MEDIA DIET

By: Charlie Mitchell
May 26, 2026

A weekly series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — HILOBROW’s friends and contributors — whose “output” we admire.

Charlie has been a valued HILOBROW contributor since 2013. His first post was on the topic of A FANTASY LAND. His most recent contributions to this publication include: I WASHED MY HANDS IN MUDDY WATER | REPO MAN | and the novella TRANSHUMANCE.

St. Paul…

HILOBROW: What are your reading habits?

CHARLIE MITCHELL: A loved-up paperback of Mary Oliver’s Devotions orbits the bed — though I’m not a religious person, call it morning prayer. I wake up, reconcile with the fact that I’m going to go to work, and pick a poem at random. I read it out loud to myself, to the cat, and into an audio message that goes to my partner. She says it’s better to open up Mary Oliver rather than scroll. Unsure how much of her collection I’ve drunken in; equally unsure if it’s worth measuring. That would snuff something essential. I sermonized “Don’t Hesitate” and “Wild Geese” when asked to give a few words at my best friend’s wedding.

My ritual started in trade school a couple years ago. Eight hour days of what we coined as “Bunker Boy Time” — think Lord of the Flies but in a realm of windowless brick and linoleum rooms, perpetually-clogged shitters, splintered plywood, reek of burned transformers and creatine sharts, telltale shrieks of screws stripped smooth, and the ape-like thrill of electricity working as it should and shouldn’t. Hence the spiritual salve; kicking steel-toes off to walk barefoot over jade pillows of moss.

HILOBROW: Share any media “input” of yours.

CHARLIE MITCHELL: I used to read voraciously. Seems that it’s a tidal pastime now, subject to the ebb and flow of other movements. Podcasts jumped into my life when I entered the trades — passively absorbed stories while doing a separate task. I’d put up a good fight for a long while but here we are. Nearly a point of pride, I’d gloat that I never listened to them, or complained how over-saturated the media sphere already was, that not everyone should have a platform of such power; regurgitating the bit that podcast equipment should be leased out by the state. We all had or have our dumb hills to die on. Anyways, I vacillate between TrueAnon and The Blindboy Podcast. Passive listening — story intake while cooking, painting or drawing, ice fishing, processing scrap metal, any solitary hobby or hands-on task with eased focus. The days seem too packed for reading; that every day must be quartered out to ends and means. Coincidentally, I crush more books traveling light or doing a stint in the wilderness than I usually do back in the routines of rent and W2s.

HILOBROW: What forms of media do you “take in” the most regularly/frequently, during a typical day or week?

CHARLIE MITCHELL: I’ve been slowly molting out of streaming. Speaking of rent — today’s media finds itself on a flat circle, thanks to subscriptions. Don’t like the ads on your streaming service? Cough up a bit more to watch your shows and movies unmolested, and we aren’t too far from cable TV of the mid-’00s. With the advance of smartphones, iPods and similar devices slid into obsolescence, and music libraries along with. Today our music streaming platforms offer an echo of that ownership in downloaded/saved playlists. Say an artist shows backbone, like Neil Young (or Panopticon, or George Cessna), and pulls their music from a platform; that instability is unique to these streaming platforms. Don’t get me going on AI, fair pay, or the strangling of local radio.

To me “streaming” suggests something unownable as a true creek or river, an infinite body where you can drink your fill — and it can just as easily dam and dry up. These are all different forms of rent: methods to elude true ownership. And I don’t like where or who that money and data is flowing towards. With time and resources, I’d really like to create a library of physical media and load up an MP3 player, a walkman with a trove of cassettes…

MEDIA DIET

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