Ep. 147: "The Om of Surrender"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
I was just watching videos of young samurais displaying their swordsmanship skills.
So I'm in a pretty weird mood.
Not young.
I mean, you know, I think of a samurai as being, well, a thousand years old.
So these samurais were, you know, in their 30s.
Still, to acquire that level of swordsmanship at such a young age, I mean, these guys were using their swords to slice open an edamame bean.
Yeah, did you see the guy that does the move with the stick and then kicks over the water bottle?
Have you seen that?
No.
I love those.
I hate to admit it, but I love those.
Yeah, this guy, somebody was shooting pellets at him, and he cut a pellet.
Somebody shot a pellet at him, and he chopped the pellet in half.
Deadpool does that in one of the X-Men movies.
That's a good move.
Yeah, but this is like a real guy who's actually doing it.
You can't fake a video.
Yeah.
Not one of these videos.
It was a Japanese game show.
Did you know every trick basketball shot on the internet was faked?
Can that be real?
Mm-hmm.
It's an Area 51 thing.
Can it be real that they are all faked?
Oh, we're through the looking glass.
I mean, well, you just blew my mind.
You know, speaking of blowing minds.
Yeah, I was driving today and the car in front of me had a bumper sticker that said, let's see if I can remember.
It said, oh, my God.
O-M-I-G-O-D?
O-M-O-M-I, letter I, God.
Full on G-O-D.
G-O-D.
You can put God on a license plate?
No, not a license plate.
It was a bumper sticker.
Oh.
Oh.
And so I read it, and if you say it out loud, it's like, oh my God.
Oh my God.
But oh my God, it's one of those coexist type things.
Visualize world peace.
Yeah, where you're supposed to be like, whoa.
But then it had the effect, it had a very strange effect on me, Merlin, which is that I said the word ohm out loud.
And then I said it again.
And pretty soon I was driving down the street going, Om.
Om.
I was like, you know, George Harrison had a lot to say about this.
About saying Om over and over.
It's a holy word.
It's going to put you in the Godhead space.
and so pretty soon a half an hour goes by i've been saying ohm the entire time i feel really calm no way i feel super chilled out and i was like i don't want to stop saying ohm i had to park my car and get out and rejoin the world yeah and so i'm walking through the lobby of this building and i'm saying you know quietly ohm
Om.
And then I encounter someone pushing a cart with a bunch of papers on it.
And I have to stop saying om.
Because that would have been a weird... You know, they're smiling and like, good morning.
And I'm like, om.
So I stopped.
And now I just want to get back in.
I just want to go back somewhere where I can just say om some more.
Because it was really very pleasing.
Yeah.
It's a very informal version of meditation.
It's not even a walking meditation.
It's a walking around meditation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Walking around meditation.
And I was oming and I was like, I was reflecting.
I felt shanty.
I was ready for, you know, I was ready to like spin a prayer wheel and build a mandala.
I had a whole plan.
You build a lot of mandalas, let's be honest.
They don't have to all be made of sand, but they do blow away.
If I had a permanent mandala for every sand mandala I've built, I would have a warehouse of mandala.
Hmm.
I've been exploring a lot of fruity things lately.
Hmm.
And I don't need to go into a lot of detail, but one of them was a talk I listened to where this guy teaches this version.
He doesn't call it, you know, it's a mindfulness meditation talk, but he has a version of that word that actually has three parts.
And it's, I'm not trying to cock block your OM, but it's a very satisfying three syllable version of OM.
How does it sound?
Imagine a satisfied ah sound that turns into ohm and ends with kind of a yummy sounding, like a yummy food mm sound.
It starts out high and it goes kind of like this.
It's not as good as yours, but there's several things about it.
It kind of makes your body relax when you do it.
You sound incredibly crazy.
Yeah, well, this is the thing I could not do walking through the halls of an office building.
No.
You get to be known as that guy.
Yeah.
I have a cousin who is a practitioner of scream therapy.
The Janov thing?
The Tears for Fears John Lennon thing?
I'm not sure.
Yeah, it's Arthur Janov.
You get the scream therapy, and you go and you scream.
Yeah, well, they had some kind of... My cousin and her husband had some kind of compound in Northern California where people would go and scream.
It wasn't... You know, it was like their school.
They ran a scream therapy school, my cousin and her husband.
Yeah.
And I'm not sure how you measure the success of a program like that.
I was about to say it was a very successful program, but then I would imagine that earning money would be anathema to you if you were running a screen therapy school in Northern California.
Especially when people want refunds.
Talking about primal therapy, am I right?
I think that you measure the success of your Scream Therapy program by how many sacks of millet you have.
You don't know anything about this stuff.
That ain't millet.
That's Bitcoin, my friend.
How do people pay for it?
Do they pay for it in hugs or do they pay for it in real money?
I don't know.
The thing is, if you're going to have – cult.
Cult is such an ugly word.
If you're going to have an alternative therapy, I think you come up with a system and you've got steps and there's meetings.
Right.
There's usually a building.
There's materials.
You probably – you have a materiel.
You've probably got to buy a mat or a screen.
Well, you have to have the land in the first place.
That's true.
I mean, Northern California, they're not giving it away.
No, sir.
And you've got to get like a scream shirt probably.
i don't know but you know that first uh i think the first john lennon record was um recorded while he was in chanoff's primal therapy oh really uh-huh that that really that really raw first album uh-huh this is the one where he was like where he was putting his hair up in a pompadour and wearing a leather jacket no that's rock and roll 1976 yeah thank you
That was much later.
Boy, his post-Beatles career is so weird.
You know, he got a lot of credit for that.
But then just a few years later, Neil Young put on a pink rockabilly suit.
And the shocking pinks.
And everybody dropped a ton of shit on him.
They said that's the end of his career.
Neil Young has officially gone into genre hell.
That's what they said.
Yeah.
That's a phrase they used about him for 10 years.
They killed him for that record in trans, let's be honest.
Yeah.
You're a trans fan, right?
Big trans fan.
You're not transphobic?
I am not.
I'm not at all, and particularly not that Neil Young record.
But also, and when you learn the story of trans... When you learn the story, you feel like kind of a dick for saying anything.
It's even quadruply amazing.
But the thing was that I responded to that music...
Really positively.
The first time I heard it, I was like, this is great.
Really?
This vocoder really speaks to me.
And I liked him with those wraparound sunglasses and the headset microphone, the early Bluetooth.
I liked the way he kind of stomped around the stage like a Godzilla.
Yeah.
But I was also a big fan of Neil Young and the Shocking Pinks.
I thought that record was great.
Wow.
And I'm a huge fan of Neil Young and Crazy Horse's Reactor, another record that gets dogged.
So basically, Neil Young's late 70s Crazy Time output was hugely influential on me.
You know who else loves that?
All of those?
Our friend, the physicist, Grant Balfour.
He turned me on to a lot of those records that I had seen in Cutout alongside the Kiss Solo albums and lots of Frank Zappa records.
Those were 99 Cent records.
Those albums, Trans was in Cutout.
For many, many, many years.
And Reactor was like the canonical cutout album.
Reactor was everywhere.
Absolutely.
I bought it for 99 cents and I got it home.
You know, I used to buy those cutout records and I would get them home and it'd be a massive disappointment most of the time.
The most profound disappointment was...
i think zappa's orchestral record yeah see that that's that they should have a stick remember the pmrc stickers uh he was protesting they should have had classical music stickers on there not into it he's got his tics
You know, when Charlie Parker got big in bop, a lot of the criticism, I think specifically, was it Philip Larkin?
No, it was Cab Calloway.
Cab Calloway called it Chinese music.
And then people started noting that I'm going to tell you something that's going to ruin Charlie Parker for you if you're not careful.
Charlie Parker, his main riff is almost always a version of the Woody Woodpecker song.
Try it.
Go ahead and try it.
Salt peanut, salt peanut.
Oh, wow.
Hold on.
Oh, no.
Wow.
Sorry, bird.
Mind blown.
Mind blown.
You know, what's interesting is the young people who are listening to our program have no idea who Woody Woodpecker is.
And so they're just like, huh?
Do you think they know about the magpies?
John, do you think they know about Heckle and Jekyll?
I am betting that they do not know about Heckle and Jekyll and their mischievous hijinks.
That was Brady's bits.
That was my wife's favorite cartoon as a child.
She loved Heckle and Jekyll.
She always calls them the Magpies.
Heckle and Jekyll.
Which I think might have been a nod to Chip and Dale.
Well, you know, Heckel and Jekyll have a very Marx brother-ian, it's like two grouchos, right?
Aren't they both like, I remember them being like always polite to a fault.
Weren't they always extremely polite with each other?
Yes, but it was a sardonic politeness.
Oh, it's more like...
Spy versus spy.
They're absolutely spy versus spy.
Oh, Aragones has some answering to do.
God, we are opening up a lot of windows today.
Anybody under 40 years old is like, what are they talking about?
Sergio Aragones, go worship at his temple.
He did a lot of the marginalia in Mad, right?
Yeah, I think all of it.
Or, no, not all of it.
Every once in a while I would see one by somebody else and it was confusing and it infuriated me.
Like, stop doing that.
Why are you doing that?
Go back to the marginalia that belongs there.
He also, you know what else he did the marginalia for?
TV's bloopers and practical jokes.
He did the dissolves between segments.
Oh, I suppose I've seen that.
I have some faint memory, but I was not a regular watcher of TV's bloopers and practical jokes.
What put you off?
Was it Dick Clark or Ed McMahon?
I think, you know, we've talked about this before, but there was a cutoff for me in television land.
Oh, yes.
Right.
Like up to a certain point, anything that was on the television I was interested in and I was fortunate enough to be alive during an era which I now look back at and think of as the golden age of television.
Especially for a kid.
That's the thing.
If you think about what was on, I think about, I'm a little, two years older than you, 75 to 79.
There was so much stupid shit on TV that was perfect for kids.
So amazing.
The freaking Gong Show?
Oh, my God.
The fact that we were kids during the tenure of that incredible program.
I can't believe that show was on TV.
I can't believe it still, and I feel so lucky to have been 10 years old, right?
But also, like, all the garbage TV and the fact that that was the last heyday of all those Jackie Gleason and...
The golden age of entertainment, like Gene Kelly being in Xanadu.
You would still have Fred Astaire.
Was it The Twilight Zone?
No, no.
What was the one he was in?
Fred Astaire was in his last film.
The Old People movie.
Yeah.
No, he wasn't in Cocoon.
He was in...
But you would still see that and you would watch a variety show.
You could turn on any variety show and it was still like a Hollywood spectacle, but Kiss would be on.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Those were the guests, like those were the headliner guests of all the late night talk shows.
And then Robin Williams would be on there.
And then, yeah, right, like David Bowie.
And it's just like, what are we watching?
Well, so anyway, there was a moment in 1984,
two i feel like 82 83 where where the where it all gave up the ghost and it was uh all those shows i mean i never i didn't get into miami vice we've talked about this a million times and i think part of the problem is that it's hard for me to uh it's hard for me to have my intelligence insulted even as a child
Right?
And your intelligence is insulted by Fantasy Island.
Oh, man.
But at least I was a young enough kid.
I mean, even at eight years old, I felt like, this is insulting.
It's insulting.
It felt that dumb.
Dumber than Love Boat.
uh well yeah because because that was just at the age because fantasy island was supposed to be serious it was serious and i was just at the age where i realized that every single person that arrived on this island would be here to enact a sex fantasy if this was true if if fantasy island were a true thing it would just be a sex camp how much did it cost was it ten thousand dollars
Wasn't it $10,000?
I mean, if you could go to a place and they would give you whatever your fantasy, you're not going to go there to reconcile with your dead father.
You're not going to go there to learn to swim for the first time.
Whatever those flimsy premises were, it would just be a sex farm.
And I think at 10 years old, I was like, wait a minute.
Like, because I mean, it's not at 10 years old like I had any sex fantasies, but I was starting to it was starting to dawn on me.
And again, this was 1978.
Right.
So there was a lot of fantasize about.
Well, there was also a lot of talk about that in the culture.
I mean, that was the era where you would go to somebody's house and there would just be like we magazine on the coffee table.
Right.
It was we we was like, wasn't we sort of the classy version of Playboy?
Well, I don't know.
It was somewhere between Playboy and Penthouse and it was a little bit more.
It was like if you were a sophisticated, you know, like guy that had a I mean, they were all about stereo systems and mixing cocktails.
But we was like, well, the name it's right there in the name.
It's it's yes in French.
Hmm.
Come on, you've got to have three different ferns in macrame plant holders in your house to even know what it means.
I just want to cover this very quickly because I definitely want to circle back to this.
I'm on the Wikipedia page for Fantasy Island, which I can highly recommend.
This is under a section called the Fantasy Subsection Cost.
In the first film, it was noted that each guest had paid $50,000, about $196,000 in 2014 dollars.
Yeah, yeah.
In advance, that's the only way you should ever charge for anything, for the fulfillment of their fantasies and that Fantasy Island was a business.
In return to Fantasy Island, Rourke told Tattoo...
Okay, I thought I could do it.
In return to Fantasy Island, Rourke told Tattoo that he sometimes dropped the price when a guest couldn't afford the usual fee.
What?
Because he believed everyone should be given a chance to have their fantasies fulfilled.
Come on.
See, that just strains credit.
I'm not running a charity here.
Yeah, what are you talking about?
There's like financial aid for fantasy?
Do they have a financial aid office?
John, I'm fucking 48.
Fantasy Island, you know what I think about?
Logistics.
I want to know how it all went down.
I want to come back to that.
So you didn't like having your intelligence insulted.
You could roll with it for a while.
See, when you're a little younger, I think also, you know, it's a different mindset.
And now we're really going to lose the young people in the app class is that you watched whatever the fuck was on.
Yeah.
And you were starved for it.
And that was the thing.
Also, you were prohibited by adults from watching TV all the time.
Oh, yeah.
When you got the chance, it didn't matter.
It didn't matter what was on.
It mattered that it was on.
You'd flip through the five available channels, find the best thing in that half-hour spot, and then you'd flip around.
Yeah, and then you would enjoy it.
And I think in Seattle when I was a little kid, we had four channels, right?
ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS.
Yep.
Clear Five, we also had a local affiliate, as I told you, WXIX, Channel 19.
Right, right.
Well, see, then you were big-time East Coast Ohio people who had an extra channel.
They called it Porkopolis.
Yeah, out here in Seattle.
And then in Anchorage, when I moved to Anchorage in 78.
You got half a station on Tuesdays.
Get back to work.
No, you had ABC, CBS, and NBC, but they were all on a seven-day time delay, right?
Because the tapes were actually shipped.
That does not make sense.
The tapes.
They sent the tapes, and then they played the tapes.
You're saying this is a pre-satellite era where they had to run the tape locally.
They get Fantasy Island, they hit the button at exactly 10 o'clock, and a tape would play.
Yeah.
So if you subscribed to TV Guide, you just made the adjustment that everything was one week later.
Ugh.
And so, you know, we have this problem all the time.
You'd go on a trip.
You'd fly down to Seattle.
And I'd run into some old elementary school classmates.
And, of course, what comes up in conversation right away, you're talking about the last episode of MASH.
Yep.
Right?
Because you're kids.
You're worried about what's happening in the Korean War.
Mm-hmm.
You're worried about the humanity.
And I would always be a weak mind.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, that's brutal.
But, you know, anyway, so that era... But then in the 80s, I feel like all of American culture began to be an assault on my blossoming intelligence.
Yeah.
And bloopers and practical jokes, all that kind of stuff where, like, polished hosts were smiling at you and fake laughing as somebody got hit in the crotch with a volleyball...
I was just like, what is this?
Yeah.
The early 80s, here's the way I think of it at least.
Like I say, 70, kind of 74, but 75 to 78 or 79 for me.
It's bookended on the one end by my dad passing away and me becoming a latchkey child who got to watch more TV than he should have.
And then it's bookended on the other end by my mom remarrying and me going to military school in Florida.
Oh, you have such a 70s childhood.
Yeah.
That is a fucking after school special plot line.
Starring Lance Kerwin as Merlin Mann.
Did you have a bowl haircut?
Did you have a John Danford haircut?
I had a home haircut.
It was an approximator to bowl.
We couldn't afford a bowl.
Did you carry your key around your neck on a piece of thread?
For a while, yeah.
I had a key.
Then I had it on a glow-in-the-dark real estate keychain.
It was the style at the time.
Until I was in ninth grade.
Ninth grade.
I carried my house key around my neck on a red piece of yarn.
See, I think that's cool.
When I would see kids wearing a key around their neck, especially if they're younger than like 13, I'd always thought that was a cool look.
That was like tying your shirt around your waist.
It just looked cool.
I didn't feel it looked cool because every other one of my friends had a stay-at-home mom.
Oh, yeah.
And so I was the one with the house key.
They didn't have a house key until they went to college.
Yeah, my mom's really boring.
She's a pioneering female computer programmer on the Alaskan pipeline.
Yeah, I know.
That's so boring.
And the front door opens for them.
They don't even have to touch the doorknob because their mom is standing there looking through the keyhole.
With a selection of delicious Hostess products?
Yeah, with a plate of fresh-baked cookies.
And I'm keying into the house and trying to...
No, I never even, I didn't say hello.
I knew there was nobody there.
You knew there was no one there.
I'd key into the house and some cat would look over his shoulder at me and run upstairs.
And I'd try to get the furnace to work.
You, you, like going from, your dad dies, your latchkey kid, your mom remarries in military school.
It's like, I can already hear, I can already hear the theme to bless the beasts and the children.
I'm like two different TV movies waiting to happen.
But for me – here's the thing though.
For those years like – especially I would say through 76, 77 kind of – yeah, and 78.
I mean I knew – I said this before but I literally – I didn't need the TV dial that was in the Sunday paper.
I knew – we couldn't afford fancy TV guide.
But I knew every primetime show exactly what time it was, even stuff I didn't watch or especially stuff I didn't watch because I knew I didn't want to watch it.
But –
Think about the shows.
All the great shows.
You got Alice.
You got Happy Days, followed by Laverne and Shirley.
You got Barney Miller.
You got, I mean, I could go on and on.
Love Boat and Fantasy Island.
You got All in the Family and the Jeffersons.
Come on, you're killing me now.
I know, I know.
But think about some of those.
You got, oh God, you got MS Romano over on the One Day at a Time.
This is life, the time when you get to go and have it all.
Remember Schneider?
No, I can't remember Schneider.
Schneider was the guy who led himself into the apartment.
Come on, I know who Schneider is, but I'm saying that all I can see is Valerie Bertinelli's smiling face.
Oh my God, she was so cute.
They used to call her a tomboy.
She was a tomboy.
I bet Edward liked that too.
You know, Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen are a classic example of people marrying their opposite-sex doppelganger.
Their doppelganger.
And I'm sure that they had a dog, and I'm sure that the dog looked like them.
Yeah, and Wolfie.
Oh, Wolfgang.
Is that his name?
Can you imagine naming your child Wolfgang Van Halen?
Well, you know, can you imagine being named Van Halen?
It used to sound so weird.
I went to see that first reunion tour, the David Lee Roth, but with Wolfgang Van Halen on bass.
Oh.
And he did a very passable job, the young man.
So you got all of that.
So here's – I'm going to toss out a few things, and it's almost – it's virtually impossible for me to talk intelligently about this because on the one hand, I don't know the exact details, and that's part of the problem, but also that I have very strong feelings about this.
But around that time I went to military school, first of all, I started being able to watch a lot less TV.
But – which I picked up again after I blessedly went back to public school.
But think about this.
Think about the early 80s and think about the switch in programming at places like NBC where you got whatever – Tartikoff coming in.
Well, but you also got – you also got now Hill Street Blues is going to change the way we think about dramas.
So I think the drama – part of the problem is the big thrust.
The sitcoms did start getting dumber but also – I mean dumber in a less fun way.
I mean, you know, Three's Company was still around, but, you know, it wasn't... We'd already switched.
Mr. Roper was gone.
Yep.
And you got Mr. Furley in there.
Furley, which was, you know... He's a great comedian.
Oh, no.
Don't get me started on Don Knotts.
Don Knotts.
But once you lose Chrissy...
Once you lose Chrissy, you replace her with the subsequent Chrissies.
Yeah, the other ones.
But then the other thing is, like you say, I guess, I don't know.
I think in the 80s everything changed.
When people today think about dumb sitcoms, people who are old enough to have nostalgia, they think of the 90s.
You think of the Too Many Cooks type openings, right?
You think of those very silly 90s sitcoms.
People refer to 90s
And I honestly have no idea what they're talking about.
I knew them all.
I've seen every Seinfeld many, many, many times.
I don't think I've ever seen a full episode of Full House.
No.
Or what's the one with Urkel?
Family Matters?
That was way past my time.
I was playing in bands then.
I was looking up some Playmobil toys and Lego toys the other day on the internet because I was like, you know what?
I would like to have classic Legos.
I've been very upset as Legos have become more and more kit-based and there just aren't those big bins of red, white, blue...
I think we had yellow, red, white, blue, yellow, green.
I don't even think there were five colors.
We have three different colors of green Duplos now, I realized the other day.
Yeah.
So I was looking on the internet, and so I put in, I'm trying to, you know, you try and game eBay with your search terms.
And I was like, a vintage Lego lot?
And I got all these responses that were like, 1997 vintage Legos.
I was like, die a thousand deaths.
1997 is not vintage anything.
But for some people, for young people.
1997 is not vintage anything.
It really isn't.
1997 doesn't even exist.
It does not exist to me.
It's a non-year.
It's just an un-place.
What do I associate with 1997?
What happened to you in 1997?
I'm trying to remember.
It's the year before I moved to a new house.
I was married two years at that point.
About a year and a half, two years.
And musically, it was before we put out our...
Yeah, I don't think 1997 happened.
I think it was a bye year.
It was a bye year.
It was a total bye.
What did you do?
What were you in Bunn Family Players then?
It was what I guess would be the last year, the last full year of the Bunn Family Players.
So some might say the heyday of the Bunn Family Players.
Some being whom?
You know, there are 125 super fans.
Oompa, oompa.
For those of you who are not playing Roderick on the Line bingo, the Bunn Family Players were my band in the 90s.
It was like your first big Seattle band.
First real rock band.
We were called the Bunn Family Players because we tried to pick an intentionally difficult to like name.
That subverted the dominant paradigm.
There was one guy in our band, my best friend, who really wanted us to be named something like Chunk or Pile or Dirt because that was the fashion at the time and all the bands that were cool were all called Tool and Grunt and Dirt.
Tad.
Tad.
Ass.
And I was like, no, we should be called something else.
We're different.
We're not a grunge band.
We're something else.
We should have a name that reflects our difficulty and our smartness.
And all the bands that came out of that era all had three names, or three-word names, and they were all hard to listen to, and we were one of them.
Bunn Family Players.
Really.
It's a terrible, terrible band name.
But we were...
We were not a terrible band.
But anyway, 97 was this year where I was like, do I remember where I lived in 1997?
Name a song from 1997.
Was that... My Heart Will Go On?
Nope, that's 98.
Was that... That still feels like the era where every song had a moment where the singer went, Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Except it all popped up, right?
Or like, yeah, you mean like the... Oh, yeah, that could be it.
What song was that?
That was by a band that I actually went to see later.
It wasn't Offspring.
It turned out that their music didn't sound anything like that song, one of those bands.
Oh, that's how they get you.
You know what I mean?
Oh, but their music maybe was better than that?
It was good living with you.
When's that from?
That's probably earlier.
No idea.
I think probably earlier.
What about Closing Time?
The song Closing Time.
I bet you I would put that in 97.
Closing Time.
You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
That's a good song.
What is that?
Electrostatic?
What are they called?
Closing Time.
That's a good song.
That is a song.
Semisonic, sorry, 1998 from their album Feeling Strangely Fine.
I feel like that is a Courtney Cox song.
There's an entire part of the culture that orbits around our generation that I just put in the Courtney Cox category.
I would love to get in that category.
Which is, who's the dummy that she's married to or was married to?
Oh, David Arquette.
David Arquette, right.
Why do I know that?
Courtney Cox and David Arquette.
Why do I fucking know that?
I want those blocks of my drive back.
What is a duvet?
What?
Why do I know what a duvet is?
So she and David Arquette are married to each other, and they are the people that are in the culture.
They are the people that magazines are writing about.
And I remember looking at magazines and saying, I could not care less about them.
I am trying to care less about them.
John, I feel pride when I don't know who people are on the cover of a magazine.
Okay.
The problem is with us now, we're just old.
We don't know who anybody is because we don't know.
But at the time, I knew who they were.
I couldn't care less about them.
And the fact that they were probably listening to Closing Time put that song and all the associated culture into a swirl.
That's the beginnings of old man chunking.
Old man chunking, we called him, where you suddenly just go, nope, that's not for me.
That goes over here in this pile.
Is that ping pong?
A little bit ping pong.
It's a little ageist.
Yeah, old man chunking, but I was still a young enough person that I shouldn't have.
Because the thing is, I did care slightly about Jennifer Aniston.
I see.
I think it's a Ginger and Marianne type situation.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
I agree.
I agree.
I was worried about Jennifer.
Yeah.
I still am worried.
She seems genuinely nice.
I'm not even sure if she is, but I'm just worried that she didn't get what she wanted out of life.
Here's the double problem with the closing time problem is that I later on became good friends with one of the guys in the band.
Yeah.
with semi-sonic yeah john munson is in that band and john munson is like this he does the music for john moe's television show and he and i've played music well if john munson ever hears this hello john i think you and dan wilson and jacob slichter were a very good band i like your song chemistry whatever john says
John is an amazing guy, and I don't even know if he had any hand in writing Closing Time, but it's certainly, you know, he's wonderful, and one of the guys in his band wrote that very interesting book.
So it ends up being that I can't hate Closing Time or Semisonic.
Mm-hmm.
And now I have to go back and revisit how I feel about David Arquette.
Jesus Christ, you talk about growing up.
See, you might run into him.
He might be an indie filmmaker now who wants to use car parts for his commercial.
David Arquette?
I don't know.
I don't follow him.
This is the problem with this podcast is that we've said so many things over the years.
And then one day somebody's going to come and they're going to say, oh, I'd love to, you know, if I start making movies with David Arquette.
Yeah.
God willing.
Right, right.
Inshallah.
And then somebody who, I mean, the thing is that our loyalist fans, right?
Yes.
Captain Marm.
Captain Marm, yeah.
Is never going to betray us.
I don't know.
Oh, you think?
Really?
You think?
Well, I think she's there as a resource.
Would she work for the opposition?
I think she's like a librarian in the sense that she's not going to tell you not to read that.
Here's the problem with this show.
She's agnostic.
She's agnostic.
Well, I think here's the problem with this show is it's almost impossible to figure out where we talked about something, especially if it was more than once.
And yet it's almost certain that every terrible thing that we've said will find the light of day.
David Arquette might have you on a short list right now.
The thing is that David Arquette is probably not right now listening to the program.
But if he and I make a couple of movies together, somebody is going to say, hey, Dave, did you ever hear what he said about you?
And then I'm still waiting for Dan.
What's his butt?
My wife watched his program on Netflix and said it was very funny, his Harman Town show.
Oh, yeah.
Isn't that awful?
She's been sick, and so she's been watching Harmontown.
She said it's a lot like something you guys would do.
Can you believe that?
She said that.
My wife, my fucking wife, said that to me.
That really hurts my feelings.
The thing is, I am convinced that Dan Harmon and I are going to be, once again, standing in front of each other, looking at each other.
You're going to give him another chance?
I don't know.
I have no idea what's going to happen.
And I don't know.
He might look at me and say, you keep showing up in my Twitter feed because people are making jokes.
Did you see the picture of Dan Harmon at South by Southwest?
And a guy in the front row is wearing a Roderick on the Line t-shirt.
Oh, shit.
Really?
Standing right in front of him wearing his Roderick on the Line t-shirt.
And I'm like, I don't know if Dan Harmon...
I don't even know if Dan Harmon can see that far because he's a middle-aged guy.
He probably needs reading glasses like the rest of us do.
Maybe he didn't even see the T-shirt.
Maybe if he did see it, he doesn't know what it means.
Maybe if he does know what it means, he doesn't care.
Who knows?
But one of these days, he and I are going to be stuck in an elevator together.
Oh, it'll come up.
And maybe Jay-Z is going to be in there and it's going to be very confusing.
Yeah.
Okay.
So here's the thing.
Semisonic had four singles in 1996.
They had two singles in 1998 and they had a single in 1999.
See?
97 does not exist.
1997 does not exist.
It's a bi year and nothing happened.
See, I could go to Wikipedia and look up what movies came out this year, but I'm pretty sure given that it is user edited, there'll mostly be errors.
I don't remember anything that happened in 1997.
I wonder if Beck put something out in... You know what?
97 seems like a Beck year.
He would put out like a K-Record single or something.
Yeah.
Something fun.
I bet you he put out something kind of crazy and fun.
Now, what about Either Or?
1998?
I feel like that's 98.
I feel like it was 98.
XO's 99, I'm pretty sure.
Harvey Danger's Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone.
What, 97?
I wonder if that didn't come out in 1997.
I think it came out in 1994.
I think that's an error.
No.
No, 94.
No, 94, they were still playing at the Lake Union pub and people were throwing beer bottles full of pee at them.
Yeah.
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Tip your bartender.
thank you thank you fuck you um no 97 for me and so so here we are now i don't even know what year it is and uh okay wait a minute what year what year did uh star wars uh minus three come out
Star Wars, the part three?
No, not part three, but minus three.
Part three, the nominally first one of the series, which I refuse to call episode one, which I call episode negative three.
I think it came out in, I believe, 1999.
99.
Yeah.
And I think the third one came out, I want to say, in 2005.
I was thinking about this the other day.
I have started watching the Better Call Saul program.
Mm-hmm.
Which I have been enjoying because I like the star.
I like the actor.
I know you do.
Who plays the star.
We bonded over him very early on.
Yes, we did.
Many of our earliest interactions, I think, were about Mr. Show.
That's true.
And I feel like Mr. Odenkirk is one of the great Americans.
And I feel like the best thing about Bob Odenkirk is his complete inability to do a British accent or any kind of accent.
Yeah.
Also, his singing is pretty special.
He can't do a Southern accent.
The laser beam.
I'm the big actor.
San Francisco, dirty city, filled with criminality.
New Orleans, full of water.
He's terrible at accents, but he's amazing.
And so I like him, and I also like the protagonist of the show, which is a character played by Bob.
That's the park.
Oh, okay, yeah.
I hear it's good.
They say the pacing takes some getting used to.
It's slow.
The killer guy works in a parking lot.
Yeah, I'm not so sure about that.
And that is part of the problem.
It is the prequel problem, where I feel like the Star Wars episodes negative three, negative two, and negative one...
I might adopt that.
That's pretty good.
The entire time you're watching all of them, and I can't speak from experience because I only watched negative one.
I didn't watch negative three or negative two because I couldn't stand even the idea of Jar Jar Binks.
But I imagine that you're just waiting for Darth Vader to arrive the entire time.
Yeah.
Right?
You're just waiting for the things that you know to make their first appearance.
And so the problem with Better Call Saul is that I'm sitting there and I'm waiting, and they're conscious of that.
They're not dummies.
And so it's just like, when am I first going to see these people that I already know?
And what is the surprise?
What's the surprise of their reveal?
Do you think they'll do that?
I mean, I haven't watched the show.
I've heard several things on Fresh Air about it.
But I'm given to believe that it really is its own entity.
It is its own entity, but there's just enough.
They're just seeding it enough.
They can't resist it, right?
The first time that Gus Fring appears on the screen.
Is that the old guy?
Gus Fring was the chicken guy, right?
Oh, okay.
I don't remember.
I don't remember either.
His name just popped into my head, and I thought I would drop him in and seem knowledgeable.
But you must dread it a little bit, too, because you're going like, oh, it's going to be like a young Jesse at a playground.
Right.
You're like, oh, I have to go to this school to serve a warrant.
And there's a teacher there.
He's got a full head of hair and a weird mustache.
He sure is a wimpy guy.
I don't want that to happen.
And I feel like the showrunners have to know that that is a risk.
And let's just see.
But that's the thing.
That's more information already.
That I have to wrestle with every time I try and watch one of these television programs.
I'm already wrestling with expectation.
And that is not a thing that you have with a show that you've never seen.
But in that case, I don't have any interest in seeing them at all.
So...
it's tough it's tough i've been really debating whether or not to show my daughter who just recently had a birthday and i didn't want to say anything happy birthday yeah it's nice oh uh but i've been wrestling with whether or not to show her frozen the film which everybody raves about have you seen it i have not seen it none of us have seen it but she is absorbing it from the culture enough she came to me the other day and she was like elsa
wears a blue dress.
And this is something I already knew.
And she said, and she has a song.
And it goes like this.
Let it go.
Let it go.
Let it go.
Let it go.
And she walks around the house for the next 15 minutes singing Let It Go, a song which I don't know if she's ever heard.
But it only had those lyrics, Let It Go.
Wow.
And she walked around singing Let It Go at the top of her lungs.
And this was Elsa's song.
And she knew these things.
I think she just got them.
She picked them off a toilet seat.
Wow.
uh they are a contagion she picked up frozen from a she did they're a contagion like vd i think so she's a terrible thing but so so somebody gave her a gift for her birthday with the frozen as a component of it because like all great brands you are now i'm sure i am absolutely sure if you wanted to buy
a Heckler and Cock 9mm semi-automatic police rifle, you could get a Frozen branded one.
It's got Olaf right on there.
Right, Olaf and Elsa.
She pronounced Olaf Olaf.
She was like, his name is Olaf.
This is a thing, John.
This is a thing.
There was a whole article I want to say in the New York Times about kids who are into Star Wars that have never seen Star Wars.
They may not even have seen the cartoon.
But there are some things that are such a phenomenon that kids – like my daughter has never played Minecraft, but she loves everything related to Minecraft.
We bought her $10 worth of Minecraft cutouts at the Walgreens because she loves Papercraft and made a bunch of little blocky sheep.
I feel like I was a member of Kiss Army in 1977, and really I had only ever heard Beth.
That's a perfect example.
It's exactly the same thing.
How many kids that wanted the Kiss Army patch, pay their $5 or whatever, how many of those kids had even owned Destroyer?
Probably none.
Not none, but surprisingly few.
I didn't own Destroyer, but I guess I'd heard Detroit Rock City.
Yeah.
But anyway, so I'm debating whether or not to show her this program.
And so she brings this little, she unwraps this present.
She brings it in.
She shows it to my 80-year-old mother who looks at the pictures of the two girls, Elsa and Constantine or whatever.
I think it's Anna, maybe?
Anna.
Oh, actually, I was corrected in the pronunciation of that by my loquacious daughter who said, it's Anna.
Anna and Olof.
Anyway, my mom looks at the cover of the box and she goes, they look like monsters.
Thanks, Grandma.
And Marlo looks taken aback, and I'm a little taken aback, and I'm like, what do you mean?
And she says, look, their eyeballs are one-third the size of their face area.
It's like equivalent to a baby.
You know, like the proportions of a baby face, but then with the sharp angles of a supermodel.
It's like the proportions of a baby face if you are talking about a baby Komodo dragon.
Or a baby gray, right?
They're UFOs.
And so my mom is like, they're disgusting.
They're the big eyes.
They look like lizards.
And Marlo is now looking at the Frozen characters through the eyes of her beloved Nana.
And I'm like, well, now, wait a minute.
Hold on.
Like, I need to intervene, I think, a little bit here in this conversation because these are characters that every child that she knows, I'm like mom, every kid she knows thinks that these are the models of, like, beauty and these are the princesses.
These are the princesses.
And my mom is like, they are repulsive.
And so now Marlo's carrying that around today in her mind.
And I actually took the Frozen thing and I was like, the Frozen game is going to go live on a farm.
And one day we'll go visit it and it will remember you.
And Miles was like, oh, that's going to go live on a farm.
Why?
Because of the influence?
Because I don't know.
I have not resolved.
I have not resolved how I am going to deal with the encroachment on our lives of these things that we have not.
It feels like she came home from school and she was like, mom, dad, have you ever gone clear?
Would you like to take a personality assessment test?
It's just a thing that... Where did this come from?
I don't want this in my house.
I don't want people coming home with these things.
And yet...
Yet I feel the song.
I feel the ohm of surrender.
Yeah.
Just surrender to Frozen.
It's a fait accompli.
Everybody's doing it.
It's fun.
It really is.
It's the phenomenon of my daughter's childhood where – I mean like you go to school.
I go to school to volunteer or whatever, go on a field trip and –
Some little boys, but definitely a legion of little girls will, apropos of nothing, suddenly break into Let It Go and sing the entire song.
Does it have more lyrics than just Let It Go over and over?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Can't hold her back anymore.
Is it by a pop star?
Never bothered her anyway.
Kind of.
I think it's a Broadway star.
What's her name?
Maggie Azalea?
What's her name?
It's Lil' Kim.
I forget her name.
It's by Lil' Kim?
Maybe Helen Mirren.
I'm not sure.
I want to see it.
Little Kim and Helen Mirren star in the Broadway adaptation.
I'd almost go to that.
I would pay money to see that.
Helen Mirren, you know, very attractive lady.
Helen Mirren and Dame Judi Dench, I heard.
Wait, let me get this right.
So for me, this is the three old lady English actresses I have a crush on.
You got Maggie Smith.
Right.
You got Helen Mirren.
You got Judi Dench.
Yeah, and they all have pictures from the 50s where there's a nipple slip or whatever.
They're all a little dirty, right?
Really?
I feel like they were all doing some gossamer blouse photo shoots back in 49.
I need to look into that.
One night when we were watching Harry Potter, one of the Harry Potter movies, I did a lot of Maggie Smith Googling.
Oh, yeah.
You know, a few things make me feel lower than having a drink while I'm watching Harry Potter with my daughter and I'm looking for dirty pictures of Maggie Smith.
Isn't that awful?
Not dirty, but, you know, empowered.
Compromised, yeah.
No, empowered.
Compromised.
Judy Dench was a Christian Dior hat model.
No.
Yes.
The devil you say.
In the 60s, she's got like a twiggy, she went through a twiggy phase.
Shit.
She is amazing.
Man, her and those James Bond movies, so great.
You know, I bet I don't remember because I didn't follow these things, but I bet there was a lot of dust up when they announced that she was going to BM.
Oh.
And I think she's great.
I think she's great.
She was going to BM?
She does that in one of the Bond movies?
Gossamer Blouse.
I'm tempted to stop right there.
Hello, governor.
She's only 15 years old.
She gave that Komoda right Roger in.
They don't just give those dames out to anybody.
You got a really BM.
That's right.
That's right.
That dame comes at a cost.
Oh, God, no.
No, the royal family was German.
That's it.