In which the podcaster foists a recap, gives you a status report, and plays with dolls.
In which the podcaster foists a recap, gives you a status report, and plays with dolls.
Richard Loranger
MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST
EPISODE 3 - WEEK 2
This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 3, covering Week 2 of My 12-Month Video Fast.
Previously on My 12-Month Video Fast: the podcaster ditches his TV and speculates on how that’ll make him feel, only to find himself grousing a few days later that the fast is inducing a fugue state for about an hour every evening in which he feels dumber than a bag of hammers. And have you considered how recaps like this present an altered, condensed memory of a series by TARDISing around time and the plot and setting up a provisional dramatic arc to hook you in, hoist your expectations, and get that dopamine moving in the right direction? As if time isn’t already one of the most fundamentally psychedelic mindfucks of sentient life (whatever that is). And did you by chance notice that my pre-tangent recap contains a few phrases that don’t even occur in the previous episodes? You might pass that off as paraphrasing, but could it also be that I’m reframing and possibly even recontextualizing the fundamental narrative of this podcast? I sure hope so! Why not change the context? It’ll keep us alert, and it’s going to happen anyway. Might as well stay ahead of it.
Speaking of time, I should give you a little status report on how this absurd self-denial is mutating me, as promised. Definitely a lot of it this week is about shifting time. My goal is to keep this succinct and honest (or at least honest).
First up, I’ve got a lot more “free time” on my hands since about twenty hours in the evenings has opened up. As I’ve said too often, I’m getting in more reading, writing, and time for working on my business, though it’s not all crammed into the evenings. Instead I’m spreading more of everything through the day and evening and working out a rhythm to keep the various activities energized and balanced. (That does by the way include naps.) The biz work mostly consists of prospecting for naming gigs, promoting my literary services, and trolling LinkedIn (I actually have a spot under a bridge there), since my income this year has been…painful – though I did have a little paid work this week, yippie-kai-etcetera. As for reading, I’m glad to be taking in more books since I have hundreds piled up here that have been taunting me to get to them for ages (yikes). More on my current reading later. And most of the writing so far, which has only been what, a dozen days, has been putting these talks together. That might not seem like much but I’m writing more frequently than I have in a long while and I can definitely feel my stamina for it building. I love it. In my 20s I actually did write (almost) every day, with a prodigious creative output. That was interrupted by an amphetamine addiction in my early 30s – there’s another jones for you, I know you’ve been waiting to hear. I was never quite as prolific after that, which I usually don’t admit even to myself so there’s some a that honesty for ya. I was afraid this month that it wouldn’t come back much at all, but now I’m feeling it, and I’m expecting this podcast to become more manageable as my word-brain limbers up and tends to other projects that have been waiting their turn. At least I hope so, and that’s the most exciting prospect of this experiment. I’m also finding energy for an extra social evening or event each week, mostly literary, readings and such. Sorry no raves so far but I’ll let you know. And I’ve been taking time for calls with friends around the country, which is such a healthifier. I’m thinking of installing a princess phone by my bed to go full-on 70s.
Next it’s worth mentioning that my sleep time has shifted about two hours earlier, which is a major accomplishment for me. Before the fast I had been turning off the TV between midnight and 1 most nights, then wandering toward bed, where I’d spend a couple of hours theoretically “reading” and “writing” before taking the knockout drops. That normally got me to sleep by 3 or 4 (or 4:30). Now I’m winding down around 11 and drifting off by 1 or 1:30. Does that make me boring? I’m still getting six or seven hours sleep, but I end up with a couple more productive hours in the morning, which I also love. There’s one other big difference now: the futon-ensconced reading and writing have gone from theoretical to actual. See, after all those pixelated hours, instead of reading I’d find myself on my phone scrolling endlessly and imagining I’m reading – a mystery to me but I think my brain gets a kind of wind-down dose of dopamine from the tiny screen, you know, one for the road, just a guess but that’s what it feels like. And instead of writing I’d often do crossword puzzles – New York Times at least, and I guess that’s kind of writing but really mostly printing. And then sometimes I’d catch a few pages from a book before dropping off. In hindsight it feels as if the TV had been extending its influence to make my mind as fuzzy as possible as long as possible. But not anymore. I still get in a couple hours of bedtime R&W, but it’s actual, like words in books and stuff. I’d call that a big yes.
On the flip side, as I reported last week, unless I make sure my attention is occupied, I’m still having those weird spaced-out cravings for a while every evening – they’re hard to ignore and really make it difficult to focus on a task. I continue to attribute those to dopamine withdrawals, which my brain was so used to producing at the bidding of that screen, mostly because when they occur, all I want to do is watch TV (which is creepy). But I have been wondering whether to some extent there’s also a psychological dependency I’m shaking off, one of having allowed my brain to shut down for the evening, going from active to receptive, courting amusement over acts of creation. Whatever they are, I’m hoping they start to let up soon. Of course I might really just have an old brain and these fugues are the beginning of senescence – this might in fact, considering my age (63) and the time of day, be the onset of sundowning. (Please don’t let it be sundowning, please, please. I’m not quite ready for that and, frankly, I’m busy.)
There are two things that I can’t quite evaluate yet. First, I know my dreams are changing both in content and tone, but I’m not sure how. I don’t write them down, and I only remember them dimly. I do know that while sheltering from COVID they became quite populated (with friends or unknowns) with complex and wild plots, which is no surprise. But now I sense that they’re becoming more austere and maybe a little more personal. I’ll be watching for any clearer changes there. Second, I also don’t have enough data to gauge or analyze to what extent all that watching had influenced my world view or general life-perspective, and how much doing without is changing that. I’m thinking specifically about orientations and filters and ideologies that have been externally imposed without me realizing. I know that I’m damn hard to influence with advertising – most ads make me want to not buy what they’re selling – but some shows (all shows?) might be quietly selling perspectives. Some not so quietly haha. I’m very curious to determine, if possible, what forms of control have been successfully imprinted in my susceptible little mind – because we’re all susceptible, aren’t we? In what ways have I been indoctrinated? That one might take a while.
One thing I’m not concerned about, because I already feel pretty solid on it, is my tendency for analyzing what kinds of representation are used in any given film or video. This week I had a confirmation of my passion for that, a happy affirmation of what a good thing it is, that came from (wait for it) watching a movie on someone’s TV. What! you say. Did you break your oath? Are you okay? I’m great, in fact, thanks for asking. This was indeed a deliberate viewing that had been planned for a couple of months, and the timing wasn’t right until this week. So I claim amnesty! And if it makes you feel any better, the fugue was a little worse the evening after. In short: I went to my friend Mary’s house to show her the recent film Barbie. Mary is a second-wave feminist poet and novelist who I was surprised to hear hadn’t seen it. I wasn’t certain that she’d enjoy it (she quite did), but also wanted to hear her take on it. Besides, I love bringing humor into her day because she finds it both therapeutic and energizing and she’s my friend and that’s what friends do. Rationale enough for you? I hope so.
It's been close to two weeks since I started my fast and my main reaction was: goddamn do I miss the language of film. From the fade-in tone to the blast of pop music in the credits, I was thrilled with every nuance of voice and cartoonish sound effect – and those songs!. The color palette of Barbie Land is, as every sighted person has likely noticed, indelible and trippy. I haven’t seen such vivid hues since the Wachowski’s Speed Racer (though admittedly I don’t watch everything). The ubiquity of those pinks actually left me pink-blind afterward, creating not so much an afterimage as a chartreuse tint on everything for a few hours. Okay, that’s a joke, though I’m not sure that it is. And I came out of this viewing, my third, with a more specific paradigm of the characterizations, with the Barbies and Kens behaving like a five-year-old might imagine adult women and men to behave. Of course! (The biggest coup there is the Kens and their pouty aggressiveness and tendency to want to Beach each other Off.) The Real World corporate men are of course intentionally flimsy caricatures – who could resist – leaving the Real World women and girls to be the only “real” people in the film. And of course its saviors.
I know that the director Greta Gerwig received some blowback from parts of the feminist community, who saw her depiction and message as shallow or too broad. I’m reminded of the crit that Kathryn Bigelow received upon directing the film Detroit, which recounts a 1967 race riot, as having too narrow a focus (the Algiers Hotel) and as being presented by a contemporary white woman. I know that she responded by noting that this was the first film made of the incident in the fifty years since it had happened and she felt a responsibility to bring it to the public eye since no one else had – then invited her critics to make the films of it that they wanted to see. A beautiful reply, Kathryn. Thank you. This sentiment might be a terrific response for Gerwig as well, who clearly made exactly the film that she set out to, that works masterfully and with great joy; that has I have no doubt opened feminist issues to further exploration for many folks; and that hopefully will open the gates to a river of more contemporary feminist films of many types and perspectives in the coming years. And I do mean the gates of funding – let’s get them out there! Curiously, the underlying message that I got from this viewing was not feminist, though very human: simply, if you want to effect change, you need to decide to grow up. How true that is, and how easy it is to forget. Plus, it’s one of those rare movies, feminist or human or anykind else, that ends with a genius final word.
Whoa that felt good!
After the viewing Mary asked me if I’d broken my fast, so I explained to her the exception I had claimed. I had hoped, to be honest, that watching this would feel a bit like smoking an old cigarette that’s been sitting in a drawer a few months since quitting. Not that I’d associate Margot Robbie or Ryan Gosling with a stale smoke (and certainly Simu Liu *sigh* will always be fresh to me). Obviously that wasn’t the case, though it might have been a bit too soon for me to watch anything like that. But here I think I need to draw a line, to distinguish between addiction and passion, if such a thing is possible. The whole sucking-dopamine-out-of-a-flat-screen is definitely an addictive behavior, complete with withdrawals and so Pavlovian it’s sad, and it’s destructive – elsewise I wouldn’t be doing this. But loving the art and craft of film and dramatic representation, watching it form itself in the moment and taking it apart in my head afterward feels almost entirely constructive, forward facing, an ongoing re-envisioning of the world (whatever that is). So in attempting this project, this fast, for the sake of what – personal reinvention? psychological healing? – I’m also depriving myself of this method of moving forward, also a joy. I gotta tell you, that part feels a bit like punishment to me, and I kinda resent it. At the same time, my overindulgence in this – my dependency – is what got me here in the first place, and I can eventually return to it (the viewing not the dependency), assuming that I’m alive and not in a gulag by next June. In the meantime, of course, I can get the same kind of joy, and heaps of it, through literature and other means. And that’s as good as a giant blowout party with planned choreography and a bespoke song any day.
I almost forgot to mention one small piece of progress I made this week, which was cancelling my Netflix, Hulu, and Peacock accounts. My mom and sisters use my Max so I’ll let them keep that, but I ain’t goin nowhere near it. And I’m calculating whether the cost of Amazon Prime is worth the occasional shipment of office supplies and art materials, especially considering how high it jumped a year ago to pay for Elrond’s new pants.
Regarding that meantime, how about a little status update on where I’m going with this. I’m not trying to write a tract on media theory or compose some kind of neurological hypothesis, much as it might seem so, though you should expect an account of shifting priorities and goals which I hope will ground me against the pull of the Pleasure Principle. I am looking to see if this rash action can help to reshape my life and allow me to do things that I find more fulfilling. And actually finish them. I don’t know exactly what shape or shapes that will take – I guess that depends on what kind of planet or ecosystem I end up in. But with a little spit and grease, blood and chrome, with a little motherlovin’ agency, I’ll get there. Because like the Cylons, I have a plan, which by the way does not involve a dramatic structure predesigned to entice and please you. But then again, neither did theirs.
I can give you a little hint of what to expect in next week’s episode, and a real one this time. I picked up a copy of Jerry Mander’s 1978 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which I mentioned in my first episode, having not actually read it in thirty years (pshaw). Well I am rereading it now, and I plan to give you an evaluation, a book report if you will, my impressions of it, an explication of its arguments and how well they hold up (or don’t), along with any relevant, amusing, or silly reactions, thoughts, and tangents.
Finally I’d like to give a tip of the hat to Milo Starr Johnson of San Francisco, who saw fit this week to supplement my meager income with a subscription to this podcast. Thank you so much, Milo!
I’d tip my hat to you,
I’d do just that.
I’d tip my hat to you
but I haven’t got a hat.
This has been Episode 3, covering Week 2 of My 12-Month Video Fast.
Thank you for listening.