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... [More...]
