Ep. 03: "The Viet Cong Can Smell the Soap"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: How are you?
Merlin: I'm well, Merlin.
John: How are you?
John: Oh, you're sick, right?
John: I'm sick, and I'm having a peanut butter sandwich, so that makes it sound like I'm sicker than I am.
John: Oh, man.
John: I know.
John: Well, you know, when I get sick, it's never a small matter.
John: I don't get sick for two days.
John: I get sick for 20 days, and it's like...
John: It's like marching my people out of Egypt.
John: I have to go through all this stuff.
John: It doesn't matter if everybody else got the same cold and they're all over it by the weekend.
John: I have to go through this long march.
John: The seas have to part.
John: The plagues have to come.
John: It's frustrating.
John: You get sick hard.
John: I do.
John: I get sick hard.
John: It's part of being extreme.
John: It's part of a no-compromised lifestyle that I've adopted since I was a young man.
John: No fear?
John: It's this no-fear-based lifestyle program.
John: Hurley.
John: Of totally burly, like, shralping, you know?
Merlin: You got Hurley.
Merlin: You got Thule.
Merlin: How do you say that?
Merlin: You got one of those on your car, right?
Merlin: Thule?
John: Isn't that where you put a bird on it?
Merlin: Oh, I guess I'm thinking of Frito-Lay.
Merlin: I'm thinking about when you get that thing.
Merlin: Again, it's like the carabiners, right?
Merlin: When you got one of those things on your car.
Merlin: I don't know what you put it.
Merlin: It's some kind of board.
Merlin: It's a movement-related board.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: I guess you like board-related movements so much that you go somewhere and deliberately buy a big black box.
Merlin: And you put it on top.
Merlin: Isn't that Thule?
Merlin: Thule, that's kind of like... Oh, I see what you're saying.
Merlin: It's a board-carrying... It's a board-carrying box on your car.
Merlin: Do you have any stickers on your... Do you still have the same van, or did you get something different?
John: The van blew up, I'm afraid to say, and I didn't have any stickers on it.
John: But when I was a teenager...
John: I definitely... I had a Chrysler Imperial, a 74 Chrysler Imperial when I was a kid.
John: Also known as a pussy magnet.
John: Oh, boy.
John: We called it the boat because we didn't use words like pussy in high school except to describe wimps.
John: But my car had so many stickers on the back, and they were all stickers.
John: They were all like...
John: Solomon binding stickers.
John: You know, they were, they were about ski equipment and it was, it's a private language, right?
John: I mean, one of those cars would drive past you and it would seem like they just had, they had chosen random letters and numbers to put on stickers on the back of their car.
John: But, but I was communicating very definitely that from the back of my car, you could tell that I thought if you had Tyrolia bindings on your skis, that you were a pussy.
Yeah.
John: Really?
Merlin: That would come through.
Merlin: It would be like a Red Sox affiliation.
Merlin: People would see that instantly, and you could say, like, you know, Ty Cobb's a racist, and everybody would know you probably didn't like whatever team he was on.
Merlin: I guess the Yankees.
John: Wow, wow, wow, wow.
John: So, I mean, if you had given me a pair of skis with Tyrolia bindings on them in 1984, I would have refused them.
John: Because you're not a pussy.
John: Because I'm not a pussy, and I'm not going to use that...
John: There are only four brands of ski bindings, but I had chosen sides.
John: And I expressed that partisanship through stickers on the back of my Chrysler.
Merlin: And they're all, but those are all, it's so, God, this is five shows.
Merlin: That's so interesting to me because it's, if you think about it, have you ever seen an Atlantic Records bumper sticker?
Hmm.
Merlin: I'm going to guess not.
John: No.
Merlin: Great label, right?
Merlin: Put out a lot of great stuff.
Merlin: They did the R&B, and then they did the Led Zeppelin.
Merlin: And then eventually you're your buddies, right?
Merlin: Weren't they on Atlantic?
John: That's right.
John: Death Cabs on Atlantic.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I had an SST records sticker on my car.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Well, you do see punk rock bumper stickers.
Merlin: But that's the thing.
Merlin: I mean, to me, this sounds ridiculous because I don't understand why people ski.
Merlin: I mean, it seems like you could just buy a scissor jack and hit your leg till it broke.
Merlin: I don't know how that works.
Merlin: I'm not a mechanic.
John: It's the fresh air.
John: That's all it is.
Merlin: Yeah, the date rape, right?
Merlin: Is there a lot of date rape in skiing?
John: Well, there's a lot of drinking in skiing, and wherever there's drinking, you're going to find date rape.
Merlin: Silent epidemic.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Although, no, wait, that's not true, because there's a lot of drinking in rugby.
John: But there are no girls in rugby.
John: So I think the date rape is a lot lower in rugby because it's a 100% male environment.
John: And I know there's female rugby, so.
John: Well, sure.
Merlin: But there's probably somewhere there's probably a female Steely Dan fan, too.
Merlin: That's the exception to prove it.
Merlin: Right, exactly.
Merlin: Female rugby players and male rugby players I don't think have ever met.
Merlin: Do you think there's more date rape in rugby than lacrosse?
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: Lacrosse is way date rapier than rugby.
Merlin: That's probably equipment.
Merlin: You get on a sports basement.
John: You know what?
John: Oh, but lacrosse is, I mean, I don't even think there's lacrosse on the West Coast, is there?
Merlin: Lacrosse is... Lacrosse is big where my lady's from, back in Rhode Island.
John: Yeah, see, and Rhode Island, to me, when I think of going to school in Rhode Island, I think of it being basically a series of rapes.
John: that you have to get through in order to graduate.
Merlin: They got a lot of food with eggs in it there because of the Portuguese.
John: That's something I didn't know.
John: Although I did know that the Rhode Island Mafia was a kind of a terrifying local mafia, if you will.
Merlin: They never became like a big mafia, but they were a scary... I don't think they sought out the headlines in the same way that the five families did.
John: Right.
John: They were a small, they were an artisanal mafia.
Merlin: Arsenal.
Merlin: Now, is that Lupo's?
Merlin: Lupo's is the club there, right?
Merlin: You played at Lupo's?
John: I never played at Lupo's.
John: The only show I've ever played in Rhode Island, I have to confess.
John: was when I was in Harvey Danger, and we played in... Oh, like the David Byrne School?
Merlin: Did you play at the RISD?
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: Are you kidding?
John: There's not that many cities besides Providence and Rhode Island.
John: There aren't, and Providence even, really, is stretching the limits of the definition of a city.
Merlin: I don't want to go down a tangent, John, but I – and I have a lot of people – well, they don't have computers and stuff in Rhode Island, so we're probably clear.
Merlin: Yeah, we're fine.
Merlin: They got a lot of eggs in their food and, yeah, a lot of parties, a lot of – you know, I think it's a stretch.
Merlin: It's a stretch to call it a state.
Merlin: It's kind of like calling Lichtenstein a country.
Merlin: You can rent Lichtenstein now.
Merlin: Did you know that?
Merlin: We should circle back to that.
Merlin: $20,000 a night, you can rent Lichtenstein.
Merlin: Did you know that?
John: You know what's a great country?
John: Lichtenstein.
Merlin: Is that the one with the stamps?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Isn't that stamps?
Merlin: Aren't they all about the stamps?
John: Well, Lichtenstein is about banking.
John: It's about, I mean, if the Swiss are too revealing for you, you take your money to Lichtenstein.
Merlin: Right, it's like a mattress nobody even knows exists.
John: Yeah, but the problem with Lichtenstein is that it's really just, it's really part of Switzerland that they just are allowing to kind of, they use the Swiss franc.
John: Like the Vatican.
John: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: It's like a Vatican for... The Vatican's in Luxembourg.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Luxembourg is the one with the stamps.
Merlin: Luxembourg, philately.
Merlin: That doesn't sound right at all.
John: Luxembourg is a great country.
Merlin: Is that the really, really little one?
Merlin: Is that the one with the mouse that roared with Peter Sellers?
Merlin: Luxembourg is very, very small.
John: It's small, but it's got a fascinating history.
John: You know, they speak French, they speak Dutch, they speak German.
Merlin: Oh, it's like the mirror.
Merlin: It's like the shadow cabinet, Switzerland.
Merlin: Switzerland can't decide what they speak, right?
John: Well, Switzerland.
John: Switzerland's a wonderful country.
John: They speak German, Italian, and French.
John: But no, yeah, Luxembourg is a tiny, tiny country, and then the city of Luxembourg.
John: So Luxembourg is a country, and it's also a city.
John: The city of Luxembourg is like a train set.
John: You go there.
John: It seriously is.
John: You stand in this, and they built it on this ravine, and it's always kind of shrouded in fog, and it looks like people have taken lichen out of a bag and glued it to little pieces of rock that they made out of.
John: Out of felt.
John: It's a beautiful place.
John: If I was ever going to go on a honeymoon somewhere and it wasn't to a beach, I would go on a honeymoon to Luxembourg because you feel like a princess there.
John: Even the groom feels like a princess in Luxembourg.
Merlin: It says it.
Merlin: It says it right there on the sign when you come in.
Merlin: Boy, I'm learning so much.
Merlin: I don't want to get off topic.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: No, no, no, because I'm not sure what the topic is.
Merlin: You've had so many.
Merlin: Have you ever used Wolfram Alpha?
Merlin: I think it's something you need to know about.
John: I don't even know what you just said.
Merlin: Was that one word or four?
Merlin: I'm not sure I only speak it phonetically, but there's a website.
Merlin: If you, Wolfram, like Wolfram, Wolfram is a word, and then search for alpha.
Merlin: And it's kind of like Google.
Merlin: Wolfram is a word?
Merlin: That's the guy's name.
Merlin: He's the guy who invented a program for doing math.
Merlin: He's really weird.
Merlin: But you're going to, many times, like when I was able to look up what it costs to sleep on a board in San Francisco in 1849, I did that on here.
Merlin: Oh, Wolfram Alpha is a website.
Merlin: And so you go in and say things like, you go in and say something like, like I just entered in Lichtenstein and then the word San Francisco.
Merlin: And I can tell you, and then it pulls up a bunch of stuff.
Merlin: And did you mean this?
Merlin: Did you mean that?
Merlin: What it says here is that Lichtenstein, are you ready for this?
Merlin: First of all, San Francisco, as you know, 46.87 square miles.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: So we're about seven by seven more or less.
John: Right, and that goes down to, that doesn't go all the way to Palo Alto.
Merlin: No, no, it's literally the glands.
Merlin: It's the glands of the penis.
Merlin: If you envision the peninsula, you can't spell peninsula without penis.
Merlin: Lichtenstein, so that was 46, well, you know, it depends.
Merlin: It depends on whether I've been drinking.
Merlin: 46.87 square miles in San Francisco.
Merlin: And by the way, to your point about Lichtenstein, San Francisco County is...
Merlin: also San Francisco, the city, which seems weird.
Merlin: I don't know why you even have a county if it equals the city.
Merlin: Right, right, right.
Merlin: That doesn't make any sense.
Merlin: You ready for this?
Merlin: You got that in your head?
Merlin: Lichtenstein, are you ready for this?
Merlin: 61.78 square miles.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I'll send you a link for that.
Merlin: That's, I mean, doesn't that, I mean, I'm not even sure, I'm not even sure how you get like to the, whatever the DMV of countries is.
Merlin: I'm not even sure how you get in there and like have them take you seriously when they say, are you sure you didn't leave off like seven zeros with this?
John: The great thing about Liechtenstein is that the western border is a river, right?
John: So you know that you're in Liechtenstein because you go across the river.
John: And then the ground immediately starts arcing up into a mountain, and the entire country— Have you actually been there?
John: Did you go there on your walk?
John: No, I didn't go there on my walk, but I've been there, yeah.
John: Wow, okay.
John: And then the country just sort of arcs up the side of this mountain—
John: And then the border with Austria, which is on the eastern side, is just up there in the misty clouds somewhere.
John: So the whole country is basically just the western side of the Alps.
John: It's just the western side of this long range of mountains.
John: And it's just a little bigger than a zoo.
John: Right.
John: I mean, you can stand on the one side of the river and see the entire nation of Liechtenstein...
Merlin: It's like Twin Peaks.
Merlin: Remember the morning after I met you, your band and Ken Stringfellow and my wife and I went to Twin Peaks and we went up there and you could see the entire city of San Francisco from one place.
John: It was a beautiful day.
John: That was the first time I'd ever been up there.
Merlin: Yeah, I was heavier then.
Merlin: I have a photo of that.
Merlin: I had orange hair, and Ken Stringfellow had green hair.
John: You did have orange hair.
John: Ken Stringfellow did have green hair, and it was not becoming on either of you.
John: You were old men, and you should have stopped that silliness.
Merlin: That's true.
Merlin: That's true.
Merlin: And I still don't really completely understand how he was outside during daylight.
Merlin: You're going to have to tell me about that sometime.
Merlin: That's a nasty cold, John.
Merlin: You get sick hard.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: I do it.
Merlin: I want to correct something.
Merlin: According to the Guardian UK, reporting for the Guardian UK, Amin Sinmaz clarifies Lichtenstein for hire, $70,000 a night.
Merlin: That is not a huge amount of money.
Merlin: I bet you've gotten nearly that for shows sometimes.
Merlin: You can rent Lichtenstein for $70,000.
Merlin: Lichtenstein rentals.
Merlin: It's like in the Michael Moore movie when you can go to the benefit where you're a rich person in jail.
Merlin: Same deal here.
Merlin: You go in, and I think it includes a few things.
Merlin: Lichtenstein looks like Snoop Dogg tried to do a music video there.
Merlin: That would have been weird.
Merlin: 35,000 inhabitants.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: That sounds pretty comfortable.
Merlin: That sounds like a couple in a four-bedroom house.
Merlin: That sounds very comfortable.
Merlin: It's nice.
Merlin: I mean, and it's not a poor country.
John: There's no ghetto in Liechtenstein.
Merlin: Can I mention one thing in passing, and this will circle us back to something I'm quoting here from this article.
Merlin: Visitors could also try cross-country skiing, snowboarding, and snowshoe hiking to explore the picturesque landscape.
Merlin: So they do have skiing in Liechtenstein.
John: Yeah, I bet they do.
John: The whole country is on a mountain, like I say.
Merlin: Yeah, but I mean, they're putting that to use.
Merlin: They're not just sitting around staring at the mountain trying to figure out what to do.
Merlin: Twin Peaks, I think the primary industry up there is Chinese ladies selling San Francisco fleeces to people who refuse to believe that it's cold all the time up there.
John: Wait a minute.
John: I heard just something very recently that they were building a big stem cell research center that kind of hugged to the side of Twin Peaks.
John: Is that not true?
John: Are you kidding me?
John: No, like a giant secret stem cell research laboratory, I think is how they're calling it, that's up there hanging on the mountainside.
John: That seems to be, I mean, you know, I follow sort of the stem cell scene.
John: And that was all the buzz, all the gossip.
Merlin: Well, I follow the Twin Peaks news.
Merlin: They have a newsletter.
Merlin: Very small circulation.
Merlin: It's in Chinese, though.
Merlin: It might just be in my head.
Merlin: Oh, the problem is you want to read it again an hour later.
Merlin: Why is it always funny?
Merlin: I don't want it to be funny, John.
Merlin: It's racist.
Merlin: Well, I mean, it depends.
Merlin: It's racial.
Merlin: It's not racist.
Merlin: It's racial.
Merlin: It's racial.
Merlin: Racial.
Merlin: Yeah, like racial, racial weiss.
Merlin: So you went to college, like in your way, right?
Merlin: Sort of.
Merlin: Okay, well, I was going to try and drop some kind of science, but I don't remember enough.
Merlin: I'm remembering like what?
Merlin: Were you guys at the University of Washington, which is your alma mater, I believe?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Were you Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress?
Merlin: I'm guessing Library of Congress.
John: Well, yeah, there are multiple libraries at the UW.
Merlin: Oh, they're on different systems?
Merlin: That's crazy.
John: Well, I think they've standardized it now.
Merlin: Okay, now, I would have to look this up.
Merlin: I will look this up after our visit.
Merlin: God, I wish I could give you some Theraflu.
Merlin: I mean, that's awful, John.
John: Well, I just drank a whole lot of Robitussin, which is something I don't like to take medicine, as you know, because it goes against my core values.
John: That you're perfect.
John: Well, that I'm perfect and that also I can endure any pain and also that drugs are bad.
John: So that's kind of a perfect storm, right?
John: That's the trinity for me.
John: I am perfect and drugs are bad.
Merlin: It's more properly really a storm of your perfection.
Merlin: Well, you have to get close to really feel the wind.
Merlin: Really get a good whiff of the eye.
Merlin: I agree with you.
Merlin: I think you're like a Marine, right?
Merlin: Oh, sorry, yeah.
Merlin: I mean, not like the adjective.
Merlin: You cannot get the chow cold enough or the bed hard enough, right?
Merlin: You like it, or in my case, taco-shaped enough.
John: Yeah, well, you know, that's why I originally started shaving without lather, and then I progressed to just shaving without water.
Merlin: That's like a punishment in an English movie, isn't it?
John: No, no, because I read it in a Special Forces handbook.
John: I found some old Special Forces handbook from the 60s, and they said, don't use lather because the Viet Cong can smell the soap.
John: The Viet Cong will identify you in the jungle by the smell of your detergent, and they'll find you.
John: And I said, that's not what I want.
John: I don't want the Viet Cong finding me.
Merlin: That's an enemy without a cold.
Merlin: If you can smell that, that's astounding.
John: Well, they're very attuned to their environment, the Viet Cong.
Merlin: And they hide so well that really in the PNW, there might be Viet Cong around you right now just waiting to get a whiff and go, you know what, that's an American.
Merlin: Wherever I go, I assume there are Viet Cong.
Merlin: I don't think that's bad.
Merlin: I think that's self-preservation.
Merlin: Agreed.
John: So anyway, I stopped using lather because I didn't want to give off this scent that betrayed my location.
John: And then after a while, I was like, I'm shaving with water.
John: What would happen if I started shaving with cold water?
John: And I tried that, and that was painful.
John: And then I said, what would happen if I just stopped using water and just shaved dry?
John: Yeah.
John: And it's also painful, but there's a beauty to it.
John: And then, of course, eventually I just stop shaving.
Merlin: That was my question.
Merlin: I mean, if you're in Special Forces, I appreciate that you're taking that time and working that hard for us, but is there a reason you just wouldn't shave?
John: I stopped shaving at a certain point.
John: I mean, I always shave.
Merlin: Not you, but the actual people.
Merlin: Are you talking about airborne?
Merlin: Oh, right.
John: Well, here's the problem with airborne.
John: They wouldn't shave.
John: I'm not airborne, but I'm talking about special forces.
John: The seals.
John: Oh, okay.
Merlin: That's higher up.
Merlin: Black ops kind of thing.
John: That's right.
John: Those guys.
John: They wouldn't shave.
John: Those guys would have beard.
John: They'd have Taliban beards if they could get away with it, but they're part of a corporate structure, and they have to go back to the base, and some candy-ass general who's never been out in the shit...
Merlin: Probably played by Jeffrey Jones.
John: He says, I don't like how long your sideburns are, and these guys have to go fucking shave.
John: It's ridiculous.
Merlin: You know what it is?
Merlin: Dirty Dozen.
Merlin: That's what I'm thinking of.
Merlin: Dirty Dozen.
Merlin: Dirty Dozen is the one where... Not James Coburn.
Merlin: Who's that actor I like?
Merlin: Lee Marvin.
Merlin: Oh, no, it was Lee Marvin.
Merlin: Lee Marvin is going to make, I think, George Kennedy go and shave the guys because they grow beards.
Merlin: Isn't that Dirty Dozen?
Merlin: They're going to dry shave them or whatever.
John: And Kiefer Sutherland's dad is in that.
John: He plays the kind of, whoa, crazy.
Merlin: Not as crazy as Telly Savalas.
Merlin: Telly Savalas, Kojak, is a really crazy one.
Merlin: That's a good movie.
Merlin: It's, you know, it's whatever.
Merlin: It's a terrible movie, but yeah, it's great.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Well, it's like Stagecoach.
Merlin: I don't know if you've ever saw Stagecoach, but when you see Stagecoach, you realize, like, this is, I realize there's other great Westerns, right?
Merlin: You get the Shane High Noon, very overrated in my opinion.
Merlin: But Stagecoach, you watch and you go, oh, this is where all this came from.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And when you watch it, you're like, wow, this is such a cliche, but it wasn't.
Merlin: It was like 1939.
Merlin: I think that's what's happening in the Dirty Dozen.
John: It was the first one to have the bearded wacko.
John: I was talking about this the other night.
John: I was an Anglophile as a kid.
John: I really liked England for some reason.
John: What era?
Yeah.
John: Oh, just England.
John: If you put a Union Jack on something, I would buy it.
John: And in that sense, I was a proto-mod.
John: But it was a long time before I was aware of that.
John: It was just England, ye olde, castles, and so forth.
John: And I think the reason for that is that every movie I saw as a kid...
John: The American guy, there was always a team of guys, right?
John: There was the American guy who was kind of officious and handsome and kind of a penis.
John: And then there was some kind of ratty guy from Yugoslavia who was good with a knife.
John: And then the British guy was always a little bit faggy, and he carried a briefcase that was full of explosives, and he always had a quip, and the other guys were always saying, come on, come on, the Jerrys are coming, and he would say...
John: Just one more second, little chap, and I'll have this wide ride up.
John: And then he would blow up the bridge, right?
John: It was always the British guy that ended up— Cool as a cucumber.
John: He was cool as a cucumber.
John: He had a little bit of a—it was Roddy McDowell.
John: He had a little witty thing to say right before he blew up the bridge.
John: And as a 7- or 8-year-old boy, that is the guy I wanted to be.
John: I did not want to be the American hero with the square jaw, and I certainly didn't want to be the ratty guy with the knife, and I didn't want to be the kind of guy that was a little twisted.
John: I wanted to be this slightly effeminate British explosives expert that had a little quip and took it right to the very edge, and here came the Jerrys, and oh, they were halfway across the bridge, and boom!
John: Boom!
Merlin: I totally agree.
Merlin: It's kind of like, well, I don't know.
Merlin: I feel like if you took out the part about being cool and having a bomb, that's pretty much me.
Merlin: Like, faggy, briefcase, and a quip.
Merlin: Like, kind of a smart ass.
Merlin: I think that was me, except D&D books instead of a bomb.
Merlin: I'm totally with you, though.
Merlin: I'm thinking, like, you got David Niven, right?
Merlin: You got Alec Guinness.
John: Exactly.
John: Thank you.
John: Yes.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Alec Guinness, here's the thing, this is where we tie it together, Alec Guinness and Bridge on the River Kwai, right?
Merlin: That's why you shave.
Merlin: You shave because you're fucking Alec Guinness, and you're not going to let that guy push you around, right?
Merlin: You shave because, again, can I just say English guys, Slaughterhouse-Five.
Merlin: The English guys in Slaughterhouse-Five, they kept it all wired.
Merlin: They told Billy Pilgrim, you've got to keep your dignity.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Every morning I get up, I do rigorous exercise, and I evacuate my bowels.
Merlin: That might not be an exact quote, but it's close.
Merlin: Keep calm and carry on.
Merlin: Precisely, precisely.
Merlin: And you think that's part of your, it seems like that might be part of your ethos.
Merlin: Maybe not about shaving, maybe not about bombs, maybe not about evacuating your bowels, but there are certain things you set a standard for yourself, and that's something that's a light that illuminates the path for you.
John: It illuminates the path.
John: That's precisely true.
John: When I wake up in the morning and I think everything is nuts and I am also nuts, the fact that I can go in and, if I chose, shave without using water gives me some clarity.
John: It enables me to say I can handle this.
John: If there are Viet Cong in my apple trees, they're not going to smell me today.
John: Because I shaved without using detergent.
Merlin: You really should have been a Vietnam vet.
John: Well, I thought about it.
John: I mean, I think I would like to be any kind of... I think, like my father before me, I realized something about my dad as I was growing up.
John: I realized that he had read so many books about the CIA...
John: that in his imagination he was living a parallel life where he was in the CIA.
John: And I didn't know that until much later in life.
John: Existential hypochondria.
Merlin: You read about the disease so much, you're pretty sure you got it.
Merlin: Yeah, right, exactly.
Merlin: He thought he might as well have a second life.
John: He'd read so many John le Carre books where, you know,
John: where Smiley walked across the Teva River and handed some guy some microfiche, that he believed in some way that he had done these things and that his actual life was just a front, just a cover for this real life that he'd led since World War II.
John: He was a World War II vet.
John: my dad and I think I think that that's starting somewhere back then he just had this sort of I mean a very faint sense impression that he had actually been on a secret mission the whole time and for all I know he was he couldn't really tell with my dad maybe he was on a secret mission the whole time but I have this same thing I mean I've been I've been sharpening my knives
John: for so many years that I'm not sure that I haven't.
John: It's the Chuck Beres problem.
John: I'm not sure that I haven't been a spy this whole time.
John: And I'm some sort of Manchurian candidate waiting for the right combination of whistles and tweets, and I'm going to be activated and go to work.
Merlin: I'm just saying you might have missed an opportunity here.
Merlin: Maybe you're meant to feel like you've missed an opportunity because I think you might be a kind of sleeper cell, as you're describing, like your father before you, possibly, maybe not.
Merlin: You might be a sleeper cell.
Merlin: You might be...
Merlin: In better shape than you think.
Merlin: You might actually be like, what, 60.
Merlin: You don't know it.
Merlin: Maybe, again, maybe they're Frank Sinatra-ing you a little bit.
Merlin: And you're going to have to go, you know, go off and take some people out.
Merlin: You start hallucinating about Mao.
Merlin: It just strikes me that you're paranoid, almost to the point of being phlegmatic.
Merlin: You like guns.
Merlin: You're a little paranoid.
Merlin: And I think it's fair to say you feel really underappreciated and often ask, where's my parade?
Merlin: So I don't...
Merlin: I don't, you know, D.D.
Merlin: Mao.
Merlin: I'm just saying this could be something to think about.
Merlin: D.D.
Merlin: Mao.
Merlin: D.D.
Merlin: Mao.
John: Well, it's why I cried through the Truman Show.
John: When I went to see the Truman Show, I sat down and I was not a Jim Carrey fan.
John: I got dragged to this movie.
John: by some people that thought we were going to see Ace Ventura Pet Detective.
John: They were like, I love this Jim Carrey guy.
John: Let's go see this new movie.
John: And we all went to this movie.
John: And I was just, you know, it was either that or an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
John: I was like, I'll go to the movie with you.
John: Fine.
John: Right.
John: And I sat down already po-faced, just waiting for this to be a terrible movie where he...
John: He did his riff the whole time, and the movie starts, and before the credits are even over, I'm bawling.
John: I bawl through the whole film.
John: And we get to the end, and the lights come up, and my friends are like, oh, that wasn't very funny.
John: And I just... I stood up and said, I have to go, and went out and walked the city streets for hours, trying to figure out why the hell The Truman Show affected me so strongly.
John: And it's because...
John: I'm the Manchurian candidate.
Merlin: Oh, it got a little bit too close.
Merlin: A little too close.
Merlin: Something got wedged out a little bit.
Merlin: You saw the camera, basically.
John: I did.
John: I did.
John: I saw the glint of the camera lens, but then when I turned to look, it was gone.
John: I could not put my finger on it now.
John: But the glint.
Merlin: I felt that way about Synecdoche, New York.
Merlin: I can't even watch the trailer for that without crying.
Merlin: I can't watch Synecdoche, New York because it's a terrible movie.
Merlin: I agree, except that it is probably one of the greatest movies ever made.
Merlin: People feel strongly about it.
Merlin: It's like the Smiths of movies.
Merlin: I just, I don't know.
Merlin: It is like the Smiths in the sense that I do forgive my friends who are incorrect by not liking the Smiths.
Merlin: I don't like the Smiths on a Sean Nelson.
Merlin: I don't like them on a Sean Nelson level.
Merlin: Do you like them on a Colin Malloy level?
Merlin: I don't think I like anything on a column level.
Merlin: Oh, your loss.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I just realized I'm talking to you on the radio, and I just took a bite of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
John: That's disadvantageous to the listener because no one wants to hear a sick person eat a sandwich.
John: A sick person eat a peanut butter sandwich into a microphone.
Merlin: I think you sell yourself short.
Merlin: It's terrible.
Yeah.
Merlin: Go ahead.
John: Actually, I think there is probably one girl out there that would listen to me eat a peanut butter sandwich into a microphone.
Merlin: Don't say her name.
Merlin: I won't.
Merlin: Because then now there's going to be like five girls who, like one of them's into it and four of them are scared.
Merlin: Let them wonder.
Merlin: Let them wonder.
Merlin: One of them's like, well, all five of them are like, that's me.
Merlin: But one of them's like, that's me.
Merlin: I like ski bindings.
Merlin: I can't even tell you what section this is in, but I just remember something like the BNs.
Merlin: I spent a lot of time in the BNs.
Merlin: First of all, I had a hard time at first learning the Library of Congress because I come from the Dewey Decimal system.
Merlin: But then pretty soon I looked back and I went, what the fuck is that?
Merlin: What is Dewey Decimal?
Merlin: You've got to be fucking kidding me.
Merlin: That's the most stupid.
Merlin: It just doesn't even make any sense.
Merlin: And then I made it to fancy school, and I learned the Library of Congress, and I never looked back.
Merlin: And I think it's the same thing with bumper stickers.
John: What's that?
John: It's like inches and miles.
John: Somebody stuck their pinky out and said, that's how long it is.
Merlin: Oh, yes, I understand.
Merlin: It's not related to anything.
Merlin: Oh, you mean inches and miles versus something like centimeters, where there's something in a bell jar, and we go, this thing weighs a gram, and that's the gold standard for measurement.
John: Right, right.
Merlin: I can get behind that.
Merlin: I also like that the books I like were near the beginning.
Merlin: I was pretty into that.
John: Here's what I did, and I did it from the beginning, and this is another thing I learned from my dad.
John: I would walk into a library, and whatever their system was,
John: I would ignore it and I would go to the librarian and say, here's what I need.
John: And then I would sit in a chair and read a magazine while the librarian found all the things.
Merlin: Oh, no, no, no, no cards for you.
John: It's a certain kind of, you have to have a certain kind of, of, of authority.
Yeah.
John: to walk in as a child to the library and get the librarian to do your research.
Merlin: Like you're ordering a French dip or something.
Merlin: You're just like, here, I'll need these.
Merlin: Henry Huggins.
Merlin: Henry Huggins, go.
John: You assume that that's what they want to be doing.
John: And then most of the time they do.
John: So I spent a lot of time in libraries waiting for people to bring me the books that I asked for.
Merlin: They seem eager to please, which I like.
John: Well, think about being a librarian.
John: I mean, I've loved a lot of librarians, and it's a job that I think I would excel at.
Merlin: Batgirl.
Merlin: Batgirl was a librarian, I think.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Barbara Gordon.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: Oh, that explains a lot.
Merlin: If that can't make you love a library, I don't know what will.
John: That girl.
Merlin: I think it's good, though.
Merlin: I mean, I think that's a big part of the liberal arts is learning.
Merlin: You've learned how to use a library.
Merlin: I think that's big.
Merlin: But again, back to the ski bindings.
Merlin: I'll speak for myself.
Merlin: I don't like being the way I am, but I look down my nose now at Dewey Decimal.
Merlin: I take my daughter to our little library here.
Merlin: What are most books?
Merlin: They're novels.
Merlin: There's a lot of novels.
Merlin: Well, that's a whole section.
Merlin: That's called F. Really?
Merlin: That's the decimal system?
Merlin: Did it not occur to you when you put this together?
Merlin: There's a whole bunch of things called novels?
Merlin: Oh, shit.
Merlin: We're going to need something for novels in our decimal system, so let's create F.
John: F. Novels.
Merlin: You know, it's like that story about the – it's probably an urban myth.
Merlin: I'll have to look it up.
Merlin: But that story about the engineering firm, architects that were having the grand opening, groundbreaking – I'm sorry, but the grand opening, I guess, for this big, beautiful glass library that's finally complete.
Merlin: And somebody says, this is amazing.
Merlin: I can't believe this is strong enough to hold that many tons of books.
Merlin: And the guys all ran out of the building because they'd never thought about having books in there.
Merlin: I think that sounds like bullshit, but it's a great story.
John: Have you been to the downtown Seattle library?
Merlin: The ugly one?
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: It's brutalist.
Merlin: Is it brutalist architecture?
Merlin: What is it?
Merlin: Yeah, I think it's the white one, the kind of weird white one.
John: It's not white.
John: It's made out of glass.
John: It's a REM cool house design, and it's one of these public buildings that was built to...
John: to give the city of Seattle some jewel in its crown so that tourists from around the world would come look at our REM cool house building.
John: And on the outside, it looks like a piece of road tar made out of glass that, you know, that has no two parallel lines.
John: And on the inside, people come in, you know, you're standing in the library and
John: You have to move out of the way of the crowds of sheep being herded through to look at your glorious architectural edifice here that, to me, looks like a spaceport
John: In a minor planet in the Dagobah system that has been neglected for 800 years.
John: And it's, you know, it's already the light bulbs are burning out and the stair treads are getting worn.
John: It already looks like shit.
John: But people are being herded through this thing like it's some kind of thing they need to see for their lives to be complete.
John: Yeah.
John: And I stand in the lobby of it, and I do this on a weekly basis.
John: I go there, and I shake my fist and scream at the top of my voice and say, it's a goddamn library.
John: Where are the books?
John: You can't even see the books.
John: There are no books.
John: They tried to make it some— This is from 2004?
Merlin: What, this library?
Merlin: Yes.
John: Yeah, no, it's brand new.
John: And here's the tragedy.
John: It's awful.
John: It's terrible.
John: Here's the tragedy.
John: The original library that was on that ground was a Carnegie library that was built.
John: It looks like.
John: Oh, my God.
John: Chicago style kind of.
Merlin: It's gorgeous.
Merlin: Not Chicago style, like Federalist style.
Merlin: It's beautiful.
John: It looks like the San Francisco Mint Building, right?
John: It's got arches.
Merlin: It's got columns.
Merlin: It's beautiful.
John: Can you imagine reading a book in that building?
Merlin: I'd read books if they had a building like that.
Merlin: That is nice.
John: I can't imagine it because they tore the freaking thing down before I was born in order to build the second incarnation of the Seattle Library.
John: Wow.
John: which looked like a regional post office.
John: It was built in the original internationalist style, which is an architectural style developed to compete with the Soviet Union in who can make the ugliest building in the world.
John: And it was a building that I swear to you, you would drive past it 60 times thinking, I keep driving past this Department of Motor Vehicles, where is the library?
John: And that library was there my whole childhood, and then they finally tore it down.
John: That was a library where you would get on an escalator, and you'd be on this escalator, and pretty soon you'd be on another escalator, and pretty soon you'd be, and you never saw a book once.
John: You were just, you were going up escalators and down escalators.
John: So they built this Rem Koolhouse building, and it's one of these buildings in Seattle.
John: If you say a bad word about this library, 75% of the people in the town
John: will react as if you told them that their kid was ugly.
John: They get this look on their face like, what?
John: No.
Merlin: They're afraid Billy Mummy's going to send him into the corn.
John: Oh, that's a big... He's a genius.
John: It's a beautiful life.
Merlin: You know, I just got to say, the first fucking meeting I had with that guy, I would see those eyeglasses and I would say thank you for your time.
Merlin: You know, you're a man who appreciates eyeglasses.
Merlin: You can tell a lot about a person.
Merlin: Somebody walks in with glasses like that, I would say no thanks.
Merlin: And then what do you get out of it?
Merlin: It looks like somebody's first semester in graphical arts class, and they took something, their first orthogonal drawing, and then made it out a chain-link fence.
Merlin: It's an abortion of a building.
Merlin: That's ridiculous.
John: Somewhere along the line here, we have decided that if an architect...
John: if an architect doodles on a napkin, that that is sufficient for him to be, that's all the architect himself needs to do.
John: He doodles on a napkin, and then his team of young, hungry assholes goes and converts that into some kind of broken Rubik's cube, and then we spend $200 million to put it in the center of our town,
John: I swear to you, Merlin, if you go to the Seattle Library in pursuit of a book, the Sisyphean journey that you will go on to find the book, you have to go through six or seven different… Is this because of different floors?
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: The books are six stories up in a catacomb.
John: That you have to, you can only access by elevator.
John: Oh, come on.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And then the rest of the, and the library itself is, like I say, it's a spaceport.
John: You just keep waiting.
John: You keep waiting for the next barge, the next transporter barge to, you know, to EOS to arrive and take all these people, all these, like,
John: you know, the lobby full of tourists and homeless people masturbating, and they all just get herded on to the barge, and off they go, and the room fills up again.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know more about all this stuff than I do.
Merlin: I don't feel comfortable commenting, except that this is just really, really awful.
Merlin: I think empirically awful.
Merlin: I just sent you a link to something.
Merlin: I was at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and they have a building there that I think you'd really enjoy.
Merlin: It's called the Moss Humanities Building, and it's considered to be a, I guess for better or for worse, a great example of what they call brutalist architecture.
Merlin: And boy, is it ever brutal.
Merlin: First of all, apparently it was designed and built at a time when they were very worried about student riots.
Merlin: So as I'll show you in this photo, are you getting these in the little robot?
Merlin: Little links?
John: Yeah, something's going bloop.
Merlin: Yes, that's the robot.
Merlin: So they built...
Merlin: They built a ramp that Evel Knievel would use to jump something and then fall.
Merlin: Imagine that is kind of like around the building.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: It's a bunker.
Merlin: It's a kind of bunker.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: But you can see, even in the picture I just sent, you can see the mildew.
Merlin: Apparently, this place was so poorly designed, they put the music department in the basement.
Merlin: And so the cellos are wilting.
Merlin: Like it's just pure, like it's like that sick building syndrome all over the place.
Merlin: Like all this crap.
Merlin: Now, the dorms at my college were built by, designed by I.M.
Merlin: Pei.
Merlin: And who's another one of these, you know, yo-yos.
Merlin: So, I mean, like we had to buy the, if you want to replace a door, it had to come from Germany, you know, same deal here.
Merlin: You want to change some toilet paper, that's $6,000.
Merlin: They don't think this stuff through, and it's heinous.
Merlin: It's like willfully heinous.
Merlin: It's like the Duchamp urinal thing, except now people got to play cello in that.
John: The universities all around the world or all around America built this kind of architecture during that era.
John: The University of Washington, the main square at the University of Washington, is literally designed so that you can turn a fire hose on a kid at one end of the square and hose him all the way across the square and off the university.
Yeah.
John: Like, it is designed to be able to fire hose protesting.
Merlin: It's designed by Terry Gilliam, basically.
Merlin: And the big foot comes down.
John: They were building all these university campuses after, basically, they were forced to let blacks into the universities, right?
John: They integrated the schools.
John: They were warned.
John: And then they were like, oh, shit.
John: Now there are blacks in the universities, and what are they going to do?
John: They're going to start protesting.
John: We need to open this area up so we can really get a good shot with our fire hoses.
John: They hate fire hoses.
John: Well, that's true.
John: I mean, basically all ethnic people hate fire hoses.
Merlin: I think the black really don't like fire hoses from that time.
Merlin: They got good reasons to not like fire hoses.
John: There are some iconic pictures that would give us a pretty good reason.
Merlin: So whoever the Rem Coolhouse of the fire hose design was probably had that.
Merlin: He probably had what they call an idea board.
Merlin: He probably cut some things out of magazines.
Merlin: He cut up some ribbons and shit.
Merlin: Cut out like a marmaduke and put it up.
Merlin: I find this a very compelling argument for the functionality of the space.
Merlin: Shut up, classes.
Merlin: It makes me so angry.
Merlin: I don't know if you can see how ugly that building is, though.
John: It's terrible, and I guarantee that they tore down a beautiful, you know, gothic revival.
John: library building or student center or something they tore it down thinking that it was obsolete and they and they built that at the every university i ever went to i was always in i was always in some wing of the humanities where you know there are there are the practical sciences and then there are the humanities which are impractical and then as you move further out the fruity arts
John: The fruity arts.
John: As you move further out in the humanities, it gets less and less and less practical.
John: You go past the poetry department, which is what one would think is the height or the apex or the furthest out on the wing of impracticality.
John: But no, you can go further.
John: And that's where I lived at the university, way out there.
John: And invariably...
John: The classrooms that they would assign us for our comparative history of ideas lecture halls were always in the science buildings that were slated for demolition.
John: Because the English department has all the rooms at the school with the leaded glass windows and the bookcases.
Merlin: You just hear beakers crashing and the smell of formaldehyde, and you're trying to think about Alexander Pope.
John: Oh, way, way worse than that.
John: I mean, you're out there where the wires are hanging from the ceiling, and there are Bunsen burners that have been left on because if they turn them off, the gas will leak and the building will explode.
John: So they have to keep the fires burning.
Merlin: It's like a really dangerous Italian restaurant.
John: And these are the rooms that they allocate for the comparative history of ideas because those buildings were built 40 years ago.
John: Those were the height of technology at the time.
John: Now they've fallen apart.
John: The science departments all are having new buildings built for them.
Merlin: Is it just me or are the science people always getting a new building?
Merlin: They get new buildings.
Merlin: The science people get new buildings.
Merlin: They'll buy sculptures for that building before they'll throw a bone to the literature people.
John: If you went to Stanford right now and declared an English major, I bet you they would just chain you to a bike rack.
Merlin: They have one Quonset hut and one of those little desks.
Merlin: It's not even a full desk.
Merlin: It's like you just got room to put your left arm on it.
John: Yeah, and everyone has to share it.
John: One desk.
John: While they're busy scraping the land in order to build a new, I don't know, applied sciences building.
John: Right.
John: And universities are just...
John: They don't care about books.
Merlin: You can just show up and go, well, we need a new hydrogen collider.
Merlin: And you go, sounds great.
Merlin: And then somebody goes, what's the hydrogen collider?
Merlin: And they're like, don't be a dick.
Merlin: It's science.
Merlin: But to me, this is the Dewey Decimal people.
Merlin: This is the Ram Koolhaas people.
Merlin: We've seen this again and again, John.
Merlin: And it's the way people do it.
Merlin: I think I mentioned this to you, that Moss building is the humanities building.
Merlin: They got cellos, cold, wet cellos.
Merlin: Nobody likes a wet cello.
Merlin: You couldn't have thought that through?
Merlin: You get some guy here sitting around doing whatever organic chemistry is.
Merlin: That couldn't be in a wet building.
Merlin: See, this is the thumb literally in the eye of the liberal arts.
Merlin: This is what we're dealing with, and I think this is why the congresspeople are always going to beat the Deweys.
Merlin: The Congress, you need a better name than that.
Merlin: Library of Congress.
Merlin: The Gers.
Merlin: That's going to look terrible on a jacket.
Merlin: The Lib... Licks?
Merlin: The Libcons?
Merlin: Libcons.
Merlin: Locks.
Merlin: The Locks.
Merlin: Libconers?
Merlin: The Library of Congress.
Merlin: Locks.
Merlin: Oh, the Locks.
Merlin: Oh, that's great.
Merlin: Like the Soches.
Merlin: Yeah, the Soches.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Which one is that?
Merlin: That's something by S.E.
Merlin: Hinton.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Well, in my high school... The Loches.
Merlin: Could we call it the Loches?
Merlin: The Loches.
Merlin: The Loches versus the Deweys.
Merlin: So I think a Dewey, Rem Koolhaas, to me, he acts like he's a Loche, but I think he's totally a Dewey.
Merlin: I think he comes in and he goes, blah, blah, blah, dot, blah, blah, blah.
Merlin: And this picture is just making me angrier and angrier.
Merlin: I will post this in show notes.
Merlin: It's him bending over.
Merlin: He looks like some kind of fucking German Steve Jobs with these goofy glasses, and he's looking at this little model.
Merlin: I even hate looking at the model of the Seattle Library.
Merlin: What about Daniel Liebeskin?
Merlin: What do you think, Loche or Dewey?
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: He seems very sensitive.
Merlin: And that makes him a dewy.
Merlin: Probably a dewy.
Merlin: I think if you've endured the kind of cello moisture that people like you and I have, you know what I can say, Richard Hugo, big loche.
Merlin: Super loche.
John: He endued a lot of cello moisture.
John: Here's the problem with loches, though.
John: We don't know how to stand up for ourselves.
John: You know, they were designing that, that, that campus.
John: And I'm sure some Tweety, some Tweety, uh, Tweety fucking Dewey guy came in, some Tweety Dewey came in and said, well, um, actually I, I think we would like some windows in the music department.
John: And they were like,
Merlin: Silence, Knave.
Merlin: Oh, you're saying he was a little too moist of a loche.
Merlin: They're all too moist.
Merlin: He didn't dewy up.
Merlin: It's just like the Republicans, right?
Merlin: This is the conservatives.
Merlin: Not to go political, but the thing is those guys stick together, right?
John: Well, there was a time.
John: Not to go back to my dad again.
John: I'm always talking about my parents.
Merlin: You cannot talk too much about your dad as far as I'm concerned.
John: But my dad was part of an era where he was a vigorous liberal Democrat.
John: You know what I mean?
John: He was a Democrat and a liberal, and he defended those principles with a kind of
John: with a kind of vigor that is utterly absent from that wing of the political spectrum now.
John: My dad would get into fights in bars on the waterfront over liberal politics.
John: Liberalism was...
John: It was muscular.
Merlin: It was very muscular.
John: You had the unions.
John: You had the sort of people who, if they didn't believe in communism exactly, they did believe that social justice was sweeping the world and it was an active and muscular political philosophy.
John: And that now is completely gone.
John: Anyone who has...
John: Anyone who has a modicum of liberal thought in their mind has been so accultured to thinking that they need to apologize for themselves for existing, first and foremost.
John: You know, I'm sorry.
John: Pardon me.
John: I know that this is just my opinion, but here are some ideas that I had, and I am sorry if they offend you.
John: This kind of, like, constant reflexive apology...
John: is so panty-waisted.
John: It's very undignified.
John: It's undignified, and it presumes that your ideas aren't strong.
John: It presumes that the tenets of your philosophy aren't worth standing and actually putting your hand up about.
Merlin: But you get to be like a creepy kid in junior high who's always getting his ass kicked, and so then he becomes very receding around people, but he's fine, like fucking a cat and killing it.
Merlin: That becomes his thing, right?
Merlin: So all the muscularity of his personality goes into cat fucking and cat homicide, which I think that's a capital cat offense.
Merlin: That leads to harder crimes.
Merlin: You can get super hard crimes out of a cat.
Merlin: I think that's where it starts, though.
Merlin: You look for the people who are killing the cats.
Merlin: You're going to find a seriously failed loche.
Merlin: You know where you find those?
Merlin: 4chan.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: And then they make a picture of it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I totally agree with you.
Merlin: And if I don't, as you know, I'm not a physician.
Merlin: But I think right now, have you considered the fact that you are so ill right now that you get sick so hard could be somewhat related to cello moisture?
Merlin: Maybe you've been in too many... Maybe you've got sick building syndrome.
Merlin: You've got the same problem as the people in the Mossy Humanity.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: It's right in the name.
Merlin: Moss.
Merlin: See...
Merlin: Moss, but it's spelled with an E. It says it right on there.
Merlin: Could you fucking, only a Dewey would name a humanities building mossy.
Merlin: It's literally a thumb in the eye of the liberal arts.
Merlin: Mossy.
Merlin: It's so wet that it has moss.
John: So you're saying I have some kind of congenital black mold syndrome from spending all those years in the basement of humanities buildings?
Merlin: I'm saying you start out, think of it as a concentric circle.
Merlin: At the middle, you've got all the Deweys who agree that everything's okie-dokie, and let's talk about chemistry, whatever that means.
Merlin: You start moving out in concentric circles.
Merlin: You go further and further away, right?
Merlin: You get somebody teaching Conrad, and people put up with that.
Merlin: You go a little further.
Merlin: You've got the people in the poetry department.
John: I won't hear a bad word said about Conrad.
Merlin: see that everybody agrees with that but you go a little bit further out i think you get to the poetry department where everything's made out of feathers and memories of chicken soup and then like you go a little bit further out and you're in the comparative ideas section yeah everything's wet you're chained to a bike rack and there's not a fucking rim cool house in sight you know what i'm saying you're looking across the campus at the glittering towers of the the new physics building
John: Right.
John: And you've got conjunctivitis.
Merlin: You've got consumption.
Merlin: It's like Brigadoon.
Merlin: And you keep all your books right next to you because you don't want to have to go up six stories because fucking Rem Koolhaas put it in an elevator.
Merlin: Thanks, Rem Koolhaas.
Merlin: What's next?
Merlin: Is he Dutch?
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: And what do they speak?
Merlin: Is it Lichtenstein they speak Dutch?
John: No, they don't speak Dutch in Lichtenstein.
John: Which one is that?
John: Was that Luxembourg?
John: Well, you know, in Luxembourg, there's just a tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of Dutch-ish German.
John: You know, there's a continuum.
Merlin: Is there such a thing, John, really as Dutch-ish German?
John: There is.
John: There's a continuum from German to Dutch.
John: Let's just search for that.
John: If you're in, let's say you're in Winterswijk in the Netherlands.
John: You're not even trying at this point.
John: And you're speaking Dutch with such a German accent.
John: in Winterswijk, that you're more intelligible to the Germans across the border than you are to the Dutch, say, in Den Haag.
Merlin: The language is very... I'm going to find a place that sells maps, and I'm going to buy one, and I'm going to listen to this.
Merlin: Oh, yes, I think you're thinking of the valley near Farfiknugen.
Uh-huh.
Merlin: Lichtenstein, 61.78 square miles.
Merlin: Luxembourg, a bulky 998 square miles.
John: Luxembourg's got farms.
John: I mean, Luxembourg's a proper country.
John: More than one?
John: It's a duchy, let's be honest.
John: Ah, right.
John: It's a duchy.
John: But say, back in the old days, right, you had a bishop.
John: You had a bishop in Münster, which is in Germany.
John: But that bishop was responsible for...
John: for ministering to his flock throughout all of what they called Munsterland, which is this area that encompassed Germany, but also part of the Netherlands and part of Luxembourg, a little bit of what's now Belgium.
John: So this bishop was the head ecclesiastical authority, but also was sort of the big cheese, big government cheese.
Merlin: Dewey or Elosch?
John: The bishop – well, there were several bishops of Munster.
Merlin: But you could be either one?
Merlin: It was a bicameral?
John: I'm going to say that they were all – I'm going to say they were – well, yeah, I think you could be either.
Merlin: I see a political religious person as frequently being a Dewey.
John: Well, sure, but some of them were total loches.
John: I mean, you know, you had to be a bean counter.
John: I mean, it's like the popes, right?
John: Some of the popes were total loches, the borgias or whatever.
John: It was date rape from head to toe.
Merlin: I'm pretty sure the borgias were the people in Italy, so now I'm pretty sure you're making it up.
Merlin: I think you're talking about the people in Florence.
Merlin: Isn't that the borgias?
Merlin: You don't think there were Borgia Popes?
Merlin: Who's the guy that played piano?
Merlin: That's Victor... That's Victor Borgia.
Merlin: And he has nothing to do with Senior Wences.
Merlin: Is that right?
John: I don't think he does, no.
Merlin: That's a different... Doesn't it seem like they should have worked together at some point?
Merlin: I think they were both on the Dean Martin program.
Merlin: Ed Sullivan, they were probably both on Ed Sullivan.
Merlin: Different episodes.
Merlin: They were both amusing in a way that made a lot more sense to our grandparents.
Merlin: I love Senior Wences still.
John: Victor Borgia, he was a great piano player.
John: He was a comedian.
John: He was very amusing, very amusing.
John: You'd be a funny guy, and then you'd say, oh, look, a piano, and you'd sit down, and you'd dazzle your guests.
John: Noel Coward.
John: Noel Coward.
John: Right.
John: Steve Vai.
Merlin: Oh, I was going to say, okay, maybe Cole Porter before the horse fell on him.
John: Cole Porter.
Merlin: Can you imagine being at a party like that?
Merlin: Man, pre-horse.
Merlin: Right now... He was stuck under a horse.
Merlin: He wrote a song with a horse on him.
Merlin: Did you know that?
John: No, I didn't know that, but I did know that his house in Connecticut was for sale.
John: Cole Porter's house.
John: You could buy it.
Merlin: It's like a regular house.
Merlin: It's not like a cool house house.
John: No, it's a very cool house.
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: It's not a cool house house.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It's a genuinely cool house.
Merlin: You know, there's just so much.
Merlin: See, this is what George Orwell talked about in that essay.
Merlin: I'm just saying.
Merlin: Cool house, he puts cool in his name and house in his name, and now you can't help but thinking of him when you see an actual cool house.
Merlin: Well, that's bullshit.
Merlin: And can I just say it's funny enough to me that the people who are so obsessed with these three-digit numbers are the Deweys when it's our cellos that truly have the do on them.
Merlin: I don't even play a cello.
Merlin: I'm not sure I couldn't Pepsi challenge even a violin and a viola.
Merlin: But I'm just saying, this is what the Lakoff guy talks about.
Merlin: It all gets very confusing because those guys stick together.
Merlin: We're confused and moist.
Merlin: This is what happened to Gore because of Florida.
Merlin: We don't stick to our guns.
Merlin: And I just think it's a shame to have to walk so far to think about ideas.
Merlin: That's not right.
Merlin: You're paying tuition like anybody else, right?
John: Well, this goes back to all the complaining, all the liberal complaining, which is that at the core of it, if you support capitalism, if you believe that capitalism is the highest form of economic evolution, if you believe that capitalism is ultimately value-neutral or good, even better than value-neutral, good, if you believe capitalism trends toward good,
John: then all this stuff just follows from it.
John: You can't argue against the comparative history of ideas being put into a wet mop bucket at the bottom of a well without...
John: Without ultimately having to say, what have the comparative history of ideas graduates ever produced in terms of money that would enable us to keep the lights on at this university?
John: And the answer is nothing.
John: And so here's your wet mop bucket.
John: Have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and try and get over your cold.
John: If you...
John: If you believe in capitalism and you believe that all things are being gradually sucked into the orbit of the black hole of capitalist thought, then you have to prove with some kind of bottom line, what did this earn us?
John: What did this make for us?
John: Did this create any wealth for us?
John: Metrics.
John: And that's the problem with us panty waists.
John: We stand there and say, but what about the wealth of ideas?
John: And there's somebody standing there.
Merlin: Especially in that voice.
John: There's someone with an aluminum baseball bat.
John: That's the classic Loesch voice.
John: Yeah.
John: What about the wealth of ideas and the guy with the aluminum baseball bat who started a company to manufacture aluminum baseball bats?
John: Wax you on the back of the head, you're back in the mop bucket, and life goes merrily along.
Merlin: Somebody near the center of campus is very fine with their Erlenmeyer flasks, which literally have numbers right on them.
Merlin: They can count.
Merlin: They know how much it's in this titration, whatever the fuck that means.
Merlin: You come to us, we're sitting there with a big fruity book.
Merlin: You go on 30 pages in, they say, what does that literally even mean?
John: What does it literally mean?
Merlin: What does it literally mean?
Merlin: And they want to go, like, oh, 30%.
Merlin: Is that a pie graph?
Merlin: And you go, no.
Merlin: I'm looking at this book.
Merlin: It's a pretty big book.
Merlin: And they say, what is the value of that?
Merlin: Please get back in your mop bucket.
John: Get in your mop bucket.
John: Boy.
John: I have this experience every time I go to a professional sports game, which is it's a Wednesday afternoon.
John: I'm sitting in the Mariners stadium.
John: I'm watching a baseball game.
John: And I look around.
John: And if the team's doing well,
John: if the team's even doing passably well, I mean, the Mariners never really do well, but if they're doing passably well, I look around, it's 3 o'clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday, and there's 40,000 people in the stadium.
John: And I think, what was the last time there was a rock concert in this town that had 40,000 people at it?
John: In the middle of the day.
John: In the middle of the day on a Wednesday.
John: And the answer is...
John: Well, Kenny Chesney is the last time that that happened.
John: And then I ask it again.
John: Kenny Chesney is not a rock artist.
John: What was the last rock concert that had 40,000 people in the middle of Seattle?
John: And in all honesty, I think the last time that that happened was, well, maybe U2.
John: But before that, it was the Rolling Stones of the Kingdom in 1975.
Merlin: I was going to say Pearl Jam.
Merlin: I could see Pearl Jam or something.
Merlin: I could see Pearl Jam drawing a bunch of people in the middle of the day at the height of their powers.
John: Perhaps.
Merlin: There's a Pearl Jam station on satellite radio.
Merlin: Did you know that?
Merlin: I'm sure there is.
Merlin: There's a Bruce Springsteen, Elvis, Grateful Dead.
Merlin: Pearl Jam has their own station on a satellite.
John: Pearl Jam's put out 10 albums or something.
John: I mean, you could have a Pearl Jam radio station that never played the same song twice.
Merlin: I think you're thinking of their album 10.
John: Oh.
Merlin: Was that their second album?
Merlin: Their second album's 10?
Merlin: No, that was their first album.
Merlin: Their first album's 10.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Lemon Yellow Sun.
Merlin: I don't like saying that, but sometimes we'll just be driving around and go, Lemon Yellow Sun.
Merlin: I'm not happy doing that, but it just comes out.
Merlin: I think they could probably do it.
Merlin: The other question, John, I know you don't have a job.
Merlin: Well, I mean, you have a job of a kind in that you're an extremely busy rock artist.
Merlin: What do you think most of those people do for a living?
Merlin: Do you think they're playing hooky from something else to come and watch sports?
Merlin: Oh, the sports people?
Merlin: It costs money to go to the Kingdome, the Mariner Dome.
John: I know, but they're all down at those offices, and their boss also wants to go to the game.
John: It's like to go to a Mariners game in the afternoon is not to be skipping work.
John: It is to say, I am someone who—I am a Renaissance man.
Merlin: You're calling a Dewey.
John: Yeah, not only am I at work, but I'm also going to the sports.
John: I am like a Greek god.
John: I do the work and I do the sports.
John: And then I go to the movies and I have everything I need.
John: I have all the culture that I need.
John: I have a wife.
John: We eat food.
John: We are complete.
John: And it's we who are not at the sports game who are the faulty ones.
John: We are the broken ones who are not living according to a platonic ideal because we shun the sports and we shun the...
John: Well, in my case, the wife.
John: And we shun the work.
John: And so what are we but a sick and unhale, unhearty denizen of mop buckets?