Nice work. Actually, I ran out of the canvas-paper that I've been using so I bought some biggish boards to paint on - so #5 the Television is the biggest painting I've ever painted. Nice, I know. It's also, now, the only television in my house.

The cable-girl, who came to sell us upgrades and so on - she was shocked, I think authentically shocked, when we said we don't have a TV. We sure don't. That is how I am able to talk about it in the way that I am about to. The old Cathode God is pretty entrenched -and when it came time to paint my version of the Pope -the Hierophant - I didn't take too many minutes to realize that I'd paint a Television. Here's the story. First of all - the hierophant is meant to indicate the Orthodoxy, connection to faith, communal identity, and - significantly - to connect the material with the celestial. If you look at the old cards you'll see the pope giving that two-fingered blessing. 2 up 2 down - the bridge between the heavens and the earth. Well the Pope of the world that I live in is the TV. Dig it - the American Orthodoxy relies on the TV. If you, like me, don't have fluency about contemporary programming, if you don't follow television sports (football and basketball) then you're out- you are in the out crowd. People will think you can't talk and they won't talk to you, they'll suppose you've nothing going on or if you do that you're strange.


I'm painting my own tarot deck for the purposes of amusement and metaphysical awakening - so I probably count as pretty weird. In this respect the TV is easily compared to the Pope - cause Religion and TV are things I've dallied with and both of them are things I've tried to get away from, and both of them exert a tremendous influence over my interactions with people and the social world that I exist within. The TV is the contemporary orthodoxy, and participation with TV is a vital sacrament in the social circle. Channels, Cable, that kind of thing - it's like denominations, pastoral or monastic callings. The television also connects you with the unreal - the world of imagination, the heady heaven of thought and shared drama, the myths of the time, the socializing power of the collective imagination. I won't deny, I won't hate, or be hostile, but I'll resist, just me personally, with my life, I'm too busy and too generative to absorb religions or imaginary ideas. I make my own man.


I gave the TV some acolytes. And kind of pillars. The Antenna point up, the screen is the connection to the earth.


The Vicar of Christ carries the keys - and I thought it would be alright to put some keys in this- and where else, you rest them on the boob-tube.

I know this an old-timey TV and I know that there's the internet. I know about these things. The internet, it's community but still an outlier, the TV is orthodox - look at how the internet is used - Netflix man, it's all watch and commune, and be part of the community. People come to the faith, called to the temple, it is a conversion experience.

More than that, I mean - I first used the internet on a TV like that - C128 baby, Amiga and the VGA graphics on an old staticy TV. Atari? All of that the old CRT Television is an awesome icon and I don't care that wood-paneled - no remote control - bunny ears TVs are out of the world now, the image and identity of the Television goes to here, to this.