COVID Desert
A COVID-19 diary in still images from Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 film Red Desert
The SARS-CoV-2 virus finally caught me at the end of December, after four years on the run. My COVID-19 experience seems like the typical “mild case” scenario. Five days of fever, brain fog, body aches, headaches, insomnia, nausea, fatigue, and congestion. Then five more days without the fever. After two weeks I’m experiencing the levels of fatigue, insomnia, irritability, and expectoration that usually set in 7-10 days after quitting smoking. I was still testing positive a week ago but since Abbott Laboratories – the multibillion dollar pharmaceutical company that produces BinaxNOW!!! COVID-19 tests – is still charging1 Americans $23.99 to access the epidemiological data that would at least mitigate the ongoing pandemic, I haven’t tested again. I work from home, my symptoms are mostly gone, and I mask up for the few errands I actually run anyway so who care. If one million human lives are worth less than the opportunity for wealthy people to hoard more wealth, then hey might as well save twenty bucks.
Outside of feeling like shid physically and feeling paranoid mentally about whatever long-term damage the virus was doing to my body, it was kinda cozy. I isolated for the first five days in a dark bedroom with an exhaust fan blowing disease into the alley behind our apartment. Rachel never tested positive – and has yet to ride the ‘rona at all! – despite bringing me a different bowl of homemade spicy ramen, corn chowder, chicken noodle soup, or daal every 4-6 hours. I laid back on a pile of pillows, fired up the projector2, logged on to Criterion Channel, popped another Michigan gummy, took a swig of lemon/lime flavored tap water, and started over 30 movies, 25 or so of which I finished.
Despite a week of feeling crappy, the most complicated bummer of the COVID-19 experience (so far) is the realization that I was enjoying myself immensely because getting sick is one of the few times I stop putting pressure on myself to be something other than what I am. Maybe eventually I’ll allow myself such relief without acquiring an illness? Or maybe I’ll stick to my strategy of applying non-attainment ideology to every other person in the world except for me.
I’ve been in love with Red Desert (1964) since I first saw it as a film studies guy in college in the mid-90s. Other people who have stayed in film criticism rather than taking the confusing and circuitous route that has led me from magazine editor to overpaid startup loser to underpaid medic to embittered ex-nonprofit guy to unemployed freelance psychedelic death yoga DJ have written much more insightfully about Michelangelo Antonioni’s iconic film, but in addition to the COVID diary below I’ll add the following pithy observations:
• Red Desert is Stalker for horny Italians with depression. They both include breathtaking imagery of gloomy and spooky environmental destruction, but the dialogue in Red Desert is much less pretentious than in Tarkovsky’s 1979 sci-fi epic which is surprisingly similar to the pretentious but much funnier dialogue in My Dinner With Andre (1981). I’ve seen Stalker a couple times and started it randomly halfway through as part of this series, eventually only watching 30-45 minutes. We watched all of My Dinner With Andre - one of Rachel’s favorite movies – to celebrate the end of my fever.
• Red Desert features the most existentially glum and wildly non-horny pre-orgy scene in all of cinema. Two couples plus Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris in italiano) try and fail to overcome their malaise with an innuendo-laden conversation about the aphrodisiac properties of quail eggs, while lounging awkwardly in a crowded bed in a wet and drafty fishing shack built at the end of a concrete industrial pier. Rather than group sex, the impotent would-be libertines start busting up furniture for firewood before they watch a ship – quarantined because of an infectious disease on board – dock nearby. Mi ecciti!
I enjoy the soothing ambient depression of Red Desert more with each screening, but this time it felt especially relevant to my own diseased state of mind. For your consideration:
COVID DESERT: A coronavirus diary in still images from Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert
COVID-19 Day I
COVID-19 Day II
COVID-19 Day III
COVID-19 Day IV-VI
COVID 19 Day VII
COVID-10 Day IIX-IX
EPILOGUE: COVID-19 Day X
Perhaps I’ll publish more fever-dream-state reviews from this impromptu film festival in the future. I may even release an alternate COVID-19 diary3 told in still images from That Darn Cat (1965) if I make it to 40 paying subscribers. We watched this surprisingly menacing film in separate rooms on New Year’s Eve, talking on the phone like a couple of grounded teenagers.
I do hope you’ve enjoyed this departure from the usual blend of music/politics/complaining content. Inter-Dimensional Music returns to the airwaves of Indianapolis, Far West Texas, and Northern Chihuahua this weekend on WQRT and Marfa Public Radio.
As always, thank you for lurking, reading, clicking, subscribing for free, subscribing for money, sharing this with a friend, or unsubscribing if these occasional dispatches are no longer enjoyable.
blessing up and blessing down,
DC
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We’ve lived in and received mail at the same address for four years but the free COVID test website won’t recognize that address because it has a 1/2 in it. It’s cool that all of the credit card companies and anybody that wants to bill us for something has no problem with the address, but the free COVID test program can’t get it sorted despite multiple patient phone calls and emails.
I removed the canvas that is usually on the bedroom wall so I could project the movies there, but I didn’t bother to remove the hanging brackets so that’s why you can see this lil’ guy in my hand held phone camera pictures of Red Desert:
In an auspicious coincidence, friend of the newsletter Con/Jur/d also offers visual documentation of their ongoing first bout of COVID-19 in a recent edition of gate(less).
