Hebdomadal Aesthetic Heuristic
A weekly digest of my artistic consumption and my thoughts thereon.
Hebdomadal Aesthetic Heuristic
HAH Wk. 1: Introduction to Heuristics
In this first episode, der Dunkle discusses his spring playlist, van Gogh's The Potato Eaters, Meditations on First Philosphy, the Return of the Shadow, How God Became King, why he's not listening to any podcasts, his movie draught, X-Files, Dragon Ball, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, Coffee, Beer, and Maafe.
Hello
SPEAKER_00:and welcome to my first published episode of my new podcast, Hebdomadal Aesthetic Heuristic, which is a pretty pretentious way of saying that I am going to be talking about the art that I have enjoyed in the past week. And hopefully as we get into the heuristic of it all, to talk about how I understand art, what I think its purpose is, what I think its value is in our lives, and talk a little bit about sort of trying to develop a means to judge art as good or bad, engage with the arts on very different levels. I'm really working my way through the stuff that I engaged with in the past week, starting with hopefully the Starting with music as sort of maybe the eldest of the arts and then working my way through some of the classical arts, some sort of visual art, hopefully, although admittedly that one has been a little harder for me to... Something that has required me to think a little bit more and make a more intentional effort. And then working in through... Some of the more modern stuff through literature, certainly, but also through things like podcasts or radio, movies and TV, and eventually through into comic books, and maybe sort of a more avant-garde moment through food and drink, which I think are really important to me as sort of elements of the arts and aesthetic elements. thinking as a whole. I will be coming back here in just a minute to talk about music. Thank you for your patronage.
SPEAKER_02:Welcome
SPEAKER_00:back. So I'm going to be talking about music in this section and I'm going to be talking about specifically how I engage with music and how I choose what to listen to and sort of my process for listening Engaging with music on a regular basis. First things first, I have set up a set of playlists for the seasons. As we all know, the five seasons, winter, spring, summer, fall, and Christmas, I've got playlists for each. And with the exception of the Christmas, which is obviously a little bit more specific, I listen to... pretty much exclusively the playlist for the given season. And sometimes it's just, a lot of times it's just on shuffle, listening through what's in there. But I basically try to split all the music that I listen to on a regular basis or would like to listen to on a regular basis into those playlists. And those playlists have been a really good way for me to engage intentionally with music In such a way that, one, I don't get bored of the music that I have, that I'm listening to, but I also don't... It's not totally random, and I'm not just hoping that eventually I remember that I listened to this artist and this album and I want to listen to it this week. Part of why I created these playlists is because I really don't enjoy... The experience of getting in the car and hoping, like, trying to think about what I want to listen to, it's such a frustrating thing about sort of modern music listening that, right, in the sort of tape, A-track, CD age of listening to music, whether you're in a car or wherever you are, there's just a process of having to make that choice in that moment. You're like, I would like to put some music on. I have to decide what that music is going to be, and decision-making for me is always a bit of a stretch of my sort of abilities. I really don't love making a decision, especially not quickly, so having something to fall back on and say, oh, that's what I'm listening to right now has always been really nice. My playlist on Spotify for spring is called Infernal Equinox, which is a weird name, but it's probably the weirdest one I have, but it's a reference to a name i came up with for a horror movie um set on the vernal equinox um that is the spring equinox so that's my spring playlist uh it's on spotify i think you can probably find it i doubt there are that many other infernal equinoxes on spotify hopefully um but i i like to talk a little bit about sort of some of the big things on it. One thing about these playlists is that I choose to put whole albums on there. Um, I think the album is kind of the, the most basic unit of music. I don't love just listening to tracks anyway. I think that artists put music on an album, hopefully with some intention. And I think it's better to listen to it in that context. Not that I always listen to right. Um, the whole album all the way through every time, but that like in the spring playlist, right, I don't have one song from this album and one song from this album, but I have the whole of different albums so that in the process of going through the spring, I'm going to find myself listening to different pieces of the same album throughout the season. And it will hopefully, hopefully creates a sort of continuity and a contiguity maybe to the whole, to the whole process. Um, so for me, uh, a lot of the playlists, a lot of why an album or something might be on a playlist has to do with like cover art. She's just about colors on the cover, but, um, it's also a lot about feel. So there are some artists that are kind of like pretty much solely on a single playlist and, um, all the stuff that I listened to by them is on one. Uh, the, the ones that are probably most notable for this playlist are, um, Andrew Bird, like Andrew Bird's music is, um, Most of it feels very springy. As I get deeper into his catalog, I might try to split those up. I tend to kind of jump into a new album. It's kind of a crying process, and it's always something where I'm like, I don't want to think about it. Listening to new music is so much more of a chore than listening to music that I know really well. Yeah. For Andrew Bird, I only have like three albums that I've really listened to. Some of the early ones, Armchair Apocrypha, the mysterious production of Eggs, and then the newest one is Soldier On, which I would argue Soldier On is probably going to eventually make its way to the winter playlist. But especially Mysterious Production of Eggs just feels very springy. A lot of the songs just feel like they have that vibe. Some of that probably has to do with the fact that my birthday is in the spring and he has the Happy Birthday song on there, which I love. But I think if you look at... mx missiles or the naming of things or opposite day fake palindrome i feel like there's a lot of songs on that album in particular that are that feel very springy that have sort of that the essence of new life um similarly the band hyam which i um heard about from a girl that i went on like two dates with um like six years ago. I don't know. I don't remember her name, but I do remember how I am. And that was, uh, a huge get. Cause I think they are, I have all three of their, um, most recent, like all their albums. I don't think they've released more than three, um, are all on here. And that is, um, I think it's, they become kind of the backbone of that, of that thing. Uh, those days are gone. Um, women in music three and something to tell you, I think as all the ones I've got on there, um, which I think is all the albums that kind of have. Besides those two, the ones that felt most worth mentioning, Sufjan's even State's albums are both on there, so Michigan and Illinois' two that I love, that just so much of what Sufjan does feels very springy. Certainly some albums like Carrie and Lowell is definitely on the summer playlist, and there's some, you know, Different ones that are in different places, but those two in particular, I feel like, have a very springy vibe. As well as Magnetic Field's 69 Love Songs, which has 69 songs. So it's extraordinarily long. For an album, the songs are often pretty short, so it doesn't really add that much to the... or relatively doesn't add that much to the total length of the playlist, but it's... It's definitely in there. It kind of forms a backbone when I'm listening. If I go out and deliver food for an hour or I'm driving to a job or whatever and I have a long commute and I listen to music, there's a really good chance that I'm going to have two, three, maybe even four of those songs show up. in that one drive. So, yeah, those are some of the ones that are really important. Also, with noting, this is where a lot of music that I've got that I sort of got from somebody else, particularly from my wife, got onto the playlist. So, like, the Abbott Brothers and the Wood Brothers, some of their first albums, The Carpenter and the Muse, I believe, The Head and the Hearts, self-titled, Civil Wars, Barton Hollow, although my wife is definitely not the first person who suggested that to me. But, yeah, that's when it finally stuck kind of. So that's, uh, what that is. Um, uh, stand out as mountain man made in the Harbor. Very, very good album. Oh, that one really does feel like it's more, it feels like me in a lot of ways. Um, I think she showed me that after I showed her the, I have no idea that the version of the song Babylon that was on, uh, mad men, um, The one on Mad Men is very good. The one that Mountain Man did is actually, I honestly like it a little bit more. The language is a little bit different, but it's also sung on a round. I have to say, I was classically educated, so maybe this is some of it, but really a round really has a magical effect on me. Just hearing something sung on a round is so exciting, even if it's not. Even if I didn't love it already, and this one's based upon a psalm, so it's pretty far up my alley. Um, that's kind of, I think where I'm going to leave it with this music. There's definitely a lot more on there. I will talk more about that as we go. Hopefully by next week I will have, you know, be able to talk a little bit about some of the other music that I have on there, but those are those standouts and kind of the backbone of it. And hopefully I'll dig deeper as I get further into the season. All right. So that's where I'm going to stop for now. And I will pick up with, um, The visual arts hopefully here coming next.
SPEAKER_02:All right.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome back. So I think this is actually one of the hardest ones for me to do personally, but also just, I think it's hard for modern people to engage with the visual arts in the same way they do other things. Like I have shows I'm watching. I have movies that I want to watch. I have, Books that I'm reading, I have all these things. There's a natural place in my life, it feels like, for all of them, because I've just got a pattern of engaging with arts in that way. It's not so much, there's not a clear pattern. I have looked at a lot of paintings and sculpture in my life, but it's mostly an event. I go to the museum. When I go to the museum, I haven't been to a good art museum in... I don't know, at least a year or two. I think I made my wife visited one, the one that the Walton family has down in, I want to say like Bentonville. We visited there, I think that must have been a year and a half ago. That's probably the last time I spent time in an art museum. And that is kind of where we can see art. It's such a segmented experience in our life. And I, especially just as a modern American, I feel like that's, I feel like I'm not on the low end of seeing art, and I'm not seeing art very often, just like visual art in that sense. What we mostly mean when we say art, like when I say art, people don't think, oh, if you're into the arts, a lot of times people don't think you mean, right? A lot of the things I understand a lot of time talking about, they think you mean painting or sculpture or things that appear in museums. So that's, I think, a really interesting thing. problem and something I've actually been thinking about a lot as I was getting prepared for this. And so this is a shout out that's completely unpaid to the app that I downloaded a little while ago called Artly. I have not gotten far into it. I have, I got a free trial. I'm not convinced about it, but I really have found it as an interesting way to engage with this. So I'm going to throw out the one that I started with the very beginning of their like famous artworks thing. starts with Vincent van Gogh and this painting called The Potato Eaters, which I haven't, I think I've seen it before, but it's not, it doesn't feel to me like the kinds of works that I've mostly seen van Gogh, I think he's famous for. I think people, when they think of van Gogh, they think of things that are essentially still life. I mean, whether it's Starry Night or The Sunflowers, I think people think of him doing specifically not doing a lot of humans. And that's actually something that I think I kind of focused on, but I think this one is, is an interesting one. And that's something that kind of caught my eye, even though, again, I just went onto this app and I picked the first one they had. And, but I think it's really interesting to see sort of his, and maybe you can kind of see maybe why he didn't do a ton of people because he it's, he's got a very, Um, you've got somewhat cartoony style. I want to say it's a little bit like our crumb. Um, if you guys are seeing American splendor, um, either the movie or the comic, um, but the, it's definitely, you know, got a very working class vibe, you know, um, from 1885 and, uh, Amsterdam is where it's held now in the Van Gogh Museum, but somewhere in the Low Countries, I assume. And yeah, it's a kerosene lamp hanging above a bunch of people sitting down eating, somebody pouring what I presume is either tea or coffee. It's hard to know. I don't actually know a ton about what that probably would have been, more likely, whether the Netherlands and the Low Countries in general are like a coffee or tea... based society in many ways. There's this great book called The History of the World in Six Glasses that analyzes sort of societies largely based upon, right, their caffeinated drink and their alcoholic drink of choice. And so I know that in most places in Europe in the 19th century, right, most countries have a very clear, like, we're tea people or we're coffee people before the sort of advent of the, or at least the wide scale advent of the sort of soda, or whatever you're going to call it, pop. But yeah, I find this interesting. The figure not looking at us is herself particularly sort of a strangely dark presence, even though it seems like she's feminine, and yet she's the only one without a head covering. So, I don't know. It's probably one of those things. I've looked at this a couple of times before I actually recorded this, but I'll admit that Um, it somehow doesn't feel like enough. I want to give myself more time to think about this, but I, um, I don't know. Hopefully this segment will get better, but I honestly do think that it's valuable if nothing else in the sense that it will force me to spend some time looking at a painting or a sculpture or architecture is also one of those ones in that, um, the list of the seven classical arts or whatever, um, that I kind of would like to engage with. But most of those are, visual art. So, yeah. I'm going to leave it there for now and I will come back to talk to you guys about literature here in just a little bit.
SPEAKER_02:Alright,
SPEAKER_00:welcome back. I am engaging now here with literature. I'd like to talk a little bit about the books I'm reading. This won't probably be less about the books I'm reading because for, I don't know, the first time in a while. I can say that I have finished three books in a week, which I don't want to make it sound like I'm a really cool guy who just reads and reads and reads. Three books in a week is a crazy amount for me. Again, to be clear, finished, did not read all three of these books in the last week, but these are the three that sort of... I think it's probably good to talk about now, and I think I'll come back to some of the stuff I'm reading going forward as I get a little further into it. But the three that I finished this week are, first one is Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes, which I read with my Catherine Project group. I will come back to that here in a minute, talk a little more about what's interesting about it. The second one is The Return of the Shadow, which is a book by, sorry, by, Sierra Tolkien and his son, Christopher Tolkien. It's sort of an analysis of the writing process for The Lord of the Rings. Definitely worth discussing. And then last is How God Became King, The Forgotten Story of the Gospels by N.T. Wright, which is very much up my alley in terms of theology. It's probably the I haven't read nearly enough theology in the last couple of years, but that has been really nice just to dig into his stuff, which I've always liked, but I haven't read nearly enough of. So to start, Meditations on First Philosophy is, I think I read this last year, it's part of a Catherine Project group that is also reading the Discourse on Method, which I read, probably finished three or four weeks ago. I just finished Meditations on First Philosophy last this last week. And it's been really fun to dig into. I think I read it last year because there was a group of high schoolers who I felt like I just kind of wanted to reread it so that I could talk to them about it a little bit. Kids that I was engaged with in my job, I have a friend who teaches the sort of philosophy course there and who I would sometimes sit in with. And to kind of engage with those kids, I really went out of my way to read it, although it's not hard for me. First of all, it's not a long book, but Descartes is really probably one of the philosophers that I have spent the most time with, either by reading him directly or just by thinking about his thoughts. I mean, right now, I think if somebody asked me, which philosopher do you identify with the most, I would probably call myself an Aristotelian, But when I was first getting into philosophy, first starting to think about the big questions, I think I would have called myself a Cartesian. Descartes has been really essential to sort of the beginning of my life of thought. And this book in particular, I think, is the clearest, simplest version of the project that he was on at that point in time. If you don't know, Descartes is a 17th century philosopher who really, I think in many ways, just kind of wanted to be a scientist, but also felt a need, felt a requirement that he give some... some justification kind of for what he wanted to do because it was a little bit avant-garde, right? This is the period of time where he, I think he puts this book out not long after the trial of Galileo and you know, Francis Bacon and others had kind of talked about this. There's, there's a history of people talking about doing what we now recognize as science more or less and, But he is one of the other people doing it. And he puts together this philosophical project, which is to create a new basis for doing these sorts of things and to kind of justify his desire to look at the natural world and engage with it on sort of a naturalistic basis. And I think– Yeah. I think there's something really cool about that. And I think it's particularly the thing that got me right is he starts, he really wants to do a project from the ground up, right? No other propositions. What can, what can I absolutely not doubt as true? What can absolutely be determined to be true? And I think I, I really follow his basic strategy pretty closely in my own personal philosophy. The first step is right. You can't doubt that you exist, right? Because the, person who's doing the doubting has to exist on some level and to sort of establish my certainty about my own existence as the basis for everything else as like the undoubtable or proposition for philosophy is really, really important to me. I think it's really, I think it's a really important insight that I don't think a lot of other people have had said before him. So, um, I think that's really important to me. I think his path then is to say, right, I want to get to trusting generally in the world that exists around us so that I can sit down, you know, so that I can do, you know, pressure experiments on mountains and stuff and have it not be like crazy. And I think that he gets there. His middle ground is middle term, maybe in the sense of his argument is, you God exists. I can prove it from this. And that to me still, again, is exactly where I go. Besides my own confidence in my own self-existence, the existence of God as being the bridge between that idea and then whatever can actually make the natural world seem real to me, still, again, is something I'm very strong about. I don't like his argument for the existence of God. I think it's a little bit weak. I think it requires some He uses this term, but I think it does require a little bit of sophistry to believe. My argument for the existence of God is less of one of absolute certainty and more of one of, like, is it possible to do or think anything meaningful without assuming the existence of God, which is kind of where I come down. But then I love to go from that and then to talk about how we can actually– assume that the world is relatively knowable precisely because God exists, which I think is a good basis for doing science and engaging with the world in a sincere way. So, great book. Absolutely recommend it. It's one of the ones that I have finished in the last week. And the second one, Return of the Shadow, has also been a really exciting experience for me. I picked up this book for the four or five years ago, and I never finished it. But even then, I think I have this general sense that it was a really exciting thing to see because I think as a person who tries to write fiction sometimes or tries to write literature sometimes, I think Tolkien is kind of the person that I would probably want to emulate. He's the guy that I think his way of doing things is probably a lot closer to mine than mine. Most other people I know. One is just that he is a sort of serial revisionist. He'll always go back and sort of revise the thing from beginning all the way through. And I think seeing that in that process in that book has been really fascinating to see, you know, that he wrote like up to Rivendell and then he started over again and then he started over again. Like he kept doing like different shades and elements of the project and going back to earlier parts. Someone like, Chesterton or Lewis is really intimidating when you hear them describe, like, I think with The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton is supposed to have dictated the entire thing to a typist who typed it up, checked for spelling, and moved on. That's just a terrifying thing. Like, when I'm trying to imagine writing a book, even like a novella, I can't imagine trying to do that from the beginning without like without that need to sort of go back over and sort of refine my footing over and over again. Um, so that's been exciting cause it's honestly pushed me to do some writing, which hopefully I'll get to talk about here in a minute. But, uh, that book has been really good and I'm really glad I finally finished it. Um, fun fact that I think we should all take away from the Lord of the Rings is that all of the Hobbits names are, have origins in like, gothic or frankish like names from the middle ages which i i find fascinating like i would never have guessed that like bilbo and frodo and and all these names are coming from that uh from that kind of a source and that like i didn't realize it until i saw like all the different names that he played with for different hobbits and the fat and starting to see that, Oh, wow, that actually is from like, this one is from a particular, like I actually know historically that that's from this, whatever Gothic King or whatever. So I really fascinating to see. And I, I love seeing inside of his process. I think that's something that we're so lucky that Christopher did all that work to make that process a little bit more available to people who are trying to write. Honestly, that's a huge boon. The last one is How God Became King. This is the first N.T. Wright book I've probably read in several years, and it was the first opportunity. I think I've made use of the opportunity to– I got into audiobooks a lot recently, and I think it's allowed me to– get through, read a lot, in a sense, a lot more stuff than I had in the recent past, and that is exciting. But I had tried to read some sort of classic-y theological sort of stuff. I think I... I forget exactly who I read. Last year I tried to do Bonhoeffer a little bit, and some of it was fun, but honestly I find Bonhoeffer a little bit frustrating at times. I think some of his... Theology is too Lutheran. This is weird because actually I think I like a lot of Lutheran theology, but sometimes it's just a little bit– it drives me a little bit crazy the way he reads the Bible. But I do think– first of all, I've kind of identified myself to people as a– big fan of N.T. Wright, if not a N.T. Wright follower, for a while, but I just haven't read nearly enough. I haven't really just had time and haven't really sat down with a lot of his big works and said, you know, what does he have to teach me? I've referred to him and read some of his books, but not nearly enough. So this one's been really fun. It's a discussion of the Gospels and sort of the way that we read the Gospels often more in light of Paul than the other way around, and maybe sometimes more in a desire to sort of fill in the checklists, like the creeds, to get the right ideas in our head, but not really reading the gospels as some of the most important statements of what it means to be a Christian, of what Jesus was trying to do in the world. And one of my pet peeves is, that Christian theology so many times is ignorant of Jewish thoughts about God before, Jewish theology that predates Jesus, and understanding how what Jesus was doing was a continuation, was an expansion, was the logical culmination of everything that happens in the Old Testament, and having that not just be like, oh, we can read the Old Testament and find little images of Jesus in there, but actually trying to ask ourselves, I don't know, what God was doing for, you know, thousand or more years, uh, before he became, before he came as Jesus and to sort of see how all those pieces connect and really see what it means that Jesus is the Messiah of the Jews and that he is the, the, uh, that he is the, the God of Israel come to be King over the earth again. Um, So I really appreciated it. And yeah, I think it's going to dig deeper into my theology as time goes on. I actually just honestly, as soon as I finished it, I was like, I need to go find another one. And I started Paula Biography, which I'm excited. I've only gotten a little bit of the way into it. But yeah, so those are my three big books for the week. And I will talk more about the ones that I've got going on that are more... in progress. There's definitely several books that I'm like, I'm reading a lot of books at any given time. I think I'm in the middle of like 24, according to Goodreads at this moment. Some of those are like, I can't admit to myself that I've actually given up on, but some of them are, it's a lot of them that are just in the middle, especially I love really big books. So I'll talk more about Don Quixote and Les Miserables and a couple other ones that I've been working on for a while and that I'm maybe a third of the way through. next week, but I almost certainly will not finish multiple books next week, so that's something we can assume. I will be coming back here talking a little bit about podcasts, maybe more generally, but also then going into movies and TV.
SPEAKER_02:Hey,
SPEAKER_00:welcome back. So the next bit here is to talk a little bit just about I'm not in the middle of any podcasts. I listened to no podcasts last week at all. Um, but part of the reason for that is because one of the consistent problems of me listening to a podcast is that I tend to get really into it, listen to it a ton and then kind of, um, get turned off to it and then stop listening to it entirely. Um, uh, if I had honestly published some of the, um, The test episodes that I did in the last couple weeks, I almost certainly would have had a long section on podcasts. But I kind of set to the side a couple. The two that I listened to the most recently, Lost in Twin Peaks, which is from the Lost in the Movies guy, whose name I still couldn't find online when I was looking. But he does a really good podcast. I was super into Twin Peaks. I have kind of passed the... I've passed to the point where I'm no longer super interested in continuing to think about and talk about Twin Peaks, but I will say that for me, my answer to the question of how to think about Twin Peaks is I am interested in the first season, first eight-ish episodes before the mystery is kind of prematurely solved in the second season, and then Firewalk with me, and it has finally become clear to me that I really am not interested in any of the rest of it. I think most of it's Honestly, kind of bad. But yeah, I was super into that. My wife was complaining about me watching Twin Peaks way too much last month. So luckily, we're going to move past that. But certainly, the guy Lost in the Movies, his Lost in the Twin Peaks podcast is really good, kind of basic. But if I was still interested in Twin Peaks, I'd still be listening to that. The second one was The Rest is History. which is Tom Holland and Dominic. Oh, I'm so sorry, man. I have forgotten his last name here. They're both great, and they do a history podcast on general topics, which I genuinely have really enjoyed. I occasionally run into the thing where, as a guy with a master's degree in history, I just don't have the patience to... They'll hit a topic that I just know just enough about to be annoyed by their opinions, and so I'll cut them off. And that's happened a couple times, but I always keep coming back because they've got great stuff. Love to you guys. You're fantastic. Even if I strongly disagree with your opinions on the French Revolution, I mean, there's no such thing as a British person with a normal opinion on the French Revolution, so that shouldn't be shocking to me, but it catches me off guard every time. Um, so that's kind of me for podcasts. Um, I am going to talk a little bit more now, I guess, about movies and TV sort of moving through the history of these things. Um, for the last week I have, and this is extraordinarily unusual. I have no movies on my, you know, um, letterbox. I have not put a single movie on there for the last week. And that is extraordinarily unusual. This podcast is, may sometimes feel like it's pretty much all about movies, but right now it's not the case because I've been watching too much TV. And, um, so I'll talk a little bit about, I'm halfway through, um, Sin City, A Dame to Kill For, um, which I think I must've watched before, but I kind of forgot that I had. So, um, I was digging into that and I will probably finish that this next week and talk more about it. And I'll probably have more going forward, but, um, I'm going to be talking mostly about TV and sort of what I've been watching and sort of where I am with that. This last week, it has mostly been a matter of the two shows that I'm watching on my own. X-Files, which I picked up more or less straight from Twin Peaks at some point. I think I'm only 10, 15 episodes in. I have enjoyed it. Parts of it are great. I love that it's more serialized. I think that's... more episodic, more standalone. I love that about it because it's as much as I get the value of like more serialized, like long form television. I really love just the, the piece of, yeah, this mystery is over. We're moving on to the next thing next week. So that's been fun. I like the characters. I, If there's anything that's going to ruin X-Files for me, it's that the show would really have been much better if they had, it seems like to me, I'm still in the middle of season one, but it seems like to me it would have been a lot better if they had planned to have more episodes where Mulder is wrong. Mulder, but also the supernatural is not the correct answer. And there was like some obvious natural explanation. And then Scully can be the one who kind of gets one up on him. It feels like, you know, kind of dated that this show is in many ways about a man constantly being right and a woman constantly being wrong. So that element of it is probably the thing that will turn me off to it if it doesn't get sort of, doesn't get better as it goes on. There's already been a little bit of a hint of, Maybe sometimes Mulder will not be right, but there is very much a lean that's like... And it's so much more self-serious than most shows that I've watched about supernatural kinds of things. It really wants you to believe, right? The truth is out there being in the opening credits is so much more self-serious than, say, Twin Peaks, which is like there's never really any impetus to... to make this about the real world. It's about a fantastical situation and that's not a problem. Maybe, maybe, you know, David Lynch or Mark Frost wants you to believe in the supernatural on some level, at least think that there's more than what we see, but that like, yeah, the X-Files just comes so much harder on this is all real and you should all be assuming that, you know, Aliens are doing all these things. All the government is keeping all these weird secrets. One thing that's actually really weird about it, and the thing I noticed with Twin Peaks 2, is there's something about that sort of 90s television thing where, for some reason, the federal government doesn't seem like the FBI is like, oh, we're not cops. It's actually an episode where Mulder is just like, yeah, I'm not a cop. I'm with the FBI. And it's such a weird thing to happen. Like, some of this is happening right at the same time as, like, Ruby Ridge and Waco and all these things where it's like, yeah, the federal government also is just cops. Like, being in the FBI is not not being a cop. But, like, somehow, like, local cops are, like, sketchy, but that the FBI, they're obviously, you know, good guys, which is both funny specifically that it's in the, from the nineties, but also specifically like, you know, the FBI as like this, the Knights and shining army armor. Like it's, these people not know anything about J. Edgar Hoover. They not know that he was like a really weird, extraordinarily political and not particularly good guy. Um, so, you know, do with that what you will. Um, But that's one of the interesting things I've been engaged with with that show. The other show that I'm currently watching is Dragon Ball, which is... I'll talk a little bit about the manga, which I have also been reading sort of parallel to, but I'm watching the anime. I have not... There was a period where I think I could have very easily become an anime guy, but I just never found enough that I really liked. Too many of them were kind of too silly or weird for me to enjoy. I grew up as a Dragon Ball Z kid. I didn't even like... really even know much about Dragon Ball. Um, but that's what I've been reading and watching. And I, um, I'm about, I think I'm sort of running that in parallel with the X-Files. So I think it's, I'm probably 10 episodes in or so. And, um, it's been really fun. It's, I like the story. It, it's one of those things where it's like, I watched Dragon Ball Z without really any knowledge of Dragon Ball. And honestly, I never really realized how much, like, I was jumping in in the middle of the story, but I'm really enjoying it. I think that I also didn't realize how weird it was because I didn't, I probably missed a lot of the sexual jokes. I kind of wonder if that's part of why my parents were opposed to me watching it when I was a kid. But yeah, it's been really good. I love the sort of, you know, Yamcha and Bulma, like, deciding they don't need the Dragon Balls anymore because they found someone to love them, basically. And I don't know. I love Goku's character. Always love Goku's character. Just the ambition, the desire to be a strong guy, but not because you want control or power, but just because you crave excellence in this one area. And I think... I feel like that character has had a lot more effect on me as a person growing up. The desire to be really, really good at one or two things, but not fundamentally because you desire power or because you want to be bigger or famous or whatever, but just the real desire for excellence. And his desire to sort of look out for the weaker people is... Something that really resonates with me and kind of has always resonated with me. So I think I've actually gotten almost to the point where I've caught up with what I've read in the manga. I've read the first two volumes. So I will talk a little bit about that as we go on to comic books. But yeah, those are the two shows I'm watching by myself. Also watching a couple with my wife. Most of these are things that I've watched before. We are watching Severance. I'm pretty close to caught up. I'm not going to talk a ton about that just because... It is relatively new, and I don't want to spoil anything for anybody. Seriously, quality show, though. I think people should be watching it. It's really good. Apple TV is not that big a deal, guys. You can take a month off of Netflix and watch Severance or whatever. There's a couple of other good things on Apple TV. Some of them have been real duds. So that's been really good. Besides that, we're re-watching House together. show we both, I think, watched earlier in life. My wife watched it a lot. She owned the box set DVDs, but we're watching it on Hulu, I think. But I watched it a ton. My mom loved it. And so that's been really fun. House is such an interesting... That sort of... He is a very, like... a lot of the stuff he says is genuinely kind of bad, but he's sort of the equal opportunity jerk that is really helpful. He works because he is so good, but he's also just a huge jerk and kind of hates people. It's such an interesting trope, and I love to see the way it plays out, because it's both like, yeah, he's making remarks that are fundamentally pretty racist towards his you know, black employee, but also like, he's the guy who comes out pretty strongly against the sort of anti-vax mother or whatever. So he, he's got like, like there are, you can clearly see there's good that comes out of it, but there's also like, should I actually be okay with him crossing X line to achieve his goal? Because he thinks he's more likely to be right than wrong. Like, cause he's so confident. Does that, is that actually how I want people to behave? I don't know. That's one of those things with, uh, you know, I honestly don't necessarily think particularly highly of medical doctors. I don't, I think a lot of them have a over-inflated sense of like how much more they know than everybody else. I think a lot of them think that they're like really smart. And I think a lot of them are, you know, often making some pretty wild guesses outside of their specialty area.
UNKNOWN:Um,
SPEAKER_00:it's my gripe with doctors, but I think like, um, yeah, just engaging with like the question of where these TV shows that sometimes valorize, like breaking the rules because you know better. Right. Um, because rules are sometimes very stupid and they often are, but also sometimes breaking those rules is like you're breaking a rule that exists for a reason. We can't let people do that because it's actually going to make the world a worse place if we keep letting people do it. Um, A great show. If you've not watched House, it's a fantastic episodic sort of, you know, detective show. But with medicine, it's very good. And Hugh Laurie's magical. I've forgotten his name. Sean Patrick something Harris? I don't know. I don't know exactly his name. He's great, the guy who plays his friend, and it's got a great cast and should actually be watched by more people. I keep suggesting people. Besides that, a little bit of Malcolm in the Middle. I think we are in the middle. We're still watching a little bit of Abbott Elementary, which has been probably one of the most solid comedies of the last several years. And, yeah, something else, I'm sure. Oh, Fargo. Fargo's actually been one of the big ones. I'm so glad I got my wife to watch Fargo. It is a great television show. I've seen the first four seasons. I couldn't convince my wife to watch the one with Ewan McGregor playing the twins because she was just like... She just didn't like it. We were just like, actually, let's just skip it. And we went to season four, which is actually probably one of my favorites, and it's set in Kansas City, so it's got, you know... the connections, and we're almost done with that, I think. But yeah, great show. If you have not watched Fargo, probably one of the best shows that's been on television drama-wise since Breaking Bad and Mad Men went off the air. Pretty much unequivocally. So that's kind of where I am with TV. I will come back here and sort of start to wrap things up with the comics and the food and drink. Thank you so much for anybody who has listened this far. Alright, welcome back. This is another one where it's probably going to be a lighter week than normal for me. I have not had a comic book shipment come in this week. Things have kind of got backed up. So for me, the only comics that I have read have been... examples, and this is honestly really exciting because I get to just spend a lot of time talking about this, but The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. This is a weird little comic strip from a guy named Windsor McKay. He's the guy who did Nemo and Dreamland, and I have been working on reading through his old The Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend for a little while here. I got super into them, just remembered Nemo and dreamland and how much I'd sort of been obsessed with that based upon the NES game as a kid. Um, but this comic is super interesting. Um, it, it follows, um, it follows people who are having dreams that tend to be like a 10 panel full page, more or less comic following a dream sequence. And, um, The idea here is that this thing called a Welsh rarebit or a Welsh rabbit is a kind of cheese toast with mustard and Worcestershire sauce on it. It's really good. I actually tried one. The idea, though, was that if you had one of these late at night, you'd have crazy dreams. It's a thing people fundamentally believed in the late 19th, early 20th century. This particular... Thank you. Thank you. They were originally done under the pseudonym of Silas, but they're all from Windsor McKay. And to give you sort of the gist of what I've been reading this week, I think they're really fascinating, these dream sequences. One of them, for instance, has a guy who argues with his wife and goes out and takes a nap in the fields. I'm sorry, I've lost his name. but the, the sort of the guy falls asleep and wakes up a hundred years later sort of situation. Um, there's a one where a guy just has the job of like fighting or like taming a bull. And like, there's something very, very cartoonish about the way that he, like the physics of each of his, uh, comics, but there's sort of, they're hilarious. They always end with, uh, um, a, the character waking up often, it's a wildly different character, right? So then what appears to be the main character of, uh, the dream sequence is often a wildly different person. Um, there's one where a, um, the dreamer is actually a wino on a bench, but the dream is these two guys who found a liquor distillery that doesn't have very good security and they go and end up accidentally falling in this giant vat of, um, It says it doesn't really give any clear indication. I think it's whiskey. Um, there's ones just, again, they're just, I mean, they follow a lot of dream logic and they do it in a really interesting way. Um, there's just one where a guy, you know, just like somehow manages to get hypnotized and then he ends up like flying all around. A lot of them end up with someone waking up very annoyed in bed and telling, saying, you know, they don't, they're never going to eat another rabbit again. Um, One where a guy goes to an opium den. One where a guy is clearly in hell and he's being, like, tortured by a demon. There always can be a pretty wide variety of topics. I really enjoy this, though. I think it's honestly one of the better things I've picked up in them reading. There's one about a guy who's too tall. There's one about a guy who's too short. And they, like, get... smashed or stretched or whatever it it all sort of fits into that kind of dream logic um but yeah it's been really fun and um i love i love the the comedy of them i'll probably pick out specific ones at some point to try to go through and talk about um but these are all absolutely available online i think i got mine through the archive the archive.org um I downloaded like 800 of them on a PDF that have been like shrunk down or their JPEGs. I think, um, PNGs actually, sorry, I don't know file formats that well, but, um, definitely something that I recommend. Uh, they are very much of a time period. Some of them are pretty, a little bit racist. Some of them are like more racist or less racist. Um, They include some pretty offhand references to historical stuff. So if you don't know early 20th century, late 19th century political history, at one point someone refers to Kaiser Bill, very clearly set in that pre-World War I era of history. But I enjoyed them a lot. I think they're really cool. I think they're really funny in many cases. So that will probably come back up again. But that is the only comic I've read. I will probably at some point be talking about the other comic books I'm reading. But that's the one that's sort of been on my mind right now. I'm going to take a break here, and then I'm going to come back and talk about– Food and drink. All right. Here's my last section. I'm going to talk a little bit about food and drink that I've been enjoying. It's not a particularly, I don't think I have any restaurants to sort of shout out or talk about their food this time, but I will be talking a little bit about two things that I kind of have given a little bit of my time and energy to in both in terms of making and in terms of thinking about. I have been paying a little bit more attention to coffee in the past. I mean, the past couple of years, working jobs where I tend to have to get up before 8, I've been drinking more coffee. And, you know, it started out with, you know, they had a Keurig and some free coffee, and I just kind of went with it. But I'll admit I have my... Brother gave me some coffee that he got from a cousin of ours that has been pretty good. Honestly, it's kind of improved my coffee game a little bit. This coffee is from a company called Cameron's. They're Highlander Grog, listed as having sort of rum and butterscotch overtones. I really have enjoyed it. I feel like it's got kind of a peaty sensation to it. When I'm not right in there with my nose, it seems to have that really stereotypical coffee smell, but I actually don't smell that a ton when I either smell the brewed coffee or the grounds themselves at close range. I also bought a French press for the first time in my life. It's a really small, cheap one from Amazon. I've been enjoying that and playing around with different kinds of creamer or whatever. I'm not a super, super into black coffee. I think one thing that I've never, I've never really, I think I realized at a relatively early stage with drinks that I would either be right. Somebody who just drank the sort of whatever happened to be available or somebody who really invested the money and the energy into figuring out about something. Coffee has not been something I've really, Put a lot of energy and effort into, but, you know, honestly, just getting this big bag of coffee. And here's the thing. I'm not following probably some of the best practices in terms of storing the coffee, whatever. I've had it for a while. It's not freshly ground by any stretch of the imagination. I've also gotten a little bit into some local places, La Primitaza downtown in Lawrence. Shout out to them. they have some fantastic stuff and I don't really know what I'm doing. I just go in and sort of order what appears to be there and kind of have messing around with that. Um, but yeah, it's been really nice to sort of get to think a little bit more about what I like, enjoy and what I would like to have. I still am not super into heavy, heavily sweetening my coffee. I do feel like there's a really nice thing with both sweetener and creamer to some extent, just that it kind of opens up some of the flavors. I love to sort of see how that works. I think it's really a fascinating process. But I'm glad to sort of dig into coffee a little bit more. My wife is digging into tea a little more. I've always wanted to, I think I've always kind of wanted to be a tea guy, certainly over a coffee guy, but I think it's really been fascinating to jump into the coffee world again because it really has been a long time since I've made any serious attempts to get into it. Um, I'm going to talk a little bit more here about the beer that I had last week. I only had the one six pack and then a little bit about my off a, um, a stew from West Africa that I made for the lunches last week. Um, but I'm going to do that after a short break. Welcome back. And, uh, This is going to be the final section. I'm going to be talking about the last elements of sort of the food and drink for this week. And the first thing I mentioned is the beer. I probably drink maybe a six pack a week on average. I mean, that's probably a little high. But I had a beer this last week, six pack from the local liquor store. And The one I'm thinking of is probably my first IPA of the season was Flying Hawaiian Double IPA Pineapple from Tallgrass. I tend to drink, according to some of the better sources I've seen, tend to drink beer kind of based on a sort of schedule throughout the year. And, you know, for the winter months, I'm drinking pretty... malty, pretty high alcohol, barley wines, porters, big or dark beers. I probably don't drink an IPA from late fall into early spring. Flying Hawaiian was my first one here of the spring. I was impressed with it. I thought it was good. I'm always happy to see the tall grasses back. There was a period of time where They were gone. Buffalo Sweat especially is one that I really loved, and I loved that brewery when it was still going. As I understand, they're now being brewed by Wichita Brewing Company, which thank goodness to them for bringing those back because some of them are really great. I think Flying the Lion probably isn't my favorite, but also it's a very solid double IPA, so no real negative feelings about that. The last thing to mention is um, Ma'afe. So I, uh, didn't probably have a ton of amazing culinary experiences last week, but I went out of my way to try to, uh, to find something good to make for lunches. And I pulled on a recipe that I have eaten before. I think I probably was pulled to it a little bit by, um, last week I finished, uh, read honestly as fast as I've read a book in a while. Uh, Chinua Achebe's, uh, Things fall apart, and there's just a lot of talk of yam stews and yam pottage and stuff like that. And so I went back to this recipe that I've done a couple times before. It's a West African stew. I think I originally found it listed as like Ivorian, but I was just looking for Ivorian stuff for reasons I won't get into now. But this stew is really, really tasty. It's got sort of a peanut butter base. most soup stews in america are either sort of like chicken beef broth tomato or dairy based and so i think the peanut butter base is actually nice kind of gives it that background uh it's a little bit like you know what you get with a pad thai um but then you've got um you've got the yam sweet potato however you want to say it uh and some chickpeas and i normally think i put peas in there, but I think I didn't do that this time. Maybe green beans? I can't quite remember. I put some chicken in this time. It's always nice to let the kale, some kale wilt sort of on. I actually put the kale in after it was completely done and kind of when I was reheating it for lunches, I would just put it kind of on top and then stir it in after it had had a good run in the microwave and it worked really well. But yeah, it's a great, it's a great Stew, I encourage you guys to go out and find it and maybe try to make it. It's been a thing for me recently, and I say recently, probably the past 10 years. Actually, back when my mom was alive, it was kind of one of the things that we really enjoyed was going out and trying to find recipes from sort of a variety of different cultures. And so trying to get things that I haven't eaten a ton of. I had not eaten a ton of African food when I first found ma'afe. And it was specifically, you know, like, African dishes, right? I tried a lot of things that probably had African origins, like gulagichi stew, I think I did a couple years ago. But, like, I really enjoyed this particular recipe, and I really enjoyed... To me, there was a feeling that, like, I could get a slightly more nuanced view of the life of, you know, these characters in this book, right? because I'm on some level eating something that might be similar to what they would have eaten. And that sort of, it's so hard for us to understand. We will read a book about someone from a different time, a different place, and it's very easy for us to kind of feel like, oh, I kind of get their world. But then just to sort of engage with whether it's, you know, I remember the South African World Cup and the vuvuzelas and the way that people in America just, like, freaked the fuck out about them. And it was really cool to see– I don't know. It's really cool to see people come up against something that is– it feels right for them, right? That's music. I'm talking about food. But I think there's something really nice about– What can happen when we open ourselves up to something like that? Because I do think it can give us a sense. It can make it easier at least for us. I wouldn't have said, oh, I understand West African life because of that food. But then putting that food with that book and making connections on multiple levels– I thought was really, really powerful. And I thought it was really interesting and added to my experience there. And then that book sort of drew me back towards retrying this recipe, which, again, I think it went really well. And it's a recipe that I want to sort of keep doing from time to time because it really is a fantastic meal. So that's kind of where I'm going to leave it. I'm actually going to talk a little bit because I didn't have to talk about this earlier during the music section. But I didn't get a chance. I have included a song here, you'll probably have already noticed, in various ways and places, mostly connected to the transitions. And my wife, shout out to her, she helped me find a really good option here of something from the public domain that I can put in this podcast without... being sued or owing anyone a lot of money. But also, I think it really did end up being, I think, a fun... I'm not going to pretend like this is music that I was listening to already, but also I do think it was really fun commentary on some of the same themes of the podcast. So this one's called It Goes Like This or That Funny Melody is how it's sometimes described. Um... The artist on this one, Cliff Edwards, I believe, is his name. This is from the 20s, sometime between 22 and 36. Hopefully, actually in the public domain so that I don't get in trouble for using it. But, yeah, shout out to my wife for that. Her eclectic music taste is... one of her many stunning qualities. So that's kind of where I'm going to leave you guys for this week. Hopefully come back next week and I'll have hopefully more interesting things to say. We'll see how that goes. And yeah, thanks for listening.
SPEAKER_02:I have just been talking with Mr. Hoover and with Smith. Friends, I said, I'd like to vote for both of you. But you know it can't be done. I can only vote for one. Will this lamb be wrecked if the wrong one I elect? Then Hoover cried, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da. And Smith replied, dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee. So I said, die-dee-die-die-die. And they said, do-dee-oh-doe-doe. Then Mr. Washington will show you just what can be done. Ba-da-da-da, we'll give you this. Ba-da-da-da, we'll give you that. You'll find a welcome on the door. Then Coolidge said, Where have I heard that stuff before?