Ep. 481: "The Deep End of Plenty"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How are you?
Hey, what's going on?
Hey, you know, not much.
Just, you know, the usual listening to the beeping outside as I listen to Queen, as you do.
Yeah.
This is your new thing.
I've decided I love it.
Two great tastes that go great together.
Bing, bong, jazzles, never my speed, and I don't like Star Wars.
Beep, beep, beep, beep.
How can they back up that much?
Are they having a race?
I feel like they're going around the kitchen cock-a-doodle-doodle-doo.
But backwards.
But it's fine because I've decided I love it.
How are you doing?
Are you ripped?
Oh, dude, so pumped.
You told me this morning I shouldn't say this, but you were eating muesli.
I was eating muesli.
That's so European, John.
Do you remember?
Do you remember?
Laughter?
Do you remember laughter?
Why doesn't anybody remember laughter?
Does anybody remember laughter?
I remember when Europe seemed really sophisticated.
Oh, God, yes.
It was so far away, John.
I know.
And the NPR moms in my world were all eating yogurt.
And then they were putting granola and muesli in it and stuff, and it seemed really European and sophisticated.
Yeah, like putting a lemon in your water.
Yeah, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
This is when Bob's mom lived in a bookcase?
Exactly.
Bob's mom lived in a bookcase.
She was eating muesli right and left.
And it seemed like, you know, and my mom didn't mess around with muesli.
You know, she was an oatmeal girl all the way back.
Sure.
Not even steel cut.
They're probably, I don't know, like cut with a cotton gin or something.
Real rustic.
They're cut how you find them.
Yeah, exactly.
This is an Ohio farm.
We don't have time to cut oat.
But then I grew up, I got sophisticated.
Pretty soon I'm eating granola.
muesli in my yogurt yeah you know it's a continental breakfast is what it is john we grew up at a time where uh there was a surfeit of a very attractive ads uh for things like sugary breakfast cereals you get your pop tarts part of a balanced breakfast all that kind of stuff and my mom had to fight that like all moms i think like i really wanted the store brand expensive like fancy lucky charms instead of the one that came in a sack from the low shelf um
Remember those?
That makes you feel poor, like your mom grabbing stuff off the low shelf.
Of course, the government lucky charms.
Yes, no, actually, and I don't mean to take you off of this, but yes, precisely so.
And then you get these introductions, and I'm not going to be that particular guy.
I'm not going to go off on kale.
I'm not going to go off on, you know, other kinds of things.
But there was a time, you know what it was for me, my friend Sam, whose parents, you know, had some doubt.
They had the first coffee grinder I ever saw in a house.
Oh, yeah.
Remember what time it was?
They'd have that one that everybody had.
I forget who makes it, but you know that one, the brown one with the lid.
Yeah, the little brown one with the lid.
Yeah, and you put your beans in there and you grind that into coffee.
And I thought that was one of the fanciest things I'd ever seen.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because you're kidding me.
You get a jar of Folgers.
We're like acolytes of, you know, Detective Bookman.
Like you get a jar of Sanky, you leave it in the cabinet.
You scoop with the scoop.
It used to be time was Folgers, big red can, big, big, big red can, the kind you put your friend's ashes in.
It came with a scoop and you use that like a gentleman.
I'm wondering, now you're going to have an answer for this better than I would, but what is fancy today?
Like, what is fancy?
I think the heart of fancy is, I don't want to say exclusion per se, but I think the heart of fancy, it's the same root as the Turns Out article, you know, by Malcolm Gladwell or whatever.
It's like, oh, yeah.
Are you still buying red Folgers cans?
Oh.
Yeah, I think we have some of that at our boathouse.
Yeah, we grind our own beans.
But you know what I'm saying?
I think fancy always begins as, oh, there's this new thing that somebody who I regard as fancy is using.
But what would he... First of all, how does the definition fly for you?
Well, I like it.
I'm definitely aware of what...
uh 50 year old in the 50 year old former indie rockers think is fancy right right but but like like i i was watching another one of those videos this morning where some 16 year old kid uh is on sitting in his studio with his headphones on and he picks up the bass and he plays some bass line that would that would put him in the first rank of all funk bass players of all time he loops it puts his bass down grabs a guitar
plays some thick arpeggio over the top of it, and then he puts it down and scoots his chair over three inches and starts hammering on the piano.
And it's like, right, this person is 16 years old.
Digital native grew up with those tools.
Yeah, and they're a better musician than ever existed before.
And you can point at Charlie Parker or something and go like, well...
But it's like, yeah, he probably... Yeah, but he hit clams.
He and Dizzy were, and all of them, Max Roach, all those guys at Bebop were innovators.
And of course, at the time, that seemed fancy to people.
I think one performance characteristic of fancy, and this is not germane to your point, but in general, a performance characteristic or a trailing indicator of...
Really going backwards out there.
A performance characteristic of that, that seems like too much given what it is.
What's wrong with Red Folgers coffee?
It's what my mom and dad would drink, and now I get it.
I don't think that's germane to what you're saying.
Well, because I...
I have the problem of a lot of us, I think, which is that I look at that and I want to find a problem with it.
I want to say, oh, well, they're not.
It's just copying.
It's definitely an impulse.
It's an impulse you got to watch.
It's not, you know, it's not creative.
It's not pure.
It's not rock and roll.
Yeah, it's not rock and roll or it's not, you know, they're just rehatching.
But the thing is, you look at it and just objectively like, no, that is an improvement in what human beings are capable of.
It's a whole new thing.
It's opened up a whole new world.
There's no way to shit on it.
The first person you saw Running Water was like, you've got to be kidding me.
That's going to go through metal to get into my house?
Why don't I just go to the well like a person?
Honestly, though, this goes for everything.
This goes for kids and phones.
There's just so many things where we're like, well, what's wrong with the way that I did it?
I didn't learn about multi-track recording until three years ago.
Before that, I did everything with John Hammond-style one take out in the Delta shit.
But I wonder how it affects, because I do believe that you can have these giant leaps.
The evidence is right there.
And I think we've seen it across...
I think about this all the time in terms of that question that I asked my mom and dad, like, what has changed more in your life?
The first 50 years when we went from biplanes to being on the moon or the first 30 years or the second 30 years where we didn't do anything but...
There was a time in America where, like, when you look back at the early part of the 20th century, you might look, one might look, one who has a slightly ahistorical perspective might look at that and go, oh, great.
Like, they figured out how to, like, not die of typhus or whatever.
But there was so much, there's a reason, like, I think that Mr. Show does the, or the, rather, the money machine, counterfeit money machine.
They had to invent new things on stage, ding, and hit the bell.
Because there was a time in America where there was just so much innovation happening, so fast.
fast where there are these spurts that I think you get what we now think of as sort of like future shock of like so much is happening so quickly that feels so disruptive.
We're like, you know, your aunt might say, no, I'm not going to have electric in my house because it comes out of the sockets and, you know, will give me pleurisy or whatever.
But you see it in these different ways, like the distance from no electricity to walking on the moon.
Did it just start seeming like subtle upgrades after that?
Well, the availability heuristic makes you think that the next time there's going to be a giant leap forward, it's going to take the same form.
There's going to be a technology leap.
And we've been living our lives thinking about this technology leap.
But what I've noticed definitely is that...
People now at the age of 17 years old can do stuff on skateboards and snowboards and skis and bicycles and motorcycles.
Things that would have been... And I was there for the invention of X game stream sports culture...
Yeah, like when that guy nailed the 720.
People were still talking about it.
And you could never have dreamt of the advances in physicality, the advances in sport ability.
It took 1,950 American years to break a four-minute mile.
And then, I don't know how this exactly works, but people are breaking records all the time now.
Is that just because of more people?
What's the heuristic that helps us understand why so many things that used to seem physically impossible for the human body, let alone with technology?
And the music stuff feels like it fits into that, right?
The guitar, like super shreddy guitar stuff and ability to play 50 instruments.
I mean, I remember I was sitting at Venice Beach one day.
Watching the kids doing skateboard tricks in the little skate park there.
And there was a dad, I think I probably told you about it at the time, there was a dad about my age who was total gait, you know, like... Like he used to skate in swimming pools or something.
You know, Bones Brigade, all the way, you know, hat with the flat brim, and you could just see that, yeah, he'd been there with Tony Hawk or whatever, or Powell and Peralta.
And he had a kid that was in the...
in the pool doing skate tricks who was probably eight years old.
And the kid was like an incredible skater.
But the dad was kind of sitting on the side of the skate bowl and he had an infant son.
The kid was...
maybe a year maybe nine months old you know like he was he was the kid was aware and he was conscious what was going on maybe it was a year and a half i don't know i mean he could kind of i guess he was he was he was pushing toddler and he this dad had him on a skateboard and he was just i couldn't walk until i was nine well that's the thing and the dad had him on the board in a way that
The dad was holding the board and the boy and he was just doing skate tricks with the kid and kind of half, you know, with one eye on his other son.
And just sort of, you know, running the kid up, flip, kick, turn, back down.
And he's holding him and the kid's just laughing and like, la-da-da-da-da-da-da.
But the dad's got his feet on the board in the right stance.
And he's putting weight, you know, on his body in a way that where the kid feels the...
He feels the momentum of it.
You know, he feels the physics of it.
And then realizing that thing that in a different way I had to learn with the segue, which is that in a lot of things in life, balance comes from movement, not stillness.
Yes.
Right.
Right.
Like you lean forward.
That's pretty good.
That's beautiful.
Write that down.
All right.
You know, you lean forward, not back.
Right.
All these things.
Put your weight forward.
And the dad just understood that...
Or is acting on the belief that you just put this in the child's physicality so that it becomes innate.
And there's never going to be a day when this little boy steps on a skateboard and doesn't understand.
Just how it worked, instinctively how to move on it.
And so that, of course, didn't exist when we were little, although we all were riding bikes by the time we were four or five, right?
But we weren't inverting our bike.
We weren't like leaping over freight trains on them.
So I do feel like...
Yeah, maybe this is not the era where the technology is, even though that's what it seems like to us, we're living in a technology age, but maybe this next generation is making all these advancements in technology.
in this kinetic and kind of body and arcs and mind, soul ways that it's going to be really hard for us to see at first, except in, in TikTok videos.
Like, how is that kind of,
What's their culture going to be like when they're 35?
Or your sense of what's possible.
And there's a million ways this is going to be a really lazy example.
But think about how, not to say anything against Eric Clapton, but Eric Clapton was regarded as the greatest living guitar player in the late 60s, playing warm blues or B.B.
King.
Setting those aside, though, yeah, you had Jimi Hendrix come along.
what, like, really, like, kind of caught on in England, 66, 67.
And not to say, I mean, there's a million shredding very good accomplished guitar players, whether that's James Taylor or John McLaughlin.
Like, James Taylor's a really good guitar player.
There's all those players that came along, but when was the next really big guitar god, Eddie Van Halen, in 1978?
And Eddie Van Halen, famously, like, he would, he didn't want people to know what his settings were.
He had to, like, protect his IP for, like, how he sounded.
The way, the first time any...
little boy hears eruption you go this is something very different now today um i listen to a lot of music i've been kind of catching up on math rock like the kind of emo ish math rock i don't know how much you've seen math rock in the last few years but fucking everybody's like jeff watson now
They can do these crazy spoodily spoodilys where their left hand, so they're usually using a capo around this 7th or 9th fret or something like that.
And they're doing these crazy figures with their left hand that you would associate with somebody like, say, I don't know, not Eno, but King Croson, Robert.
Fripp, Fripp, Fripp.
Sort of a Fripp-like riff with your left hand.
And with the right hand, then you're tapping on for a separate melody in a fucking math rock song.
If that's all stuff that like I would, I would do, I learned a little bit of eruption from guitar for the practicing musician.
And that's how I learned, you know, that basic tapping technique.
But now today that's so in the bones of what people learn to do as part of their vocabulary.
I'm not sure if it's related, but I do think to state the obvious, there is that sense of like, well, nobody's ever done this before.
Why would I think I can do it now?
Yeah.
But with all that exposure and all that equipment and all that, you know, you get strong bones from all the food, you know?
It used to just feel like it would... Well, they were.
They were physical limitations.
You physically couldn't do that stuff.
You certainly couldn't do it on, like, you couldn't do it on, like, Robert Johnson.
The guitar Robert Johnson was playing would probably not be super friendly about hammer-ons above the 12th fret.
Yeah.
I mean, I bet his action was pretty high.
But what I wonder about the fancy is, you know, a lot of the sort of muesli yogurt fancy was, you know, it was premised on the fact that we had a monoculture.
And it was a monoculture that was stratified.
There were low-class things.
There were middle-class things.
I'm sure you remember upper-middle-class, how important that distinction was.
Look no further than automobiles, where you could get the Civic.
Let's talk about this in Chevy terms, my friend.
Oh, boy.
Well, Nova doesn't go.
No, but even the trim packages.
But one thing that's interesting about what you're saying, though, I think is like you could get an upgraded version of something familiar.
Like you could get a sedan with like power locks and power windows, but you're still getting the same Mopar under the hood.
Right.
And I think the difference is like an electric vehicle or even a hybrid vehicle is a different kind of automobile.
Like, remember when people first started getting Teslas and like you're you just got it.
You're you're on the next level.
I mean, like you're living in a different kind of bookcase now.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
You've got a plug in your basement where you put gas in your car.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And like, like if you were, if you were, I don't know anything much at all about how cars work, but you know, I do know that as somebody used to service his own car, when I had a VW had that book that everybody had.
I mean, like if you knew the basics of how an automobile worked, you could probably help anybody with their car a little bit.
I'm not, I'm not trying to make this the big bitch about those guys.
I don't know.
They're still around where they're aging out.
You know, it's like a war two veterans.
Yeah.
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There's this common trope that Americans are globally illiterate or can't find Russia on a map, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's mostly baloney.
I read a statistic that...
Over 70% of Americans have traveled outside of the country.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Cumulatively.
Yeah.
But then you get into the stratification again because 15% of the people have only been to one country and then another.
I've been to Canada and England, so don't get up in my grill.
12% have been to two countries.
I was in London for almost three days.
Ha, ha, ha.
Have you been to – you've been to Canada and to England?
Yeah, I've been to Canada three or four times.
And one time I did a talk in Brighton.
So flew to Heathrow and then I guess flew to Brighton.
I don't remember.
Took a train or something to Brighton.
But yeah, yeah.
But no, I haven't been to –
Oh, you know what?
I've been to Mexico.
I've been to Mexico.
See, there's three countries, so now that's, you know.
Yeah, but I mean, really, it was more of a San Diego-centric trip.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We were mainly there to see the pandas.
But you went across.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, but I'm not anywhere in the league where you are, for sure.
Well, but no, that's the...
That's that Europe, the kind of the chauvinism that they have in Europe where, you know, if you walk out the front door of your house in Belgium, you've been to four countries by the time you got to school.
And might be able to like figure way with three languages.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, oh, I speak Spanish.
I'm not talking about like the people you see on TV.
I'm talking about people who got a URL and like just went to just go to different places.
Like we're just going to go to Spain for vacation or, you know, whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's much more—well, because of the geography there.
By the way, geography, I think, might pound for pound be my worst category on Jeopardy, if I'm being honest.
Is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
You don't struggle with that.
I know Machu Picchu.
I love geography.
It was— Oh, I like geography, but for me, it's like freehand drawing, and playing the piano, where like—
One reason I enjoyed, like just moments ago, I was listening to, they call it a raw session, but it was not very raw.
It's the raw session for We Are the Champions.
And just listening to Freddie Mercury, just his voice and playing piano, of course.
Like I admire that so much, but I am not good at that.
I think sometimes the things we admire the most are the things that we feel like we're least capable of doing.
Watching somebody be able to draw is just like mind blowing to me.
When we used to go on tour, everybody would get tired of listening to music, and we would all just be so bored.
The 15th eight-hour drive in the last two weeks.
And the whole van smells like urine and meat?
Well...
We didn't let it get that bad, but I would sometimes tell Eric, get the Atlas out and quiz me.
Oh, interesting.
Speed round.
Pop quiz, hot shot.
Yeah, like ask me.
Like second biggest city in Michigan or something like that?
Exactly, right.
Name all the rivers that feed into the Ohio River.
And so Eric would come up with these questions, or Sean would, and then I would sit there behind the wheel and I would be like, all the states that touch, you know, the Monongahela, let's go.
That's kind of an easy one.
Is it?
Because not that many states touch the Monongahela.
Is that Pennsylvania?
Pennsylvania!
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Because you've got Three Rivers Stadium.
Yeah.
I don't know what the other two rivers are.
Ohio?
Ohio.
Ohio, Monongahela, and Tippecanoe?
The tip of canoe.
That's right.
You got it.
And the Ohio, you know, that whole three rivers thing doesn't, that doesn't make any sense because the Ohio is just the combination of the other, the other two rivers.
It's not like three rivers all come to meet.
John, are you a river denier?
Yeah, I'm a truther.
You call that a her?
It's more like a brook.
What's frustrating, you know, spending time with Ken Jennings is, Ken, you can say, like, what's the biggest river in Uzbekistan?
And he knows it.
Not just because he studied it to know it for the show, but because he likes geography.
He's interested.
Yeah.
And there's some kinds of skills that really seem to exist in people's bones.
I think mathematics, not mathematics, but especially arithmetic, because I don't know much about stuff beyond arithmetic.
But arithmetic, there are some people who I feel like see Psalms...
I'm not talking about Rain Man stuff, but I'm talking about people who have that rough ability to somehow in their head multiply things by 12 and know plus or minus a certain percent what something is.
And I say in bones, but maybe that's just because they're smart or maybe because they were good students.
But there are some people that have a more, I won't say a natural ability, but a more natural ability to absorb energy.
And synthesize that information.
And the synthesis is what makes you agree on Jeopardy because Jeopardy, I mean, they're going to ask you questions.
Sometimes it's real obvious, but you get down into 600s, 800s, you get higher and you're getting more into this contextual stuff where you're going to really need to know two different things because the cues are getting cute.
You know what I mean?
And, like, that's the people who seem to really thrive at this kind of stuff, and makes the people like me, where, like, I'm so fucking left-brained that everything I draw looks like an egg that's about to break.
It's just terrible.
It's not in my bones at all, Ken.
He's doing great.
I doodle, but, like, it's something I really am trying—I really—
And that's too long to talk about.
Yeah, I'm trying.
It really means so much to me to like watch people draw something.
I'm like, you made that look like the thing that it is, not what my brain thought it was shaped like.
Have you ever tried to draw the pirate or the parrot?
I do Skippy.
Skippy?
Yeah, I was...
Yes, I was offered a partial scholarship to the Ernest Hemingway Famous School of Turtle Artists.
Let me recommend, there's a friend of mine here in Seattle named Catherine Radke is an incredible sort of pen and ink illustrator.
And she's got an Instagram account.
Oh, like where you can watch her draw?
And she does this thing where, you know, she'll...
She has this incredibly graceful line, and she'll do a portrait of someone, and it's with this incredible economy of lines.
Yeah, and there's four lines, and it's already starting to look like only that person's face.
And you're like, I can't believe that this is happening.
I know.
Where does it come from?
Her work never fails.
So anyway, Catherine Radke, I highly recommend you go check her out.
The thing about the fanciness is that we've spent a lot of time since we were kids living in a world where fancy and gross consumerism became synonymous.
The thing about the muesli in the granola is that it isn't actually luxurious.
It's culturally fancy.
Yeah.
It's kind of like, it's sort of like, you know, both a Rolex and a Volvo can be seen as fancy.
But they are pretty different in just for somebody of my age.
They're pretty different in that sense of, well, a Rolex, it's, they're all telling the same time.
And like, why do you want that?
Well, it's, you know, it's a Veblen good.
It's something you get because it's fancy.
Whereas I could see somebody saying I want this Volvo in the 70s or 80s because I know it is demonstrably safer than my Chrysler New Yorker.
Yeah.
Yogurt and granola is not more expensive.
It's not fancy because it has some amazing function.
It's culturally fancy because it's a reference to... It's not like caviar.
No.
It refers to...
It communicates that I've been overseas or I know someone who has.
Yeah, this is the way they serve this in Morocco.
This is how you hold your knife and fork if you live in Germany.
And it's a kind of, but it isn't pretentious or it isn't all pretentious.
Although pretentiousness can be wrapped up in it.
A lot of that's in the eye of the beholder.
I mean, it's like I was just saying to my kid the other day, I once heard that Americans are the only people who frequently experience culture shock when returning to their own country.
If you're like a bike person, you might go, wow, Amsterdam really does this well.
Or like when I was in New Zealand, all the food in New Zealand.
Oh, sorry, I've been in New Zealand.
Jesus.
There you go.
Yeah.
So good.
And of course, they have the Monongahela is in West Virginia, too.
So it's just like you've been to New Zealand.
I guess I have.
I guess I really have.
But no, no.
But sometimes you're like, no, this is just a better way to do this.
Like, I saw somebody like, you know, OK, here's another one.
Here's another one.
This is on the on the edge of fancy Brussels sprouts.
There's a reason why Brussels sprouts of my life taste like shit, which is that my understanding is that the way we have cooked Brussels sprouts before exaggerates the bitter sulfur-ish taste of a Brussels sprout or a cabbage.
Boiling it makes it worse.
Whereas if I do that, if I roast those like a fancy lad, I roast those in the oven with kosher salt and balsamic vinegar –
like that's an entire it's almost it's it's you can't really call it you can't call it the same food oh i'm so into roasting vegetables i watched a youtube video video about roasting vegetables john i started roasting my broccoli and i may never look back yeah it's amazing but somebody comes to your house and goes whoa look at you san francisco look at me i'm roasting broccoli oh yeah i got horns outside my office
You got to crumble some bacon on it and then you're, you know, there you go.
You don't have to ask me twice.
That's what I don't know.
I don't have cultural eyes that would allow me to know what a comparable thing is now.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
We've been living in a world where, and I think, in all honesty, the fact that hip-hop has dominated a certain part of youth culture for a long time.
You watch basketball now, all you hear is trap music.
It's the weirdest thing.
crap music wow yeah that kind of tickets again not like not like not like timbalane i know that's an old reference but like but more like you know what i mean the ticket sound like an uh like an alia song but there's that you know it sounds like basketball is what it sounds like it's like it's like heavy guys in jerseys white guys are like are aware of these bands now well but but but the but the the way that brand awareness and like fancy brands communicating a certain kind of
Well, wealth, I guess.
But also, it's not status exactly as it is knowledge.
Yes, exactly.
I was just going to say, you nailed it, I think.
You really get at it when you talk about, like, I know enough to know when there's a decision point about something specifically without regard to cost.
But you might say, there's a million ways you can get this.
And you go like, oh, well, blah, blah, blah, something Karl Marx.
And you're like, yeah, but you can't really talk about Marx without talking about Hegel.
And you're like, oh, God.
Can't I just tell you a thing I learned from a... No, you have to talk about Hayden.
In fact, the rest of this show is going to be Merlin and me talking about Hayden.
It will be in three parts.
This is a tripartite podcast.
And by the end, we'll get to the synthesis.
I just... Stupid.
Stupid fucking liberal arts.
I should have gone to electronics school like my friend.
I should have gone to the United Electronics Institute and learned how to fix cash registers.
He's successful now.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I like that knowledge angle, though, because it gets at the conundrum a couple different ways.
Because you get it like, and you know what I mean when I talk about like turns out stuff.
They're like, well, you know, you thought that this thing, you thought you were supposed to never drink wine.
Well, it turns out that one glass of wine a day is good for your heart.
Well, it turns out that you could take this instead.
Eat grape seeds because that'll be good for you.
Well, it turns out that grape seeds, you know, cause cancer or whatever.
Wait, she's called cancer?
No, they got interferon.
No, you have to just cross it with a peach pit because you get the interferon from the... Oh, the interferon.
Remember that when interferon was going to change everything?
It's always in Time magazine.
Vaguely.
Vaguely.
But like the... Write that down.
Interferon.
I should get my...
But the knowledge part also is kind of the galling part of it where you're like, oh, were you not aware about drinking lots of wine a day?
My doctor recommended it.
Well, I feel like such a fucking, I feel like fucking Elmer Fudd now because I didn't know how to save my heart with alcohol.
But like, you know what I'm saying?
So it's one thing to go like, okay, oh, now that I've started grinding my own coffee, I can't ever go back.
If Sam's parents said that in 1984 or five, I would have thought, God, that's kind of a shitty, you know.
a big timing kind of thing to say.
But on the other hand, I honestly feel like I know microwaves are not in fashion right now, but I really value our microwave.
I would not want to go back to having to use the oven to cook everything.
But from a certain perspective, for somebody of your mom's generation, I bet microwaves came along when they were like, you've got to be kidding me.
Another thing in my kitchen, I already know how to cook.
I don't need this easy bake oven to put my roast chicken in.
Well, I think I've talked about this many times before, but the thing about the microwave is that it came along at the exact same moment that nachos arrived.
I think the two of them were bundled.
And so if you were at all... So you're doing, you know what you're doing?
What's the guy's name?
Who's that guy I like with the glasses?
The connections guy, the English guy on PBS, James, whatever his name is, I'll think of it.
But there's that guy who's always like, and that's why if it weren't for gunpowder, we wouldn't have spaghetti.
Or whatever.
You know what I mean?
James Clive Anderson?
Sure.
Something like that.
You're telling me, John.
Bienvenidos a nachos y solamente a microwave con los nachos.
Beber?
Esker Bear.
That's writing, isn't it?
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Because by the time Super Train arrives, it may already be too late for you.
Is that a chance you really want to take?
Anyway, you put them in your microwave and now you got nachos with cheese, not just the chips.
It's the whole reason that my mom adopted the microwave was because it could make this brand new food that we had never experienced before that swept our home like a red wave.
Kind of thing that was brand new and like... The nachos felt like a thing that you could only get in a rest.
We had to go to Tampa.
We had to go to Tampa to get nachos when I was in high school.
The Taco Bell with nachos and cheese was in Tampa.
That was still a very new idea to me.
Yeah, we didn't have a restaurant that you could get them in.
It was the type of thing where we got introduced to the idea of nachos, and it seemed like a thing that should only be available in a restaurant.
We understood that we had leapt over something in the middle.
The microwave allowed us to make food better than you could get if you went to a restaurant by melting cheese on top of chips.
But now that information is so inexpensive, easy, and ready by...
you know by extension so to answer your question though what is fancy today i guess it depends a lot on who you're talking to well what i what i'm what i'm curious about it i was at the mall the other day and what's left of it well no the malls are thriving right okay or at least this mall is and the idea was i was going to take my kid i've been saying to her for a while uh i'm going to take you and a friend to the mall and
I'm going to sit in the food court.
I'm going to give you each $20.
And then you can just go explore the mall.
And I will be up here.
I'm not going to follow you around.
I trust you that you're going to not spend that $20 on candy.
Although you can get some candy.
But I want to see what you spend your money on when you come back.
And I also want you to enjoy the experience of just being free on your own.
You can't do like I did and go play in the forest, but this is an enormous mall, and you guys just, you know, you're cut loose.
You get to go just be yourself in public for a while.
Yeah, and you're not being supervised.
Yeah, yeah.
So I go to the mall with her little friend, and I'm texting her mother, the friend's mother, and the friend's mother says, oh, well, she gets paid for her chores.
Yeah.
And so she's saved up a bunch of money.
And I was like, she gets paid for her chores.
Oh, this is an important play date.
No, no.
This disparity in resources for kids.
That's why you're only allowed to bring so much on a field trip, right?
So I said, well, so tell me more about this.
And she said, well, she's saved up $100.
And she's going to bring the $100 to the mall.
And I'm really curious.
This is the mother saying, I'm really curious to see what she spends it on.
Because, you know, she's saved up all this money.
She walks up to the Chick-fil-A wearing a very fancy hat.
Well, who knows?
Like an Atlanta lady Sunday go to church.
It could be, right?
It's our money.
She earned it.
She could come home with a bicycle.
Who knows?
So here we are.
We're on our way to the mall.
And my daughter's little friend says, well, you know, I get paid for my chores and I've saved up $100 and I have $100.
Well, my daughter looks at me and she doesn't get paid for her chores.
We've been operating on the, well, your chores are part of how to do the family.
You know, it's just a contribution that you make to living here.
Careful, careful.
I don't want you to get in trouble.
My kid is denied resources because they are included in their living.
I know.
So we're standing at the front door of the mall, and I go, all right, well, you know, your friend has $100 of her own money.
I'm going to give you $100.
Talk about a pop quiz.
Let's see what happens.
So I give her $100.
Remember, it's very easy for both or either of you to really disappoint your parents here.
Well, and as soon as, you know, as soon as she walks away, I have a moment with myself where it's like, okay, this is a pop quiz on her, but I cannot be disappointed.
I set her up for this.
You know, like if she comes back and has just bought.
That's a good approach.
$100 of pure garbage.
Like Necco wafers or something.
I can't, you know, this isn't, she hasn't been training for this for years.
She doesn't know what a fucking dollar does because unlike me who stood at the cash register,
One million times with my mother and said can I have some gum and she was like we can't afford gum Well, you know the time that I wrote to President Ford Was I wrote it to President Ford about inflation in 1975 because encourage him to whip it
Whip inflation now, yes.
Or you turn it upside down and it says Nixon is a moron.
Remember that?
Those buttons were everywhere.
But I drew my rich president for it because I got a dollar for when I would go to hang out with my...
My uncle, my father's brother's family on the weekends.
My mom would break.
I'd hang out with them a lot on weekends and go to Swallon's, the really good variety store in Cincinnati.
And I wrote to President Ford and I said, this dollar I have through my mother, my single parent mother, is all I can get is some CAPS.
I can't get anything good.
I couldn't even buy a gun to put the caps in.
You know what I'm saying?
But you've thrown your daughter, in some ways, into the deep end of plenty.
Because she doesn't normally have $100 in her pocket, right?
No, she doesn't.
And we're living in a universe, of course, where $100 doesn't buy what $10 did.
Right.
But...
But I had set myself up for this situation.
I was not prepared for this.
And what I learned was that the little girl who had earned her $100 was a lot less spendthrifty.
You know, she...
She bought a couple of things at the Lego store and a couple of little trinkets at Claire's.
She didn't spend it all?
As a poor kid, I cannot believe that.
Because I would spend every single nickel of that, maybe on video games or something.
She came back to report to me at the food court.
Well, you know, I spent $25, but then I don't want to spend any more because now I want to go do some chores and work back up to $100 because it felt really good to have $100.
Wow.
And, you know, and she volunteered that I wasn't even quizzing her.
And, you know, my little girl spent $85 at this, that, and the other.
And she got a little one of these and she bought a makeup kit.
Well, if you gave me $1,000, I would have probably spent $800 at least.
I mean, the amount can sound shocking to somebody, but it's mainly a question of, like, as those dollars disappear from your pocket, do you have a sense of, like, how you feel about those being gone from your pocket and...
as against how you feel about what you've acquired.
And that can be a really mixed feeling at the end of the day.
You could feel a little bit like fucking Augustus Gloop or something.
Well, and that was the thing that motivated me as a kid.
It hurt me way more to lose the money than it did to gain whatever it was the money could buy.
But my little girl doesn't have that, obviously, because she hasn't made that connection.
And it was and is still, because I have a little bag...
that has all the receipts of her purchases.
And I want to sit down with her and go through the receipts and tally them up and look at the tax and look at how the money plays out.
Like how it feels to spend it versus how it feels to have it.
But I'm going to be struggling not to put a bunch of my own judgment baggage on the money because it's never going to connect with her until that's really her money that she's earned somehow, right?
She's going to look at it.
I feel like when you're in college, when you're like, I can have laundry or food, but I can't have both.
Yeah, right.
But as I was sitting in the mall, so I'm sitting there, and I've got three hours to kill in the food court, just watching kids, basically.
Because the mall, and this mall in particular, the South Center Mall here, is one of these incredibly diverse community spaces where...
Every single person that walks by is from a universe different from the next person, right?
There's no homogeneity at all.
You don't get that much of that these days apart from like sports events.
There's not that many places you go, at least that we go, that we see people.
Well, I mean, we're in a pretty diverse neighborhood.
But I know what you mean.
It's unusual.
There's one mall here.
I think they're actually going to destroy it.
Tam Farhan Mall.
There's a lot of people there who are like Pacific Islanders and stuff like that.
And a lot of Latino people.
And it's always so interesting to see how everybody rolls in that environment.
It's phenomenal.
And it's a thing that didn't exist when I was young.
A public space where tens of thousands of people were intermingling with each other, and they are all races, colors, and creeds.
And I'm having these moments where I'm watching a group of five teenage girls, one of them in a hijab, one of them in a half shirt, one of them with platinum blonde hair and big blue eyes, and then the leader of the group is like...
a little asian girl with dreadlocks and i'm like what i don't even know where to what school are they from you know like you went to my junior high people couldn't even decide how to make fun of you it's really complicated and you know the like like at any time prior to i mean 20 years ago that would have been the cast of a science fiction show
Or it would have been like a Brady Bunch episode with a birthday party where you had to have one of each.
Even recently.
It just didn't happen.
Yeah, because of schools and busing.
You didn't get those combinations as much.
Certainly not where I'm from.
But what I was noticing is, as you know, I like to look at footwear.
Because I believe the shoe tells the story.
And there was a certain kind of... There was a well...
not being displayed in the actual shoes, like expensive shoes.
The wealth was that we were living, we're in the Northwest, it is now winter and it's cold.
Okay, I know where this is going, yes.
And there are lots and lots of people walking around in shoes.
That are not shoes.
When I see people walking the streets of San Francisco, even in my suburban neighborhood wearing flip flops, I'm always like, what are you doing?
Because your shoes, as you've taught me, shoes are a way of you telling me what you're prepared for or what you think is going to happen in your life.
And in the same way that if I were not a mobile mechanic, I wouldn't have super long fancy lady nails.
If you're walking around, Ugg boots, I'm not a huge fan, but that makes more sense than wearing Birkenstocks to the mall.
It's like, what are you prepared for in this city?
Well, and it's obviously like a kind of status shoe to be wearing what looks to me like a shower shoe.
It's not even a flip-flop.
It's like a... Yeah, like those Adidas blue and white ones.
Yeah, a little shower shoe.
And there was a kid, there was this group of four black teenage boys that were so cool.
They were just way cool.
Like they had a cool vibe that almost felt like they were wearing skinny lapel suits and black ties and sunglasses.
Yeah.
Like, they felt that cool.
But they weren't.
They were wearing whatever, regular street, you know, or some version of, like, street fashion.
But one of the kids was wearing, I think, either Nike or Adidas, but they were just rubberized...
showered shoe kind of things but they fit like they went over his entire foot but they were but water could get in you know they were just made of plastic there wasn't there was no leather or lace it was um it was just some it was they looked extremely uncomfortable and extremely impractical and and they were extremely unattractive
But all three of those, impractical, uncomfortable, and unattractive, combined on him made a statement.
And the statement was one of, well, in that you could not work in these shoes.
You could not run in them.
You could not be outside in them for long.
And let alone showing up for an executive job.
It's the kind of thing.
You know what I mean?
I know that sounds silly, but it really does tell the world, like I say, what you're ready for, what you're expecting.
And that's why it was so comical to me when you see these chuds walking around in hockey pads, acting like they're the...
January 6th kind of people.
And you're like, wow, you're really ready.
You're wearing like a water fountain as a helmet.
That's really cool.
Because you saw that, I guess, on a forum somewhere.
Whereas to be an athletic black teenager in cool shoes at the mall telegraphs a kind of confidence and sureness about who you are beyond just like in the late 80s wearing a bunch of gold chains.
Like there's something about that that's very luxe.
Well, in a way, luxury has always been communicating that you don't have to work and that you don't have to fear.
Wow, yeah.
Nobody that's wearing a pair of showered shoes in winter...
is prepared for the the the power to go out and and and it's it's not conscious right and probably they're from a place where the power doesn't go off we're all you're always in a heated vehicle yeah we're all now living in a place where we're so far from the power going off way further from it than we were as kids yeah you know the power would go off and it would stay off for hours and
but but i think i mean my parents for sure my mom was never sure the power would ever come back on and was totally prepared for it not to um and not not out of a survivalist mentality just like well where are you going to put your money you're going to put it in in the banks you know what what are you what are you simple you're going to what you you need you need steel to cut your oats
You're going to starve to death.
You're going to have a tough time this winter if you're oat cutting steel bricks.
Or you can't find someone to hone it for you.
You know what we used to cut our oats?
Other oats.
Oh, my gosh.
Oh, yeah.
Fractal oats.
So looking at this group, and by this group, I mean like I surveilled 1,000 teenagers.
Yeah.
in the course of three hours as they just cycled through the mall.
It was just a gyre.
And I was watching them and trying to pick up all of the signals.
And I could not see, for one, there was no unifying...
Like, style slash status brand thing.
Think about 1983 or 1984.
All the boys that I knew, the young men, if they had the money, would buy their clothes at Chess King.
And all of the young women would go to the limited...
so like all the girls are wearing a spree and all the guys are wearing like joe elliott you know flag shirts and parachute pants or whatever but there was a real it was very much well certainly because maybe it was pasco county florida very much a monoculture of like there's this one lane of sophistication and wealth and you either did that or you didn't and putting an alligator on your shirt wouldn't help
What was crazy was that other than those four black teenage boys that weren't like... And they didn't look anything like each other.
They were just rocking a very deep awareness of how powerful you could be if you had a look, like a good look.
But a lot of times I would see...
In these groups of girls, four or five girls, one of them is normcore, one of them is punk rock, one of them is from, you know, is jock girl.
Right.
It happens with my kid and his friends.
Like, it's very... There's not... It isn't like some clutch...
of four or six mostly identical people from the same class or whatever, there's a lot to mix them up, whether that's for obvious reasons with gender and sexual stuff and race.
But what you're describing here, my kid is equally comfortable in a crowd with a kid that would have been considered a nerdy Asian girl with braces and someone who's a Nubian queen.
And they all just hang out together.
And they're not dressed the same.
They're not all wearing like poodle skirts or something.
They're each repping something very, very different.
And I'm the weird one to look at that and go, I'm glad that exists.
But boy, is that ever different than what I came up with?
If you have the wrong haircut, you could be an outcast.
That's the thing that my mom commented on when I said, what has changed more?
going to the moon or having email.
And she said, no, no, no.
The thing that's changed the most is that
Little black girls and little white girls are friends now.
And they never could have been when I was a kid.
Like actually friends.
Like friends.
They just walk around.
But you know what I mean?
Not like being polite for a reason.
No, no, no.
They're actually really good pals.
And they know each other.
And it doesn't seem at all unusual to them, which is amazing.
But like so much of the way that you and I learned the rules...
had it was the idea that there was fancy and not fancy that there were good books and not good books that there were good books and better books and as as you i mean think about like good bands and not good bands oh it's just there's there's gas station coffee there's grocery store coffee and then there's like fancy grind your own beans coffee but it's all still coffee
One of the things that defined us was that everything was stratified.
There was a better version.
There was a cheap version that you got if you couldn't afford the good version.
And then there was the middle version that was probably the best value.
And that was true not just of coffee, but like of culture.
If you can afford it, always buy the middle one.
Yeah.
I mean, do you remember the first time I sat down with the Times Literary Supplement and said, look, I'm smart.
And I can hang with any smart and I'm going to read the times literary supplement because fuck you, you can't have a thing.
You can't be smarter than me.
Yeah.
And I started to read the times literary supplement and I was like, why do you want to read this every week?
Who the fuck are you people?
Yeah.
First time, even as somebody who had a subscription to Rolling Stone for a while, the first time my friend Michael gave me a copy of New Music Express, and I was like, oh, wow, this is really over my pay grade.
Like, I don't understand the English sense of humor.
I don't know who Harley, there's an article in here somewhere about the Waterboys, and I know who they are.
But like, almost every other band here, I don't even know why they're making fun of them.
And I felt like such a fucking rube.
It was hard for me to acknowledge that there was a place in the class stratification that was highbrow that I got there.
I put my hands inside the door and pulled my head up and looked around and self-selected out, right?
It wasn't that I didn't get it.
But I didn't.
And it wasn't that somebody said, whoa, whoa, whoa, how did you get in here?
I just looked around.
I tried to consume high culture.
And I was like, oh, this isn't for me.
This isn't where I want to live.
And I went back to my plate.
which was where I was comfortable, which was in that kind of high, middle, intellectual, but middle-brow still.
Fun reading, but smart, but, you know, like, the music, the fashion.
It's like if you check off that box, like, about your education, it's like where it's like I never finished elementary school or whatever, and then you eventually use that one that says at the highest or higher levels, you see post-doctorate degrees, you see college.
It's like you click the box that says some college.
Right.
Yeah, right.
And the thing was, realizing that class structure that I had seen as a young person described to me many times, then when I found myself actually making choices and realizing that every one of my choices was...
Although I was not consciously choosing and I certainly wasn't being told where I belonged, I was self-selecting to be where I was, which was where my parents had been, this kind of cultural place.
And it's what made sense to me.
And there were books and songs and movies and things that I felt were beneath me because they weren't smart enough.
He's a phrase like guilty pleasure.
Or, like, the way you talk about, oh, I listen to that, it's a guilty pleasure of mine.
Like, me listening to Yummy, Yummy, Yummy or something from when I was a kid.
Where it's like, you know what I mean?
Or, for that matter, like, I'm going to eat this Kraft macaroni and cheese because that is kind of, like, where I'm from.
I'm sort of beyond, on most levels, beyond a variety of levels, hopefully, beyond Kraft macaroni and cheese.
But that's still...
that home flavor, you know what I mean?
You settle back into, I guess you might even call it a reversion to the mean.
Wherever you're from, you kind of end up back in that area because there's this gravitational force that kind of draws you back into where you're from.
But what I don't know about the kids now and the world now
Is that, like, for instance, all those fashion brands, Balenciaga and... I didn't realize how... I've heard that name.
I did not realize how costly that is.
It's extremely costly.
It's like beyond... It's like the difference between, like, I don't even know what to say, like a Jaguar and a Lamborghini.
Like, that's a very, very costly brand, right?
Well, and...
When I look at all that stuff, I think of it as being kind of Euro trash, like it's beneath me, even though it's way more expensive than I could ever afford.
It's a kind of it's culturally beneath me.
Yeah.
Or to the side, right?
It's not because I'm over here in a Volvo eating muesli.
Like there's also – Parked outside the mall.
There's virtue signaling about the class stuff too, right?
Like the reason rich people drive Volvos and eat muesli is that they are communicating to one another and to each other this kind of – these values.
Tribal things also, yeah.
And tribal things, exactly.
Think about the way you dress when you're an attorney.
If you're a partner at a law firm with five names, you're going to wear a certain kind of tasseled loafer and not other kinds.
You're not going to wear your driving shoes.
Or maybe you are.
It depends on the culture and what signals that this dark blue suit signals that I belong here with you.
And we both know that now.
Oh my God.
When I was dating millennium girlfriend, there was a time she was going through her closet and I was like, what's all that?
She was like, oh, those are my lawyer suits from when I was, you know, like right out of law school and practicing law.
And I was like, you have lawyer suits?
And she was like, yeah.
And had to like rep, you can trust me, I'm a lawyer.
And so I sat on the couch and I was like, please try on your lawyer suits.
And she was like, I really don't want to.
And I was like, just please, just for me.
And so for like an evening, I sat there while she put on these, he's,
These pinstriped gray flannel suits with the little yellow ties and everything.
And she was just like, I really hoped I'd never have to wear these again.
Imagine her looking kind of like a sexy TV evangelist wife.
It's like, come on, just put on the tassel loafers again.
Yeah, yeah.
But now...
And I think part of this was that throughout our adult lives, part of upper middle class America has been—part of the idea of it has been trying to destroy it or destroy the—
the cultural significance of these things like we're trying it's in particular upper middle class america that wants to that are that has the the idealism and the ideology that wants to eliminate that stratification right and it's not the upper class never wants it's not enough to just part just not participate that it's something that is damaging to society so we need to like subvert and flatten it
Exactly.
So we're no longer talking about good books versus bad.
We're no longer talking about good bands versus bad.
We're no longer talking about guilty pleasures.
We're not yucking other people's yums.
It's precisely the world that I live in and you live in that has spent the most time and energy and effort trying to deconstruct its own place in the culture.
And I don't know now
Whether all that that we grew up thinking was the order of the world, whether it exists in the same way now, whether those kids at the mall would have any sense of their being...
a hierarchy as opposed to just like a pallet, like a flattened out list, like a matrix closet full of machine guns.
The ones on the top of the rack and the ones on the bottom of the rack aren't
aren't better or worse.
They're just different choices.
The cereal that's on the bottom shelf is no longer an embarrassment.
It's just one of the 50 different choices that any kid can make on any topic at any time.
And it's not just to clarify, although I think what you're saying, it's not just obviously it's not just about things you choose or choose to buy or not to buy.
It's about it's about a flattening is a weird word for it.
But the idea that like this is just a big box of props and we can all just grab the one that we want.
And there's no need for one person to knock everybody out of the way to pick what we all regard as the best prop.
Yeah, exactly.
They're all props.
And and and what we're doing is we're.
Because not everybody can be playing with signs and symbols.
There was a time when it was funny to play with signs and symbols.
It was called the 90s.
And it was the 90s.
Yeah.
Situationism.
It's us trying to do something ironic and against the grain that signifies our feeling about the man.
Cultural hegemony.
No, you have to know what all the signs and symbols signify and symbolize in order to play with them.
And hope that everybody agrees on what those signs and symbols are.
Right.
Or at least you're trying, again, tribally, you're trying to communicate to the person across the room that sees that you're wearing it wrong.
Ha ha ha.
Yeah, I know that's the hat, but I'm wearing it wrong.
And the other person's like, I see you.
I know you.
All that's gone because it is because the signs and symbols have been
And it was on purpose, divorced from their meaning.
But then the signs and symbols remain and there's still a shadow or a smell of their earlier meaning because there's a reason.
There's a reason they exist.
The whiff of semiotics.
Yeah, exactly.
The whiff is there, but the kid can't possibly know all the symbolism, right?
The kid can't possibly know what it signified because the thing it signified doesn't exist anymore.
Look at me, I'm Jimmy Durante.
And everybody's like, that's great.
Who's Jimmy Durante?
Like, what are you doing?
I know Karl Marx, right?
I also think of like the shabby chic of old money versus new money, which is a term I never really – I'd heard that term, but like I'm not even new money.
I was old poor.
Well, old poor we called him.
But the idea of like showing up in your sharp new suit that still has the tags on it versus like my roommate in college, his grandfather had started a very – was a well-known grocery store or drugstore chain in Florida called Eckerd Drugs.
His grandfather was Jack Eckert.
Like, he's the guy who started Eckert Drugs.
And Jake, like, wore, like, Ralph Lauren things that were, like, 20 years old and frayed.
Whereas if I went to show up for something and he would just wear the same shorts every day, because that's what rich people do.
That's what real rich people do.
And that's a kind of signification.
I didn't realize that.
Whereas I, as, like, the lower middle class kid, if I were to show up like that...
I don't know how to carry myself like John Roderick.
I would have been escorted right out of the room because I didn't know the uniform of the day.
And if I dressed like Peter Brady going to a First Communion, I really instantly identify myself as somebody outside the tribe.
What's interesting about shabby chic is that what shabby chic was was the white painted furniture of the rich people that had.
Adirondack chairs.
Yeah, that had gotten all dinged up and was all bashed and the paint had gotten chipped off.
And then that stuff had been sent to the thrift stores or to the dump, and then had been found by the poor sons and daughters of people who had enough aspiration to know what rich people looked like, and they...
repurposed that furniture.
You go to the costly part of the Goodwill.
But they made the dents and the scraped paint look like part of the... Oh, like anthropology, where you can go and get a $700 medicine cabinet that already looks old.
But that's what I mean.
Once shabby chic has gone from being an actual recycling of rich people things to brand new things made to look like they were...
That they are old and recycled to a generation that came up after all of the semiotics of that original conversation of class is gone.
All they see is that you go to an expensive store and you buy something that looks like the paint's been scraped off of it.
What does that symbolize anymore?
It's just another finish, right?
It's just like, well, you can get- And I'd be standing around going, huh, huh, huh?
Like, don't you notice how kitbashed my medicine cabinet is?
Isn't that cool?
And people are like, yeah, I get anthropology catalogs too, dude.
I know.
Just because you bought, like, we went to the mall this weekend too.
Like, and I, you know what I bought a crate and barrel?
Pint glasses.
Yeah.
I was not there buying a... I don't know.
I don't even know what to call fancy anymore.
I have no idea.
I know.
I know.
Well, if you go and buy a Gibson Les Paul right now for $5,000, you can then take it to somebody, a specialty shop,
where they hit it with bejeweled where they hit it no they hit it with chains and they hit it with and they scrape it with sandpaper and they and they put it in a freezer and they freeze it and then they pull it out and heat it up real fast so the finish cracks and you can pay another five thousand dollars to get this brand new guitar to look like it's 50 years old
Are you serious?
Is that a thing people have done?
Oh, absolutely.
It's called relicking, and it's a whole universe.
You're kidding me.
I've never heard of it.
Well, do you remember when you'd buy, if you could save money by going to the county seat or whatever and buying the way that, you know, you and I, well, at least in previous times when we were both just normal middle-aged men, we'd both buy Levi's 501s, right?
You used to be a 501 man.
I'm still.
I still am, too.
501s new and unwashed.
Because back in the 80s, they were cheaper.
And there was stuff you could buy at the store, I think called like Old Glory or Old Denim or Old Blue or something like that.
You would put in the water.
My mom, this drove my mother fucking crazy.
As somebody who was never any kind of money, old, new, or otherwise, the idea of buying a pair of brand new pants and then buying something else to make them look old was ludicrous to her.
And there was this stuff you could buy, and when you washed it, it would really super fade your jeans and soften them up.
Because now you get to act like you'd spent $8 more on your pants.
Whoa.
Well, whoa, I mean.
Does your kid do anything like that?
Relicking, they call it.
No, because she, you know, she's somebody.
She doesn't know from relicking.
Well, her vibe is that she lives in an old house that her father bought with the idea he would fix it up.
And my daily driver is 79 Suburban, or it was until last year, that I bought in New Hampshire from an asshole guy.
And I bought it because I was going to fix it up.
And her mom lives in a mid-century house that she intends to fix up.
Oh, I bet that house is really clean, though.
It's very clean.
But everything in her world...
Is doesn't work properly.
Smells weird.
Sometimes catches on fire.
And all of her father's favorite clothes were made in the 1950s.
And it feels to her like he's intentionally dressing in sandpaper.
Yeah.
You know, she's like, I say the word Filson, and she just rolls her eyes like bowling balls, clanking.
And so she has recently started coming out, basically, to me, saying, I want a new house when I grow up.
I want new things that have never been worn by anybody else, that don't catch on fire.
Look at me, I want to have a house with heat that works.
I drive cars that shift themselves.
My cars shift themselves.
And so, her whole thing is, there's no class consciousness.
She just sees this, what is very obvious, which is, for some reason, my people put all this extra significance on old things that work poorly and
smell funny and aren't comfortable whereas you can see you're just smelling a guitar case interior yeah and i'm just like i don't know i know this i know this jacket is is full of moth holes but i'm gonna fix it up because this jacket was once worn by a football player that was fought in the korean war a guy who knew shackleton yeah she's like
You can go to Target.
I'm going to blow your mind right now.
You can go to Target and buy something that's really soft and fuzzy.
You know they have cheap stuff at Uniqlo, Dad.
And it's really comfortable.
It's not like sandpaper now.
It's not that expensive either.
And also, you can wash it in the washing machine without having to dry it on a special rack.
And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.
But I'm buying all this stuff that symbolizes my taste and my dature and my understanding.
To some extent, your values.
To almost 100% my values, right?
But I mean, like, am I being, is that an exaggeration?
Not at all.
No, because when she says, why do you want to wear this?
It's so scratchy.
I'm like, but American industry and the gold rush and another thing.
These sheeps were guarded by a dog whose name was Sam, and he punched in every morning.
Put that on the card for your eBay slash museum project.
She's just like, I don't think you understand that technology has provided us with opportunities to not have to think about that stuff.
Funny little porthole, like from the world in which she lives, the world to which she is acclimated.
And then to come back home and you're sitting there sniffing cases in sandpaper, it must feel like she does need to bring the new ideas to you.
Were you even aware that you don't have to live like this?
Well, what's interesting is that I'm still here in the shabby, chic world.
arguments of the 1960s like somebody was going to throw this perfectly good Chippendale chair away and look I put on some I put some oil on it it's good as new and she's on the other side of the whole anthropology universe where all of that got churned
And churned and turned into a product and turned into an aesthetic.
All the invisible value we saw in it is gone for her.
It's fallen out the other side.
And she's like, why would I want something where the paint was already chipped?
I just want something that's new and soft.
And if it was made in China, who cares?
I don't even know what that means.
And I'm like, well, I mean, admittedly, she's 11.
And when I was 11, who knows what I was into?
I was into...
I was into G.I.
Joe.
You're conjuring orbs.
I was.
I was conjuring orbs.
And I was like, when I grow up, I'm going to be a half-elf wizard.
Get a shabby, chic, high, hard boots.
Yeah.