Week 6: In the Middle of Nowhere

In which the podcaster takes you for a ride, makes a movie, and recalls living on the planet.

Transcript

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MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 7 – WEEK 6:  In the Middle of Nowhere

[FADE IN WITH MINUTEMEN ENGINE SOUNDS]

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 7, covering Week 6 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

I spent the last couple of episodes exploring ways to regain a grip on life with a bit of agency, and nice it is to feel at the helm, don’t you think, at least for a reel or two, or till the next commercial break, or for the whole damn season. But just because I’m driving doesn’t mean you don’t have a say in where we go – if you’ve boarded this vehicle (whatever that is) you’re along for this magical detelevisication trip, and you’re welcome to point in a direction and see if I’ll take it. As for what kind of vehicle it is, feel free to choose your model: maybe you’d like a Tron lightcycle or a Pee-wee Herman Schwinn Special, or an X-Wing, a Mad Max tanker, or a good old Thelma and Louise Thunderbird convertible. I’m more of a Bedknobs and Broomsticks flying brass-bed man myself, so I’ll go with that. In the meantime I’ll be following my nose and I might not always use the turn signals but I’ll try to give you a heads-up before I hit the brakes. And toward that end, let’s pull over in this rest area so we can take a look at my GPS (a.k.a. the General Podcast Scenario).

Six weeks ago I threw myself into this podcast like I do any new relationship, blinded by passion, limbs flailing, and not sure where to put things. So now you know. The irony is that while I traded a bunch of that insidious TV time for podcasting time, which is much more worthwhile, I kind of gave the pod a bit much and I’m still pressed for time on other projects – which wouldn’t be so bad, cause I’m really loving this – it’s like getting to write a new interconnected monolog every week. But after I posted last week’s episode, despite its stampeding nuns and mystical rattlesnake skin, I found myself a bit disappointed – first one I didn’t think was quite up to snuff. See, I actually prepare these episodes the few days before I post them, that’s the whole concept, and with that one I got rushed. It felt like a Polaroid pulled a little too soon from the camera. You folks have been super supportive, and I’m sure it sounded fine to most, but if you’re gonna be here for this, I want to make the best possible thing for you. So you might find me tapping the brakes a bit as we move forward. You might find some shorter episodes in the future (I thought this one would be, lol) or I might switch to twice a month to make sure they’re as juicy as possible. I’m just being straight up with you that I need to find a better balance, so I can make everybody happy, which clearly is what I’m all about (um, not). Anyway as always, your thoughts are welcome on that. Okay! Let’s get back on the road and check out those mesas.

I was reading this week through the first couple of essays in Susan Sontag’s On Photography (ohmygod she’s so wonderful! ohmygod she’s so terrible! – whatever, it’s good writing). The first essay, “In Plato’s Cave,” I must have read long ago since I recalled the gist of one of its more well-known passages: “Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on.” Though there’s more context behind it, I know it had stuck with me because I’d thought of it most every time that I’ve seen tourists taking photos for decades. The passage set off two responses in my mind, which I think of not so much as mutually exclusive than as two branching realities.

One reaction created a sort of echo chamber with some of the ideas that Jerry Mander poses in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television on the mediation of experience by television – or the mediation of media in general (and I do include writing with that). Sure I could relate to his points about feeling that I’ve had vicarious experiences through all kinds of film and video, be it the real-life (and well-documented) motorcycle adventures of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman riding around the world, or the well-drawn crew of Battlestar Galactica on the run from the Cylons – or even being a stalwart eighteen-year-old warrior woman hunting vicious robot animals in a post-post-apocalyptic future (that’s Horizon Zero Dawn, for those unfamiliar, which might be my favorite video game and one of the better sci-fi experiences I’ve had in the last decade). Okay, point made. But Mander also argues how people (especially Americans, in the 1970s at least) believe they’ve experienced places around the world simply by viewing them on TV, thinking 1) that most people were easily duped into taking this as actual experience, rather than a suspension of disbelief that it wasn’t, and 2) (and much worse) that people are perfectly content with experiencing global sights and cultures in this fashion, rather than just visiting them, which is disconcertingly classist, as if most people were (and are) just too lazy to wisk themselves away on jets. Which leaves me, in retrospect, kind of pissed sitting here wishing I could be a world traveler (and a little irritated that I’m denying myself the vicarious travel of the pixelated world), when in fact my choice – really my non-materialist drive to maintain a low level of participation in capitalist culture has left me little opportunity (read: capital) to leave North America more than once in my six decades of life. Complaint over.

Which flips us easily to the second response that I had to Sontag’s essay: a vivid recollection of the great amount of travel that I have experienced, all over and around these United States (so to speak), and what eyes I experienced them through. Because despite my paucity of buckaroos, I had a wanderlust in my 20s and 30s that sent me careening the nation’s highways and byways. I didn’t have a car until I was 26 (and then only because my mom and her sister gave me their dad’s old Torino) – so before that I was thumbs out and fancy-free. If I wanted to get somewhere too far to bicycle, I’d stick out my thumb. Wanted or needed a long-distance trip? Often as not that stubby digit did it. To dump the romanticizing, I took three long hitchhiking trips, all of which were instructive and eventful. I’m currently writing them as a collection and won’t test your patience with them here (there’s one project I’d like more time for), except to mention that on the most successful hitch I made it from Berkeley, CA to central New Hampshire in four days and one hour, ten rides, and nine dollars (not counting the food I’d packed). I.e., I was good. I guess that’ll do as a teaser trailer. 

After I got the car I was more prone to road trips, and frankly hitching became sketchier as the late-80s American culture of crack and corporate takeovers really got rolling. The charge of being on the road was like nothing else for me. In a way it felt like the purest form of living, of being an anonymous creature somewhere on the planet, but no place in particular, free of most societal demands and expectations, really just…alive on the planet. How pure is that? Not to mention the beauty of every square inch everywhere. This had to be what Mander referred to in Four Arguments as unmediated experience, of actually being in the “natural” rather than the built, technological, programmed world – and I value it enormously. It remains a seminal facet of my life. All that travel, by the way, wasn’t spurred by film or video media, not even encouraged by it; this was during my almost completely TV-free decade, and for that matter most road-trip films of the 60s and 70s did not paint a pretty picture: Easy Rider, Duel, Race with the Devil, The Hills Have Eyes (yikes). The only more positive-slash-quasi-realistic depiction I can think of was the TV show Route 66, an On the Road knockoff that aired 1960-64, when I was too young to be aware of it. And whereas Kerouac might have amped up my interest at some point, I learned to hitchhike from a high school friend in Detroit a few years before even reading the guy. Nor, by the way, did I snap pictures while I traveled; though I was fond of photography, I was un-fond of the tourist identity in general, especially that propensity but also the whole “sightseeing” thing. I was more prone to visit somewhere and stay for a few months if I could, to see what the place was really like.

Road trips in my 30s were pretty much always with others. They were fun and adventurous as well, with all kinds of stories – the gas cap that sat on the rear bumper for 100 miles through an ice storm on potholed I-95 in Connecticut; a bipolar friend deciding to repack the entire car while parked at the gas pumps at midnight on a Friday in a tiny Central Texas town, surrounded by rowdy high school footballers bearing a strong scent of testosterone and bigotry while my bf cowered in the back seat certain we were about to die. Lots of stories there. But those trips were in fact more like social events, and a very different kind of travel than long distance solo ventures – in which I’d also include most long hitchhikes, where I’m more often than not alone with my thoughts. They just didn’t have as many contemplative stretches floating over the Great Plains or winding over mountains or drifting through the high country of the Southwest. 

I didn’t really notice this until I had my first long solo drive in ages. It was November of the year 2000, and I’d just spent five days on Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota participating in a Lakota Lawampi sweatlodge and healing ceremony for old friend ill with AIDS, another long story maybe for another time. (I would like to recognize Chief Norman Running for allowing and leading such a ceremony for an outsider and having us as guests in his home: thanks and honor to you, Chief.) There were a dozen of us there from around the country to support our friend. I’d come from Brooklyn with two other friends, barreling non-stop in somebody’s car across the country. But after the ceremony was completed, people scattered in different directions, and I found myself driving someone else’s car alone on an all-night trek across I-90 from South Dakota to Chicago. I was digging the solo drive but pretty tired so I was playing some tapes I had brought – loudly. At one point I’m listening to one of my favorite albums ever, Jack by the 1980s San Francisco circus-rock band Eskimo, and I know all the songs and all the lyrics and I’m singing my favorite song at the top of my lungs (“Crazy is no place to go…”), and I look down and realize that it’s midnight and it’s my 40th birthday and I am singing loud and very happy in the middle of nowhere, and I look up at the clear late November midnight sky in Central Minnesota and realize further that here I am for the first time in years alive and alone and anonymous somewhere on the planet and I am in love with everything again.

This is all going somewhere, by the way, ha haha ha, no really, I promise. And here’s where.

So the next summer, no surprise, I took my longest road trip ever. I couldn’t wait to get back out there. It’s June and I’ve just finished grad school and I worked my ass off, I’ve got a few teaching gigs lined up for August and a few thousand dollars left from my student loan, so I decide to get in my car and drive from Brooklyn to San Francisco and take the long way back across the South. What else would I use that money for anyway? I spend a week calling friends around the country and getting my shebang together, I have road trips pretty much down to a science, and at the last minute I decide to bring something that I’ve never taken on a long drive and in the front seat I toss my old Hi-8 video camera with a few extra batteries and a bunch of tapes. I’m not even sure why. But as I pull away from the curb on Adelphi Street in Fort Greene, I pick it up and point it at my building edging away, then turn it toward the front window for a few seconds as I head down the block. And for the next two months as I drive close to 10,000 miles around the United States, across I-80 to a farmhouse in Western Pennsylvania, west and up to Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids and a big loop north through Michigan that leads me eventually onto a two-track through high reeds to a secret spot in the woods, back down and around to Chicago, back onto I-80 across Illinois, Iowa, and Great Nebraska, then a jog down to Colorado, through Boulder and Denver, west across I-70 over the Rockies and down Glenwood Canyon (my favorite gorgeous gorge in the U.S.), diagonally up through Utah to Salt Lake and across 80 again through the Salt Flats and Nevada Nevada Nevada, whump over Donner Pass and across California to the shore of the Pacific in Sonoma County, then sharp left south to San Francisco, a long meander down Route 1 along the coast through Santa Cruz and Big Sur to Los Angeles, I-10 across the Basin and the Mohave with its vociferous Joshua Trees into Arizona, left at Phoenix up through Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon (first time there and I take a few photos with the tourists), down to I-40 (a.k.a ♫ Route 66 ♫) through New Mexico with a wave at a friend and her dog in Albuquerque and into that treacherous Panhandle de Tejas to Amarillo, then swerving southeast through swelter with no A/C and a touch of heatstroke (I love that shit) to Fort Worth, a loop down to Austin and back up to I-20 through Louisiana and a sharp right in Jackson, Mississippi to a friend’s house off another two-track this one through cotton fields, back up 20 through the gravid humidity of Alabama and Georgia to shiny climate-controlled Atlanta, then a final valiant heave over to 95-North up through the Carolinas and Virginia with a swift dart across the Chesapeake, through coastal Maryland to Lewes, Delaware and a ferry across the Bay to Cape May, New Jersey, where I pick up the trusty Garden State Parkway from Exit 0 to Exit 125 and the Outerbridge Crossing to the Borough and Island of Staten, New York, delirious across the Verrazano Bridge to yes-it-was-still-there Brooklyn and Adelphi Street where I slide happy and done into a parking spot right across from my building, all the while picking up that camera every few minutes, pointing it at the front window, and filming a few seconds of whatever was out there.

[Whew! That was a long-ass sentence.]

So the camera quickly became compulsive. I was driving safely (mostly), but instead of enjoying the road and that whole just-being thing, I spent much of my time looking for the next shot – even though I soon learned that the camera didn’t pick up a lot of detail. It was pre-digital (pretty much the last generation of analog), and the resolution was really quite akin to Mander’s description of the lo-def 70s TV picture. But it didn’t matter. If it looked cool, I shot it. And if I didn’t see something cool, I took a shot every few minutes or miles anyway. After a while everything was cool and nothing was. In fact I’d say that my focus on the camera and the “shots” caused much of the landscape to look less compelling than it would have otherwise. Plus I gave myself rules. I could only shoot when in motion. I could only shoot in daytime (which was really a tech limitation, since night shots weren’t very discernable – sound familiar?). After a couple of states I decided that I was actually documenting what the roads around America looked like in the summer of 2001 – which might in fact have some (very minor) socio-historical interest. I recorded only “natural” sounds (i.e. noisy car and wind) or occasionally whatever was on the radio in any given place. In a few places I unknowingly recorded me talking to myself, and once a snippet of me singing an embarrassing song loudly and out of key. On the rare occasions that I had a passenger, I’d ask them not to speak when I picked up the camera frequently (which was super obnoxious, in retrospect). And I’d review the footage every night, either in real time or fast forward – I was always looking at it. None of this was planned nor particularly intentional; but hey, I was making a movie, if a little obsessively, and I had to watch the dailies. But I very rarely experienced that joy of the road that I speak of, that unmediated living, if you will; I did here and there, but never for long before I’d remember the camera and pick it up. Nor did I do much else besides visiting lots of friends. I usually journal on road trips, but didn’t even do much of that. And here’s the kicker – I didn’t even notice that I wasn’t doing those things, which were the point of the trip to begin with. My head, my eye, my mind were in the camera and not in the world. So you see, I do get Mander’s point about “natural” versus “mediated” experience, and pretty darn well. And when I’m watching you-know-what, I do savor the worlds I see, real (let’s call them that, however framed they might be), altered, or imagined, that I likely couldn’t go to if I wanted. Which I’ve learned to live with, as have most folks, I think, if not always happily, as part of the mechanics of Late Capitalist culture. All of which raises two final queries, [at least for the moment,] for Professor Marvel’s prognostications. How did I feel about focusing those two months of valuable travel on making this “document” rather than, as planned, living on the planet? And [how/what] do I feel about the final product?

Second question first, of course. Back home I transferred the footage from Hi-8 to VHS, the only format at my disposal, doing a simple in-camera edit to remove any shots that were too dark or washed out, or accidental footage of the front seat, my shoes, etc.  I ended up with a 5½ hour movie that I called Driving, which was exactly what you’d expect: what I saw out my windshield, in motion, somewhat lo-def in blips and blaps around America. It’s a little like getting in your car and driving 10,000 miles without stopping, in a 4:3 frame at least. You see the road, the topography, the traffic, hear the wind and the occasional radio music or talk, as it was in the summer of 2001. Right in the middle (sorry but spoiler!) there’s a huge plot twist where I pull into a State Beach parking lot facing the Pacific, stop, get out and walk to the edge of the ocean (you actually see me do this!), touch the water, turn and walk back, get in, start the car, and drive off. Shyamalan couldn’t have done it better. And that’s the only stop in the entire film. It has a little degradation from the copy, and I couldn’t stop watching it. I’ve watched it through dozens of times; a few friends have managed to last 45 minutes or so. In one sense it’s like an ultra-minimalist vacation video, in another it is that document as I describe it, and in another, at least for me, it actually evokes a shadow of that road-ecstasy that I missed out on by filming. But it is a simulacrum, and feels like it; without that sense of expanse around your body, it’s not the actual experience of living on the planet. I wasn’t bummed out that I did it, and the act of creation, of any creation (whether making a film or preparing a holiday feast) has its own species of joy. At this point in time, and in current culture, it becomes a matter of priority and choice: live in the world or live in the media. The only caveat is, to actually have that choice you need to avoid or overcome any media addiction or dependency to maintain the ability to turn and walk into the world. It’s like any other addiction really, except that most would deny that it is one.

I’d like to leave you with a brief passage from a road trip journal, if I may, to take us back out and away from the camera. Keep in mind that language is a medium as well, and consider whether this brings you closer to the experience than a film might, and just how close it does take you. It’s written in May 2023, on the first little road trip I’d taken since the pandemic, from my home in the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles, after a few months of heavy rain.

I tear down I-5 through California’s Central Valley and it is absolute dharma—I had no idea how badly I needed this. The endless straight drive that I often think of as hypnosis in ochre is GONE. After our recent rainy rainy season it is full of life, sensual and shimmering. Yes, I know this region has been stricken by drought then massive floods and everything is not hunky-dory, but I’ve caught it at just the right slice of time. The superbloom is lingering in the hills here and there, beaming shades of green and gold, the planted fields are happy as fuck and the fallow ones are rich and contemplative and the miles and miles of fruit trees are practically singing. I am on the road again, if only for a moment, with all its specific gifts: past and future dancing, breath of the earth turning, shifting light, shifting mind, and all the world opening around me. Why has it been so long since I’ve done this? It feels like part of my body has been missing and is back in splendor. I begin to levitate.

This week I’d like to thank Drew Mora, big-hearted gentleman from Antioch, CA, for subscribing to my podcast. I am most grateful, sir.

Please tune in next week. I have an intense week ahead so I don’t know what it’ll be, but I will drop something, either a full episode or at least a poem or a song or a treasure map. But don’t fret, this podcast ain’t goin nowhere. It just needs a little bio break sometime soon.

Oh yes and extra thanks to The Minutemen for the opening and closing engines this week. They come from their album Double Nickles on the Dime, one of the greatest rock albums of all time. Thanks for making that, guys.

This has been Episode 7 covering Week 6 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

Thanks for listening and please drive safely.

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