Lost Xplorers

148 - What’s in the Lagoon in the Tunnel of Love?

On this episode, we're going to Disneyland!!!!

We talk about:

Post-cultural society, hornswoggle consumerism, OCD update, self-imposed crutch, bad job interview, explaining what I do, long silences, businesses are vampires, creating courses, Harry Stack Sullivan, tardigrades, anxiety as a choice, idiosyncrasies as defense mechanisms, going into other people’s dreams, David throws Kris for a loop, adult Disney fans, Disney’s cryogenically frozen head, Sam Cooke’s 24-hour access, the connection between Disney and J. Edgar Hoover, trapped on It’s a Small World, the Smellitizer, giant Mickey Mouse effigy, the peerless theme park, arrested development, Dreamland by Kevin Baker, theme parks as replacement for the freak show, the libidinal nature of theme parks, the betrayal of the middle class, taxidermy, corporations replacing churches as the primary distributor of cultural shame, Freaky Friday (spousal edition), working on the voice, Claes Oldenberg, and David has an acid flashback while listening to Kris telling him his dream.

147 - Hunting the Soul of America

On this episode, we talk:

Change of scenery, 60-mph winds, boating safety, dust storms, friendship resonance, distance vision, The Control Group, algorithms of destruction, cyborg rights, feminine energy, getting out of the house, scaring yourself, the hardest time zone to find, novelty and pattern, theme parks built on the corpse of the parks, sacred spaces, the home as earthship, mosques, fractal patterns, keeping the eyes moving, obsessed with the Islamic State theme song, Don Cherry, evensong, ostentatious movie theaters, haus tambarans, the Church in the Rock, crocodile scarification, storytelling masks, the Guild Navigator, transcendental time awareness, dropping bombs from a holy building, prayer rooms, Coleridge, the eroticism of going to church, warnings at the beginning of Disney movies, Little Odessa, and a battle for the soul of America in Big Bend.

BONUS: this episode ends with an actual 7-minute dream recording Kris made moments after waking up.

146 - The Time Shelter

On this episode, we talk about:

Old Route 66, A&W, psychic judo, push reel mowers, nice weather, mariachi bands, phobophobia, Golden Guide collections, a pitch for the Principles of Design by Manfred Maier, occult books, John Woo movies, varying degrees of nonlocal connections to the past, Kris’s text message, sharing homes, architecture’s relation to human needs, being bored, are all buildings “architecture”?, subjectivity vs. objectivity in perceptions of buildings, Notre Dame sync, how would you modify your house, the storm shelter industrial complex, the occult mathematics in the walls, geodesic domes in Oklahoma City, space age optimism, buildings as heraldry, time share gimmicks, AirBnB disaster stories, dystopian fringe groups, neon graveyards, river mountain avenues, wondering how things work, and the noble gases song. (I think it was from Earthworm Jim.)

145 - Brutalism, Cell Phone Buildings, and Anteaters: Every Idea Has Its Time

On this episode, Kris and I nerd out on different forms of architecture, and develop a system for sharing syncs with strangers.

We talk about:

Hoodies vs. fleeces, Jiffy Lube play, W-H-I-T-E privilege, Tom Wolfe's refrigerator writing, scriptedness has taken hold, QUACK!!!, stunt doubles, ricochet harmonics, Burmese pythons, the Counting Man with the clothespin hands, basic structural grammar, gimmick buildings, purple houses, the gimmick of no gimmick, actually having to live in a space, the Lost City Museum, tic-tac-toe heads, semantics precedes perception, the welcome ambush, wild surmise, architecture defining the age, the quantum nature of Central Park, Korean tenements, anonymity, strip windows, Soviet brutalism, Rally Way, structures made for skateboarding, stem cells, inter-zoo conflict, the isolation of OKC, the dead will be left with too many buildings, participating in the ceremony of imagination, Millennial hell, waiting on yourself, eating ants, sympathetic magic, ant psychology, the Chinese Emperor regimen, oscillating wave form of verbs, Ace of Base sync, non-local earworms, telling strangers your syncs, Tabasco Twins, speaking nonsense, offset blowgun targets, every idea having its day, the way steampunk work, abandonment vs. continuance, and regenerating orcas.

The picture for the episode is the one Kris mentions in the show, which he took.

144 - Extinguishing the Flame

Today we talk about invisible architecture, how buildings can define time, and holding ideas loosely.

I wrote these notes while scrubbing my floor on my hands and knees. It was a satisfying experience. As I write this, my son is banging on the glass of the fireplace. I told him to stop. He doesn’t look happy about that.

Notes:

Slapstick double helix, old school skater style, aesthetics as a manifestation of harmony, defining "woke," Hostile Witness, embracing the edge, needing a reminder, weapon salve as longitudinal measurement, Max Ernst's father's tree, building invisible cathedrals, invisible force data, the hospital as iconic form of architecture, the way that hospitals are decorated, Kris tells hospital stories, morgue pranks, remembering labor times, verbing nouns, post partum, butterfly messages, taking wounds with you, Infinite Jest's big metaphor, circling back to your own footprints, a dragon story, Hindu shadow puppets healing children with deformities, things only existing because they are remembered, Bishop Berkeley, pine needle tea, intellect of the first water, the joy of being wrong, cyberpunk dreams, listening to Chinese, "Through the Looking Glass," and dream causality.

143 - The Pinball Machine Will Tilt, and the Ears Will Bleed

We’re making rebuses and diving deeply into our own psychology. What happens when we shift our dichotomy from materialist vs. mystic to known vs. unknown. What happens if you become comfortable with potentially doing things wrong? Is that how to break through?

Hard, wet and wild, the biker messiah, fun photo sessions, feelings yakuza, thrashing the bathroom, Disabled Princess, enormous butt plugs, self-amputees, pornography vs. horror, is horror just a container for our worst impulses?, going along to get along, reading auras, dervishes, George Lucas, Analog Sea notebooks, Rotring 800, David Origin Story, “slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” ESP, telephone telepathy, Crick’s helix, the gifted amateur, extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, pataphysics, constructing an academy for dreamers, rebus solutions, letting things cook, creatures being eaten alive, the necessity of overlooking fundamentals, bird callers for birds that don’t exist, opening and closing the imagination, and purple cows. Are your ears ready?

142 - The Momentarians

On this episode, Kris and JDO continue their discussion of architecture.

Subjects include:

DIY instrument building, tornado update, Paul Winter Consort group, Woody Harrelson’s dad, Stephen Colbert, psychedelic frog fish, a dog watching TV, when did the Momentarians arrive?, sonic decay, disappearing space contingent on space that is there, spacial issues as cultural issues, design decisions, temporary buildings, a pueblo snow globe, and leaving the theremin on.

141 - Reverse Pleasantville

This episode kicks off Kris and JDO's segue into talking about architecture! We've been looking forward to this one for a long time.

Little people out of work, cleaning up language, Roald Dahl's makeover, flattening nuanced curves, addition to text, Kris writes a children's books about a hippopotamus,, lines in the sand, the best of intentions (and a little bit of mental illness), making books spineless, editing the Autobiography of Malcolm X, the rise of mental illness, is this all fake?, kayfabe, the ultimate devouring television, Modern Weiner, the end of midi, Looshaus, remembrance of the past, the advantages of psychology, architectural postmodernism, the neoliberal door, the hyperreal, constant rebooting, the jungle room, reverse Pleasantville, manual transmission ASMR, Auburn boat tail Speedster, Polgar, Bachelard, the Age of Feuilleton, social media's effect on architecture, From Hell, Shanghai, Dark City, and whether or not a psychologist marooned on a desert island could use their skills to survive.

140 - Super Bowl Debrief

On this episode, Kris and I talk:

California condors, witnessing the beginning of semantic architecture, Cadillac ad campaigns, the alarming balance of society, the communal feeling of watching football, the black national anthem, sports as a safe space to argue, celebrating interracial community, Super Bowl commercials, aggressively antagonistic terrain, coach wars, and an imaginative challenge that finds David telling a tale of an outsider artist with a goopy alien intelligence giving his art a life of its own.

There's also book talk at the end!

139 - The Accelerationist

On this episode, we go deep into the world of social media. JDO is feeling burnt out on the whole thing, the pervasive feeling of the third man in the woods looming over every aspect of it. What is a Jellyfish Word? What does it mean to be reduced to a talking head spouting the same opinions we all see a hundred and fifty times a day?

Kris tasks JDO with coming up with a pitch for a movie about a Blade Runner who hunts down MK Ultra spawn.

The whole conversation is fantastic. We're really getting close to something here.