Weeks 26-27: "Clean"

Episode 19 – Weeks 26-27:  “Clean”

 In which the podcaster jumps up and down, makes an argument for impurity, and reveals his true desire.

FEATURED LINKS

The White Trash Debutantes on Bandcamp

MDC on Bandcamp

MDC on Spotify 

The Scriveners on YouTube (diff kind of improv but good stuff)

(there are five of these – click here to find more) 

Global Spider Community on Bandcamp

Global Spider Community on Spotify 

Polly Genius on Facebook

Polly Genius on Instagram 

Hyperkids Africa on Instagram

Hyperkids Africa on YouTube 

Hoodie Fam on Instagram

Hoodie Fam on YouTube 

QUOTATION FROM 

William Carlos Williams, Paterson, New Directions Books (NY)  

THE NEXT POD WILL BE CAST ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21. 

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 19 – WEEKS 26-27: “Clean”

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 19, covering Weeks 26 and 27 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

If you’re good at math or calendars you might have noticed that Week 26 marked the six month or halfway point of this endeavor. [GENERAL MULTIVOICE YAY?] Will someone give me a token? And have I earned one?

I can tell you this: I really don’t think about watching and gaming any more, at least not like I did, and more to the point I don’t crave it – the urge to consume movies and stream shows and even euphemistically open treasure chests seems to be gone. I’m not resting easy yet, but I really don’t think about it anymore; it is not to mind. So some happy dance there.

How fast is the fast tho? Prett’darn, in terms of the main offenders. I kept to my complete ban in October, during which I did have cravings. I considered that additional to the fast in a way as it was really a reprimand after a lousy record the month before (see Episode 15, “Re-re-re-re”). That abstinence barreled into November, despite the actual ban ending. By that point I was busy with job research and applications, along with a rediscovery of music shows which hit me like a minor rebirthing and left me feeling in a much better state mentally and feeling more connected to community. So good good there.

I mentioned those shows in the last episode, but there’s actually more to the story that contributes to why the effect was as strong as it was. And I think it’s worth telling. The first show was totally spur of the moment. On Friday, November 8, I was in the trenches as I have been for months with the whole looking for work thing (argh, argh) when I opened an email announcing punk bands that night at the Ivy Room in Albany – a great music venue that I hadn’t been to since before COVID. The two headliners were bands that I used to see and emcee for and knew a bit in the 80s and 90s – The White Trash Debutantes and MDC. Despite being broke as fuck, as I believe the expression goes, I was like, I am so going to that, and I did. I knew no one in the crowd, which was fine, nice in fact to be out and about and anonymous, and reintroduced myself to the singers of each band. And I had a blast. The Debutantes were raucous and raunchy, with singer Ginger Coyote, who must be a few years older than I [CRITICAL VOICE: That’s really old…] [ME: Shut the fuck up.], sporting long and lovely bright green hair, screaming for ten-inch dick through much of their set (apparently she really wanted it). MDC a.k.a Millions of Dead Cops a.k.a. Multi-Death Corporations, among other appellations, followed up with good old-fashioned pissed-off punk, and what a week it was for that, just a few days after the smellection, with singer Dave Dictor and the original crew in fine, fine form and defiant as ever, thank you very much. And what a joy it was to jump up and down in a throng with both middle fingers in the air yelling at the top of my lungs. I’m just sayin.

I made it through both bands on exactly one beer, got home a little past 1 and still managed to get up at 9 to organize equipment for a poetry reading that I was hosting all afternoon at a park in Berkeley. There were twelve featured readers and a large audience with emotions running high, and it felt like part of my job to bring a sense of harmony to the gathering, which I think I managed but I’m not the one to ask. At any rate, it was a terrific read and I left the event feeling even more levitational. Got home to find an email from a friend which read: “Hey I’ve got two passes to see Lydia Lunch tomorrow at the Ivy Room. Wanna come?” Those of you familiar with the punk monologist Lunch (not to be confused with Naked Lunch or Lunch Poems) might imagine that I yelled, “Lydia Lunch!” – when in fact all I saw at first was “Ivy Room”, the venue that I’d gone to the night before for the first time in years and was now being offered the chance to patronize for the second time in three days at no cost. Of course I immediately said, “Yes!” Then I said, “Lydia Lunch!”

I don’t know about you, but when I end up unexpectedly more than once in the same location that’s out of my usual range in a short amount of time, I wonder why I’m being drawn there, by circumstance or whatever. I mentioned this in conversation on the way there with my generous friend D.S. Black, who expressed an interest in psychogeography, which he views via Guy Debord’s definition as “the study of the...specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." I countered that I found it closer to a phenomenon of geomancy, meaning for me the intrinsic power of a place, noting that in this case his invitation had no direct connection to my mental state or processes, and much as I had been intrigued by the Ivy Room coincidence, and I would have likely said yes regardless, I considered it to be the place itself, rather than my mind, guiding me there. We decided to split the difference and start a company offering services from both perspectives.

Lydia def had her game on, still full of dark energy and foaming over with snarky wit, though her set pretty much amounted to a (quite good) thirty-minute poop joke. The opening band, however, blew me away. They were The Scriveners (nice writerly name), a trio of double-bass, drums, and hollow-body guitar (with occasional effects) who to my ear created a wandering and complex jazzscape that left me, yes, levitating even further. Holy geomancy!

The next day, Monday the 11th, I noticed that Polly Genius, one of the bands headed by my old friend Angela Coon, was playing the following Sunday at…the Ivy Room. I’d been wanting to catch the Ange in action for years, but hadn’t since, well, I wasn’t going to music shows. (Yes, I’m weird that way; see Episode 5, “Sound and Silence” for details.) But now I was, plus Ivy Room, and I’d accrued a little cash so goddamn it I was gonna go. So I did. And here’s where community really floods in. Turned out the opening band, Global Spider Community, who did quirky fun rock (I’m so bad at describing music), featured two members who were in the band Eskimo that I loved and shared stages with many times in the 1980s. (They’re mentioned in Episode 7, “In the Middle of Nowhere,” and you can hear my favorite Eskimo song in Episode 8, “A Musical Interlude”.) So those two guys were there (turns out the singer and bandleader is married to one of them), and a poet-friend and her partner were right up front, having known the band for years. I’d met two friends there myself, and over the course of the evening I ran into close to a dozen people that I knew from different parts of my life, some of whom know each other in various ways and some not at all. And this wasn’t just a bunch of Hi how’ve you beens; I had a lot of warm exchanges and catch-ups, all too brief, that felt like wading into a vital and rejuvenating hot spring. It felt like opening a treasure chest, and it’s on my map now with a great big X.

They say that “third time’s the charm” and “third time pays for all” and, gosh, lots of other axioms, and I’ve third-timed it many times in the past. and this seemed so clearly the reason that the Ivy Room had been beckoning me for the prior nine days. Feel free to have your own perspective but I’m happy with that. Polly Genius, which I’d neglected to mention is a PJ Harvey tribute band, finished off the night with an hour of thunderous and loving woman-power songs that rolled over us like a series of tsunamis. To mitigate my sketchy descriptions of all these bands, by the way, I’ve put links as available in the episode notes so you can have a listen for yourselves.

Whether all this music washed away the video-crave, I’ll never know. But somewhere in there it up and evaporated. It also helped that I spent the second week of November vigorously cleaning and prepping my apartment for a visit from my mom and sister the week after. That was one serious clean and some serious work. I even had to utilize this venerable mantra, which some of you may recognize:

Dust is the mind-killer. It is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my dust and permit it to pass over and through me. And when it has gone, I will turn my cleaning eye to see its path. Where the dust has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

That’s from some ancient culture, I believe, and proved very useful and powerful. Anyway Mom is 85 and this was her first real vacation, which she so deserves, after ten years caregiving for my dad, who died in 2017, followed by seven years for my brother, who passed this February. My apartment can be cluttery though never really filthy (except for the d-word), but I wanted their stay to be as pleasant as possible and the space itself to be spic and spanny, and with the help of my Number One, we made it so. [CRITICAL VOICE: That was a lot of work…] [ME: Yes it was.] All with not a craving in sight, unless they got swept up with the dust.

Amidst all that, I did in fact watch four movies on my laptop this past month, and before you can say OMG here’s the rationale, here’s the rationale. I’m helping someone with a screenplay, all hush-hush of course, which has partly to do with Katherine Hepburn in the 1940s, and I’d agreed to take in a bit of her oeuvre from the era. So I watched Keeper of the Flame, Bringing Up Baby, and Adam’s Rib (saw the latter with Mom, which she very much enjoyed). There’s three-quarters of your rationale. For the fourth film I just don’t have one, except that I was exhausted and overfull of language one night last week and really in need of a non-verbal, non-creative divertissement (I’m really full of French today!) – though notably it didn’t feel in any way like a craving for pixels; I just needed something to occupy my time and sit there and be dumb, just like old-fashioned TV. So I watched the recent remake of Salem’s Lot, from one of the best early Stephen King books about a small town being overrun by vampires, which I’d re-read for didactic purposes during the pandemic when I was writing a novel about a small town being overrun by…something else. The book has been adapted twice before, both times as mini-series in the late 70s and the 00s, and both are pretty good. This one, designed as a two-hour film that released recently on HBO MAX, met with mixed reviews, and I sure found out why. Though adapted by Gary Dauberman who wrote and directed the two masterful recent It movies, this one tells about a quarter of a similarly epic tale with several dramatic and inexplicable changes. It’s probably fine for those unfamiliar with the book, but for those of us who love it, it’s a bowl of buttered noodles. To step back to my actual point here, while I found watching all four films to be enjoyable, I also found the experience overall to be adopaminergic, a not-French term meaning “without a drop of dopamine.” I did get a couple jolts of adrenaline during the revamped (haha) climactic scenes of Salem’s Lot, but really none of that familiar rush. Maybe it was held in check by my disappointment in the unsatisfying and amazingly illogical new ending, but regardless I consider that lack of dopa to be a very good sign.

That’s especially true because I have been continuing to indulge overmuch (to my mind) in Reels, those super-short TikToky videos on Instagram. And this is in fact the final part of the answer to the question that I posed at the start of this episode regarding how the fast is going – and I know this isn’t what you expected to hear after my claims of it going so well. In fact, WTF! you might rightfully exclaim. It’s not like hours of indulgence at a time, usually just a few minutes as a diversion in-between work tasks, but sometimes it can be half an hour or more, and certainly a lot of those Reels, as far as I’m concerned, do waste my time, even at 30-60 seconds or whatever a pop. Which raises the further question: Am I clean of the video-crave, as I seem to be claiming, or are the Reels functioning as a type of methadone?

To answer that as clearly as possible, if that, I think we need to examine what in the hell I mean by “clean”. I mean, how clean is clean? How clean do you need to be to be viably clean? What is “clean” exactly? What does it mean? I’m not talking about dictionary definitions or etymologies here, which for “clean” are fairly direct and include a lot of the current denotations (and connotations) of the word; nor do I intend to cite from holistic thought or literature per se; I’m just riffing here without basis or reference, as I am egregiously wont to do. Here we go.

So we come out of our mothers, each of us a flailing sack of chemicals. Are we clean then? Can we use that as a baseline for purity? I think the most we might claim is that we’re close to purely our mothers, full of whatever their bodies hold, their flora, what’s in their bloodstream. In 1960 when I was born it was common and accepted practice to sedate the mother to relieve them of the “unnecessary discomfort” of birth. For my delivery and that of two of my siblings, my mom was given ether – no shit – knocked right out and doesn’t remember a painless thing. So I, in fact, was born anaesthetized. No clean starter blood for this mammal. But at least I survived, was not the case with all infants or moms subjected to this practice. Even more deadly at the time was a “twilight sleep” induced with a cocktail of morphine and scopolamine, so in a way I really lucked out – and certainly more so that the many who are born with addictive substances in their system and have to undergo withdrawal. Simple rule: we bear what our bearers bear, whatever that might be, though it’s unlikely (and maybe impossible) to be without impurities. And for that matter, wouldn’t a certain level of “impurities” be the norm?

So I was certainly born with ether in my blood, which I would vote to be not the norm, and who knows what other supplements and pharma they put into her body to “assist” with the pregnancy and delivery. Mom also notes having seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho the week before as a possible influence on my non-normative character (though she might be joking).

From Day One I was “nourished” with manufactured baby formula, which was also prescribed practice at the time. If you listened to Episode 4 about Jerry Mander’s book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, you might recall his early note of astonishment over an expensive scientific study done in the 1960s which determined that a human mother’s milk is healthier for infants than an artificial substitute – which was my breakie, lunch, and dinner, and…. was soon replaced by processed pureed baby foods (Gerber. Gerber. Gerber.) also acclaimed by the “experts” of the day. This was followed by Cream of Rice sprinkled with cinnamon-sugar and eventually a decade or more of Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, and Captain Crunch (those Crunchberries did rock), starting pretty much every day with a bloodstream and nervous system steeped in pure cane sugar. It’s amazing that they didn’t have us sticking our tongues in electrical sockets – which might in the long run have been healthier. (Please note that the “they” in that joke was in reference to the “experts”, not our parents who were in fact raising us in ways they’d been led to believe were perfectly healthy – as many still do.) So historically not a lot of clean for this sack of chemicals, no sir no ma’am no in-between. In fact marketing that much sugar into a pre-adolescent bloodstream might qualify as a method of programmatic social control, not to mention drug dealing, and should probably be criminalized. Just my humble opinion.

And you know how the story goes from there: over the decades I’ve put all kinds of shit, pleasurable and not, into this sack – amphetamines, opioids, alcohol, sugar sugar sugar, but also light and color and sound and language and ideology. And I’ve been referring to this fast from the start as a detox, a de-poisoning, the quelling of an addiction – which is part of our metabolic lives. We toxify and detox, in waves, like everything else. This is no big revelation – it’s just day-to-day biology; it’s natural law. It’s how the body functions. We make our chemical abodes and they make themselves cleaner, then less clean, then cleaner again, which always been the case, since just about anything and pretty much everything can be a toxin, a foreign substance, an “impurity”…. No matter how much you work out, what your Body Mass Index might be, how organic you live, you still have toxins and you always will. You’re never perfectly clean. Nothing is. You can’t be. Clean is an ideal, an absolute, a goal and a motivator like “strong,” “smart,” “woke,” “free,” “human”…all things to strive for and impossible to fully reach or become. It’s the striving that keeps you going, but it’s not why you’re alive – do you see what I’m getting at? It might be your energizing force, your vis vitae, but isn’t life about more than keeping that energy going? I just don’t think that the purpose of life is to keep your heart beating. And of course there’s no right or wrong in that debate. But when you’re only striving for an idea that you can never achieve (because it’s an ideal, it exists in the realm of idea alone)…

gotta look good

gotta keep my weight down

gotta impress [fill in the blank]

gotta make more money

gotta raise my status in some artificial hierarchy

gotta do everything perfectly and with moral certitude…

…when do you actually live? And anyone who tells you that you’re alive to keep your heart beating, to strive endlessly for something imaginary, is using that ideal as a control mechanism and is gaslighting you. Again just my humble opinion.

The reason that your heart is beating is to allow you to take your next step, is to give you agency. And living by prescription limits and eliminates agency. Which is I’m pretty sure the reason that I started this fast – to reclaim some personal agency, to refound and strengthen my sense of purpose and my functionality therein. Didn’t I say something like that? So ultimately I’m less concerned with how “clean” I am (or this sack of chemicals is), and more concerned with how clear-minded and present I am, both in general and at any given moment.

For example: after seeing those music shows, having engaged in the joy and whelm of community, I felt more connected to purpose and clear of mind than I had in a long time, regardless of the bit of beer or kratom that I’d consumed or how many Insta Reels I’d been watching of cute people dancing…. And I do often feel more clear of mind when I allow myself a little down time, a little not-critical-thought-and-decision-time, a little rest, which makes me more astute when it is that time, and which these days is often. I feel better when I allow myself rest – it’s so basic – as I’m sure you’ve noticed, having been so caught up in all this cleansing, I forgot what happens when that’s all you do. I forgot to occasionally be kind to myself. I forgot to allow.

So I step back a moment from all that militant cleansing, to re-perspective and refocus the lens, and find at this juncture that the vital core of this project is partly a fast and partly a reclaiming, is about clarity and agency and whatever it takes to gather and maintain them. And it’s about shaking off the addictive shackles so kindly provided for us by the Capitalist media and culture factory – and I did say the shackles, not the media and culture. But the aim, more or less, is to retake the helm of my forward motion in as non-illusory a manner as possible, what we mundanely call “regaining control of my life” – which itself has so many shifting and mirrored surfaces let alone the sand-trap words “control” and “life”, each of which carry their own set of semantic shackles hooked to their belts.

In other words, I just want to do my fucking work – what feels like my work to me, at any rate, this creative muck that is by nature, however much some may appreciate it, of less importance to anyone else but is my foundation and reason to live – what my heart beats for – both process and product. It’s my airway and I don’t like it being blocked – which of course it’s gonna be at times, because life.

And I’m not at all the first to think this. Here’s one of my favorite short passages from Paterson, the mid-20th Century book-length poem/cross-genre piece by William Carlos Williams about, ostensibly, Paterson, New Jersey, and most everything else. In these lines he addresses the challenges of the creative act in modern culture (from shifting perspectives).

They have

manoeuvred it so that to write
is a fire and not only of the blood.

The writing is nothing, the being
in a position to write (that’s

where they get you) is nine tenths 
of the difficulty: seduction 

or strong arm stuff. The writing
should be a relief,  

relief from the conditions
which as we advance become—a fire, 

a destroying fire. For the writing
is also an attack and means must be 

found to scotch it – at the root 
if possible. So that 

to write, nine tenths of the problem
is to live. They see 

to it, not by intellection but
by sub-intellection (to want to be 

blind as a pretext for
saying, We’re so proud of you! 

A wonderful gift! How do
you find the time for it in 

your busy life? It must be a great
thing to have such a pastime. 

But you were always a strange 
boy. How’s your mother?) 

— the cyclonic fury, the fire,
the leaden flood and finally
the cost— 

Your father was such a nice man. 
I remember him well        . 

Or, Geeze, Doc, I guess it’s all right
but what the hell does it mean?

There he’s discussing anti-intellectualism and the belittlement and devaluation of creative endeavors – of writing in particular – by the entrenched belief systems and disengaged mindset of Mid-20th Century Americans – all still rather relevant a mere 80 years later – 

– when the airway (to return to my metaphor), the act of creation continues to be blocked again and again by so many forces in Western culture, some of which I’ve referred to in general already – the enervating and debilitating ideological control mechanisms (take your pick), the addictive substances strewn literally across the culturescape, the constant distractions of mesmerizing media, not to mention (and I’m about to) the contemporary system of paid labor and credit banking which is designed to exhaust, impoverish, and essentially enslave workers at every level below “ownership”.

…the being
in a position to write (that’s 

where they get you) is nine tenths 
of the difficulty…

No shit, Dr. Williams.

All of which together essentially form a quicksand for the working artist – there’s a very good reason why the arts have long been deemed an activity of the “leisure class.” But we can leave my sentiments on class war for another time. Or not.

The most motivated of those stricken by the creative urge often scrape out moments of candlelight to allow it to manifest between eking a survival and begging The Man a penny for an errand. This is by no means a contemporary phenomenon and in fact has been around since the existence of social hierarchies; we can cite centuries and millennia in which women, racial and cultural minorities, and the uneducated were allowed no greater access to creative activity than the hanging of yellow wallpaper and the building of the hangman’s gallows. Then there’s the curse of the expansion of higher education as more and more people learn how to harness their creative drive and (god forbid) how to employ critical thought. That curse of course is on the Capitalist system that wants – no, needs to keep people occupied as cogs, but also, clearly noted, on the poor creatives themselves as that system fights back. 

So here I am, cursed by adamant predilection, half a year into this self-described “video fast,” wondering what to do next. Like I said, the main objective seems to have been, somewhere under the radar, achieved – I’m a good ways past the daily Jonesing, the TV is no longer whispering to me, and Shepherd Commander and Aloy the Nora have, I assume, wandered out of my PlayStation console and are happily engaged with adherents elsewhere, I wish them all the best. And yes, I have gone a little overboard with the Instagram Reels and I’m in the gradual process of curbing that shit, but I’m also – bit of shift in perspective here – okay with allowing a certain amount (remember the saxophone chickens?) that have some value specifically in providing beauty – in lightening my day. And lightening is actually quite important right now – because, you see, that’s exactly the way that you get out of quicksand. If you flail, you sink. But if you employ slow, calm, deliberate movements to first free your feet, then allow yourself to lie back into it – if you distribute your weight, you lighten yourself, you allow yourself to float – you can move slowly out of it. And personally after so many months mired in jobhunting, and for everyone else amidst the vomitous political situation, I suspect we could all use a little lightening right about now.

That was in fact another result of attending those music shows, alongside the clarity, which I referred to earlier as levitation – I was lightened considerably by the creative force and the community, and by the serendipity – love that shit. And it taught me – no, it reminded me how valuable, how vivifying a little release and enjoyment can be. So while I’m finding some of those Reels as I’ve mentioned to be an unacceptable waste of my time – all those cats scaring dogs and jumping into toilets, young people demonstrating how they dress themselves, how to be attractive, how to look fashionable or sexy, how to wear those shackles well– well I’m just glad to be old enough to know the phrase, ”meme, schmeme” – oh yes and “influencer, schminfluencer” as I learn to swipe right by them. At the same time I’m pretty sure that I maintain clarity and energy and, yes, even agency at a higher level if I take a few minutes every so often to watch people joyously playing music and dancing, even for 90 seconds on a Big Brothery little screen. Go figure. I find myself a little closer to being human if I allow an occasional dose of Hyperkids Africa and Hoodie Fam into my day. I’m just sayin. And I’ve put links for both of those in the notes in case you want to judge me.

I feel like this is the minutia of the fast as I sort out which of these little dopa-kicks are nourishing and which are Captain Crunch. And though I don’t delude myself by thinking that I can ever be completely clean (or ever have been), I’m finally feeling a little cleaner for the effort.

This has been Episode 19, covering Weeks 26 and 27 of my 12-Month Video Fast.

The next episode will drop on Saturday, December 21, near ground zero of holiday stress for many and Winter Solstice! I’m not quite sure what it’ll be, but I’m thinking we could all use, and you deserve – a lighter episode (and I mean that in every sense of the word) on that darkest day of the year. And maybe I’ll even have a little Solstice present for you. So tune in and lighten up!

I’m also planning a couple of special episodes for January with interviews of working artists on how they manage to support and actually get to their real work.

In the meantime, if you’re enjoying the podcast, please spread the word! And if you’re finding it of benefit, please consider supporting it with a subscription of $3 to $10 a month. There’s a button here somewhere for that…

Thanks as ever for listening, and remember to treat yourself kindly in this stressful month. Au revoir.