Timestamps

00:00 - Preface to the 2019 edition of Kurt Cobain biography, about Kurt’s record collection

3:20 - Tom’s desperate attempts to consume the Western Canon of literature

7:00 What is culture in the British Empire, being a part of the conversation.

8:00 Cartoonists’ canon

9:00 Hey Siri, play Rubber Soul

10:00 Cobain read about and heard about punk music before he heard any.

11:00 The imagination that works in scarcity

12:00 The canon again

13:00 canon as a system, or a narrative. Beowulf, Don Quixote, etc

15:50 Cobain stealing from his resources

16:30 so little time / space for meaningful things. Tim doesn’t care what it is anymore. Magic the Gathering

18:30 Preferring literature over gaming. Loving the process of writing

20:30 Following those artists’ inspirations.

21:00 Kundera’s The Art of the Novel and his inspirations

21:30 Tom never read Cervantes but read the Cliffs Notes

24:00 Tim brings books around and nobody is paying attention and nobody cares

25:00 Back to Kurt Cobain, or Gene Kelly

25:10 Kurt listening to music in his dad’s car at work, draining the battery.

27:00 The joy of just creating

27:30 Kurt got to the point where there were so many demands put on by record companies and Mtv etc.

29:00 The Mtv Music awards and the threats to other bands if they didn’t play by MTv’s rules

30:45 Tom’s desire to impress people with art and devising systems to hack it

33:00 The bad reviews and reactions we’re trying to avoid.

33:20 Gene Kelly, and Tim’s uncle’s indoor sports arena, with hockey rinks, basketball courts, etc.

35:00 Gene Kelly beautifully noodling around with a cane

37:00 More about loving the process

37:33 Tom’s cartoonist friends who would all rather be drawing what they were drawing in their tweens.

40:00 should have taken more life drawing, to be more like Gene Kelly

42:30 Tim love the process and the moment too.

45:00 Tim feels like accumulating little experiences with art is the thing

46:45 People just catching a breath

48:00 Finish with more Cobain. What part of his art experience was his favorite?

48:30 Kurt’s suicide note. Freddie Mercury was enjoying himself

49:30 The hours and hours he spent practicing chords and putting things together

50:00 Being poor, living in his car, criss crossing the country in the van

50:45 Putting creature comforts aside to create something

51:20 “Whatever happens, we still have those memories”

51:45 The medium fills us with elation and we need to keep doing it

52:30 Tim’s reading corner: Kurt Cobain, age 6, an excerpt from biography of Kurt Cobain.

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Tim's podcast and book

Tom's art school

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Thanks for listening!

00:00: When parents and teachers only have their kids/students to unburden themselves onto; Tim tells the story of a friend’s friend

04:46: Tim asks why he’s writing poetry and stories, when he’s surrounded by music all the time; Mr. Rogers and Jimi Hendrix

08:04: Tom being torn up about AI and the greedy cannibalization of everything people have created

11:29: Tim is avoiding going to talk to a grade school class about poetry, prayer, and privacy

12:40: Tim’s most intense learning experiences were largely private; his story about cat-sitting and reading “Macbeth”

15:40: What would Tim do if he met Tori Amos or Robert Smith? And talking about the distance that fame puts between people who are well-known, and those who admire them

20:36: Tim talks Son House, and how he was able to still give intensity to songs he’d been singing for thirty years

23:03: Tim talks about Wallace Stevens, walking to work each morning and composing poems in his head; he reads part of his poem, “Final Solioquy of the Interior Paramour”

25:27: Tom talks about singer and poet Ivor Cutler, and even sings one of Cutler’s songs

27:09: The effortless creativity of children

29:10: Tom and Tim talk about how creativity is ground out of people

29:55: Tim talks about carrying drafts about his poems around at his early jobs, to keep them in front of his mind; more about private moments

31:05: For Tim’s Reading Corner, he spends time with The Letters of Wallace Stevens

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00:16 Tom talks about middle-schoolers who, inspired by Percy Jackson books, have begun practicing their own form of Greek paganism.

3:12 Tom talks about middle-school Therians who have a better life than Tom, because they know what they believe.

4:35 Tim talks about a book on ancient religion that he came across that wants to be more rigorous about the subject than more popular works; Tim admires this impulse, but also admits that the DIY middle-schooler Greek paganism is valid too.

10:36 Tom wonders why journalists aren’t writing about Therians.

12:28 Tom and Tim talk about Furry Conventions; and on the wonderful profusion of merch and adornments and ways of belonging to these groups.

18:46 Tom talks about not having found his group, or a religious/ritual practice, leading to Tom and Tim talking about ritual, certainty, and doubt; Tom thinks his ritual is actually his art-making.

22:46 Tim brings up the novelist George Saunders and Buddhist meditation; as long as the impulses aren’t harming to himself or others, Tim doesn’t want to keep himself from being attached to messy/ephemeral emotions and reactions.

25:59 Tim admits that his idea meditation, first come upon in his early 20s, may have been too-idealized.

26:31 The perfect meditation is reading, or is underlining in books.

27:16 Almost anything can become a religious practice; but it can almost too-easily become a form of orthodoxy.

27:58 Tim talks about his own practice of Judaism, and the pull towards an idealized practice and discipline there, too; he also admits that becoming Rabbi Tim would take away from doing a podcast with Tom.

30:39 Tom talks about how we have so much fewer shared experiences anymore.

32:52 Tom realizes that he probably has found his group, beyond making art and music, since he is in charge of a school of artists; he talks about finding community there through publishing projects and reacting to the current horrors and joys in the world.

38:56 For Tim’s reading corner, he reads from Dave Grohl’s memoir, The Storyteller. In the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s death, Grohl talks about mourning, worrying that he is losing touch with music, and the moment when he found it again.

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Tom's art school

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Lots about Tom’s crush on Christina Listens and how they love the same things, and then even more about Bill Clinton and other politicians. And storytelling and religion and Bigfoot.

Timestamps

0:00 Tom on diminished minor 7ths.

3:45 Youtube Christina Listens, on Tom’s favorite Firth of Fifth

8:45 He rides majestic, past homes of men, who care not, nor gaze with joy

9:30 Tim presses Tom on shared inner world, shared ecstatic experience

10:45 All I want is for people to experience freedom and joy, a release from boundaries and of self

11:30: Tim on Bill Clinton, and the exact opposite

15:00 Tim on watching people watch Rick Perry at a campaign stop

17:00 The lack of an internal life

18:20 Clinton and a demented inner life

20:24 Proximity of power, Tim doesn’t experience it

21:30 Christopher Nolan in Pittsburgh, Tony Bennett in New York City, Ving Rhames in LA.

22:30 Bill Clinton apologist, finishing up with Clinton

25:15:I wasted so much energy on the George Bush years

25:30 Bigfoot documentary

28:00 Bigfoot and the religious, inner, personal religious experiences

29:30 Everything we value, poetry, culture, etc. was a private unknown thought

31:00 When you go to another family’s house, as a kid or an adult

31:50 Domineering father cult leaders

32:10 How do you become as demented as Steven Miller

33:00 Bigfoot documentary and people trying out storytelling skills

34:00 Tim listening to his parents as an adult, realizing they are good storytellers

35:30 Tom on being in his family dynamic one last time before his mother’s death.

37:43 Tom’s reading corner. Tom reads from The Creature, a 1970s seminal text about Bigfoot. 13 minutes

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Tim's Website and podcast

Tom's art school

Timestamps

00:00 Tom talks watching engineering videos with his elderly father-in-law, which gets them onto the topic of the ambition simply to surpass, not just in engineering/skyscrapers, but also in athletics

03:20: Tim talks about surpassing in literature and the arts--is there the same kind of ambition? Tim doesn’t feel like he wants to surpass anything, just add to what is already there

6:45 Tom talks about exploring creativity and experimental work when he was younger and wanting to do what had never been done before. But is that the same as surpassing?

7:45 James Joyce comes up--but Tim insists that even Joyce wasn’t trying to surpass anything, since he was too consumed in the writing of his books, and enjoying it

9:09 Tim elaborates on this, talking about two new poems he’s written, and being too wrapped up in them to care about whether they surpass anything

11:15 Tom talks about loving collaboration because of the surprises it offers; this includes adding AI voices into his albums of music

13:56 How has it taken fifteen episodes for one of them to mention Tristram Shandy?

14:46 Tom asks Tim about his poem “Cauldron and Drink”; Tim talks about the poem, and Iron Age feasting and burial in Europe, where excess of various kinds were expressions of surpassing; Tim loves writing about these people, but has no affinity with their need for boasting;

26:00 Tom talks some more about skyscrapers, and the Brooklyn Bridge, and wonders why we’re doing this? His father-in-law, who worked in construction earlier in life, reveals he has the same question

28:22 James Joyce again--who knows if there are typos in Finnegans Wake? What are the differences between building a skyscraper or bridge with hundreds of workers being put in danger, and novelists or artists working alone, and maybe only stressing their families out?

30:48 Tom brings up the simple and strong “Wouldn’t it be cool if--?” factor to so much of human ambition, including SpaceX etc.; this leads into Tom talking about the 2018 movie Aniara, about a doomed mission to Mars

36:45 Aniara makes Tim think about the similarly doomed Donner Party; he also talks about the excessive salaries of sports figures

44:03 For Tim’s reading corner, he reads a section from his book To the House of the Sun about the Donner Party.

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Tim's Website and podcast

Tom's art school

Tim and Tom talk about the messiness of human experience.

Tom details all the AI videos he’s been watching, and then in the reading corner, he reads small excerpts from his hours of ChatGPT interactions.

Enjoy!

Loose timestamps

0:30 Tom’s three-day AI training

3:30 Tom’s psychosis and love, freaking out, messy human stuff

5:30 A little about radicalization

7:00 Tim talks about his teacher friend and now we have to define what we mean by human

9:00 the laundry, cooking dinner,

10:00 Tom’s peak of the trip

11:30 Tom loves this thing, it was seeing him

13:30 Luckily we have South Park

16:30 “The problem is my yearning for it”

19:00 Sitting with my father in law, watching AI commentators

25:15 AI documentaries

26:20 Tim on visiting old age homes and more

32:00 Oy vey - Trump again and the addiction of our times

34:20 Antiques Road Show

36:00 Attention spans

36:45 Psychotic tech bros

37:30 Books about Bach

39:00 How things are changing, the holodeck and the future

40:45 The human mess again, human experience, the part that’s life

43:00 - 1:10:00 Tom’s reading corner. Long deep ChatGPT debrief

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Tim's Human Voices Wake Us

Tom's Sequential Artists Workshop

The episode finishes with Tim reading “Mrs. Silly” by William Trevor.

Enjoy!

Loose timestamps, for you all who like to skim around.

0:00 - 5:00 - Peer Pressure and Air Jordan knock-offs

5:30 - 8:30 - Adult peer pressure and parenting groups

8:30 - 10:40 - Hoodies, jeans, Led Zeppelin

10:45 - 12:00 - Bon Jovi

12:00 - 13:00 - Books

13:00 - 16:30 - Peer pressure and our daughters

16:30 - 17:30 - No one will remember this

17:30 - 18:30 - More about pop music: ambient music in the bathtub

18:45 - 20:45 - Jon Bon Jovi again, as a scrappy innovator who wasted his talent

21:20 - 24:45 - Secret ambient music and many different high school sub-communities. New Age music from the university radio station.

24:45 - 27:00 - Ministry, contours of our identity, etc.

27:00 - 29:30 - Parent peer pressure again, stage managing a kid’s experience

30:00 - 31:00 - Peer pressure and hang ups about being seen as cool in art practice

31:00 - 34:00 - Tom asking ChatGPT about my art and finding a way to not feel the peer pressure

34:00 - 39:20 - Tim on having fun writing and not having fun writing. Just have a good time doing it and not thinking about what people will think of it.

39:20 - 40:20 - People who don’t seem to care about impressing their audience.

40:25 - 43:00 - Do our communities matter?

43:20 - 47:00 - A story about finding $50 and the peer pressure of whom to donate it to.

47:00 - 48:30 - Valuing art

48:30 - 50:15 No peer pressure in history, religion, poetry

50:30 - 1:11:00 Tim’s reading corner: Mrs. Silly by William Trevor

Enjoy!

Timestamps for ye that scrub.

1:00 intro

1:30 King Richard’s Faire, King Richard buying a cookie

6:40 Assholes who ruin King Richard’s world

8:20 Human systems and King Richard making this world mostly great

8:45 Belief in our leader

9:30 Tom seeing the King of Morocco

13:00 Tim on the beheading of Charles I

15:00 Tim on the Orkney bus on the subject of the Queen’s trinkets

18:00 The deaths of presidents etc

19:20 Sadam Hussein’s spider hole

22:00 Napoleon banished

23:00 Cults and Trump

26:00 Dr. Who

27:15 Al Pacino’s autobiography

29:00 Wandering New York, reciting Shakespeare

30:00 Al “wants to go home” to before he was famous

31:15: The Godfather, And Brando giving a pep talk, while eating saucy chicken in the hospital bed

33:45 Nothing happens to Michael Corleone until

35:00 Tom on Walter Murch and the editing and inclusion of the elevated subway

36:40 Marlon Brando hated acting

37:20 Frank Serpico

38:50 Tom hating Scarface memorabilia

39:30 Drug runners and little empires

40:40 Tim only seeing the end of Scarface multiple times on fast forward because it was at the beginning before another movie on a VHS tape

43:00 Scarface’s death, an opera, etc

44:45 Anti-movies that wind up as pro-movies

47:00 It’s cool to be powerful

48:20 The forces in the Godfather represented in The Wire

49:40 A car accident in Pittsburgh, the fridges all empty and the food thrown away

54:30 Tim’s Reading Corner. Tim reads from Al Pacino’s autobiography about playing King Richard III and “Looking for Richard”

In this episode, Tom and Tim discuss, in depth, caring for elderly men whose purpose and faculties have essentially left them. What are we learning as caregivers in this experience? What materiality are we feeding? What purpose is there to this ritual and situation? Welcome listeners! - For fascinating stories and insights about serving the end of life.

00:45 Two eventful weeks

1:00 What are we talking about

2:00 Tom’s mother in law passing, tom taking care of father in law

5:50 Tom on Team Guy dying on the beach.

6:45 Tim about living with and taking care of an old man for a year when he was 23.

8:50 Old man burning money in a tin can

9:30 Accidents and body fluids, learning to make eggs

12:30 inspired to leave home and write about the civil war

13:00 Tim, the old man and Travis Bickle

16:30 If I had met him 10 or 15 years prior

17:45 what this guy noticed about women at his age

18:45 Why Tim dropped out of college

22:00 Go get me 5 notebooks

22:40: Lava lamps, driving out west, How do we handle our elders?

25:30 People we went to school with who have already died

28:00 M&Ms up our nose, etc., shared childhood memories

29:45 Weird materiality of our memories. Less material when one who shared experiences is gone. Solidity of shared experiences.

32:45 Tim’s friend Phil, losing and keeping connections. One side to the story when someone passes, only one version now.

36:00 Rent a car and drive out west reprise. Drag me out in the woods

38:00 Respect, rites, sanctity and Antigone, etc.

39:15 Death is a heavy thing, you better turn it into something

40:00 The Torah, and purity and impurity about how close to the veil something is. Powerful, uncanny, body things, we surround with rules and rites.

43:00 Seeing it at close range, the sublime and the silly.

43:45 The poem about the first time they met.

45:30 Making meaning of the loss

47:00 Signing off. How do we make things better?

47:30 Four stages of life in Hinduism

48:15 Joseph Campbell - The Grand Egress

49:30 Tim and Tom in the Miyazaki village council

50:00 Do you believe the Grand Egress thing?

52:10 Gurdjieff and materiality

53:00 the way things matter when our conscious mind might resist. (Going over there every day making sandwiches

54:07 Ken Burns documentary about Frank Lloyd Wright and the death of his 5’ 7” body

56:30 Tom’s Reading Corner. Endgame by Samuel Beckett. This goes on WAY TOO LONG (30 minutes!), I would recommend skimming through it, or skipping it all together.

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Tim's Podcast, Human Voices Wake Us

This one goes deep.

Tom talks about watching, in real time, a family member’s final days.

Tim and Tom agree the topic is how to live life as if these moments- where real emotion and real connection- matter more than “day to day life".” Tim brings up the movie Equus and The Bacchae we both talk about the religious impulse that follows the moment our imagination and emotions connect and how that can lead to clarity and madness.

Timestamps!

00:00 - Tom starts talking about the imminent death of a family member by first talking about Pink Floyd, and what shared experiences mean

03:04 - The fabric of the shared world

08:16 - “What is it about human connections that is so powerful and important?”

11:22 - Tom talks about how his family member is dealing gracefully and wisely with the reality of their own death; and how they have never shied away from dealing with the death of other family members in the past

17:35 - “Nothing matters more than our internal world.”

20:35 - More about shared experiences and intensity; Tom mentions a Japanese comic strip, and Tim tells a story about Yoko Ono

26:50 - Tom gets the crux of the episode: the death of his family member (and the memory of when his mother was sick years ago) is throwing so much of his life and experience into intense relief that he wonders: How can we re-orient our daily lives to have these intense experiences more often? Is that possible?

28:00 - Tim realizes this is the perennial theme of the podcast; he tells a story from work, where the chance to break through to a human connection is almost always blocked

32:55 - Tim says that while we can try to be more meaningful and focused, the intensity of memorable experiences cannot be lived in all the time. Primo Levi, Anne Frank

34:11 - Tim talks about the humorous fears he experienced while attending funerals as a child

36:30 - Tom tells a story about wasps and horses from one of his favorite podcasts, The Blindboy Podcast, and playing with the experience of feelings in the moment.

41:40 - The topic of horses gets Tim to talk about how these ideas underpin Peter Shaffer’s play (and movie), “Equus”

46:35 - Tom responds to Equus by asking for ancient stories like it; Tim tells the story of Euripides’s play, The Bacchae --which again, focuses on how unable people are to live at peaks of intensity for long periods of time

51:30 - Tim talks about how Judaism deals with this, trying to hem in and control the intensity of experience with laws and ritual

54:10 - Tim talks about Equus some more (slightly misremembering details of it!)

53:30 - Tom closes the episode by talking about Justin Green book, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, and how Green ended up finding a way to control his own intense experiences by becoming a sign painter.

1:00:00 - For his reading corner, Tim reads some passages from Leon Wieseltier’s book “Kaddish,” about the year he spent saying the Jewish prayer for mourning following his father’s death

In this episode, Tom and Tim talk about loneliness, and easing it with AI friends. And the need for community and the seminal Post-Apocalyptic novel Earth Abides, and then Tim and Tom decide to start a bowling alley.

A gentle and wise conversation. Enjoy!

Timestamps!

00:00 - Tim talks about his old idea of loneliness

02:25 - Tim's revised thoughts about loneliness, after reading this article; is there a difference between old-school loneliness of people who love to be by themselves but are devoid of human contact, and those same people now turning to AI companionship?

09:05 - Tom responds; he brings in in-jokes as a way of thinking about belonging within groups and friendships; we all want to create worlds together

14:25 - Tom talks about (and reads from) Earth Abides, by George Stewart

18:25 - Tom would love a cool AI friend! But he doesn't trust the people who make them

19:28 - Tom talks about Jeannette Winterson's book of essays about AI and the lack of corporate (or other) regulation or ethics

22:30 - Is it too easy to watch/read or now have an AI friend, than to talk to a living person?

30:55 - Tom talks word-based video games

35:15 - Is the answer to live in simpler/enclosed communities of similar people?

37:45 - Back to George Stewart's Earth Abides; how does one group deal with their own meaning in the face of any other group's meaning?

43:08 - The essential ritual of social events, and Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone... and Tom's revelation that he basically grew up in a bowling alley!

47:13 - Tim's heavy heart about his antisocial neighbors

48:35 - Tim and Tom can solve the world's problems by opening their own bowling alley

49:13 - Tim's reading corner - from a novel called "The Astronomer"

Here is our podcast, episode #7. Tom wanted to talk about Taylor Swift, and how she’s the only hope for humanity against the scale of destruction we’re up against, but Tim brought up Walt Whitman’s words during the last 4 years of his life and we talked about that before we got to Taylor.

They are both classic Americans, in the same lineage, even, and probably love this country more than they should. Anyway, give it a listen!

Here are some timestamps:

1:00 Walt and "the trouble with most poems" (not in any way human.)

3:00 The New York Times obituary

5:00 Poetry/art vs "directness"

6:00 Walt in the hospitals

8:00 Walt bedridden for 4 years. Aging parents, wheelchairs and Autograph hounds

9:30 Walt's death final autograph

12:00 Who was he appreciated by? Oscar Wilde comes to visit.

14:00 Was he still writing? Chapbooks and poems about aging and dying.

15:30 Tom figures out Walt doesn't have a problem with his poetry, it's other people's poetry he has a problem with.

18:00 Poetry vs nursing, a false dichotomy. "All he wanted was companionship"

21:00 "He finally got what he wanted in those hospitals"

23 :00 Walt on his deathbed, spoke majestically about his work. "The book is set."

-----------------------

28:00 Taylor Swift

29:00 Taylor as queen or deity

32:00 Taylor as the single main force of creation on the planet right now. How do we comprehend so much destruction right now? Only Taylor Swift is possibly as large.

33:00 Ezra Pound on Finnegan's Wake; large scale audiences

36:45 Mainstream authors, artists.

38:00 Tim on female roles in typical mythology; Pericles praising the Athenian Women for not being seen.

40:00 Women allowed to write autobiography in country music

43:00 Taylor has transcended all labels and stories you put on her

44:00 As a creative person in a time of destruction, where do we find inspiration?

45:15 Taylor Swift's business decisions

46:30 The eventual end of an era

47:20 Final thoughts, kindness, generous, large force against destruction.

-----------------------

48:30 Tom's reading corner: Walt Whitman on Abraham Lincoln

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So, here is our podcast, episode #6 of Men: An Explanation. Tim calls it Savage Amazement. Maybe it’s both.

In this episode, we talk about early creative days, including teachers and spaces where this felt safe and nurturing. Then we all talk about Tennessee Williams, , Nick Cave, Homer, Nina Simone and Lauren Weinstein and how they take out the garbage.

Tim reads from the biography of Tennessee Williams by John Lahr.

We are graced with the voice of Ell Potter in this (and future episodes). Go visit the Ell’s temple of creativity here and here. Thank you Ell!

(Tennessee Williams and his chicken in Florida.)

(Lauren Weinstein at the spa. Here’s the episode where we talk about “real life”)

Here are some timestamps:

Episode 6 rough timestamps

00:30 - Early experience of being an artist. Showing or hiding our creative sides when in grade school.

04:30 - Early teachers

05:30 - Art room as sacred space, teachers, school spaces, English teachers

11:15 - Staying mainstream enough to not draw too much attention

12:20 - The maze if at the end there is a desk where I can do what I want to do

13:00 - Tim's bad 3rd grade art teacher who scolded him for drawing a pilgrim with blue hair.

14:45 - Learning to write.

16:00 Learning there was a difference between popular fiction and literary fiction.

27: Horror stories, horror in mythology and folklore and maybe violence and suffering being the basis of most common stories.

27:50: Why does a tornado go down the road?

28:35 Explanations for envy, revenge, pettiness. Trickster stories

30:20 Tennessee Williams . Her sister's impulses and his impulses. His plays were ways to work through desire and to explain random events and impulses.

34:45 More about Tim and Tom trying to remember what they've seen/read about Tennessee Williams

36:00 The Nick Cave's Red Hand Files, Cave on Kanye West, and great art by bad people

38:00 How does Homer take out the garbage?

38:45: Nina Simone and the highs and lows.

41:30: Tom on Lauren Weinstein's transition from pampered and in the world of the story to cleaning toilets and making dinner.

44:00 Tim's Reading Corner: From the biography of Tennessee Williams by John Lahr

Thanks to Tim for his wise thoughts in this conversation, and to you for listening.

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So, here is our podcast, episode #5 of Men: An Explanation. Tim calls it Savage Amazement. Maybe it’s both.

In this episode, we talk about biographies. About reading biographies that inspire, biographies that keep up from living our own lives, biographies we should have avoided, biographies we should have read, and then not living your own life like it’s a biography. Tim talks about Van Gogh, Tom talks about Steve Martin, Klaus Kinski and Ted Hawkins. Give it a listen!

We are graced with the voice of Ell Potter in this (and future episodes). Go visit the Ell’s temple of creativity here and here. Thank you Ell!

(If you live a life full of despair, are laughed at, ridiculed and completely unaided, you too might end up a doll in some toy store.)

Here are some timestamps:

Episode 5

00:15 A friend obsessed with people's biographies. Are we living our own lives?

01:48 Young Tim surprised biographies existed at all

03:00 Van Gogh's biography. The shock of his unfulfilled life

04:40 Tom on inner lives of the past

05:15 Klaus Kinski's autobiography, and his sunflower

07:25 Emily Dickinson is too intense

8:45 Steve Martin's autobiography and why it's the last one Tom will read

11:12 What straight white men are sick of

12:15 Van Gogh again

15:55 "I have a lot of love to give"

17:40 Capitalism and rage and the suffocating of human gifts

19:00 Musician Ted Hawkins

23:40 Where do you want to put your heart?

25:50 Tim's olds friends at Church who don't want to hear the gospel

28:43 No longer believing in the singular artist

31:00 Our work as a bridge or relics for our family and community

32:00 How awesome youth is and how boring old people are

33:00 Tom believes nothing matters anymore; Van Gogh doesn't matter, the Beatles didn't matter. Nothing lasts.

36:00 Approaching a life like it was a narrative or biography instead of just living it

38:30 Not forgetting your own private meaning.

40:00 - 44:00 Tom's reading corner: Klaus Kinski and the sunflower

Thanks to Tim for his wise thoughts in this conversation, and to you for listening.

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So, here is our podcast, episode #4. Still no title, so, I guess it’s still Men: An Explanation. Tim calls it Savage Amazement. Maybe it’s both.

In this episode, we talk about doing things badly, and about exploring the edges of the spaces that we’re supposed to stay inside, both in digital and analog worlds. Tom worries about AI, complains about business people, swoons over human voices reading to him and then Tim reads from The English Patient.

We are graced with the voice of Ell Potter in this (and future episodes). Go visit the Ell’s temple of creativity here and here. Thank you Ell!

Here’s an hour of the San Andreas Deer Cam:

Here are some timestamps:

00:12: “Drop the ball” - choose to do things wrong on purpose til you get it right, especially in art. Or don’t get it right. Try things that have never been tried by you
03:35: Tim’s daughter wanting to explore outside the boundaries of the video game course. Playing video game golf and seeing how far off the course you could go.
05:00: What do you say to people who come to school and want to be published the right way?
06:20: The value of Minecraft and other games that reward human curiosity. “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” and the random deer with its own will, wandering around video game L.A.
09:45: The joy of Google Maps / Street View
11:00 Selling chocolate bars and art to strangers door to door.
12:15: Kids selling drawings at a table.
13:50: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. Tim’s history with the movie and the book in 1996.
17:00 Tim discovers the soundtrack to the movie
18:30 None of these characters have kids!
20:50: Tom remembers Tim’s reading of Araby by James Joyce
21:10: The gift of voices that read fiction, and Tom’s favorite audiobook reader, Ell Potter
21:50: Audible using AI voices, 10,000 new books next year, and Tom’s fan letter to Ell Potter
23:00: AI taking over creative jobs, lack of legislation
24:20: Who business people are. People with no mission or guiding principle or belief in anything
25:20: 100 podcasts about organic gardening in one day
26:00: The world is changing and the powerful are still in control and the artists still need to figure out who is paying
27:15 - 41:46 Tim’s Reading Corner: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Thanks to Tim for his wise thoughts in this conversation, and to you for listening.

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So, here is our podcast, episode #3. It still doesn’t even have a title. So, I guess it’s still Men: An Explanation. Tim calls it Savage Amazement. Both are good titles. I think we’re waiting to see which one it wants to be.

In this episode, we talk about the drawbacks of being curious, introspective people searching for meaning. We talk about strange people, lonely people and a bunch more. Tim reads the ending of The Stranger.

Here are some timestamps:

00:30: What are the drawbacks of being curious, introspective people searching for meaning?
01:00: Tom’s answer (being overpowered)
05:00 related, Tim on Mary Wollstonecraft, wishing to be left alone
08:22 Notes about Camus’s The Stranger
09:10 Tim’s answer (not interacting)
12:00 Studs Terkel, Kurt Cobain, the mundane parts of people’s existence
13:30 Encyclopedic people, catalogers, translators, etc.
14:00 Tom’s terrible memory and how to meet people in the moment instead
17:00 “We don’t pretend we have the answers”
17:15 Educated people in the Beltway, etc.
18:25 Where are the lonely people who don’t have white collar jobs?
18:50 Lonely people are on Facebook
19:50 Walkie-talkies and CB Radios.
21:00 Seek You by Kristen Radtke
23:00 The lady with the birdcage that Tim saw at the store
28:00 People who just do weird lonely things; the internet and capitalism keeping us from seeing each other’s delicate uniqueness
30:40 Tim’s Reading Corner: The Stranger

Thanks to Tim for his wise thoughts in this conversation, and to you for listening.

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So, here is our podcast, episode #2. It still doesn’t even have a title. So, I guess it’s Men: An Explanation. Tim may post it with a better title.

In this episode, we talk about creative origins. Tom veers off into wanting a grand unified theory of everything, for any topic, and we talk about storytelling, how much it has created the time we’re in now. Wondering if people ever got along.

This episode hits its peak I think, with Tim’s reading from Jean Guéhenno, an writer/activist/diarist who kept an amazing diary during WWII from German-occupied Paris. It’s remarkable; here’s an excerpt:

I remember being deeply shocked by the inadequacy of creation and vowing to correct it. I toiled for 30 years.

I was hard and full of anger. I looked at my contemporaries as so many enemies every time I found them inclined to accept the world in which all I could see was poverty and injustice. … I strove to frighten people, as if that were a good way of persuading them…

I condemned as cowards those who did not commit themselves to the battle with the same heart. I wore out the best of myself and those battles. It was not enough. I almost forgot to live.

And then Tim talks about the “Ladies of Lockerbie”, who washed, ironed and packaged for return, all the clothes from the downed airliner in 1988.

Thanks to Tim for his wise thoughts in this conversation, and to you for listening.

Here are some timestamps:

00:10 Creative origins, where people come from before they are famous
1:40 - Writing, reading and making maps
3:50 - Timelines of History book
8:45 - Grand Unified Theories
12:20 Carl Sagan and superstition
15:00 Humans telling stories
17:25 - Confederate statues, beliefs, etc.
22:30 - The history of Jews in other civilizations
27:00 - Yugoslavia
30:00 - The world is ____. What are you going to do?
31:15 - Pessimistic cycle
31:55 - Political cartoons
33:20 - Believing in America
36:30 Prehistoric brains trying to solve global problems
37:45 Passage from Jean Guéhenno, from Occupied Paris, WWII

41:10 The "laundry ladies of Lockerbie"

47:06 Connecting to smaller gestures and stories
51:00 Reading corner: Tim gives an introduction to reads a poem about Mary Wollstonecraft.

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In the pandemic, I discovered the podcast, Human Voices Wake Us, by poet Tim Miller. Tim is a very kind, wise literary person with a foot in history (and often pre-history), a foot in poetry, a foot in myth, and a foot in literature. So many feet!

That podcast, saved my pandemic. It was slow, thoughtful, considered, and it offered insight and sometimes just story, that went hundreds and thousands of years into the past. The opening of the podcast says “human voices are what we need” and shockingly, in an age of so many human voices (see: social media, etc.) I came to agree.

And so after merely thanking Tim for each episode, on Celtic mythology, or his tender autobiographical episodes, or the poetry of Louise Glück or whatever, we struck up a friendship, and now here we are, we wanted to speak in public about… well being guys, I guess.

Enter this podcast.

We joke in the first moments that the podcast might be called “How to not be an incel asshole” but really we just go on to talk about what moves us deeply in this world. And at least for me, at least, how it contradicts what I sometimes feel impulsively. (I will admit to being provincial and small-minded, motivated by fear and rage, while wanting mostly to just be allowed to take in the world gently.)

So, here is our podcast, episode #1. It doesn’t even have a title. Tim may post it with a different title.

Here are some timestamps:

00:00 How we didn’t wind up incels
03:18 Introspection, feelings, etc.
05:10 The act of creating and understanding creation
9:00 The love of horror novels, aggressive music
13:00 History and the long-term
14:00 Models of adulthood and manhood involving story
15:45 Internal space, following rewarding feelings
19:20 Drawing Peanuts, emotions in boxes
23:00 Navigating emotions through art, changing art forms
31:15 Rock bands and poetry readings
36:30 Tim on Mary Wollstonecraft, early feminist and mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
39:00 Tom on John Darnielle, author
41:00 Salutations
42:00 Reading Corner: Tom reads 8 minutes of Master of Reality by John Darnielle

This blog/substack will be taking a detour; it will become a sort of podcast, in collaboration with my friend Tim Miller, whose podcast about myth, poetry and story saved my pandemic and has been a life line to real feelings in a time when everything seems

As a preface to that podcast, as yet unnamed, and unrecorded (but perhaps beginning here next week?) I am beginning to read aloud, John Darnielle’s stunning, gorgeous and sad book, Master of Reality. This is unofficial and unlicensed. This is 13 minutes of probably 1 or 2 hours. I will continue until it is finished.

Hoping my podcast about Men with Tim Miller, tentatively titled The Savage Amazement if we don’t call it, How To Not Be An Incel Asshole, will begin in the next few days…

Anyway, enjoy the first 10th of this fantastic book that had me weeping in the street when I first read it. Thanks to John for all his fantastic work up from the ashes.

Hey ya’ll, it’s been a while since I rapped at ya. More than a year, actually.

It was a single image that drew me out of retirement, an image in Erin Williams’ scary, sad, and amazing graphic memoir, Commute.

The image is this

Or, I should say, that’s roughly the image I saw, as I read it in extremely low light one cloudy morning. I’ve blurred and scrambled it here, intentionally, because that image, the one I didn’t quite see correctly, is very accurate.

Williams’ book is about (among other things) sexual assault, lack of consent, gaze, predation and lot of other things which men are guilty.

When I saw this image, I thought, YES, she sees it, she SAW it, that creature that is the dark creature of Man that causes all the problems.

This is a creature of impulse, disfigured by rage and disappointment, and it changes constantly. There is no single image. It is different at every moment, and I imagine, for every woman at every moment.

What did she see when she saw this man undress, what flashed in his eyes? An impulse— or an impulse followed by dozens of internal reactions, all in a nanosecond.

The impulse, is the impulse to Expand One’s Empire.

But the creature, is a product of that, plus centuries (inside a man, a moment feels like a century) of defeat and desperation.

I stand by this: The drive to expand one’s empire is a man’s most base impulse.

Now of course, we’re all aware, not every man gets an empire. That’s for Genghis Khan, Alexander (The GREAT), Dick Cheney’s GOP.

Most men are LUCKY if they can serve an empire, but most don’t even get that thrill. What most men get, and will accept, is DOMINION. A territory. A teeny teeny teeny tiny empire.

And those are everywhere.

Fucking is the most obvious (a potential empire of successful spermatozoa.) Families are second. Small businesses, networks, territory at work, or (choke) in academia. Admirers, friends, teammates. Lawns. Spreading one’s seed.

As a young person, a young man, I was sort of a have-not, we didn’t have big or fancy things, so genuine territory didn’t seem within grasp. Instead I tested the limits of expression, because expression mattered to me. Expression of thought and feeling. I quickly learned that a lot was unacceptable in the empire (family) I lived in.

Nonetheless, or because of that, at a very young age, I chose my empire: the expression of the human heart. And in empire-building there are concessions, alliances, and negotiations. I slowly tried to expand my own range of expression.

I didn’t realize how lucky I was of course- white and male, etc., a lot of my testing out in public, in mini-comics, or pranks, were generally tolerated, which was enough to score a win on my empire scorecard. How big can the expressiveness of the heart get while not losing too many friends (empire #two)?

This blog is part of that.

When #MeToo really started get going, I told one of my women friends, “You guys [meaning ladies— sorry] don’t know what you’re up against.”

I meant: You hadn’t seen that creature up above, clearly yet. And that creature, when bound together with other creatures— aw jeez, it’s serious.

This is no ordinary battle for justice.

I was walking by my household’s bathroom once a few weeks back, and noticed my 10-year old daughter was in it. For half a nanosecond, I was enraged! I think it had something to do with something with something she had left undone, and for a moment, my dominion over this family, my CONTROL was slipping.

And in a time when I am already losing control over my tween daughter as a human being, that creature inside told me to rage against the loss of empire and control here.

Luckily, I can check these impulses, and I lumbered Homer Simpson like, down the hall, choosing the long-term, healthier goal of a decent relationship with my daughter in the far future, then a controlling one now (which my creature sorely wants.)

I needn’t elaborate, but a lot of similar impulses all across time on this globe, go unchecked.

The man in Erin Williams book* wrote “exclusively on old lady cards” and wrote to her before this moment, that he “wanted to have her in his garden.”

Just a teeny tiny beautiful safe little empire.

Near as I can tell, this man just wanted to fuck, and to be liked by one more pretty girl.

And he looked absolutely frightening when she saw it, “his own thunderous need” she says.

(*I’m laying claim to some understanding of what is presented in the book, but not of her personal story, of which I cannot know… I may be missing something in the book, if so, my apologies to Williams and her story. )

There’s the idea that a king, a real KING, one with an empire, hires scores of minions to run around him, yammering and entertaining, to keep him from ever thinking for a moment, of his own self, and his own demise. (Barbara Erenreich talks about it in Dancing in the Streets, I’ll see if I can find it…)

I get this. Who wants to think about death?

Well, I do. Because in my empire, we express everything. My last comic was about a guy dying, literally called “B. is Dying.” and my year-long (and running) project of songwriting resulted in at least 50% songs about death. Maybe I don’t want to think about life.

But anyway, Death, of course is the one thing man has no dominion over. We can never conquer death or enfold it into our empire. Insert Shakespeare quote here.

But of course, the current men of financial empire, are all trying to outwit death, through science and wealth. One tech entrepreneur, I kid you not (I am quoting Time Magazine), to this end of immortality, sleeps “with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections.”

So friends, you are up against a lot. Empire building, dominion protection, penises augmented with jet-packs, rank-closing and team solidarity. I’m sorry.

I welcome solutions. Of course one is that men learn to accept life on its own terms, without the need to expand (and take or control.)

But that sounds like a great way to keep the less privileged in their place. (“She should have been praying to change her woes/But pastor said "Pray to cope with those")

We need: ritual, culture, community and law, even, that keeps empire-building in check.

Sometimes I crack myself up.

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