Take a pause to let your mind work | Podcast producer John Cameron Mitchell | Big Think

Take a pause to let your mind work
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Taking a pause after consuming a piece of art or media is essential to our memory, emotions, and intellectual digestion, says writer, director and podcaster John Cameron Mitchell.
We live in an age full of influencers and TH-cam personalities, but fewer narrative powerhouses. Storytelling takes time, skill, and requires us to make space to gather our thoughts.
Podcasts are a storytelling rebellion against so-called ADHD culture. If the internet ruined our attention spans, can the single-sense format of podcasts bring it back?
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JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL:
John Cameron Mitchell directed, starred in and co-wrote, with Stephen Trask, the musical film Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), for which he received the Best Director Award at the Sundance Festival and was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actor. His recent Broadway production garnered the 2014 Tony Award for Best Revival of Musical and a 2015 Special Tony for his return to the role. His latest work is the radio-cinema podcast Anthem: Homunculus.
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TRANSCRIPT:
JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL: I'm feeling like a lot of people are feeling helpless lately with nonstop bad news. And even ADD has reduced our resistance not our resistance, but our capacity for nuance and for empathy. You know, if you are moving from moment to moment and avoiding a pause, consider that neurologists tell you that the pause is where the memory becomes entrenched. And it's where emotion is synthesized, after the event, in the pause. If you don't go down you can't feel the going up again. So in this era where every pause is filled with checking your phone, when porn, when you skip to the cum shot, you know? From cum shot, to cum shot, to cum shot. You know, and if there's no pause, the orgasm feels like nothing. And the same with joy, the same with sadness. If you never stop you can never feel, fully.
So my goal at times is to create pauses more than create the actual thing between the pauses, which some would call things, or events, or words, or just sounds, in this case with the podcast. I was very careful of, like, this needs to be 24 more frames of pause; I use the film term because there's 24 frames per second. I said, the audience is not feeling it because they don't have enough time to pause. So the art of the pause is what I'm encouraging now.
Anthem is the name of our series. Every season will be a different musical, in probably 10 episodes. And our first season is called Homunculus. My character, Ceann, is a down and out failed writer in a trailer park in the Midwest who's run out of insurance, and he's got a brain tumor. And the tumor, one of the names of the kind of tumor he has is homunculus, which is Latin for little man. And the tumor becomes a character. But my character's online, he's doing an app-based telethon to crowd-fund his treatment.
This piece is really more about me. It's really more of an alternative autobiography. The characters became really me; If I never left my small town, what would I be like? So I wrote it as a TV series. It was too weird for Hollywood, you know? The resting pitch faces at desks across LA were saying no. And a company called Topic Studios said yes, in New York, as a podcast. It was an old form that is being rebooted for today. You know, audio theater has always been a traditional part of radio, and it's sort of been forgotten, and except for some comedy, let's say but this, I really wanted something more like cinema of the mind. Obviously, it's much cheaper. Though, we may be one of the more expensive podcasts ever made because of the density of it. And it's really something that we want to push the podcast form into a more complex, nuance, dense, fictional place. I'm used to theater. I'm used to novels. You know, the words and the music evoke images. You know, sometimes a thousand words is better than a picture, too. Otherwise we wouldn't have Dostoevsky and Nabokov, you know, lasting so long. I'm a word person. You know, I'm a music person. But I love words. You know, when people say films shouldn't be too wordy, and, you know? It's like, why not? You know, Eric Rohmer, so many great filmmakers, they're word based. So in our case, when there is an image that's important to see, for our listeners to envision, we have characters that describe them in a poetic way, which is, of course, the ancient form of prose poetry, that evokes images, and evokes other feelin...
For the full transcript, check out bigthink.com/v...

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[@TanvirAhmed24]

"If you never stop, you can never feel fully."

[@medicrq]

This is how you speak after smoking the entire bowl...

[@crashmer]

Well that escalated quickly

[@maralorca6518]

Oh my gosh. I nearly played this video in front of my parents. On full volume. Good thing I saw a JunsKitchen video.

[@Gulgathydra]

3:09
"Resting Pitch Faces"
🤣 (and said with the appropriate amount of venom)

[@nicola-socialmediasuccess8687]

I can relax my mind in the gym 💪

[@aleistersatrjan5322]

There's a great Ted Talk about slow multitasking. Its related to overwhelming stimulation or trying too hard.

[@sarsafaty]

Slow and calming, it is even in his voice.

[@medicrq]

That's what smoking a joint b4 the video will do for you....😅

[@BrothersJacksonVideos]

In an increasingly busy worl, it is important to make some quiet time for self reflection and to absorb

[@MrSpaztastic23]

I think what's he's talking about is edging... practice makes perfect lol.

[@aleistersatrjan5322]

Want to buy his jacket. Also nice hairstyle.

[@AdamShaiken]

Sad ! I am 55 years old and I have well developed ADHD/ADD. Frankly, the style of speech that you describe simply forces me to utilize the 2x feature on playback. Too much interesting and worthy material to discover and soak in !!!

[@chingiskhant4971]

Ikr, I played it on 1.75x

[@monsta6144]

The irony of me skipping through bits of the video to get to the point faster

[@osse1n]

*is he present?*

[@cheetor1987]

I was misdiagnosed with adhd, now just add I was told, when I was younger and, I had a rough time of it as a result. Turns out I was just bored in class. The fact that it's seen as an easy thing to diagnose piss's me off. Let prescribe amphetamines to children because, their energetic...

[@Grace-rv7le]

This guy looks fuckin insane

[@annipsy2185]

do u have to take that pause between every word though? i feel like im watching the sloth from zootopia

[@harrietpotter649]

His essential point is valid, but the script he's using is bloated, unfocused, and needs rewriting.

[@scootcha]

Harriet Potter the man is just thoughtful with his words. He's calculated and deliberate, leading to pauses in his speech. Everything he said makes sense and serves a purpose. Quite the opposite of "bloated" and "unfocused".

[@harrietpotter649]

@@scootcha I'm not talking about the pauses. I'm talking about the content. Quite a lot of the material in his talk was extraneous, and clearly was included purely to increase the run time and advertise his show.

[@FightingTorque411]

It didn't seem to me that he was talking from a script at all. which would explain it meandering somewhat

[@federicocarpi2378]

Big think, pleeeease bring back the intelligent people...

[@GajanaNigade]

Where's Dan? I want my dose.

[@carpenterfamily6198]

Watch Eckhart Tolle speak . . . he pauses all the time.

[@nGAhGENVH0Ul]

Watch Eckhart Tolle pause . . . he speaks sometimes.

[@carpenterfamily6198]

Ok, THAT was funny ! 😊

[@Roosterwbass]

🤔

[@cjgann4320]

I clicked off less then 2 minutes in. This guy seems a little nuts and it just wasn’t interesting.