Ep. 116: "Smilin' Alligator"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
How are you going?
We should break the fourth wall, or we should at least, you know, pierce the fourth wall.
How are we going to do that?
Well, I don't know.
By being forward-thinking.
Let's be forward-thinking and pierce the fourth wall.
Well, you know me.
I don't like to talk about the show on the show.
Right.
No, I know.
Other people don't like us to talk about the show on the show.
But we're recording episodes early and stacking them, as you say, because we're both going to be away parts of the summer of this year, 1978.
And so we hope that everything we see on here will still make sense then.
We've done this before, where you and I have recorded multiple episodes in one sitting, and I've found it generally to be a success.
Oh, I agree.
We're nice and loose and warm.
Right, all warmed up.
I've already blown through all my Grateful Dead material I prepared.
It's the problem.
Yeah, well, and the thing, you know, I feel like the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
Hmm.
is really a 450 pound gorilla wearing a gorilla suit i'm listening but you know part of the problem with doing episodes because you as you have said many times you like to feel like our show is timeless it's evergreen yeah and you can listen to the show at any time any episode will work
But the real world does intrude sometimes, right?
And we are recording this show immediately after the electromagnetic pulse destroyed all of civilization.
And a lot of our listeners are going to be wondering, you know, did this happen in an alternate universe?
How did they do it?
It's a lot to explain.
But also, there's a lot of Macintosh talk in the air.
Oh my goodness, there's so much Macintosh talk.
And you and I are studiously avoiding talking about it.
Oh, that's a shame.
I wish we could talk about the Macintosh talk.
Because we want our show to be evergreen, we don't want it to be topical.
What about Benghazi?
Should we talk about Benghazi?
Oh, Benghazi, it's on everybody's lips.
Bergdahl oil, a popular brand of motor oil.
Is that the hostage guy?
I mean, I think we're giving away when this show is being recorded.
Did you enjoy the Hillary Clinton book?
I'm still reading it.
It's pretty dense.
I'm trying to get into Game of Thrones.
Oh my gosh.
Because I met George R.R.
Martin the other day.
Oh, you know, I kind of want to hear about that.
Yeah.
Studious Roderick on the Line scholars will know almost exactly when we're recording this now based on this topical information we've given.
Thanks, Obama.
Part of me feels like that is destroying the illusion
That we are posting these from the future.
But yeah, so I spent the day basically with George R.R.
Martin.
Would you forgive me a slight voir dire at this point?
Sure.
Okay.
You are a man who exists out of time.
Correct.
You're a man who is not a fan in italics.
Correct.
Right?
But isn't it fair to say that in your studies, Dark Web and otherwise in the past, you've read a lot of books?
Yes, that's true.
I mean, you've read some science fiction and stuff, right?
I have.
You don't talk about it.
I do not, generally.
I mean, and partly it is, you know, like I went through a phase many years ago where I read everything that Harlan Ellison wrote.
Wow.
And I really enjoyed it, although his politics were inexcusable.
That seems to be kind of a thing with sci-fi writers.
Right.
I like the Ender's Game movie.
His idea of what the proper gender roles were, even 25 years ago when I read all those books, it's just unconscionable.
You can't endorse it, but at the same time, great stories, great imagination.
I think it's ultimately like...
You know, I talked about this in my I'm Not a Fan article for the LA Weekly, which produced what I can only imagine was a very entertaining comment section that I absolutely did not visit or read.
You've learned your lesson.
I expressed to myself no curiosity about it.
Like, oh, I'm sure there are people yelling at me on there, not going to give them even the pleasure of thinking about that I would go read it.
But...
You know, the complicated thing about reading the product of someone else's imagination...
for me, is always that I absolutely enjoy the experience, but I am always conscious of occupying some rented real estate in someone else's imagination for a short period of time.
It's not a place I want to buy or build a house.
It's not a place that I want to
I don't want to put my imagination there.
Right.
There are things that I experience in entering someone else's imaginative world that I absolutely want to borrow or take with me and put into a cigar box, if you will, in my imagination.
Right.
I want to walk out of Harlan Ellison's world and be like, oh, it never occurred to me that, for instance, incest bias was a cultural thing.
I read a Harlan Ellison story one time where the plot was, oh, why do we have a prohibition on incest?
There are ancient reasons for it.
But really, it's a cultural bias rather than a necessary one or an a priori one.
And I was like, huh, that makes me uncomfortable.
That's an idea that someone else put into a story.
And it makes me uncomfortable to think about.
And that's very interesting.
And that story was a success.
Because, you know, the reveal was like, oof.
Ouch.
Huh.
I'm going to take that away.
I'm going to chew on that.
And yet...
My first instinct, even the Star Wars universe or anybody else's universe, my first instinct is like, okay, that was fun.
Thank you for having me over.
And now it's time to say goodnight and goodbye.
Maybe I'll come back and visit you another time.
It's an Airbnb of the mind.
You don't want to move in.
Yeah, right.
Because my own imaginative world is almost completely fulfilling.
Like, I do not sit around and ever feel like, wow, I've run out of things to imagine.
Like, I am so bored sitting here imagining things.
I would like to see what other people are imagining.
I mean, you know, every once in a while I do out of just sort of – I hear people talking about something enough or –
But it's never a case of, like, I'm having a real imagination drought over here, and I'd like to go somewhere else.
And, like, and just, you know, that whole business that people talk about, like, I just turn off and just, you know, am absorbed with someone else's story.
Like, I understand the feeling of, like, turning off, but, you know, turn off and go into my own...
Playland library of speculative fiction.
Right.
And so, so, I mean, all the comments, all the angry comments that, that made their way to me about that fan article, you know, just, or we're having the same sort of defensive reaction that the, that the angry comments about the punk rock article had, which are like, this is my world.
This is important to me.
Why are you attacking me?
Yeah.
And I think a lot of that is just the tone that I write or my know-it-all tone.
But of course, I'm not attacking.
I'm just like... You're talking about yourself.
Talking about myself.
And the best comments I got were that handful of emails from people that were like, thank you for writing that.
You described me perfectly.
I never thought about it that way before.
I always feel like an outsider.
Yeah.
And I'm not a fan.
And now I know that I'm not alone.
And it's just like, oh, good.
I'm glad that I made that connection with you.
Because people tend to think like, you know, and I don't really have a dog in this fight too much.
But people tend to think, and I feel this sometimes when I meet people who are really into comics that don't like or are not into, not even don't like, but aren't into some comic that all of my other friends are into.
It's like we have to stage an intervention.
It's like you just don't understand it yet, you know?
And so I know that feeling and that feeling of community that comes out of fandom.
But I didn't get that you were saying that other people shouldn't be fans.
No, God, by all means, be fans.
You like your fans.
I do.
I like all fans.
I like so many people who are fans.
It's just a – I'm just kind of describing like a – like my state.
It's not really that – I mean in some ways, not to inject myself too much, but like it's kind of like how I feel with me in like politics and current affairs.
Like I don't hate –
politics and current affairs i don't even hate that people have strong opinions about it it's just not my thing and i really feel like in that case i'm the one saying i'm not a fan and like i feel like an outcast i feel like people think uh i don't know i i don't know what people think but sometimes i wonder if if like i come across someone who just doesn't care about stuff i care a lot about stuff i just don't feel the need to have that like arguments about it with people
Well, and that's the thing.
I mean, in the form of politics, the people who are fans of politics don't describe themselves using fan language.
They describe themselves using language where if you aren't interested in politics, then you're not engaged in the present world and you don't care about the fate of mankind.
And really, you're absolutely right.
Their motivation...
is very fan-based, or a lot of the politics groupies are fan-based.
The people that are writing about politics every day and writing about politicians like they are stars.
And, you know, that's true of any of these, you know, the way our culture is siloed.
And somebody wrote an interesting... So the bass player of...
Skin yard who went on to own CZ records, one of the seminal Seattle grunge labels.
He posted, he reposted my fan article on his Facebook page.
And typically like his friends on Facebook are all the crusty,
grunge era um crustoids that uh that hated my punk rock article too and there was a lot of shit talking there and he posted it like this is interesting to me i this i'm not sure i'm not sure about this but i but i kind of feel like i might even be one of these people that's in this category of like
has a difficult relationship to fandom.
But there was a lot of angry yelling on his Facebook page, and that was kind of the extent of the angry yelling that I saw, that I allowed myself to see before I shut the whole system down.
But there was an interesting comment from someone on there that said, like...
This John Roderick person seems like somebody who is primarily interested in the breadth of experience and not especially interested in the depth of experience.
And I was like, huh.
And I walked away and chewed on that for a while and feel like that's absolutely true.
It's certainly a conclusion that could be drawn.
It's a conclusion that could be drawn.
Whether it's 100% accurate all the time, it's certainly an interesting thought technology.
It's an interesting thought technology.
And what I feel like is that we all use the power of extrapolation to get through life, right?
You don't have to... I mean, somebody that had a memento-like condition where every experience they had to figure out the terms of it anew, completely anew with no prior experience, you know, what a nightmare that would be.
Like, you go through enough situations that...
When you see a guy who has bleached his goatee, you pretty much know that you're dealing with somebody that wants jalapenos in their food.
That's me in face tattoos.
You don't have to meet this guy and figure it out again.
Like, oh, you bleach your facial hair, betting that you think that your food's not hot enough, I guess.
When you're thinking of asking him, do you want a hit off of this?
You don't really have to ask.
He wants a hit off of whatever it is.
Exactly.
He wants a hit off of it.
He's a pan person.
He wants a hit off of everything.
Do you want cream cheese on that?
I bet you want cream cheese on that.
Fuck you.
So, you know, my experience of depth when it comes to anything kind of culturally or experientially is that I experience the depth of things largely through extrapolation.
Like, I go down a street in a neighborhood and
And I say, okay, I got a picture of this neighborhood now.
Because I've gone down this street and maybe I turned and went down a second street.
And I'm going to extrapolate what the character of this neighborhood is through...
through that experience.
Now, next time I'm going on a trip from point A to point B, do I go down this same street again because it was the route, because it was the fastest route?
Or do I take a second route, a new route, so that I can increase that power of extrapolation?
I can increase my sample size and
So that I start to get a picture of this whole part of the town.
I start to get a picture of this whole community.
That's interesting.
Instead of being a fan of this particular route, and because you like it more than the one other one you tried, you're saying, I want to see what all these do.
Right.
And that is my experience of culture, too.
I'm always trying to increase my sample size so I can use the power of extrapolation to know more.
And, and what I, what I think is, you know, like I do not have a, I do not have a deep knowledge of, of, of, of any process, right?
Like how do you get to be a, how do you get to be a great luthier?
How do you get to be the ultimate sushi chef?
You know, you do the same thing over and over and over until your knowledge of it is like in your hands, it's in your bones, right?
You are the ultimate practitioner of a thing because you have turned that experience.
You've gone through rote into body memory.
And I don't have that...
With anything, even with guitar.
I find it very difficult to practice the same thing over and over again.
I'm always playing something different and new and other.
And in a way, that informs how I make music.
The problem is I never play the lick multiple times until I can do it.
And it's why I'm not a...
not a real technical musician, but, but what I, what I do instead is always take a different route.
Always try a new food.
You know, I was, I was in a restaurant with a friend the other day and they were like, I come to this restaurant with you 50 times.
You've never ordered the same thing.
And I ordered the same thing every time.
I always order the same thing.
Yeah, and I think that's true for a lot of people, and they were remarking on it, and it took them 50 visits with me to realize it.
Like, every time you order something different, and I think that that makes me a little uncomfortable.
Like, each time you're going to try something new, like, is it all...
It can't always be good.
And I'm like, no, sometimes it is not good.
Sometimes it's not.
But a meal is just a moment.
And if you get a bad one, sweep it into the trash.
Try a new thing the next time.
So it's a...
So it's a relationship to fandom that's really part of a larger relationship to experience, which is like, I don't care to do the same thing enough times that I develop a deep knowledge.
Because deep knowledge of a process or of a...
Any real deep knowledge is a thing I feel like I can approximate through analogy, and I would much rather increase my breadth.
But let me just add a note here that I think is important, which is I don't hear you saying that means nobody else should have deep knowledge of things or that that's not valuable.
You're not saying that at all.
The only way I could be this way is that I'm surrounded by people that have deep knowledge.
Do you agree, though, that isn't that something that people hear?
When you say, I have chosen to know enough about these couple things to be able to extrapolate and learn and learn about a new thing I want to know about, you're a curious person.
That doesn't mean that you don't think other people should become experts.
No, and I don't understand how anybody could – I mean, I guess I feel like – It's weird to even have to say that.
Yeah, and I feel like when I talk about my experience, I talk about it with a natural pride –
I am proud of how I am.
I'm not defending how I am against attackers.
I just am proud of it because I feel like that whole modern tendency to apologize for who you are first.
Like, hello, hi, nice to meet you.
Listen, I'm sorry that I'm different from you, but I have to express my difference.
And I know it's bad, but please don't hurt me, but here I am.
I hate that.
I feel like I'm proud of who I am and that's not something I should be ashamed of.
But expressing who I am in a way that seems like just sort of contented or happy or that I prefer the way that I am is immediately interpreted as judgment of other people and my preference for myself is...
is somehow an expression that i am better uh which you're that you're just categorically disrespectful almost yeah right like oh yes i i don't prefer to be an expert so anybody that's an expert is a fucking idiot like and i don't know where people how people make that leap it's an invisible uh mist in the culture today i feel i feel it all the time it's bananas
It is.
And it's so cocky and self-involved to assume that you can understand that much about somebody who's not even saying anything against what you believe or saying anything against the very idea that you like to believe what you believe.
It's so caustic and unnecessary, but I feel like it's everywhere.
And if you – and you really – you sound – one sounds –
very self-involved or insulated if you don't excuse yourself for not knowing everything about somebody.
You know what I mean?
It's such a weird situation.
And again, this comment section on the Daniel House Facebook page...
There was a guy, and at a certain point, full disclosure, at a certain point, I started to comment on his Facebook page.
Oh, no.
Because the first commenter was a guy that was just like, you know what?
This guy's a fucking asshole.
I hated his punk rock article.
I hate his whole
attitude.
He thinks he's better than everybody else.
He thinks he's smarter than everybody else and that's fucking bullshit and his music sucks and he's got a fucking stupid haircut and his glasses are dumb.
Everything about this guy sucks and he's an asshole and I hate him.
So that's the first comment.
That bodes well.
And it gets liked five times or something.
But then there's three or four comments from people that are like, I don't know, this article seems pretty reasonable.
I mean, I don't know if I agree that Kiss is no good because I like Kiss, but a couple of people defending or at least making that conciliatory Facebook medium post.
And then the guy comes back in.
He's like, no, you know what?
You guys, you're all wrong.
And another thing about this guy, like he's got bad taste in shoes and he's like, and so finally, of course, I show up.
Here I come through the door in a cape.
I'm like, hi.
I'm the writer of this article and I'm reading your comments, you know, I'm reading your comments and I'm and I feel like I'm not trying to attack anybody with this article.
I'm just expressing who I am.
I'm just talking from my perspective.
It's not a bad thing.
And so angry guy comes back in and now he feels a little bit like, oh, oh, there's an adult or like the adults are in the room now.
So I have to pretend I'm an adult.
And he's like, well, I'm it's very I'm I'm very pleased to see that you're here defending yourself.
But I just have to take issue with the fact that you are such a that you're so arrogant.
And I was like, well, I'm not arrogant.
I'm just talking about my experience.
And why would I apologize for it?
You know what I mean?
And he comes back again a third time with like chastising me about my tone.
And so I wrote, I would like you, sir, to read back on your posts on this Facebook page and reflect on your tone.
And then contrast it with my tone and tell me which tone you prefer.
Like, my know-it-all tone that is, like, so offensive to you because I'm proud of myself.
Right.
You're an idiot and he's speaking truth to power.
Yeah, exactly.
Or you're, like, you are pouring...
vitriol against someone you don't know and don't understand.
And your instinct, your first instinct is to be butthurt and, uh, and like pissy bitchy.
So what world do you want to live in?
You know, like I'm, uh, and, and, and that, that idea that to, um, to be, um,
To not apologize for yourself is the greatest crime, is the first crime, is the premier crime.
in our internet culture now, to not begin with a, I have no right to speak, but now that I've acknowledged that, I'm going to proffer my humble opinion, and now I'm going to slowly back out of the room, bowing and scraping, and that's what's necessary to not be taken as a strident, combative...
And ultimately, like, you know, angry troll.
I don't get it.
I don't get it.
I think when you're doing any kind of personal writing, when you're talking about yourself, when you're talking about yourself as a member of society, which is what a lot of personal essays are in some ways, you have to be skillful to say something interesting.
You have to be very skillful to say something new.
And you have to be somewhat courageous to say something honest.
And I think it's very difficult to efficiently say anything that's interesting and new and honest without –
a lot of people getting upset for sometimes very little reason and it isn't it isn't i mean people could and i think that reads you're right i think that people read that as arrogant but like the thing is though if you don't what so what do you do to not get that reaction from people you say something uninteresting you say something that's not new and you say something that's dishonest you say something that everybody can agree with because they already think that and that's why bother yeah right that's that's just asking for compliments and that's that's not making anything
Yeah, yeah, it is.
And it's part of, I think, the growing sense of online life as a groupthink consensus machine where we are not trying to invent something new right now.
At this moment in our culture, we are not trying to put a man on the moon.
We are not trying to push the...
The boundaries of what it is to be a human animal or a global culture.
We are just, at least online, just trying to round off all the nubs, sand the corners and figure out and basically shout people into a consensus.
Yeah.
That makes us feel like that validates our own prejudices.
Well, and think about how much of that is about corralling a temporary tribe of people who categorically agree on who's a bad person and why.
Ask yourself how many things that people consider like important conversations mostly stop at who's a bad person and why.
Uh-huh.
And then ask yourself what you get out of that in terms of making something.
Well, yeah, you're not making anything.
Especially if 36 hours, you move on to find another tribe that you can agree with.
And I really do, I really honestly do believe that, I mean, you know, several years ago, 10 years ago, we were very worried about
uh the millennials and i don't want to dump on the millennials because i some of the smartest people i know are part of that generation you're so arrogant and some of the fun you know some of the funnest stuff that is being bandied about is coming from millennials who have a who have a a different enough take and a kind of uh you know and the and the power of youth uh
But 10 years ago, we were all very concerned about this brand new generation that was arriving that had never gotten a bad grade.
No one had ever given them an F. No one had ever told them they needed to try a little harder.
They were congratulated at every step of the way.
And now they were...
18 years old, they were entering the world, and they were really unhappy to find that they didn't get a round of applause every time they pooped.
And this was 10 years ago when we were adults, and we were like, oh, there's a new generation arriving on the scene, and it's kind of weird interacting with them because they are indignant.
And their indignance is...
We were characterizing it as a product of this era of no bad grades.
If I could make it worse, a seldom analyzed indignance.
It really felt like something that arrived by FedEx one day and that they really completely deserved was just this constant sense of like – I don't know.
I don't mean to be negative about it, but I just got this sense of –
Of always looking for bad stuff in everything as a way to explain why your life sucks.
Right.
And crucially unreflective.
That's exactly right.
They were not reflecting inwardly.
They're fine reflecting on other people and what they need to be doing differently to be more unhappy like them.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, so here we are 10 years later, and we're no longer really talking about millennials in that way because that was the way that we thought about them when they were newly minted adults.
They weren't kids anymore, but they still were very kid-like.
Now that generation is in its 30s, and it is...
it is producing a lot of culture.
It is really generating the tone of the conversation.
And so I'm beginning to try and do what we've done with every generation so far in my life, which is kind of slot them into what the story is, what the story of our culture is.
And millennials are typically the children of baby boomers.
And your and my generation is this inter-generation that is largely going to be forgotten.
You know, we're a smaller population-wise.
We're much smaller than the boomers before us or their children after us.
They're fewer of us.
And we're going to be marginalized.
We already are marginalized.
We always were marginalized.
When we were 18, the popular music on the charts was still boomer music.
And we had our brief moment in the early 90s where our culture poked through for a little while.
And we were regarded as a sulky, entitled generation ourselves.
And then we just sort of got dust-heaped as the culture moved on.
They weren't really interested in hearing from us anymore.
Whatever it was that we contributed was just kind of ironic.
Every year we're moving more and more out of the Target demo.
Yeah, right.
We were like the sneerers who sneered our way right into...
like a position where we acquiesced to total sellout status, which invalidated entirely our prior sneery mentality.
You know, like we, we self invalidated ourselves in a way that the, it took the boomers to,
25 years to do, and we just got on it pretty darn fast.
And now today, the idea of selling out is disappearing in a way we couldn't have imagined even five years ago.
Yeah, right.
And in one sense, good riddance, because that was self-defeating.
But in another sense, everything is marketing now.
I mean, everything is marketing, including journalism.
I mean, things that we thought were unassailable.
Including your personality.
your personality, your, I mean, every fucking thing.
And I say that as somebody who, uh, who embraces the fact that you and I have found an advertiser for our program.
Hello.
Like love, uh, love the idea of making a living doing creative work.
But my God, I, I, I, I go on the internet.
I'm trying to find a thing.
I want to search for the, the, I want to search for some information on the 30 years war, uh,
And the fucking thing pops up and it's like, if you like the 30 years war, you're going to love the new Nissan Sentra.
A tee by Carl's Jr.
You know, go click to this BuzzFeed thing and it's, and you're just going to, and every time you look for the arrow to see the next picture, it's actually going to be an arrow that takes you to a chase credit card ad.
You won't believe what happens next.
It's like, fuck you, everybody.
Like everybody, fuck you.
But so, so we're living in a world now where millennials have, have, uh,
have melted into the larger adult population and have brought their values into the adult conversation.
They are adults now and have their, have this value system that we perceive to be founded in an untruth, which is the untruth being that everyone is special.
And we feel that to be intrinsically untrue and an unexamined lie is,
But it's now in the water.
That LSD is in the water supply now.
And you cannot take a 30-year-old and segregate them from a 45-year-old and say, well, you, sir, are still living in a state of delusion, whereas we at 45 have exclusive access to the truth because the baby boomers ahead of us are also living in a delusion.
Like, we're the only ones that hear the clang of metal on metal.
I mean, we're all just dummies.
But, you know, you have a kid, I have a kid that are part of a generation that we have to imagine... I have to start imagining what their viewpoint is going to be.
I know.
And our millennials...
Are they the aberration?
Or were we?
You know, are they establishing what the new tone is?
And we're, I mean, in a way, absolutely they are.
We're always, from now on, going to be living in a world that is somewhat defined by
the the group think and you know like rights based thinking you know kind of justice based thinking of the generation that came after us but somebody's got to come along with a fucking plan for something exciting and new right right we can't human history cannot just turn on itself and bite its own tail for the rest of we should have more kids
We should have more kids.
We should teach them science.
Have them build trail.
Get them out there.
Get their healthy, strong bodies building trail in the sun.
And then set them loose with tools and math, right?
Teach them math.
Standard math and computer math?
Teach them standard math.
If they know their maths well enough, computer maths will be easy.
Because computer maths are just a trade that anyone can learn.
Meanwhile, back in Santa Fe...
I think if you ask the typical pop quiz hotshot, you ask the typical Roderick Online listener, which one of us had read – You or me?
Which of us had read any Tolkien?
I have a feeling most people would guess that I have read some Tolkien.
Right.
I've read no Tolkien.
See, that's insane to me.
I know.
I know.
It's insane to a lot of people.
I have read all the Tolkien.
See?
Including The Cimmerillion.
That's the hard one.
It's impossible to read.
That's his metal machine music, right?
It's like reading A Hundred Years of Solitude if all the story was taken out of it.
We'll be right back.
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The one Tolkien I haven't read.
is his apparently genius translation of Beowulf, which went unpublished until very recently.
That was his, I guess, his young masterwork before he did the fantasy writing.
He wrote this brilliant translation of Beowulf and then never published it, just sat on it.
And do you think his estate did that?
His estate has finally published it, yeah.
You've got to be careful what you leave on your computer, J.R.R.R.
You really do.
Hey, I'm Chamonix, lover dear.
Sketches by John Rock.
But he wrote this thing, and I think it might have been his Leaves of Grass.
He kept writing it or monkeying with it or didn't think it was ready.
I don't know.
But George R.R.
Martin...
Very curious character.
Very interesting to interact with him.
He is a nerd.
Oh, really?
Yes.
But of the old school, you know?
Like, remember when we were young nerds?
Yes.
And the difference between the nerds that...
You know, that played Dungeons and Dragons and the nerds that were actually trying to learn swordsmithery.
Do you remember there were, you know, there were real nerds, even when we were nerds, who were just a dimension beyond.
Like, the guys who...
Talked about swords.
There was a kid in my ninth grade science class who was a friend of mine, and we talked about fantasy writing and science fiction together, and we enjoyed...
Dungeons and Dragons culture.
But he had notebooks full of designs of swords that he was sincere about learning the ancient arts of sword making to craft these swords, to hew them out of the metal.
And I remember at the time feeling like
You know that that is, you are choosing to pursue esoterica down a rabbit hole to the end.
Like, sword making is never going, it's not relevant, it's never going to be relevant now.
It's, you are on a siding.
And I appreciate the art, I appreciate the history, I appreciate everything about it.
But I think there was a part of what made it possible for him or what made it a sighting was that there was a part of the fantasy...
where he believed that maybe one day civilization would crumble and swords would be the way we interacted with each other again.
Sounds like a free thinker.
Not in a political way, but he's definitely got his own thoughts about how stuff is going to go.
He's not doing it to be cool.
He's not doing it because it's the next obvious step, given that his father is a swordsmith.
He's got a larger worldview.
Yeah, and I feel like there's a part of steampunk culture, Ren Faire culture, fantasy culture, cosplay culture, that there are underthreads, undertones of apocalypse in those things.
You know, people...
are aware that they are in modernity, and they are enjoying these cultures, and I cannot help but feel like they all secretly hope that the grid goes down.
Sort of like you and Red Dawn.
A little bit.
That these are Red Dawn fantasies, and that when the grid does go down...
Their swordsmithing, the fact that they can cook a hearty meal in a kettle, the fact that they know how to entertain themselves with just a flute and footbells.
They've dealt with in-period lice and fleas.
That's right.
That's the thing in the Civil War thing.
It's okay if you have fleas.
That makes it more realistic.
Yeah, you figure out the fleas and the lice.
You figure out that suddenly those skills, which we all thought were laughable, are going to come in very handy.
And the traveling minstrels and the jugglers and the juggalos...
The juggalos are just waiting for the apocalypse.
They are.
And I feel like, I mean, and this may be my Cold War childhood speaking, but I cannot help but think all these alternative cultures are in some ways secret apocalypse cults.
And everybody is privately preparing for what they... And because this is absolutely true on the flip side.
Like all the gun nuts, all the survivalists, all the people who are more out about what they call preparing for...
the race riots or preparing for the water wars or preparing for the when the government comes and what they're really doing is fantasizing about those things they're praying for those eventualities because their preparation is like it's so excited they're so enthusiastic about it they are hoping to god
That the grid goes down and that they are defending their homes against hordes.
And I really feel like the fantasy world and what we think of as the nerd world...
At least the steampunky, Renfairy, artisanal craftsman side of things, it's also subtly prepping for the end times.
I never thought of that, because when you think about somebody...
The typical thing would be when you say, not even a rent fair, but just like a medieval, like a Middle Ages kind of dress-up thing.
You're like, why would you want to spend your weekend acting like you're living in this really squalid time with no resources and horrible health conditions and terrible food?
And if you look at it, instead of looking to the past and pining, instead of looking to the future and preparing, that turkey leg is going to look pretty good in a couple of years.
I think what they're doing is making Apocalypse fun.
And, you know, and it's really like the tech people who are right in the middle of the culture who are, you know, the tech people are betting that everything keeps going.
You know, tech people are laying the groundwork for the fact that the grid does not go down and that really the skill sets that are going to be needed in the future are skill sets built on
What we're doing now.
And it's like that conversation I had with Jonathan Colton many years ago when my daughter was born.
His kids are a little bit older than mine.
And I was expressing my kind of hippie suspicion of screen time.
Well, I don't think I'm going to let my kid watch TV.
He's got very interesting thoughts on that that really have heavily influenced me.
Yeah.
And he was like, well, why are you doing that?
Like, all they're going to have are screens in the future where we're going.
The future where we're going.
That's going to be their life.
The future in which we will spend the rest of our lives.
Right.
And so the longer you deprive her of screens, it's like you are refusing to let her use a fork because they didn't used to have forks or something.
Like, these are tools.
To me, this is super reductive, but I walked away with thinking, well, you know, I want...
I read so much bullshit I don't like to my daughter, but she wants to read it.
So it doesn't matter if it's Barbie or My Little Pony or Green Lantern.
I will read it to her because she wants to be read to.
I want her to hear lots of words.
I want her to read lots of words.
And if those are the words that get her excited, that's good.
There's a part of me, and I really admit this is reductive, but after having that conversation with – we have two friends named John that fall on really different sides of the fence about this, and it's interesting to talk to them about this.
They argue with one another.
Still, they still do.
But for me, that's the new literacy.
It doesn't feel like literacy to us.
So what I say to my daughter, you're only allowed to look at educational books for an hour a day.
I know it's not exactly the same thing.
But you can look at books, but they need to be educational.
There was a time when people thought books were like – were something that were going to be really upsetting in a time with a theocracy in place.
Like that's really dangerous information.
Well, I mean I feel like even when she's playing Monument Valley, like even when she's trying to buy – and failing, thank God, to buy toys for a talking cartoon cat on a screen.
Like at the same time, she's learning to manipulate that.
She's learning to type a little bit.
And I didn't really learn to type until I was like 18.
And my God, if you don't have that, I mean, God bless the people who don't play their kids' recorded music and make them play with blocks.
We have a good friend who goes to Waldorf, and Waldorf is a very interesting educational program, but on the face of it, it freaks me out a little bit.
How so?
Well, I don't know enough about it and everybody who does Waldorf says it's not as bad as it sounds.
But the idea is that it's really all about play and play and play, which is great.
But you play with fairly simple toys and you're not supposed to listen to recorded music.
You never do anything with screens at all until a certain age.
And anyway, I don't want to be reductive about it.
But for me, I feel like –
My life has been made so much better and frustrating sometimes by this computer stuff.
But we have to understand that back to your thing about the millennials, we still think about this as computer stuff.
For them, that's just life.
And the sooner she gets good at that version of life, the more prepared she'll be to make good decisions when that stuff gets weird, which it will in a couple of years.
Right.
Anyway, we're so far off George R. R. R. Martin.
But anyway, you were saying, so –
Well, I feel like it's very interesting how much...
how many trends in the popular culture in sort of every direction and of every political stripe can be traced back to a kind of to an apocalypse origin story.
And the mainstream culture just putters along in a state of like unreflective mass...
lockstep conformity where even the negative thinking is that things will get worse in a way that we'll mostly understand yeah right it's just gonna be like oh you know it's gonna be hard it's gonna be harder to uh it's gonna be harder to get uh my shade of lipstick in the future because uh because apparently it's uh not if you're selena kyle in the dark knight rises she got great cosmetics after they shut off the electricity
she really did and i i can only assume that she spent all the time she wasn't on screen like up at macy's going through the dark and i think it's clear that she moved into a mac cosmetic store before bane shut off all the utilities yeah and she just she would disappear for a while and you'd be like where did you know honestly did you notice that i was like first of all anne hathaway very beautiful woman but like everybody else looks like half a dickens character and she looks amazing
Well, this is the thing.
I think a lot of the female superheroes, what we forget is that their mask is makeup, right?
They don't, the female superheroes often do not wear masks because they, because their pretty face is necessary.
And so Batman and Bane have these hideous appendages on their faces.
She is, you know, it's, it's a, it's a skin tight body suit and a, and a, and a, and a made up face.
Like that's her costume.
Yeah.
But in any case, the tech people are the ones that are curious to me because they are not part of the lockstep mass culture that is just going into the future unreflectively.
They often trend culturally with these apocalypse and modern primitive cults.
But everything that they do is contingent on faith.
Technology will survive.
That progress is linear and always building on the last thing.
If your kid doesn't learn the swipe gesture across a swipe screen...
That 10 years from now, they won't be able to even read a book because everything will... The swiping is like... Now that we're in a swipe world, everything will follow from the swipe.
And that is a curious kind of faith and a curious...
Like, whatever the Articles of Confederation are of people that go to Macworld and are like, tell us, Oracle, what are the new, you know... The new swipes.
Yeah, what are the new swipes?
Is plural marriage allowed yet in Macworld?
If not, it's only a matter of time.
That whole subset of... Which makes up a huge part of my world.
The people that I know and am friends with.
We discuss you at the meetings.
I know you do.
On LiveJournal.
You just can't see it.
There's a lot of LiveJournal talk that's like, when are we going to finally bring John into the room?
When will John teach the swipe?
LAUGHTER His negativity has become problematic.
LAUGHTER
Apocalypse, apocalypse.
George R.R.
Martin.
Here was the first story that George R.R.
Martin told me.
I said, how did you and your wife meet?
And he said, in the early 70s, she worked for Ringling Brothers Circus.
And we went to a early convention, comics convention.
And because it was the early 70s, there was an all, like a women-only sauna at the comics convention.
And I went into the women's only sauna naked to liberate the gender bias inherent in a women's only sauna.
I went in there as a warrior.
Yeah.
A men's rights warrior.
So lost already.
1971 or whatever.
That's very courageous.
And she... He's the real hero.
She felt like that.
No, it was very appealing.
My boldness.
But he's being serious.
This is the real story.
Yeah.
And I was just like...
I mean, I'm standing on top of a teetering pile of understories.
I'm just like, okay, wait a minute.
She works for Ringling Brothers.
You guys are at a world con.
There is a woman's only sauna that you were liberating, and that's how you met?
And he's like, well, I mean, I was, you know, my wife had bought him with it.
Exactly.
He met your wife at a John Vanderslight show.
He and he's like, well, and then I married someone else for a period.
But then we met again.
What was he liberating her from?
Who knows?
But I was like, OK, this is all happening in 1971.
This is a separate thread.
of the culture that goes back a long, long time that he is one of the, you know, he's one of the early, early, early, he, you know, world con was like a big, big part of his, his universe at a time.
where the culture at large and even the nerd historians like have a hard time going that far back in the culture to a time when like
And I swear to you that they absolutely were probably wearing puffy-sleeved garments.
There might have been a jingle stick.
And so I'm like, I am so enthralled and so elated picturing these nerds at the dawn of what we think of as
Like, fan culture.
And so his wife is sitting there, and I'm like, tell me your version of this story.
And she's like, well, you know what?
I am a fan.
I am one of the early fans.
And we were the first generation of people who recognized that being a fan was its own thing.
And I've spent my whole life as a fan of science fiction and fantasy.
And it's made a beautiful life for me.
That's lovely.
It was extraordinary.
Extraordinary to hear that they were...
they created that culture in the quiet in a way, you know what I mean?
Like they were not trying to interact with the larger culture.
They found one another at these, at these comic cons and it was an imperfect, um, it was an imperfect center probably, but close enough for the circus people and the burlesque people and the vaudeville people and the,
Fantasy and science fiction people, they all found each other in a way that I think we think of that experience happening really in modern times.
That's the nerd narrative.
What you just described in some ways is how people talk about things like Woodstock.
You know what I mean?
I don't mean to sound reductive, but in the same sense of going like there was a time when people who were really into free speech and weed...
And free love and beat poetry and all these things that now we all just slap into the same pile.
There was a time when all the people who are, if you like, outsiders of a certain kind of middle class outsider, like found a commonality in that.
And now that all seems really obvious.
But at the time, it probably was not that obvious.
Not at all.
And in this case, it's even more obscure.
The nerd thing was contemporaneous with that, and yet a tiny, tiny fraction of the size of, you know, like, it was not general interest.
It was very specific.
It's also like when Underground, you know, that's when your buddy Art Crumb was starting to come up.
There's a lot of... Underground comics were huge then.
Fritz the Cat and so forth.
Even Marvel, you know, what Jim Storenko was doing with Marvel stuff was pretty out there then.
Yeah, right.
And then everybody's getting high, too.
But so so meeting him and his wife and seeing their connection to this culture.
And then he has he has four assistants.
George R. R. Martin has four assistants whom he describes as his minions.
They describe themselves as his minions.
Sorry.
All four of them are women.
Who are a little zaftig.
Who have dark curly hair.
That they wear in braids.
And one of them is British.
There are a couple that are like Americans.
One of them never.
I never actually saw.
Only heard spoken of.
They're all like hilarious.
Super smart.
Like in their 30s.
Or 40s.
And they act as his intermediaries, as his planners, as his, you know, they're more than assistants.
You know, they're like executive assistants.
But, like, there are four of them and they interact with one another seamlessly.
Like, it's a culture.
Yeah.
and it's very captivating and and like wow and and you know and they kind of they flirt with him and he flirts with them like it's a their interactions are very flirty and it and it's exactly the way that people on the jonathan colton cruise or people at comic-con interact with one another
I've seen it before.
I've seen this culture before where there's a lot of flirtation.
There's a lot of sexual energy.
A weird combination of confidence and lightness sometimes.
You know what I mean?
But it isn't the kind of like, I don't know what I'm doing.
I'm a flighty idiot.
But no, smart people but who are very confident and, as you like to say, aren't asking for your approval about how this is going.
Exactly.
And I think if you if you got into a political conversation with any one of them, their politics would be absolutely dead on.
You know what I mean?
Like there's no it isn't a it isn't a patriarchal cult.
Like all of these women are fully empowered and yet they are play acting.
a kind of sexuality and george rr martin is the is the papa figure and everybody's very comfortable with that they're very comfortable with with i mean you know this is a guy who in the early 70s when it liberated the women's sauna okay i can't forget that you know and and when i think about and hodgman and i had a long conversation about this where we were both like
There were the cool kids over here having sex with each other and wearing polo shirts with the collars up and going to beer parties.
And then there were the nerds over here having sex with each other and going to beer parties and wearing their velvet collars popped or whatever.
And how the fuck did we end up being like
Right in between in the narrow band, the narrow cultural band of kids that just weren't having sex with each other.
You know, we were sitting there silently judging both cultures.
And in fact, the district slept alone every single night.
I love John's – it might have been when Hodgman interviewed Martin.
It was a pretty interesting interview.
But at one point, John Hodgman was describing the way that he dressed when he was in high school.
You heard him talk about this.
He had kind of a Doctor Who thing going on.
He carried a briefcase.
He had a ponytail.
Yeah.
Yeah, he was working a lot of different angles trying to figure out which one was going to be the one.
But cobbling together, like a lot of people, cobbling together your own idea of what cool was without much outside influence to steer you one way or another.
Yeah, I understood that my mom would not buy me an Izod shirt.
Because they were $85 or something like that.
At a time when you could get a shirt with a little fire-breathing dragon on it from Sears for $14.
Right.
And I remember going to the fabric store with her one day when I was in ninth grade or something like that.
Which is already like, you're going to the fabric store with your mom in ninth grade.
Loser.
And I'm walking through the fabric store and there's a little embroidered alligator.
Oh, no.
But he's like, he's a happy alligator.
He's smiling.
But clearly not the Lacoste alligator.
And he's about twice as big as the Lacoste alligator.
And he's like looking at the viewer and maybe even is giving a thumbs up.
And I said, you know what?
That's my alligator.
And I bought it and I had it sewn on.
I had it sewn on actually my Levi's jacket.
And then like smiling alligator was my little motif.
And, and I, I, I might've even had it.
I bought a second one and had it sewn on my ski sweater.
You know, like I was, I like Laverne with an owl.
Yeah.
Except here's the smiling alligator giving a thumbs up.
And I was like, I firmly believed that I would be respected and loved for my hilarious outsider take on being an insider.
And,
What a big pecan subversion you've made.
I was just reviled.
I was reviled by everyone.
No one liked it.
No one thought it was good.
And I was so proud.
My smiling alligator, check me out.
I get it, right?
know wrong although you know maybe yes maybe if i had just stuck around in my smiling alligator tent long enough i would now you know i'd now be at the at the center of some um you know some vaudeville burlesque culture think of all the saunas you could have liberated i tried