A helmet over the bed

The American space age reached me the way most of it reached anybody born here after the Union was already over: secondhand, out of order, and long after it had stopped being the future. I Dream of Jeannie was a sitcom about an astronaut and a genie, and I loved it without ever knowing where it had sat in anybody's schedule. What I actually loved was the furniture. Rounded consoles. White plastic. The flat confidence of a decade that expected the living room to be pressurised. I have never managed to explain the appeal to anybody who had it first.

The Videosphere is that decade with a model number. JVC drew it in 1970 as a television inside an astronaut helmet: hard ABS plastic, a smoked visor over a black and white tube, a chrome chain at the crown so it can hang from a ceiling. The chain is not somebody's improvisation: it came in the box. The sphere turns a full circle on its square base, so I can aim it at the bed, a chair, or nobody. A black one stands in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, a red one in the background of The Matrix. Nam June Paik set a white one in front of a Buddha in 1974 and let the figure watch itself, which remains the best thing anybody has done with a television.

Mine took a long time to get here and I am not going to describe the route. It hangs over the brass bed on its chain, like a lamp that changed careers, at the height where the helmet stops being a comparison. It has never shown me anything. A television that receives nothing is still a television. I lie under it most evenings. The room comes back curved and grey.