Weeks 38-39: On Losing Things

In which the podcaster takes on a tragicomic perspective while shattering glass, misplacing teeth, and taking a joyride through Hollywood.

LINKS

Dianoga – Wookieepedia page 

Golden State Film Festival – 2025 Program 

·         Not sure this link will hold up, but you can open a pdf of the program. It has a bad interface, but if you click on the three bars on the upper left, you can scroll down it page by page. You’ll find the poster for our film “Force Drift” (which I designed) on page 5.

Ken Paul Rosenthal’s website (more links in Episode 21) 

Itzhak Perlman on Wikipedia  

Yaakov Andrew Cohen is @realyaakovcohen on Instagram 

THE NEXT POD WILL BE CAST ON SATURDAY, MARCH 15. 

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 26 – WEEKS 38-39: On Losing Things

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 26, covering Weeks 38 and 39 of “My 12-Month Video Fast”. 

This week you’ll find a little respite in a slightly briefer ep; a lot happened in the last couple of weeks (more on that in a bit) and I’ve ended up short on time. So I tried to break the laws of nature and actually write a short episode, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned concocting this ‘cast, it’s that once I water the seed of an idea it tends to sprout pretty precociously into a sudden flower [CRIT VOICE: They’re awfully pretty.] [MOI: Yes, they are,] and sometimes into an entire meadowland of wild blooms, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. (More on other things I’ve learned in the heart of the pod at a later date.) So here’s to summoning a single bright petunia from a few stray thoughts that might perchance root, form stem, sepals, petals, and, if we’re lucky, a quivering stamen that you might recognize and find of use. It is, after all, almost spring.

A couple of months ago I was in my kitchen one morning stirring some yogurt when my hand slipped or jerked or spazzed a moment and knocked over my glass of tea onto the white-tiled counter, shattering it quite efficiently. It was an old, one-of-a-kind glass that I’ve had for maybe ten years, plucked from the shelf of a Goodwill Store and used for my omnipresent cold tea every day since. It was a tall, narrow, cone-shaped vessel, almost like a chalice, rising from a small flat base. The glass was clear and speckled with small round knobs placed geometrically around the outside like stars on a flag or gems on a goblet (or the roundels on the interior walls of the TARDIS), except on one side, from which arose a sculptured relief of what seemed to be none other than the face of Pan. I mean, really. That glass cheered and charmed me daily through gallons, casks, vats of chilled Earl Grey with a hint of Mango Ceylon, my preferred blend for close to twenty years, until that unexpected moment when it not just shattered but pretty much exploded in a foot-wide radius of tiny shards around the sink and cluttered counter. Thus endeth my chalice, my yogurt, and a full draught of tea.

What struck me most about this miniscule accident, this iota of an incident, was how strongly it affected me. Once I realized what had happened, my first reaction was one of loss. Never mind the tedious aggravation of cleaning and de-dangerfying my sink and food prep area – that was my tea glass! I’d had it forever! What was I going to drink tea out of now? And who or what would I be without it? For a decade or more (which might be close to as long as I can remember), whenever I’d lifted it to quaff, I felt like a royal or a pagan priest perhaps (well, maybe faintly). Now all I had was a goblet-shaped hole in my life.

That feeling only lasted for a couple of days. A couple of days? you might ask. Yeah – and what was that about? I’ll tell you what it was: it was ridiculous. Absurd – because we are absurd, irrational, emotionally unkempt creatures. And how many of us have experienced something like that? Lots, I bet. It was a glass! How important could it be? Which is a good question, actually. Because over the years I’ve acquired all kinds of trinkets and objects – jewelry, articles of clothing, shiny things I’ve found on the street, stray pretty rocks, odd things that friends have given me – that always seemed more important than other things, and I’m not really sure why. I’ve often called them “power objects” (a term I picked up from a friend years ago) and think of them as material items in which I’ve instilled or invested part of myself (whatever that is), kind of like a totem, maybe, or a horcrux (gee, I hope not). They’re similar to what I think ghosts might be, meaning part of our energy that we leave behind in places (yes, even while we’re alive), though in this case, in objects. I think that all works for me because of how I see our lives – not as isolate individuals, certainly not in the Humanist sense – but as fields of energy each focused on a locus that we call “the body,” but not contained by it really, unbound and intermingling. [CRIT VOICE: You’re such a hippy!] [MOI: Haha, no, I’m a Post-Humanist.] So when I lose a favorite necklace, or break a favorite glass, I can feel as if I’ve lost part of myself – though I know it’s still out there, just uncontained at the moment. Yet it stings like a glimpse of mortality – which is maybe what all loss evokes.

The tea glass incident reminds me of a similar circumstance from when I was eleven years old or so. A few of us siblings were rough-and-tumbling around the family room and knocked over a tall floor lamp, shattering the globes. It had been around forever, so we knew we were in trouble, but what we didn’t expect was for my mom to cry and cry. Turns out the lamp had been her mom’s, who had died a couple of years before. So different from the tea glass, really, since this was an object of sentimental value – but what is that exactly? Value found in memory, in this case (and often) ancestry, which, if I’m not mistaken, is pretty damn connected to one’s sense of self, and by extension, mortality. So at the same time quite similar. Now for some reason I don’t experience a strong sense of sentimentality, at least not in regard for ancestry – whether that’s pathological or developmental is anybody’s guess (“Pathos or Power?” – let’s make a gameshow!), though clearly I do for other kinds of emotional connections. I’ll have to ask my therapist about that – she’s gonna love this one.

I just spent about nine days in Los Angeles, where the topic of the January fires is still on everyone’s tongue (as is, I suspect, a bit of the taste). Most everyone knew someone (or someone who knew someone) who’d lost everything – home, possessions, keepsakes, memories, community. Sentimental or not, I find it hard to imagine what my life would look like without my really important things – mostly decades of papers and notebooks and artwork of my own and friends I’ve been close to. I’ve been thinking a lot about that this past year as I’ve been near penniless at times (that’s not hyperbole, by the way), and have wondered how I could save most of it if I have to go homeless – even if someone, a friend or relative, were to help me out, I can’t expect they’d find these things as having near the same value as I do. So, y’know, yikes. Even so I don’t think my feelings on that would hold a candle to those who have literally lost all their connections to the past, their moorings, such as they exist in objects – though all things being equal, loss and especially profound loss can’t be quantified. So how do we, how does one get over that kind of loss, get past it? Though certainly less devastating than losing a loved one (though it might be close), it still bears the true sense of the word “devastating,” of being thrown into a vast emptiness. I suspect, as with any loss, one gets past it by letting go of the things that are no longer there. Unfortunately our culture, and many ingrained behaviors along with it, are founded on attachment to the world and its material objects. We really do see them as part of ourselves, in some way or another. I don’t have a solution – and it’s probably different for everyone – but I do feel as if I should be conjuring things every day that are more than really important to me, that are cardinal: smiles of friends, certain glints of eye, mammalian sounds, the crash of waves, wind on a mountainside…

I should mention that I’m thinking of loss that has accidental or natural causes, rather than at the hands of another. In the latter case, the most appropriate response would be to drop the perpetrator into a Death Star trash compactor where they belong, complete with dianoga but without an R2-D2 to shut it down. Then press the button.

Oddly enough, the idea for this topic was not spurred by all that loss from the fires, but from a single tooth, and not even a real one at that. I actually drove to L.A. in the middle of February in my beat-up 2006 Toyota Matrix, about a 6 ½ hour jaunt from my home in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was going down for an unusual reason, for me, anyway – a screenplay I’d co-written with a friend some years ago had been made and was being screened at the Golden State Film Festival at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. No kidding. I’d be staying with my friend Graham, who’d conceived and directed the film and who is a film-industry person, which I most definitely am not – I’m not even a good actor, meaning that I can’t pretend to be an industry type if I need to. One of the indie directors that I met that week even said, “You talk like a writer.” “You mean, like, with words?” I countered. “Yes,” he said, possibly without humor. At any rate I would be amidst that tribe (my word not theirs) for several days, and wanted to look my in-the-flow-est, uninvolved yet present, astute if unfamiliar – hell, I don’t know how I wanted to look, just not like a doofus. At least that was the plan.

I actually had a freelance gig for the first few days of the visit, so I decided to take a hotel room on my way down to get an evening’s work done before I arrived. It was at a gorgeous spot at the very bottom of California’s Central Valley, just before I-5 heads over the Tejon Pass to the L.A. Basin, with pastures and fields heading hundreds of miles back north, and low mountains rising all around. I love a well-timed drive down through the agri-core of California, and if you wanna know how much give a listen to the last few minutes of Episode 7, “In the Middle of Nowhere,” where I freakin tell ya. Part of the hotel blocked the sound of the Interstate so it was peaceful and I did get a lot done, though not as much as I might have since I’d forgotten the power cable for my laptop. First time for that and it hurt! But we have this nightmarish new organ called Amazon that will spit shit out at you whenever you ask, so I ordered one for next-day delivery. Prepping for a good night’s sleep, I went to brush my teeth and my teeth – which means the ones that come out then the ones that don’t. Oh god, here I’m getting too personal again – but hey, I’m in my 60s and I can be missing a few teeth if I want to. I’ve got a partial for most of my bottom molars, and a clip-on with a right fancy full-on top front tooth to replace one that came out last year – that I lost last year. Except on this fine night I couldn’t find that fake front tooth anywhere. Now that was lost too. I realized I’d put it in my shirt pocket halfway down the Valley to eat something chewy – they tell you not to wear it for that cause you could snap it – but they also tell you first thing, never to put these valuable prosthetics in your pocket. Which I did. And where it was no longer. Holy Incisor! Where had it fallen out, and was it findable? I tore apart my luggage twice, tore through the grocery bags twice. Dug in the trash can twice. Crawled around in my car by phonelight – twice. And reported to the front desk in the late-night Wyndam lobby, to someone’s amusement I’m sure, that I’d lost a dental appliance so if anyone came across one…God I’m old!

But here’s the thing – all I could think of was what a doofus I’d look like to all those indie film people and potential finance people and all that, awkwardly promoting my “first film”. Anybody who knows me can tell you how unlike me that was, but I was caught up in a bit of an identity crisis (whatever that is) along with my fantasy Hollywood adventure. I’m used to poets and literary folk who couldn’t care less, but I wanted these people to take me seriously (who knows why). Plus it’d taken me six months to get used to the clip-on, and now I can speak well with it and have more of a lisp without. I spent all night sleeping badly and going Duh. I am powerful.

Part of that reaction wasn’t only to the current situation. As you may have surmised from this sordid tale, I’ve lost a lot of real teeth in the past. It started in my 30s and by my mid-40s I was missing almost half of them. More yikes! Lots of yikes! I even wrote a book to honor them called Poems for Teeth, which, before you start screaming, you’ll notice is for teeth, not about them. Still, each one of those was basically losing a body part – now you can start screaming. But really, honestly, humanly, when you come across someone with missing teeth or false teeth, the appropriate response is compassion, because that situation signifies pain, and a lot of it. So get over yourself on that, please. And there’s more to it than that – I reached a point where I had so few teeth that I couldn’t eat well – couldn’t take in a lot of kinds of nutrition. The food pyramid became more of a food trapezoid and I was lacking in protein for a few years. Beyond that, eventually I couldn’t articulate well, and for a spoken word person that’s pretty much a ticket to nowhere. Or so it seemed. (If only I’d heard the advice then from Itzhak Perlman that you’re about to hear in a couple of minutes…foreshadowing!) Anyway that shit affected my sense of identity, let me tell you. Sure I could still write, which is always my primary, but speaking words with beauty and ferocity has always given me life, which I felt was ebbing. Also ebbing was any bit of savings I could muster, just to keep my mouth as functional as possible – though clearly not very. In fact one of the reasons I’m where I’m at financially today is that I came out of my 40s drained of savings, in the great American tradition of medical expenses keeping us under the boot of the 1%. 

Even this past year with very little income I had to get this top plate made and replace the bottom partial – affordable mostly due to a particularly philanthropic dentist – and a big-hearted thank you to him. But there’s no way I could replace the top one so soon after – and I won’t shaggy dog you any longer, because I did find the tooth in my car the next morning. It had somehow leapt from my pocket and bounced square center under the driver’s seat, where it thwarted recapture all night long. And look at all the chaos that loss, albeit temporary, wreaked!

After all this harangue on the loss of body (and other) parts, I’d be quite remiss not to state how fortunate I am to be otherwise fully-abled and not to have lost (or been born without) other bodily parts, save mediocre lungs and a collection of creaky joints. And no, I don’t deny the pain I’ve been through, all that I’ve mentioned and more, a couple of bone infections, a bunch of MRSA’s, torn ligaments and cartilage, broken bones, because I think we need to acknowledge, we need to own our pain as denying it denies our human fragility as well. But it’s just as essential to recognize and acknowledge others’ pain and struggles, since humanity dwells there too. And while many who are differently-abled (a great phrase if I ever heard one) might struggle with having to live in a world designed without them in mind, society and Western culture in particular often turn a blind eye to those who are suffering greatly, as cancer destroys parts of their body, as the brain wears down and cognition and memory lapse to fearful confusion, as, like my dad with Parkinson’s, the body slowly loses its ability to move on command (and man am I scared of that one.)

And again, what do we do? What do we do in the face of loss? We adjust and adapt, we let go, or we don’t. Each to their skill set, each to their resilience. But let me say here, and damned if I don’t, each with the resilience of others at their side. One of the hardest parts is that we don’t always – don’t usually expect to lose things – there’s that good old hubris. But with a little humility amidst this exploding universe, and with an ally or two, we just might shore ourselves up for moments of tremble. In some ways, resilience and the abilities and skill sets involved in changing run contrary to our neurochemical programming to achieve stability, not to mention our Humanist programming to demonstrate our control over, well, everything.  Which are very silly and dangerous facets of modern humans, whose psychological removal from the evolving world actually inhibits our natural course of resilience and regeneration. And we all know it.

Can we step out of ourselves for a moment, O We Loci, when for our betterment we need to subsume our manic grip and let things run their course? Or is it an impossible act?

Here’s what filmmaker Ken Paul Rosenthal has to say about that. When I was editing his interview for Episode 21 in January (Part 1 of “How Artists Survive in America”), I removed a few moments from our chat which in context seemed at the time to be an unfinished tangent, but which – voila! – apply perfectly here.

[PLAY KEN PAUL ROSENTHAL EXCERPT]

"…in my moments in my life, when my trauma has erupted so egregiously, so aggressively, where I feel like really, I'm at the point of being swallowed by my shadow and I mean my life snuffed out by my own hands.

Richard: Yeah.

 [00:51:49] Ken: In that moment of deepest, darkest despair, the switch will flip and I'll immediately think, but I have to finish my project. I have to finish that first. Every fucking time that has happened. That's been my experience. And it's like, well, my work just saved me. It's like, something I learned by spending so much time in nature. I spent a month on the island of Hornby, north of Vancouver, a month embedded in a redwood forest, and I felt no anger, no aggression Inside. Why? I'm not used to that. Because I was living in an environment which was constantly taking care of itself, constantly regenerating. If there's a fire in the forest, things burn, and then right away, the seeds start popping right through.

Richard: Yeah,

Ken: That's what it's like being an artist and how my art has saved me."

I don’t think he’s saying that you need to run to the forest or make art to step out of your mire; rather you just need to have something that feels important enough to keep doing. And you do, don’t you?

The Great Film Festival Adventure gave me leave to gorge a bit on moving pictures with sound and everything, which you gotta know I loved. The fest screened 369 films (my count from the brochure) in seven days, from super-short to feature-length, of which I caught about a dozen (including our film). Two that really struck me were Darling, a fifteen-minute vignette by director Finola Hughes about a woman confronting her husband’s potential mistress in a hotel room, mostly because the two actresses really kicked it in what seemed like a difficult scene; and Riot on Redchurch Street, a feature-length by Trevor Miller that follows a love triangle between punk clubsters against a backdrop of crime, gentrification, and racial tensions in Shoreditch, London. Easily the most polished film I saw there, it featured an engaging plot with terrific characters that were kept barreling along with great music and stylistics evoking Guy Ritchie, documentaries, and music videos with fast edits and a constantly shifting palette. Looks like you can stream that one on Apple TV or Prime Video, and I recommend it. Other highlights included Tomb of the Unknown Junkie, a documentary by Joseph Alexandre about Cocksucker Blues, the suppressed experimental film by Robert Frank that documented the 1972 Rolling Stones tour, with some of the verboten footage; and Let Love In by Ramzi Abed, which I can only describe as existential meta-porn. Yay indie!

The festival ended on a high note when our motion picture won an award – though actually Nichelle Nichols, our top-billed actor who was best known for her long-running role as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in the Star Trek Universe, won Best Actress in a Feature-Length Film. Nichelle, whom I’d had the pleasure of working with for a couple of days on set, passed away in 2022, so I ended up on stage thanking her and the festival folks for the award – an unexpected and interesting moment for a nerdy old queer-ass punk rock writer.

Our film, by the way, since everyone asks, is called Force Drift, and is [TRAILER VOICE] “an unblinking look at a military interrogation gone bad.” It’s the brainchild of my screenwriting partner Graham Green, though I was definitely on hand to midwife the brain-birth (ewwwww). It also stars Andrew Walker, whom current fans of Lifetime and Hallmark movies should recognize instantly, though in a somewhat more strident role than they might be used to. And this weird festival stuff is part of an effort to get it on streaming so y’all can eventually come along for the fulminating ride.

The morning after the awards party I punted up my laptop to catch up on a lot of stuff, only to find that it weren’t punting nowhere. For reasons unknown it refused to boot, so I spent the morning on a fraught call with a Lenovo Tech Specialist resetting the damn thing. Miraculously I didn’t lose any data though I did lose most of my apps and settings and sign-ins. Worse than that, I lost my least favorite thing to lose: time. Productive time – out the window for a few days. Few things make me crazier than those that stop me from doing my work – and my art – when I have to get to it. It even catalyzed me to initiate a certain video fast, with fairly good results. It hearkened to the time lost to that forgotten charger cable, and the lost time spent looking for that unlost tooth, and that dental trauma from the mid-aughts that slowed me down again and again  and the millions of things since then including my own damned sloth and enervation came on in a wave of PTSD, or PTS-Teeth, if you like, that dogged me all the way home to Oakland and a few days hence. Such is the life. Then yesterday I came across this on Instagram – yes the same Instagram that I did battle with for months till I stopped fighting moments of joy and which now occasionally saves my life. In this brief anecdote, Yaakov Andrew Cohen recounts an on-stage incident that leads to an epiphany for all of us from the heart and mind of violinist Itzhak Perlman.

[PLAY YAAKOV ANDREW COHEN EXCERPT]

"The world famous violinist Itzhak Perlman came onto stage to perform a concert at Lincoln Center in New York. Perlman, who has suffered from polio since he was a child, slowly walked across the stage using his crutches. As soon as he sat down, he undid his leg braces, laid them down along with his crutches, and picked up his violin and began to play. After the first few bars, one of the strings broke on his violin. The audience assumed that Perlman would have to stop playing to replace the broken string, but he didn't. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes, and signaled for the conductor to begin again. Perlman played from where he left off, but with a level of passion unlike anything the audience had seen before. As Perlman played, he was seen adjusting the three strings that he had left to create these new and amazing sounds. When he finished, the room was dead silent. Seconds later, the audience stood up and cheered. Perlman smiled, wiped the sweat from his forehead, quieted down the crowd and said, 'Sometimes it's the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.'"

I think I’ll leave you with that.

Okay. We’re down to the home stretch with just seven episodes left. What will happen next? I don’t know! But when have I ever known, really.

That episode will drop on Saturday, March 15, right on freakin schedule – unless of course they take down the internet between now and then. And what will we do without it?

Until then, I’ll be thinking long and hard about what might make a nice uplifting episode – maybe one about the internet getting taken down.

This has been Episode 26, covering Weeks 38 and 39 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

Thanks for listening, and please bend well.