B:RagnaROX is a joyful howl of defiance that almost got lost in the wind. I can scarcely account for it. To be more accurate, I’ve never really accounted for it at all.
Superhumanly attentive viewers will find a serviceable definition about three minutes and 45 seconds into RagnaROX Part I Section 1. It’s on screen for less than a second, but here’s the text.
Ragnarox [Ragnarok, doom of the gods + ROX, independent television series produced in Bloomington, Indiana, 1992-95] Spurious Coinage doom of the icons; a miniseries commemorating the inevitable demise of ROX through a final purge of the ROX video archive; loosely, the confusing mess of our lives.
I will try to account for this now.
After the calamitous conclusion of the third season of ROX in April of 1995, we ceased production indefinitely. We dedicated the entire calendar year of 1996 to figuring out a business plan, but we were never able to enact anything viable. My 30th birthday in January 1997 was my arbitrary deadline, and after that I considered the project officially dead.
It wasn’t so easy to quit, though. The creative juices still wanted to flow. I had access to editing facilities at Daisybrain, the media cooperative Eric White had established with Joe Nickell and me. I also had a huge backlog of video we’d shot that I’d never worked into any of our 86 episodes. This included many random and bizarre scenes depicting the “confusing mess of our lives” in and around Bloomington: shaving heads in the kitchen, examining ice formations on the sidewalk and chewing gum stuck to a lamppost, investigating stone cairns at Cedar Bluffs, folding clothes at the laundromat, playing with kids at the Pagan-friendly campgrounds of Lothlorien, “man on the street” interviews about anarchy and anarchism, a flag corps performance at the local high school football halftime show, scenes from my bachelor party, an older artist performing “Colored Aristocracy” in her living room, a visit to the Monroe County Landfill. You get the idea. It was a rich trove of content, begging to be mined, sampled, packaged, and presented to our eager fan base — or, more accurately, foisted upon an unsuspecting general public.
Later that year I recorded some new footage. The video shows me reaching into a freezer to retrieve a tray of ice cubes. The ice is revealed to contain letters in a funky, rune-like font that almost looks hand-lettered, spelling out the word RAGNAROX, one letter in each cube. The tray is flexed, the cubes are disgorged onto a blue stoneware plate, isopropyl alcohol is poured on, and the whole thing is set on fire. Flames flicker over the ice cubes as the camera roves over the letters in extreme close-up. Cut together in a tight, 19-second montage over a ragged, grungy guitar riff (Groverpumper of Lexington, Kentucky), this would form the title sequence.
It was clearly shot at the Garage, that teeny-tiny house on a back alley where I holed up with my wife, Christy Paxson, as we reconstructed our lives after the implosion of ROX. In fact, this may be the only surviving video from our time there, and just about the only visual evidence remaining. That dates it authoritatively, as we moved out of the Garage in the summer of ’97, shortly after Christy got her first real teaching job. I’m not sure who ran camera for that little shoot, possibly Terry Hornsby, Christy’s ex-boyfriend who lived with us there for a short while. It might even have been our number one super-fan, Wade Powell, who suggested the name for the miniseries.
If I seem strangely obsessed with this minutia, it’s because of the relative paucity of available information. I’m looking for clues. The passage of years and the lack of a written record have reduced me to the status of a stranger, investigating my own life.
There’s not a single mention of RagnaROX in my journals. I never hyped it on the ROX website — and least not during the 20th century. What about the roxlyst, our long-running discussion forum? The archives are incomplete, but a search reveals only a single contemporaneous mention, a throwaway teaser for “the upcoming TV series, RAGNAROX.” That came from Joe on 15 July 1997 and garnered no response. Indeed, it seems the only reference I ever made to the miniseries at that time was in the form of a brief paragraph in my essay on “Genres of Indie TV,” completed in the spring of 1999.
Collages need not be disjointed, however. Ragnarox, Part I, Section 2, Subsection (L) is composed of street scenes around Bloomington. The pace is relaxed, not frenetic. There is no story, no dialog. There are no characters.
Such reserve from one so prone to oversharing is really quite odd. Nevertheless, this establishes the basic timeframe for production, corroborated by records from Bloomington Community Access Television which suggest three programs were submitted there in early May of 1999, just days before Christy and I moved to New Orleans.
There was some discussion of RagnaROX on the roxlyst in April 2000. Wade reported recording copies of all three hours when they appeared on channel three, which establishes that they were indeed cablecast in Monroe County at least once. That same month, Paul Smedberg played some of Section 2 at a local nightclub, part of the program for the art-damaged irregular aberration known as ER Night, garnering a glowing review from Andy Storms.
There was some excellent RagnaRox stuff….the Bart-Simpson-Gets-Molested bit, Kearney on lounge keyboard in the basement, and an unbelievable segment that [Editor B] put together called “Subsection n” or something like that….an amazing collage of still and video images of Btown…I was stunned. It was cool.
Some brief dialogue about the program followed, and a few other cursory mentions in the years after, but nothing substantive. On return trips to Bloomington I got dubs of old ROX episodes to round out my collection; I made extensive notes which were used toward establishing a comprehensive episode guide as I redesigned the website in 2003. I didn’t get dubs of RagnaROX for some reason, but the project was listed in the Rox.com Design Document that guided the process. RagnaROX was listed under “Other Programs” alongside no.rox, The Christy Paxson Show, and “Editor B’s Other Videos” on the new site. Unlike those other items, RagnaROX bore no link to any further content — a situation which persisted over twenty years later, until I worked up this account.
How is that possible?
The floods of 2005 destroyed most all the remaining source tapes which I’d lugged around from house to house. Those times were so traumatic that I hardly felt the loss, though Joe expressed some regret when he learned of it. In any case, I almost forgot about the existence of RagnaROX entirely. A passing reference from Wade in 2009 might have pricked my memory, but it wasn’t until 2018 that I finally got the videos from the station.
That leaves the programs themselves. The first thing that strikes me is the time and effort that must have gone into this. During the third season, it took me a full 40 hours to edit our weekly 29-minute episodes of ROX. It’s simple arithmetic to calculate that the three full hours of RagnaROX would seem to represent six weeks of full-time labor. Of course, there was no pay. It was strictly a labor of love, but it’s hard to fathom how I carved out the time for that while I was going to grad school.
Perhaps that explains why the miniseries remains unfinished. Yes, as expansive and sprawling as this program is, it was only the beginning of a project that was intended to be much, much larger. That unrealized scope is hinted by the numbering scheme. The titles for the first hour label it as “Part I: Section 1,” with further division into Subsections A, B, and C. The second hour is “Part I: Section 2,” again comprising Subsections A through C, but the third hour continues Section 2 with Subsections D through Q. Clearly, I was having some fun, satirizing my own orderly impulses, perhaps with the intention of making life difficult for future archivists. Now that I find myself in the archivist role, attempting to preserve and transmit these programs for new and future audiences, I’m amused and a little vexed by my younger self.
This jogs one of the few memories I retain about my overall ambitions for RagnaROX. The initial idea was to divide the miniseries into three parts, corresponding to the past, present, and future. The past was to be the biggest, that “final purge of the ROX video archive.” I don’t think I had anything beyond the vaguest idea of what the present would look like, much less the future. I’d planned to cross those bridges when we got there, but we never did. The show about endings ended up with no ending.
I’m also struck by the craft. There are zillions of edits, bizarre juxtapositions, weird effects, subliminal messages. I’m impressed by my own efforts, all the more so because I have absolutely no recollection of making those efforts in the first place. I’m mightily entertained by the finished product. Watching this after an interval of decades was and is a real treat for me, a window into my own half-forgotten past, a parade of fleeting and forgotten ephemera electronically engraved into something approaching permanence. At the same time, I’m given pause to reflect on what it must have meant to me at the time.
I was sad about the end of ROX. Our cessation in 1995 remains the biggest regret of my life, or one of the biggest. Yet we couldn’t find a way forward, couldn’t figure out a way to keep going. RagnaROX thus would seem to represent a determined effort to do it anyway, to keep going despite the fact that we’d stopped, an almost Sisyphean persistence in the face of absurdity. I was processing grief with every edit, and yet I also delighted in rebelling against the structure of ROX, and a sheer exuberant joy shines through in every pixel, in every line of resolution. My efforts in the editing booth at Daisybrain must have been infused with a sort of tragic gaiety. Maybe I was channeling Camus and Yeats in equal measure. I realize how grandiose that sounds, but watch it yourself and see if you don’t catch a whiff of sublime intoxication.
