Ooo-ah-oh.

Years ago, when I had started, without really realizing it, actually being a writer for a living, I attempted to open a particular piece by referencing The Buggles "Video Killed the Radio Star".

"I heard you on the wireless back in '52, lying awake intent on tuning in on you, if I was young it didn't stop you coming through..."

You know the one.

Well, as it turns out, my boss at the time did not and he insisted, perhaps rightly, that no one would ever understand the reference.

And as you might be wondering how that was possible, that he was unaware of a song with lyrics like, "...now we meet in an abandoned studio, we hear the playback and it seems so long ago, and you remember where the jingle used to go...", I will say I do not know. I don't think it was his age. He was a journalist so it wasn't that he was holed up in a physics lab somewhere or, as is sometimes the case with Leopold, a practice studio where it is always the early Baroque era. But he had never heard of the song so the intro paragraph I loved vanished.

I've been thinking about the song lately (1) and all the times that video, also known as technology, has been going to kill something.

Or, more accurately, the times when technology has been going to kill something and, instead, winds up creating the kind of shift in thinking necessary to open a given form up to become something different.

That was one of the realizations that was strong and forward in my head when I came back from the writers' workshop I attended over the summer. People there were doing things that I never would have considered doing on my own. Things like short narrative poems that seemed more like a chunk of short story more than what I would have thought of as poetry. Novels made up of one page intervals. Short stories that read like a single sentence. Now, Lou Beach's collection of stories that took their word count from the original restrictions from The Facebook. It's one of the many reasons why the only universal rule I know of when it comes to writing is that you need to read a lot. You need to constantly be investigating what's out there to see and learn from.

A friend recently took a trip to South America and declared it a sabbatical to recharge his creative juices. That's not really an option for me, but I'm going to see what might be out there for the desk-bound among us.

Because, really, if The Buggles were wrong about video killing the radio star, maybe they were also wrong about our being able to rewind.

Or, at least, recharge.

1. And perhaps playing it a bit too much.