Lost Xplorers

138 - Clock Faces Upon Which Deep Syntax Depends

One of my favorite episodes yet. On this one, we talk timestreaming, experiencing art together, sloganeering as a replacement for the unison of cultural ritual, JW Dunne, Andrew Sims' Symptoms of the Mind, fixing people's relationship to time, the schizophrenic experience, TV's ability to compress time, Alexis de Tocqueville, and what is real.

Imaginative challenge = design a new clock.

This one is good.

137 - A Fairy Tale, As It Was in the Beginning

On this episode, Kris and I continue our discussion of time. He brings two quotes for analysis:

"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once." - John Wheeler

"In time, history must become a fairy tale, so that it might become what it was in the beginning." - Novalis

Wordsworth as proto-hiphop and the oscillation of time's contraction and dilation.

Thrash burlesque of The Obscene Toys, the importance of starting to live, and a new hummingbird shade of blue. Kris tasks me with a storytelling challenge: a coke-addled screenwriter pulling from her own life to write a script about a demon. We finish with a dream of frightening property disputes.

136 - A Rush of Thought with No Action

What is time? What happened when the clock was invented. Kepler says implicitly that the discovery of the mechanized nature of the universe denied the existence of God. This has been repeated and expanded upon since.

What happens to time when you can travel through time zones in a matter of hours? What happened in 1365?

On this episode, we talk about Kepler's dream, the Gutenberg Galaxy, the experience of chemical sensations without their corresponding causes, evil children, brainwashing cuttlefish, and encounters with strange people in pools and gas stations.

135 - Forest Fire On Potato Road

Discussion of the New Paradigm: the advent of photography, social/media temporality, rows of Laura Palmer corpses in bikinis. What does slowed-down dialogue do to the tempo of time we're forced to endure.

We revisit the concept of the Third Man in the Woods, this time as a malevolent entity that thrives on gossip and innuendo, a kind of Thing That is Watching at all times. Are there tools to combat that?

The Bone Girls marching band juxtaposes radical individuality with the rigidity of formation. We visit a futuristic Las Vegas where a giant inclusivity mech stomps around with a midget Mr. T and a Buddhist monk at the controls.

How can we be sure of good intentions? What's the feeling you get when you look at a neighborhood close to an airport. Never too late for damage control.

134 - Spirits Rising Up Out of Turned-Over Earth

There's a cow in a bog and a savage attack on a train platform. A man's face is eaten and Jeremy Renner ends up under a snowplow. Is it possible to sizzle at 56? The news is not what's supposed to happen, and in this episode we wonder about the intersection of accidents and getting ready. Kris tasks David with beginning to develop a triadic harmonic offshoot of design and evolution, individual and unique, repetition and singularity.

We supply tools for robust synoptic understanding, making fields of study your own, finding the shadow outlines of questions, and injecting non-sequiturs into conversation. Kind of weird that you don't hear about regular sequiturs. Ghost stories and death meditations in an age of blood drinking and relentless discourse.

We end with dreams of parade-long statues and paragliders with stationary Briggs and Stratton motors. Oh, and we wonder whether Taylor Swift is a Lynchian figure or not.

133 - The Year in Review 2022

Happy New Year!

On this episode, Kris and I talk about:

Fake celebrity deaths, developing human-like pig livers, normalization of AI, the human element of AI art, medium as membrane, green screen decisions, fear of nuclear war, the shifting war parties, microgenerations, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, who runs the world?, meta shadow puppets, pervasive homelessness, how having a kid changes your perspective, collective/communal living vs. ease of existence, hygge, Vikings, repetition of words, the Biden laptop, conversion of thought leaders, Kanye West, the University of Idaho murders, and new discoveries at the Nazca Lines.

It's a long one! Enjoy this double-sized 3hr30min episode!

132 - The Embodiment of Christmas

This conversation continues our discussion of disembodiment, focusing on the story of Christmas and some of the major ideas in Christianity in general. How do we think with the story of a god embodying himself in the form of a helpless child, and eventually a tortured and executed man?

JDO is in a much better mood for this episode, which includes a fun creative challenge to invent a scenario in which one of the three wise men is a Terminator-style assassin in disguise.

131 - The Disembodiment of the Social

On this episode, JDO shows up to the program with a grumpy attitude. It melts away quickly as he and Kris discuss the disembodiment experience through online discourse. As we become more "social," the individual gives way to the group. Instead of cultivating an inner world that is shaped by principles and history and thought, we turn that over to whatever the group thinks at the time. And when you have a small and unexamined inner life, strangely, you begin to become "too honest" with the world, exposing parts of your personality that should probably be left private.

Kris brings some extremely helpful tools, and tasks JDO with imagining a world without porn. What would happen to advertising after that?

130 - May You Live in Uninteresting Times

On this episode, JDO presents an experiment involving deep fakes. We talk about not always being the audience, not living in interesting times, and living in the present. Alan Watts was fond of saying that wanting a positive experience is in itself a negative experience. So what does it mean to radically accept where you are? What does it mean to only have thirty-six summers left? We also talk repurposing cliché, and JDO is tasked by Kris with writing a woke Christmas rap. Seriously.

129 - Melody is Music You Can Hear When You’re Not Listening

On this episode, Kris and I discuss the current state of the writing world. Spurred on by an NPR article in which all the books look the same, we touch on Kris's move into non-fiction, philosophy, visual art, and music. Does the passed-down structure of novels create an "assumption of frames" that make the whole medium appear dull? What are some ways to break out of this?

We also discuss the Word of the Year, writing tips, and the first object printed by a 3D printer.