Avsnitt
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Red-headed robins, challenged by the weather, and Oklahoma mythology, including serial killers, mass murders, and werewolves. Imaginative subversion of the terrain. Students are not co-teaching. Two-headed chickens. A homeless freestyle rapper named Big Weiner.
And from the notes of Kris Saknussemm:
-Rapper 50 Cent, age 48 and trying desperately to look like a cartoon version of someone my students’ age, says to his 12 million X followers, “It’s almost over,” as in Humanity. This while he’s embroiled in collateral flak from the federal investigations of Puff Diddy for sex trafficking, rape, domestic abuse, drugs, guns—the usual. And where did all the playground-sounding names come from? Puff Diddy. Charlemagne Tha God. Megan Thee Stallion. Strange mix of adolescence (if not childishness) and sexual perversion.
-Sawfish. Improbable creatures that look like they were designed for sheer novelty. They’re somehow going crazy and committing communal suicide in the shallow waters of Florida’s beaches. Perhaps a strangely apt metaphor.
-Weirdly echoed by parents (particularly white parents) in epidemic numbers seeking professionally certified diagnoses of their kids as being autistic, ADHD, clinically depressed, or neurodivergent. Why? In order to secure more time on tests like the SATs and ACTs.
-Meanwhile, Harvard, the jewel brand in the Ivy League (and the pressurized Holy Grail of the test taking frenzy) sees the first drop in applications ever. Antisemitism and plagiarism scandals are credited as causes in the decline. The Harvard Corporation (note that term) has also come under legal fire for DEI discrimination against Asians, artificially promoting underqualified African American applicants—while it’s been revealed that a disturbing percentage of white admissions are solely legacy based—children of alumni, faculty, and staff, who are in the main unable to compete outside the nepotism advantage.
-On a broader, global scale, scientific experts from many fields debate the concept of the Anthropocene as umbrella label for the current era / epoch. But what no one ignores is that the Human Impact in question is viewed as entirely destructive. And on perhaps the principle of compounding interest, a great deal of the “damage” has occurred since the mid-20thcentury, which mirrors the rise of Environmentalism and green ideologies. Say one thing, do another.
This inventory of Dysfunction could go on and on. We know. But like many curious and concerned thinking people today, you and I have talked about the Dysfunction often in terms of mass psychosis. A spiritual, psychological vortex-disease on the Cultural scale. I now wonder if the truth isn’t conceptually much simpler.
Let’s take our sawfish death spiral despair as the emblematic end result of the ambient, atmospheric Dysfunction. If 50 Cent says world doom is at hand, what hope do sawfish have? Talk about a marginalized community. But what links these other crises (and so many more)?
I’m coming around to viewing the “problem” as a fundamental collapse / erosion of Morality. Morale. Moral. How often do we connect those two notions? Are our problems today really all that complicated? Don’t they in fact amount to people knowing what the right thing to do is and not doing it? Each of the above examples from recent news is about a failure of moral conscience and basic decency. Perversion arises from selfishness.
We can break down or address each of these issues (selected from far too many others) in almost child-level moral terms. Many people (particularly NPR followers) now embody a genuine hatred of Humanity for our environmental destruction. Does this mean they’re trying to live and consume more sensibly and sensitively? Nope. For the most part, they just complain about what governments and corporations are doing or not, while they go on consuming like it’s 1999 or 1979.
Ivy League schools, and now so many downstream schools, companies, and government departments know that DEI policies are inherently unfair, divisive, and illogical. Racism in the name of combatting racism? Victimology in the supposed service of reducing victimization? Doesn’t work. Can’t work. At the same time, admitting mediocre white candidates because of legacy loyalty is actually an advertisement of total failure in the institution’s nurture of academic and intellectual excellence. How is it that legacy applicants are mediocre if Harvard is such an incubator of brilliance and achievement? All of this is just disingenuous maneuvering for personal, political, and identity politics gain. It's in the realm of lying and cheating—basic morality. Nothing complex or clever about it.
Same with parents (especially parents of underachieving white children) pleading to psychologists to designate their kids as Special Needs. Work the System, milk the System. Everybody else is.
Could it be that our core problem at this point in history isn’t nearly as interesting as technological mass delusion or a giant masquerade festival of psychosis? What if it’s just moral sloth, devious self-interest, and everyday spinelessness?
What if, as a Cultural community, we said, “Man up and try to be the best, humble, heroic leader in your house and in your neighborhood that you can be. There’s honor in that. And you’ll live longer.” Black millionaire and billionaire celebrities aren’t doing black people at large any good. More black teachers, social workers, professionals, skilled tradespeople, and small business operators would.
What if we eliminated all legacy advantage across the board? Radical individual meritocracy, as in sports?
What if our activism regarding complaints and protest against corporations and governments turned to activism in our own habits and purchasing behaviors?
What if we could tell the truth to each other? A good example might be: yes, there are key levels of society where females need to be encouraged and “empowered,” but there are also many levels where they wield far too much power.
We need to bring back Morality and Ethics as essential…completely transcendent of any Right / Conservative frame, or Leftist rebellion. Hypnosis and Hysteria are more exciting than Hypocrisy—but mundane Hamburger Helper level hypocrisy is creating an Hypocracy.
No, it’s not nearly as cool a calamity as mass hallucination and simulated Matrix realities. It’s really just Laziness Hard at Work.
And as to the Left’s exhaustingly shrill and repeated claim that Morality and Ethics can only enter in when the “playing field is level,” that’s not a social belief system or program of coherent public policy—it’s a secular religious mania that’s so clearly not working as social program, only more mania will do. To me, the mania isn’t as intriguing as I’d hope. More and more, it seems purely pathetic.
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From the notes of Kris Saknussemm...
Travel becomes Tourism. This Sacred - > Profane style degeneration is hardly an isolated phenomenon—in fact it might seem to be a Deep Algorithm. But I think the progenitors of the Tourism Age can to some extent be forgiven. It’s fine to say now that they should’ve extrapolated—seen ahead to what large-scale, organized, budget-minded transportation of people around the world for the purposes of recreation or information, fulfillment of some kind—what that would mean. What impact. Think of Tahiti and Hawaii, Venice and Dubrovnik. Yellowstone National Park.)The problem is the Education has so much more to do with Tourism than with Travel—and has for several decades. Public Education tried to apply the values of Trade School (standardization, consistency, certification) to a Liberal Arts model…while wholesale abandoning the Trade School and apprenticeship streams. Meanwhile, Liberal Arts succumbed to customer service.Here's the concluding sentence of one of my students’ analysis of the essay “The Loss of the Creature” by Walker Percy, which is as much about this theme / crisis as anything can be.“If you don’t know the significance of William Faulkner, the story of Robinson Crusoe, the message within A Brave New World, or the man who discovered insulin, it may be very difficult to understand, and Percy’s true message may never be revealed to a 21st century student.”
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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From the notes of Kris Saknussemm...
We said last time that we were going to investigate further how the distinction b/w Travel and Tourism might help us understand what’s happened to the project of national public Education in America. An odd proposition to some perhaps. But I think this is easily done, although it’s also easy to be very hard on Tourism. Travel can take many forms, but it’s never crass. Tourism can’t escape that tinge, that odor. Looking deeper, Travel suggests an openness to experience, a willingness to take risks, and to confront unexpected situations, even illness, violence, natural calamity, or falling in love. Tourism is precisely focused on at least managing risk, streamlining possibilities, reducing the unexpected, and delivering a consistent experience. Experience as Product (right off the conveyer belt). This Sacred - > Profane style degeneration is hardly an isolated phenomenon—in fact it might seem to be a Deep Algorithm. But I think the progenitors of the Tourism Age can to some extent be forgiven. It’s fine to say now that they should’ve extrapolated—seen ahead to what large-scale, organized, budget-minded transportation of people around the world for the purposes of recreation or information, fulfillment of some kind—what that would mean. What impact. But they had no precedent—nothing on the scale that would emerge. They weren’t far or deep thinkers and didn’t claim to be. But while there was a lot of greed and foolishness (and still is), there were good intentions too. I believe some early Tourism champions genuinely thought that exposing ever more middle class Westerners to beauty, culture, and wonders around the world would do them good—and wouldn’t degrade the points of interest, destinations, and ports of call. (In addition to the interesting philosophical questions involved, there are very practical physical matters of traffic congestion, inflated prices, resentful locals, and clogged toilets. The list is long, but think of Tahiti and Hawaii, Venice and Dubrovnik. Yellowstone National Park.)
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From the notes of Kris Saknussemm...
Temporary tattoos and the latest Oscar’s night—two more examples of why we’ve entered the Post-Civilization Age. People who say the Oscar’s have been in “decline” for quite a while are the kind of folks who wouldn’t draw much distinction between Ted Bundy returning to have sex with a corpse three days after the murder, or three weeks. I maintain there’s a difference.
Moving along, it’s struck me of late that there’s a relationship between Education (public school system) and Tourism, which often goes unnoticed. We know there’s a connection between Education and Travel. Travel is how humanity has educated itself about the human globe (and all this means), the planet Earth, and the larger world / universe we’ve been able to comprehend. All good. Tourism? Hmm, not so good. Why? What is the difference between Travel and Tourism?
Many interesting people have tried to speak to this issue, including well-traveled writers such as Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams, and Jack Kerouac—hell, the list goes on and on. What a great list. But it doesn’t go that far back in time…because “tourism” in anything like the sense we mean it today really only fired up after WWII. Up to then, “travel” frequently meant adventure—both intentional and inadvertent. Calamity. Discovery. Decadence. Plunder. Escape. To be sure, the English fascination for a Tour of the Continent (Europe) was fashionable curriculum for the upper classes. But generally, Travel was a more eccentric endeavor. Hoity-toity or rough and ready. It was selective. A curious club.
I’ve recently had my students read Walker Percy’s wonderful essay “The Loss of the Creature.” It has a lot to say about reclaiming personal experience and sovereignty—and not sacrificing validation to a shadowy priest caste of so-called experts. It deals directly in the connection between Education and Travel or Tourism?
So, taking my view that Tourism arises as an industry (and as a system of social values) post-WWII…isn’t this about when the commitment to a fully national public school system takes off? I think before then, any sort of structured public education program was very porous and unevenly distributed even within states. More an idea than a system or a network. Is there a connection? What can the difference between Travel and Tourism possibly tell us about how the public education experiment is faring?
Kris's music piece at the end is titled "Recurring Dreams."
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FROM THE NOTES OF KRIS SAKNUSSEMM...
If people haven’t read Jung’s work on Flying Saucers (as modern myth), I recommend it. I hadn’t looked at it in some time, but I think it reads even better in this age of social media. He completely skirts the issue of “real” or “imagined,” and focuses on the sheer popularity of the mythology. This is the view I took of cargo cult beliefs when I was a failed young anthropologist in Melanesia. Real/Unreal misses the point if something is deeply vivid at the social level. Jung’s short book makes a nice pairing with Randolph Stow’s remarkable novel Visitants, which is set in the Trobriand Islands during a UFO-cargo cult crisis. Stow was a young patrol officer, and the book provoked a nervous breakdown of lifetime impact. You can see why. In something like Melville, the strangeness starts early, and then Stow takes you right off any map.
To me, this strangely ties in with a larger phenomenon. Representation vs. Reality. Representation as Reality. It’s interesting to me to note how far we have degenerated from Schopenhauer’s ideas put forth in The World as Representation and Will. I think all forms of German idealism have a lot to answer for in Western thinking, but Schopenhauer had a lot more on his mind than we do today.
Case in point. Google’s Gemini AI image generator has recently caused a stir for ludicrous depictions of black Popes, black female Popes, black Vikings (although they look kind of cool), and images of the Founding Fathers as blacks and Native Americans (which rather contradicts the revisionist history program of today). The Right scorns the images as overzealous wokeness or outright historical misrepresentation. The Left dodges and weaves, and claims this is how stereotypes get broken down. The larger and deeper problem, however, is the notion that image alone is what counts.
This isn’t what Schopenhauer meant as “representation.” He meant a magical human capability of imagining all of existence. It was humancentric to be sure, but it was deep conceptually and structurally. Now what we mean is “optics.” Pure visual surface. We mean the artificial world of media and entertainment. Yet we know people aren’t really fooled by this. Just frustrated.
American black people know that one black President and a few millionaires and even billionaire celebrities don’t equate to genuine structural change. How can this discordance not cause confusion and anger?
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Today on the show we have a special guest: author/teacher Matthew O'Brien! We chat about the expat lifestyle, finding love through a language barrier, and the lives of people who live in the flood channels beneath Las Vegas.
It's a great conversation. Matt is a fascinating guy. Here's his bio from his website, Beneath the Neon:
Matthew O’Brien is a writer, editor and teacher/tutor who lived in Las Vegas for twenty years and is currently based in San Salvador, El Salvador. His latest book, Dark Days, Bright Nights: Surviving the Las Vegas Storm Drains, shares the harrowing tales of people who lived in Vegas’ underground flood channels and made it out and turned around their lives. He’s also the author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas and My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas. Matt has taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Escuela Americana in San Salvador and is the founder of O’Brien Editing Services and Shine a Light, a nonprofit organization that provides housing, counseling and other services to the people living in the drains.
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From Kris's notes:
I take the view that visual Art begins at the crossroads of eyes and hands. A stick or a bone is good…dust mixed with water. Blood. It’s a start. (With Sculpture, the question seems to me to be how does one escape? The whole world including open ocean is one vast sculpture park.) With music, hands and voice are the original party starters…splashing water. Two rocks would be handy. Maybe a blade of grass or a taut vine. (What’s not a musical instrument?) Work from there. When it comes to Story however, then I reckon some serious cultural technology is required. Language. Repeatable fire perhaps. It’s interesting to me that we have elaborate formal notions of Storytelling….and later endless pedagogies regarding the learned skill of Reading. It’s very hard to find a guide to Storylistening. It’s harder still to find the coherence of connection (satisfactory or not) between Storylistening and Storytelling that we have with Reading and Writing.
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JDO gives his AWP trip. Lots of books sold! Many of JDO’s ideas about how culture is were troubled by how cool everybody was. Is the negativity we hear online…just an online thing?
Is there value in starting a collective rather than pursuing publication by an indie press or traditional publishers?
The distinctiveness of Christopher Walken’s accent…and Kris’s. The disappearance of regional American accents, Korean accents, and British accents.
Super Bowl ads…where is the Latino representation?
The American refusal to grow up is directly related to their fear of death. Or maybe their refusal to accept death.
We talk about Taboo and Tom Hardy, and Hardy’s secret rap career. The brilliance of Daniel Day-Lewis, and the troubles with an adaptation with J.G. Ballard’s work.
Super Bowl conspiracy theories. Usher’s halftime show. America’s tryhard lameness and sinister division. Are Americans inherently dishonest people?
JDO’s imaginative challenge gives him free reign to be as evil as he wants to be…but at a terrible cost.
Receiving language from dogs. Where do the words we speak come from. More importantly, WHO do they come from?
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SHOW NOTES...
We’ve been talking a lot about Education of late, and the insurmountable problem of getting kids interested in reading if they aren’t already. Two clear thoughts have emerged.
One, I think the tired but all-too-accurate metaphor that American society is an Allegory of High School (jocks, cheerleaders, druggies and criminals in the making, nerds, and disaffected sub-groups, etc.) is becoming more concrete and congruent with each passing year. The only new element I see is the School Shooting. Telling.
But as I was thinking about reading in this context, I realized I don’t recall learning to read myself very well. I vividly remember the discomfort of learning to handwrite (print and cursive). The pencils always seemed too big for my hands. What I do recall about early reading is that it meant Independence. I didn’t have to rely on my grandmother or older sister. For me, reading was an expression of masculine self-determination—stepping out from the females who both dominated and positively directed my young life. How many people today would see reading as an expression of masculinity? How odd. Only a short while ago, our most important poets were men like James Dickey, James Wright, and W.S. Merwin. Those days seem long ago.
The second thought to reveal itself from this stream was The Bicycle. I used to ride my green Schwinn 3-speed to a bookstore in a strip mall to purchase the next Hardy Boy book I hadn’t read. One rainy day, I realized I’d eventually run out of Hardy Boys…so I feverishly began creating my own deeply imitative series The Benton Boys. My real, private passion about writing came out of Fan Fiction. I openly borrowed characters. I just didn’t want to run out of story.
I paid for the Green Bike myself…with the money I earned cleaning toilets and vacuuming floors for an industrial dry cleaner, starting at age 9. The job gave me more than $ and work ethic pride. It was a place to be after school in the strange days following my violent rape in 4th grade. The Green Bike was what I needed. The rape would never have happened if I’d had a bike. I made a major correction of reality. The Hardy Boys entered in…and then the Benton Boys. Reading + Green Bike = Independence.
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SHOW NOTES...
Relaxed, deep sleep is perhaps the single best natural healing agent there is. If we wake slowly, there’s still a profound vibration of nurture, if not immediate refreshment. But pattern is the key. The reliability of satisfying sleep is elemental to its satisfaction.
Consider this then. We live in a time increasingly characterized by sleep problems. Go to the appropriate aisle in any pharmacy. It’s a big aisle. The problem is an epidemic—but not a pandemic. Yet.
But are sleeping problems seeping, and sweeping around the globe?
With a focus on Insomnia, but not excluding other sleep disorders (such as apnea, restless leg syndrome, nightmares, etc.), what if we asked this question: Is it possible that the simplest and yet most coherent and embracing explanation of Modernity is Trouble Sleeping?
Is this an oversimplification—or is it a sigilization? (Isn’t Sigilization an interesting counter to Civilization?)
-The Age of Trolls, the Age of Apps. Throngs of Dolls. Structures collapse.
I’m afraid of the Death of Mythos…the overgrown abandoned Labyrinth. In Israel, they used to show porn films at drive-in-movie theaters. Big screen. Little known fact.
I’m afraid of a descent into nightmare without magic. Ceremonies degenerating into Spectacle. Incoherent rituals of violence. Not a visionary brutalism, full of geometry and High Ideals. Not a bestial, sensual hedonism of misguided Innocence and clichéd desires. No. A kind of barbed wire methamphetamine mutant amnesia.
-My big concern with Education (and all that it represents in terms of class mobility) is the collapse of standards in the name of Diversity and Inclusion. The radical Left claims this is a misnomer, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Many go much further, believing the degradation of performance assessment is not only very real, and not merely collateral damage—it’s their explicit goal. Cancel the Meritocracy. Everyone’s a winner, baby.
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FROM KRIS SAKNUSSEMM'S NOTES 1/23/24
Hidden Terrain…
What appears to be mythic exhaustion—the Jungian Collective Unconsciousness turned to Dustbowl—may be a socially engineered fiction.
Our psychological / mental health apparatus is dysfunctional and overwhelmed. All our approaches center on social-public behaviors. As several noted sex researchers lament, what incentive do people have to share their private psychic experiences honestly? Is it necessarily obvious that they can do this even they desired to do so? Meanwhile, imagination on almost every day-to-day level is discouraged.
We find ourselves fixated on an aspect of Mind that is fundamentally limited, and in denial of one that must be at least provisionally viewed as unlimited. The result is a crisis-level imbalance between Logos and Mythos on the scale of Culture, where Logos has degenerated into a hyperspecialized (autistic) focus on Numeros: pure computational processing, and Mythos is cut off from Hypnos at the intimate personal level. Kerouac’s “unspeakable visions of the individual” are now entirely in shadow. Outlawed. What we value is the visible-physical and performative. (Covid masks as iconic expression of our time).
Imbalance + Corruption / Degeneration. Solution? The whole Lost Xplorers program celebrates a resurgence of Hypnos as a means to nourish and reinforce Mythos and to rehabilitate Logos by alchemizing Numeros back into its original position within the Family of Mind. I think it could be helpful to view the angst, distress, polarity, and violence of our age as a Family Problem writ large.
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First day back teaching. Education of today no longer lines up with the needs of young people. What if education was project-based? Outdoors?
Kris recounts his history with his Black Mountain Nemesis. Is there something wrong with the architecture of schools? The impossibility of convincing teenagers who don’t like to read, to read.
What’s going on with the price of sandwiches? Kris’s band for the day: THE LUXURIANTS! Radical wealth excess. A scathing attack on fandom. Is there any real cultural commentary going on anymore?
Stores used to be hubs of underground fandoms. Those don’t exist anymore. Kris and I talk about great bookstores. If there is an underground, Kris and I would love to be a part of them.
Hidden algorithms and inherent structures. Is the way out through treasure hunting? Forcing people away from the gardens, from cultivation, is having disastrous consequences.
We are turning away from ancient patterns of dreaming. Jack Kerouac called Charlie Parker “a creator of forms.” Who is creating forms now?
JDO puts forward his idea of “lava lamp creativity.” How does a story actually form? It’s worth creating a story in a group to find out. Where did the phrase “it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick” come from?
Collective imaginative dreaming leads to lava bubble magic. Where things get fuzzy and immaterial, that is the realm of human dreaming and imagination. Hidden terrain, socially engineered fiction, and spiritual crisis.
Dilbert and The Office as signals of the end. The rise of the middle management. What do these people do? Who knows?
JDO delivers his mentor profile in the form of a short crime story. Taking care of yourself with the idea that you might have someone to take care of one day.
Kris recalls Sonny Bono’s PSA on drug abuse. “One day you’ll be the older generation.” Kris muses on euphemism. Wondering what it would be like to live in the houses that you pass on the road.
Enjoy nostalgia. Dream is the aquarium of night.
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Snow on the mountains. Starting to teach Jurassic Park. The tallest novelist of all time. Crichton’s most controversial novel. Was Crichton a good novelist?
Trapped in the bathroom. Is the science ever settled?
Harmful Content. Militant non-musicians. Compliance. Kris vs. The Looping World. Lost malls. Hunting for bookstores in a small town. The worst bookstore in the history of America. Return policies on dirty magazines.
Osmos with the cosmos, or you will be socializing with a bureaucracy of ghosts. Sex positive interrogative counter-scientism societal utopianism.
Indistinguishable news organizations. Garmonbozia pablum. Does Liberal and Conservative mean anything? Should we have a Women Party and a Men Party? People can’t see anything from another point of view, but more importantly, they can’t see their own point of view.
Kindness as a placating sinister force. People get more feral the more “nice” the conversation gets.
Giving people responsibilities. The Gold Bar Test. Cults are about structure. Preview of 2024.
JDO’s imaginative challenge brings him to Swift Current, where a man wheels a cross through town and a Chinese restauranteur has problems with his fake hand.
The Harari Main Market. The chaos of markets, the harmony of trading. Looking closely at Mayan and Aztec societies. Hardy Boys cover designs. Reassessment of danger from the fear of serfs to a kind of danger you’d want to be a part of.
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Kris and I get in the holiday spirit!
Well, we start off cheery, at least.
Learning how to reuse the internet. Crossing the Drake Passage. The Truth About Dinosaurs. Shout out Jay for putting me on to new ways to surf the web.
Are you using your tools, or are your tools using you?
Robot Santa Carnival of Blood.
Kris has invented The Memory Game. Which game improves memory the most? JDO attempts to rank them.
Intuition vs. memory.
JDO’s imaginative exercise leads to “Polycule Slaughterhouse.”
JDO reads a new piece he’s been working on. As above, so below.
Kris takes us out with a great new piece of music, holiday-themed, called "3 Men on the Move."
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We've got a slightly darker episode this time around. But there's lots of valuable insight to be had.
Kris meets a magician named Kent Axell.
Area 15 in Vegas. JDO vents about frustrations with adminstrators. Being a high school teacher is kind of like being Tyler Durden. Learning how to teach The Great Gatsby. The tragic figure of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
A potluck band. Tribal music making. Bighorn sheep at the lake. Is the universe top-down or bottom-up? JDO shares his line art with Kris.
BIG IDEAS! Where are we going in 2024?
Kris tells a story about the time he saw a man jump off a bridge. This leads to a longer discussion about suicide and the mass shooting phenomenon as a form of suicide.
People are seeking oblivion, although it might not look like you’d expect. Is social media driving teens to suicide? Society doesn’t want to look at what is causing these mass suicides.
The power of spooning. A little time by the river. Loneliness is killing society. People who are giant walking red flags. Sanity = the history of heresy.
The inability to map the weather. Huntsman spiders. Climate as a huge idea. Take some responsibility!
Have we reach a point of too much signal? There’s no noise if you have dedication to something. We seem unable to protect cargo. Stewardship. The importance of honor.
Meaning = decision/choice. Let things roll. Don’t take so much control. Let natural cycles take hold. Fall into the groove. Don’t accept scolds and nags.
The hanged man where the chandelier should be. Dreams about you as the observer.
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Look out for another new episode dropping on Saturday!
Words of the year. The etymology of authentic. JDO talks about getting a bunch of birthday cards. Visual novels.
Mother Killed by Shark. Do You Know Where Your Parents Are? The inverse of a viking helmet. Pharrel’s Dudley Do Right hat.
What about all the good things cults have done? The strangeness of time. Every Wednesday is the same Wednesday.
Going full Bartleby. The singularity of the scrivener. Why do we have to do anything? Yielding sovereignty. Imperative. Septic tanks in the country.
Dunce cap questions are important. Extremists show us that we don’t *have* to do anything. Acquiescence to the must.
Chores we like vs. chores that we do. The satisfactory service of Chik-fil-A. The theory of logical types. Staying in the emblematic groove of our lives.
Becoming a collective requires having your own agency first. Fascination with samurai and yakuza. Gatsby’s dead-on commentary on class. Not fitting in with the upper-middle-class literary establishment.
Every president tries to convince you that they were born in a log cabin they built themselves.
JDO’s imaginative challenge involves the personification of Tabbo.
How can we take music to the level of sound? What does that mean for a whole range of things?
Power is a problem.
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Over the next few days, there will be a new episode of Lost Xplorers dropping daily! A Christmas miracle! JDO got a bit behind on the uploading during finals season at school, and it is time to catch up so our official Christmas episode drops around Christmas.
It’s officially Christmas season! Cheddar biscuits. Ultimate endless shrimp. Mcnugget boxes. Gas prices. On-the-street, at-the-drive-thru-menu level economics.
The Undaunted. High lonesome cowboys wrapped in bandages into S&M. The hungry closet. Knowing vs. doing.
JDO rapping Ice Spice in front of a huge audience. Practicing performance instead of memorization. Turning your eyelids inside out.
DREAM STUDIES BREAKTHROUGH!
Daydreaming vs. night dreaming. Dream determines depth, but does not distinguish between character and setting. Liminal spaces vs. the crossroads.
Memories vs. memories of dreams. The inventory of waking life experiences that appear in dreams. Dream mandala. Watching your actions like a cat.
History as proscriptive. Families sharing their dreams. The Fremont Street Circus. Naked nuns. Giant bears and giant salmon.
JDO spins a yarn about Kris as a young child going over to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving. The friend’s mother presents a blue, cold turkey.
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Kris and JDO record a Tascam episode! Walking and thinking. The Accelerants. Atomic age cartoon characters. Milestones vs. mileblurbs.
What has happened to the holiday season reindeer? Undercover teacher.
The Long Kiss Goodnight. JDO recounts his most recent move into an apartment. Mental illness invariably involves time distortion. Personal alignment vs. societal expectations. Blackout time. Stretched-out time. The schizophrenic is touched by God.
Physically representing how old the dinosaurs are. Charles Knight’s dino illustrations. Are dinosaurs fake?
As above so below. Depth as a category. Time running backwards. What does it mean to declare someone The Greatest of All Time? Sharing reference points. Mr. O. The conveyor belt of consumerism running backwards.
How do people who live through their ecosystems perceive our conception of time? The attempted murder of the eternal soul. Stewardship.
A fantasy world of non-physicality. What has happened to public parks? Between the Memory Palace and the Swamp…A GARDEN.
Turning people into mermaids. Alertness and attention.
Apologies for a few moments of startling distortion in this episode. The next episode, we are back to Zoom and it sounds crisp and fresh.
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On this episode, we begin with a bullet-pointed takedown of Neil Degrasse Tyson. Then we talk scientism as an unstable foundation to build knowledge. Philosophy of science. All sciences are not created equal. The price tag of academic credentials.
Bergson’s Principle of Proving a Negative. Shutting down interesting ideas. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The God of Evidence.
A band made of biofeedback. Human beings as stewards of reality. The miniaturization of knowledge. Hologram vs. jpeg. The bombardment of facts from a complete idiot. Science that isn’t about proving anything.
Religion as the outsourcing of validation. Kris invents a completely knew paradigm of education. This might be one of his best ideas of all time. The education of the hands. Realistic responses to AI.
South Korea, El Paso, and Taos. Borders always exist, a quantum state that wants the friction of two countries. Constructing sentences out of emojis. Our dependency on language.
It's impossible to run over a pigeon. Becoming monster hunters of dream.
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On this episode of the podcast, we invite our second guest (the first being Ellen) onto the show to discuss education. Lisa Sezate is a lifelong educator working in elementary schools, and she brings a unique look into that side of education.
Kris teaches college, David teaches high school, and Lisa teaches elementary. Between the three of them, they have a wide ranging conversation about the definition of insanity, how to get kids' attention, cell phone policies, and how to explain to students when a career path might not be for them.
Great episode. Thanks to Lisa!
- Visa fler
