Ep. 571: "Cannery Girls"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merles.
Merlin: Good morning.
John: You're feeling a little sleepy this morning, huh?
Merlin: I didn't say that.
Merlin: Yeah, I did.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I feel sleepy a lot.
John: It's the daylight savings time is what it is.
Merlin: They stole an hour from you.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It wasn't ever really hours, though.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: If you love 2 a.m., set it free.
John: Boy, somebody, you know, I got into one of those fights on the Internet the other day.
Merlin: Oh, John, you got to quit that.
John: It was about daylight savings time.
John: I said, people that get up in the morning think that the evening is the end of the day.
John: But the evening is the middle of the day.
John: See, the evening is the middle of the day.
John: They win because it's the dominant paradigm, right?
John: That's right.
John: And I said, no, the evening is the middle of the day, and you want the evening, it's the best part of the day, you want the evening to be longer.
Merlin: Yeah, the best part of waking up is supper in your cup.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: dinner and supper now that's one you know that confuses people because they don't know what time you're talking about well that's a midwest thing though nobody says supper out here well i i think they mean something different i think dinner in some cases is the hot meal hot meal you get midday when you're a laborer and then supper is usually something a little bit smaller uh later but yeah but that's like if you're if you're pushing a boat on the ohio river with a big pole
Merlin: That's when you eat dinner in the middle of the day.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But from a paradigmatic standpoint, re-dominance.
John: That's right.
Merlin: If you can dominate the paradigm, you get to put your pole wherever you want.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: That's in the Constitution.
Merlin: When you're a star.
Merlin: The yes, or for now.
John: Yes.
John: When you're a snake, you're always a snake.
Merlin: Oh, from your first cake of drake to your last...
Merlin: It's so early.
Merlin: Yeah, but here's the thing about a dominant paradigm.
Merlin: You can call any meal whatever you want and say, oh, it's morning and now it's normal to be up.
Merlin: Yeah, right, exactly.
Merlin: They leverage that.
Merlin: I don't want to say morning people.
Merlin: I don't think we say that anymore.
Merlin: Oh, I'm sorry.
Merlin: But the persons of AM.
John: The persons of AM.
John: Sometimes I'll get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.
John: Yes.
John: And the sun has mysteriously come up.
John: And there are people running.
John: I look out the window, there's people running.
John: And I'm like, you run in the middle of the night.
John: Just because the sun is up doesn't mean it's not the middle of the night.
John: And just because the sun is going down, it doesn't mean it's the end of the day.
Merlin: Well, man, the ceiling's another man's floor.
John: Unless you live on the top floor.
Merlin: And then the Lord is your ceiling.
Merlin: The Lord is your ceiling.
Merlin: I shall not want...
Merlin: I put my pole into thy green pastures.
Merlin: Still waters.
Merlin: You know, I remember more Bible than I think sometimes.
Merlin: Isn't that fun?
Merlin: It's in there somewhere.
Merlin: I mean, anything that you said a lot, ancient Chinese secret, like anything that got put into your head when you're at a tender, a paradigmatically tender age.
Merlin: He won't eat it.
Merlin: He hates everything.
Merlin: It's my turn to operate.
Merlin: Operate.
Okay.
Merlin: I'm the sole survivor.
Merlin: We have fun, don't we?
Merlin: Don't we have fun?
Merlin: Don't we have fun sometimes?
John: You know, it's so funny because... We adapt to the paradigm all the time is what I'm saying.
John: We do, but you know what's funny is we were kids once, and now we're not kids, but we remember being kids, don't we?
John: We do.
John: I feel like I do.
Merlin: You're using the we again, which is okay.
Merlin: Yeah, I feel like I do, yes.
Merlin: I feel like I remember...
Merlin: A lot of it.
Merlin: Or not a lot of it, but, you know, enough that I could put together a picture of a timeline if I needed to.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: But time passages.
John: Oh, buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight.
John: That's exactly what's happening.
John: Yeah.
John: We have a ticket on the last train home.
Merlin: You love Scottish folk singers.
Merlin: I do.
John: You love Al Stewart.
Merlin: And Jerry Rafferty.
John: mm-hmm the best yep the best still stuck in the middle with me you know the other the other day i was driving across canada yeah okay and i was i was singing how'd that go it was great and i was singing jerry rafferty songs just uh acapella you know because the radio doesn't work in canada
John: yeah and tubes there and i was doing all the different versions like variations on the theme you know like just singing this stuff i was like you know what this would be this would be a great ringtone me singing this in my car
John: If people still used ringtones, I could, you know, I could go on the Patreon and I could put up all these ringtones of me singing Gary Rafferty, Jerry Rafferty, acapella.
John: And people would buy them.
John: People would buy them for $0.99.
Merlin: Would they buy it with U.S.
Merlin: money or would it have to be Scottish money?
Merlin: Do they have money in Scotland?
Yeah.
John: They don't have radios in Canada, and we're not sure.
John: What's funny is that the Scottish pound is the same as the UK pound.
John: That sounds like a euphemism.
John: But the Scottish pound actually... I'm going to have him do the Scottish pound.
John: It has all its own artwork.
John: It's like... Oh, really?
Merlin: the Scottish pound oh dear it's like it's just the same it's the same as the other pound it doesn't need its own oh that's interesting that's so interesting you would say that I because you know the British you don't want to get into the whole thing with the British Isles and the UK and all that a lot of those people are touchy for overlapping reasons
Merlin: But it is interesting.
Merlin: Like, there's a place here in the neighborhood.
Merlin: And I went in and I guess I misspoke because I said, butter to butter, chicken sandwich.
Merlin: Could we please get this omelet?
Merlin: And can I please get the English breakfast?
Merlin: And he goes, the what?
Merlin: And I said, oh, sorry, the full English breakfast.
Merlin: Did you mean Irish breakfast?
Merlin: And I said, yes, I did.
Merlin: Ordinarily, that's what I order.
Merlin: But like some places, because they're different, except the fact that they're also kind of the same.
Merlin: The Irish breakfast has got blood pudding in it or something.
Merlin: Well, you get black and white pudding.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Usually, I mean, I've had beans in both.
Merlin: I'm saying it's another form of goulash.
Merlin: But everybody's got things that they're, one doesn't say touchy, patriotic about.
Merlin: We don't say that anymore.
Merlin: Scottish sound is a Scottish pound riding on a Scottish hound.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
John: The thing is, when they brought the euro in, all the different countries got their own.
John: They made their own euros.
John: So it's like, oh, this is a euro.
John: Are they still spend the same everywhere, John?
John: Oh, yeah, they're the same.
John: But, you know, you got the, oh, this one's got a Spanish.
John: You know, this has got El Cid on it.
John: And this one over here has got no soup.
John: Uh-huh.
John: And that's clever.
John: But, you know, the United States of America.
John: I don't want to stand up just hearing you say it.
John: If I may.
John: You go off, Lieutenant Colonel.
John: Until not very long ago, we just had one money.
John: But then they started making those quarters with the different states on them.
John: And I was like, don't do that.
John: Come on.
John: You don't care for that, huh?
John: The thing is, you know what they are?
John: They're just making shot glasses to sell at a truck stop.
Merlin: Yeah, it's like a Stucky's type thing.
Merlin: Now we got to collect them all.
John: Oh, look, honey, I brought you a spoon.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, it's a thimble from Massachusetts.
John: I was going to ask you about that.
Merlin: Do the states get to pick what's on their quarter?
Merlin: Is it ever retributive?
Merlin: Is it ever... It will.
John: It will become that way.
John: We're going to put foghorn and leghorn on your corner.
Merlin: The California coin is slightly smaller and no longer works anywhere.
John: No, I'm sure that there's some... You know, I was on a panel... Not a panel.
John: What are the... It was that arts organization, the Rasmussen Foundation in Alaska...
John: It was a bunch of people had submitted grants and then I was on this panel board whatever a group of people that that looked at Looked at all these submissions in the fine arts painting and poems and music and stuff And we decided who was gonna get grants and some of it was big money grants, you know, like we've given people $40,000 and
John: And it was tough because I was on there with a bunch of artists.
John: And some of them were.
Merlin: I'm just in my head.
Merlin: I'm imagining how that was typeset.
Merlin: Because I think it might be both in italics and still have online tildes around it.
Merlin: Just how much you're leaning.
Merlin: How much that word is slanting.
Merlin: All caps.
John: Artists.
John: Artists.
John: And by that, I mean, there were some people on the panel who made a living their whole careers as artists by getting grants.
John: So, you know, there are artists that like make paintings and live in a garret and cut their ear off and do opium and then are famous after they die.
John: There are artists that make giant chrome balloon dogs and sell them for a billion dollars while they're alive.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: You only really need to sell one of those and you're in pretty good shape.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: You can sell six.
Merlin: If you could sell a six-pack of balloon animals to different sweaty cities, that would be nice.
Merlin: Like a Matthew Barney type thing.
Merlin: You could get them a half rack of balloon dogs.
John: Well, they're the ones that put up graffiti that are anti-capitalist, and then people cut them off of the wall and sell them for $10 billion.
Merlin: A lot of people don't understand the bull girl.
John: You spend the rest of your life trying to be anti-capitalist in a world where every time you sign a check in a restaurant, it's worth $100,000.
John: Hey!
Merlin: Ain't that a kick in the pants?
Merlin: And now what you've done, it's disruptive.
Merlin: You've changed the barometric pressure of the art scene.
Merlin: And that $40,000, you get a few of those, that starts to add up.
Merlin: Okay, so I feel like you've opened the door to this, counselor, to this distinction, and this is certainly a cliche and so on.
Merlin: ways but when you think about being an artist there is the kind of artist that you just described the sort of like romantic capital r romantic idea of an artist maybe somebody like van gogh but then you've got people who make the same identical piece where you just glue seashells to it and sell it to motel chains that's also that is also art just because you can buy it at stein mart doesn't mean it's not art to somebody it's the clues in the name stein art do we even have i don't think we even have stein mart anymore do we i don't have them here but that's
Merlin: That's the kind of place, that was like a 90s kind of place you'd go to shop.
Merlin: It was like if you needed a Bastic, or if you needed, you know what I mean?
Merlin: It's above a Ben Franklin, but it's kind of almost like a Kohl's for your house.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Sure.
Merlin: I understand.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: They sell Bastics, they sell fine art.
Merlin: They got Bastics, but there's a whole section.
Merlin: Dude, dude, you go to the Ross where you can dress for less, or the Marshalls.
Merlin: You go in there, I'm pretty sure you can buy art in there.
Merlin: And just because you can buy it there, don't make it not art.
John: i've been singing neil young to myself all morning so i'm a little fucked up you know i want to be saved from the powder and the finger is what i know this morning those guys from the podcast that was where they were the dirtbag left and they were like oh communism and then they made a hundred thousand dollars an episode on patreon and it's like what a country communism yeah but no on this board i'm
John: You've never heard a syllable of that show.
John: I'm sitting on this thing and I'm like, okay, well, we've narrowed it down.
Merlin: Just because it's early for our listeners, too.
Merlin: This is talking about, you sound on a blue ribbon panel.
Merlin: Blah, blah, blah.
Merlin: Blue ribbon panel for the Alaskan arts.
Merlin: And you're going to be out there.
Merlin: You're going to be like in a slow motion music video where you shoot the money at the pole dancer.
Merlin: You're out there funding the arts one seashell at a time.
Merlin: Seashell, by the way, that's also an island, but that's not what we're talking about.
John: We got down to the last, you know, the last candidates here because there were some that was just like, oh, this person's a genius and they should get $40,000.
John: And there were some where it was like, so just to be clear, no controversy betwixt them.
John: No, no, that's a good project.
John: Because we have 20 of these awards to dole out.
John: And it's like, you know, there's the top three where you go.
John: I mean, this person, even if this is all they do is get grants like they deserve a grant.
John: This is genius.
John: There should be more of this in the world.
Merlin: People like it.
Merlin: There's no way this will make us look bad.
Merlin: That kind of thing.
John: Yeah.
John: But also just like, this is, this is gifted, right?
John: Like we're trying to promote.
Merlin: We're happy to give you the leg up for this.
John: Yeah.
John: And this is the arts.
John: And then there are the ones where it's like, yeah, I see what you guys were doing, but no, you, this isn't like, I think you guys should actually like go to trade school.
John: And then they're all the ones in the middle where it's like, well, this is good.
John: And then you get down to these last ones where it really is a matter of taste for the board where it's, it's like, well, I see what you like in that.
John: I understand it's good, but like I have misgivings about it.
John: Whereas I think this over here is really the real thing that
Merlin: And they're like, well, but that is just, what is that?
Merlin: And you're also the musical cheers point there where there are more people seeking money than there's money to give.
Merlin: So decisions must be made.
Merlin: And I have to, I can, I'm projecting here, but I have to imagine that you've probably had ones that you quietly consider sort of a pet project, like where you read the prospectus or whatever it's called.
Merlin: You read through them and you're like, oh, this person, you know, could really use this in an exciting way.
Merlin: But the thing I said before, I'm not trying to be controversial, but...
Merlin: Honestly, I'm thinking, of course, of the National Endowment for the Arts stuff that happened in the 90s.
Merlin: We're like, you don't want to give it to something too weird.
Merlin: Maybe that's already past muster.
Merlin: But at the end, there ain't too many seats rattling around.
Merlin: That's only going to go to some very special art people.
John: Well, in this situation, there were probably five...
John: five things at the end five candidates and there were like three prizes left and i i didn't know that this really is how it goes and i think college admissions is probably like this i think everything is kind of like this i had just never been one of the
John: Excuse me.
John: Sorry.
John: I had to put my microphone.
Merlin: One of the ones who decides the life and death of the, no.
John: And I'd never had any insight into the, into the process, but of the, so there's five, there's only three left and it, it gets into this horse trading thing between us.
John: That was like vaguely, there was like a little bit of hostility in it because there was, let's, I'll boil it down to two people.
John: There were two women who were song writers.
John: And one of them had written a song and made a beautiful music video for it.
John: And she was lovely.
John: And it was clear that she was a member of this class of artists, the artist that applies for grants from a major grant writing institution.
John: And her song was about Alaska.
John: Oh man.
John: And about a character in Alaska.
John: That's like famous to Alaskans.
John: And
John: It was ringing the bells of all of these other artists on the panel that also made a living writing grants for them, for their own music and their own art.
John: And there were, there were several of them.
John: I mean, the panel was only, there were only 10 of us, I guess, but like four of them at least only had a career as an artist because they were more inclined to support it.
John: Well, they, it wasn't inclined.
John: It was that when they looked at it, they saw it was a perfection of that form.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: And then the other artist was this pretty young gal who lived in Homer, Alaska and
John: And her music video was basically her and her friends.
John: And she had like, they were wearing baseball hats.
John: Cause that's like a tuxedo in Homer and just kind of like singing her song.
John: Like they went up the hill basically from their house and found a place that where they were like, this is pretty.
John: And she sat on a rock and they performed this song, but the song
John: was a it was just a great indie rock song it was like girl with a guitar yeah yeah yeah and and so i went and i listened to her other songs and i came back and i was like listen bored i'm telling you right now this gal is the real thing she's got six really good songs and they're honest
John: And they're cool.
John: And she could make a record right now.
John: And it's like, it could come out on Barsook Records.
John: It's the thing.
John: It's got it.
John: She's got it.
John: And they were like, she's just like a girl in jeans.
John: And I was like, yes, exactly.
Merlin: She needs the $40,000.
Merlin: The other ones were pulling more for the Alaska song person.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, and that's the thing.
John: Her songs weren't about Alaska.
John: They were about...
Merlin: I was just, it was funny because before you even said anything, I first, I don't know why, oh, because I was watching something recently that had a bunch of Jimmy Cagney scenes in it.
Merlin: And I was thinking about like Yankee Doodle Dandy, like the George M. Cohan story.
Merlin: I'm thinking of somebody coming in, you know, dressed like Lyle Landley with like, or, you know, the music man coming in and just doing patriotic songs about Alaska.
Merlin: You would kill it.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Gnome is my home where I roam.
John: And Alaska loves that stuff.
John: You know, Alaska.
John: Yeah, it's like seeing your name in the paper.
John: Yeah, it's kind of, there's an art culture up there that's very much rooted in kitsch.
John: It's like, oh, here comes Soapy Smith, and he's got a deck of cards, but there's an ace behind his hat.
John: You know, like just real animatronic animals in a pizza parlor kind of art.
John: Oh, that used to be my main aesthetic when I was 11.
John: And so I got into a huge fight with these people because they were like, I don't even know.
John: They couldn't even tell me.
John: They didn't understand why I was rooting for this person.
John: Because everybody else, you know, had, it wasn't even like a different, I was like this woman who's making this song about soapy Smith or whatever.
John: It's not, it's not commercial in any way.
John: It's not, no one's ever going to listen to this song.
John: No one's ever going to see this video.
John: If it ever plays anywhere, it's going to be in an airport, but it's beautiful.
John: And it's, and it, and it hits all the buttons and you guys are, are buying it because, because it is what you do.
John: But I'm telling you what I do is try and get songs on the radio.
John: And this girl with the baseball hat.
John: It has a shot at it.
Merlin: Do you think it looked, I mean, this might sound callow, but do you suppose, is there any element, because when you first started describing this, and I was thinking about this, and I had this kind of invasive thought the entire time of, like, all the stuff that I don't.
John: Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: All the stuff that I don't personally spend a lot of time on, like, stuff you put on Instagram.
Merlin: Like, I don't have accounts in any of these places.
Merlin: I don't have TikTok.
Merlin: But I know what a big deal it is.
Merlin: I see it through my wife and my kid.
Merlin: Do you suppose it looks too much like something anybody could have done?
John: You know what I mean?
Merlin: The second one, the baseball cap.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Like, do you think there's any kind of, like, soft discrimination of young womanhood that it just seemed too much like somebody could do for TikTok?
Yeah.
John: I think it was the other people on this board, there were several of them that were musicians.
Merlin: You totally laid it out.
Merlin: I get what you mean, where it's like, there's a thing Syracuse and I talk about.
Merlin: I think Syracuse coined this term, the plumber problem.
Merlin: Um, which is like when you, there's a piece of media that becomes sort of difficult for you to watch because you, you understand in maybe a geeky way, you understand so much about how that business works or that vocation works that you can't, you know, I'm talking about, you've seen this.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And for somebody like John, he's picky about everything.
Merlin: But it's frustrating to me to watch a classic, the classic on Letterman, when Letterman would have people come in to review movies that weren't movie reviewers.
Merlin: And the famous one where he had the guy come in and talk about Flashdance.
Merlin: who's a welder.
Merlin: I think it was a welder.
Merlin: She's a welder, right?
John: He was like, that's not how welders look.
Merlin: You would never have all your hair coming out the back of your hood.
Merlin: That's the wrong kind of torch for that kind of, you know, that's the plumber problem, right?
Merlin: And I wonder if this is almost like a reverse plumber problem where you are able to see like, oh, I love the way you put it.
Merlin: I write songs like try and get on the radio and this gal has it, right?
Merlin: And that's sort of your bailiwick.
Merlin: And I get that.
Merlin: It must be almost impossible to completely shed that.
Merlin: Is the like, I have a background in this or I have a context for this and you got to kind of just have trust me on this one that this, this kid's got it.
John: I think, I think when I think about it, it is that the, the, the little gal from Homer had a look.
John: to an Alaskan as One as a little white gal who was gonna start working on the cannery line You know she was she was made it was a class thing She was a she was somebody that was gonna end up working in a cannery and That's bad
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Well, I mean, nobody wakes up when they're five and says, I want to work in a cannery, probably.
John: Well, the thing is, working in a cannery is a very important part of the Alaska culture.
Merlin: It's important here, especially if you want to be John Steinbeck and write the hell out of working in a cannery.
John: But what you do is you work in a cannery the summer after you graduate from high school.
John: And maybe you work in the cannery the next summer.
John: So you work in the cannery for a summer or two, but you don't work in a cannery.
John: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Kind of like being a waiter.
John: you smell like fish guts it's like being a waiter who's covered in fish guts all day oh like an italian whereas whereas the other gal had lipstick on she was going to whatever she made she was going to she looked professional she was addressing an art audience that's right and and the thing about the 40 000 to the girl in the baseball hat was there was an 85 chance that that money was going up the chimney
John: Not because I didn't trust her to give it a shot, but because she was a long shot.
John: That's what it was.
John: Giving the money to the cannery girl was a long shot that she was ever going to get out of Homer.
Merlin: Oh, it comes almost like venture capital is too strong a word, but like angel investing in an arts future sort of.
Merlin: And maybe she didn't maybe seem too early in the process to the others or too early in her journey.
John: Well, but that's the thing.
John: Being 20 or 21 is not very early in rock and roll.
John: I mean, if you're 21, you know, like rock and roll, you don't.
John: Yeah, the Beatles were already sad by then.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: But if you are a grant writing artist, yeah, shit, you're going to try and you're going to still be writing grants when you're 75.
John: So there may have been that like, well, she doesn't have a lot of maturity.
John: And it's like she is, you know, she's like a songwriter who's writing about.
John: living in a tar paper shack, like my God, she's the whole, and the, and here we are, we're five, five years later.
John: And I don't know whether that, because I ended up a horse trading with these people.
John: Sure.
John: I said, listen, I will agree to sign off on this, on this smoke soapy Smith.
John: Um, you know, Alaska, a girl who made a video with like seven drones, um,
John: I'll give her the 40 grand if we give the 40 grand to the girl with the hat.
John: Baseball hat and armor.
John: And what that means is that two other super good candidates that, you know, where they were rapping about it.
John: Good old-fashioned horse trading.
John: It was some horse trading, and I got her the money.
John: But I don't know – you know, I'm not somebody that, like, follows up.
John: So I have no idea what happened to her.
John: Can I ask a question?
Merlin: Oh, sorry.
Merlin: Sorry, sorry.
Merlin: Yeah, go ahead.
Merlin: Well, so I don't know a ton about these kinds of things, but ordinarily it seems like there's a – at least the way I understand it is usually there would be a charitable organization that has an – for the arbitrary, let's just say any charitable organization.
Merlin: They have money set aside.
Merlin: First of all, there's usually, like, some kind of a –
Merlin: you know, people love this stuff.
Merlin: Maybe not a mission statement, but there's like a way you can say like, hey, this, the blah, blah, blah, Alaskan Arts Grant Program does X, Y, and Z in support of the blah, blah, blah.
Merlin: You know, like the kind of things you'd hear on a PBS sponsor spot, you know, the MacArthur Foundation for a more just and verdant world, you know, that kind of thing.
Merlin: So there's just something like sort of connected to, are they applying for that money to fund a given project or is it just a free form genius style grant?
John: It totally depends.
John: Really?
John: That's weird.
John: The Rasmussen family in Alaska, Elmer Rasmussen.
John: That's a pretty good name.
John: And these were the kinds of Alaskans that came basically directly from Sweden.
John: They never stopped in America.
John: Paper, oil, or seafood.
John: Probably seafood.
John: It was, I don't remember what he, how he originally worked, but you know, like the Swedes in 1910.
John: Swedish crank.
John: They were like, ooh, well, we can go to Minnesota.
John: We're making friends all the time.
John: Just go straight over the port.
John: And Burke Bork.
John: Exactly.
John: So, so he ended up in, in Anchorage and he was like, he was like a big deal.
John: He was, um, he was in politics.
John: He actually was like, you know, he ran against uncle Ted, Ted Stevens lost.
John: And then he, but a long time before that, he founded the National Bank of Alaska.
John: The National Bank of Alaska.
John: The National Bank of Alaska.
John: And the National Bank of Alaska is the big, or was, the biggest bank in Alaska.
John: And it's the, like, the pinstripe bank, you know?
John: Like, they're not out there giving $40,000 to every gold panner that comes along with a song about Soapy Smith.
Yeah.
Merlin: Our next applicant is Old Cletus.
Merlin: Old Cletus, tell us a little bit about it.
Merlin: Oh, God damn.
Merlin: I need to get my sluice running.
John: So he for sure, you know, and then the Rasmussons, you know, Anchorage was this kind of town that kind of, I'm not sure if these towns exist anymore, but it was like, it's a big enough town that it's a city, but everybody knew the Rasmussons.
John: Everybody knew the
John: Michelle Schacht had a whole song about it.
John: Yeah, there it is.
John: And, you know, and so when he died, he had a lot of money and they started this foundation that was just meant to promote Alaskan art.
John: And it was really...
John: Oh, that's such a gentle, old fashioned kind of approach.
John: I love that.
John: It is.
John: It is.
John: And a lot of it, a lot of the concept of it is like, here's a genius grant to somebody that's just doing some weird stuff.
John: They give a lot of money to like Native American artists who are working out, making stuff in the traditional way where it's like, I don't know how, I don't know what's going to happen to that.
John: I don't think, I don't know who's going to buy it, but we need it made.
John: So make it.
John: And this sort of like songwriter thing and, and fine artist aspect of it, you know, came along later.
John: Cause I think when the, when it was initially funded, it was like, no, we do want to give $40,000 to somebody that plays a tambourine and stands on top of a, of a pole.
John: And it's like, that's, you know, that's Alaska.
John: And honestly, the girl with the lipstick that did the song about soapy Smith, she's probably as Alaska as she's the one that's the drone one.
John: except God, this cannery girl, you know, and maybe I'm a romantic about cannery girls, you know,
John: But everybody should be.
John: We all should have.
Merlin: We should all be pulling for the cannery girls.
John: We should.
John: We should.
John: Because it's basically an officer and a gentleman, except there's no officer or gentleman.
John: It's just a girl working in a cannery.
John: Just a girl and a fish.
John: Who gets $40,000 from this nameless thing.
John: And the thing about it is she'll never know.
Merlin: Slow motion at the end is she carries the fish out in her arms.
Yeah.
John: she'll never know that there was a panel of like eight people that had asymmetrical artist glasses and weird you know that looked like like a fun like a fun like a like a like a blunt cut on one side that kind of like yeah
John: and one is round I mean basically like the dinner party in Beetlejuice and they're all glaring at me the one guy who's like in a bathrobe with a scimitar pulling for the cannery girls I'm telling you we gotta give the money to this one cannery girls is also a really good name for a song
Merlin: cannery girls and i'm the guy to write it if portugal the man doesn't do it i didn't want to have to connect the dots for you john but cannery girls is just sitting there because like you feel strongly about you got to support the cannery girls you do you do is that right love skiing and canning
John: Well, no, just for the one or two seasons, you know, I understand.
Merlin: I understand that there's those kinds of jobs.
Merlin: Like my lady friend worked at one of those terrible Colorado ski places.
Merlin: There's those kinds, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Those kinds of jobs, you know, everybody.
John: I think they're regional, right?
John: Every, every place has got a plant where you go and you work until you can get out of the town.
John: My mom went to work for, um, what, uh,
John: Over at the old ether factory?
John: It was General Electric.
John: She worked at General Electric.
John: Yeah, at the ether factory.
Merlin: You know what's so funny?
Merlin: The more you learn about General Electric, there's so much stuff that was a problem about GE that was kind of just tangentially related to electric.
Merlin: But, like, I hope you like PCBs because that's what keeps the oil from flaming up and it might give you a really bad skin condition.
Yeah.
John: But anyways, you know the thing is you you know the the work is mysterious and important The work is mysterious and important Merlin.
John: Yeah, sorry.
John: Sorry.
John: I'm doing a thing.
John: I'm pulling in a headline I know you like it.
John: You like the show everybody likes it.
Merlin: Okay, but but like but you know here's the thing here's the thing this last week of TV has really been something else and but but when in the in the pre-roll like the the recap of
Merlin: What does Christopher Walken say when he says, I met her when he was a stew man, a stew man at the ether factory.
Merlin: And I said to him, he was a stew man at the ether factory.
Merlin: And then we get to, well, sorry, no spoilers.
Merlin: But, you know, there's those kinds of jobs.
John: You're right.
John: You're right.
Merlin: And then Lumen leaves town and then you're, you know, not getting credit for your severance.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: And it's like this three hour long movie that he had a pretty hard time putting out.
Merlin: I mean, it does what it says on the tin.
Merlin: It's his very personal, very editorial look at the role of Los Angeles in movies.
Merlin: And I mean, yeah, I mean, it's important that this is where Max Sennett shot these, but it's all done just showing scenes from movies.
Merlin: And he has a POV on this.
Merlin: And his POV is that this is – let's look at all these different ways that – maybe people who don't love Los Angeles, they call it LA.
Merlin: Like, they don't love this city the way that I do or see it the way that I do.
Merlin: And here's the kind of movies we end up getting out of that, whether that's, you know, Chinatown or The Big Lebowski or – but, you know, or these, you know.
Merlin: But what was my point about that was that –
Merlin: It had to do with the cannery.
Merlin: Oh, oh, oh, there's this wonderful movie.
Merlin: There's this director from the 60s whose stuff I keep, I think it's called, I forget the guy's name, but it's a black guy who produced these movies.
Merlin: And they were talking about how there used to be, I think, three or four different tire manufacturing facilities in the Los Angeles area.
Merlin: Yeah, it was one of those things like, you know, maybe, you know, just less than a generation earlier, shipbuilding in San Francisco.
Merlin: It was a place where, I guess, automotive manufacturing in Detroit.
Merlin: It was a place where black people, often from the South, would come and get like a pretty good middle class house buying job.
Merlin: It just, there was something about that.
Merlin: And I know San Francisco had this to an extent, but just hearing that Los Angeles used to have all these, and they show them like driving past...
Merlin: I like the Lumen factory, honestly.
Merlin: But, like, can you imagine that?
Merlin: That there used to be that much tire manufacturing alone in Los Angeles?
Merlin: I didn't know that.
John: It's crazy.
John: And I think I only did through some kind of Roger Rabbit rabbit hole.
John: Roger Rabbit hole.
John: That's featured in the movie.
John: From a long time ago where I, like, was suddenly arrived in some tire manufacturing in Los Angeles in my imagination.
John: I was like, what the fuck?
John: But you know, Seattle used to be a coal.
John: Seattle shipped so much coal to San Francisco when San Francisco was rebuilding after the fire.
John: Basically, their real old Mossbacks up here will say, you know, San Francisco is built on the timber and the coal of Seattle.
Merlin: I thought we were all built on West Virginia.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Pump the brakes, scrappy dude.
John: No, I guess like what built Seattle before the gold in Alaska.
John: Before that, what Seattle, why there was even a Seattle is they found coal up in the hills and they could chop down trees for a thousand years and never get tired.
John: And so when you look at Seattle now and you think of coal, it's not like coal.
John: What are you talking about?
John: There's no coal.
Merlin: As you see on this Los Angeles movie, I remember this from Beverly Hills Cop, probably.
Merlin: Whenever you started seeing those oil derricks or oil, what do you call that?
Merlin: Oil derricks?
John: Yeah, a little pump jack.
Merlin: But it'll just be like this little, looks like about a 20-foot square, you know, like of cyclone fence or whatever around just an oil thing, like in the middle of nowhere.
Merlin: Just, it's the oddest thing.
Merlin: But the reason I'm saying that is because, hey, if there's a mineral resource that we can get out of the ground pretty easily, people will tend to discover that.
Merlin: Yes, gold, but also coal.
Merlin: If there's coal sitting around, it's pretty easy to get to.
Merlin: Shit, dog.
John: Shit dog.
John: That's exactly what they say.
John: They say it in that accent.
John: Shit dog.
John: Shit dog.
John: Have you seen pictures of Venice, California back in when it was new?
John: No.
John: It's pump jacks the whole way down.
John: And there are pictures of Venice.
John: uh where you can if you look at a modern picture today some of those old houses are still standing and you know i quasi lived in venice for a year when when millennium girlfriend lived there right you know i know all those streets and you know the thing about like the streets close to the beach they're pretty narrow they're really close together
Merlin: I remember when I was there, I just I remember narrow is a good word for it.
Merlin: I remember being a lot of like little like art, art, you know, fine arts, whatever, you know, local art selling places and like cafes.
Merlin: And it still felt like it was very, even by the time you were there, probably still pretty small in scale.
Merlin: That's a thing, right?
John: Yeah, I think that I think that Snapchat actually moving in there kind of screwed him up.
John: But even in 2007, I think Venice was cheap and ragged.
Merlin: A little bit, yeah, a little bit, what's the word?
John: Colorful.
John: Colorful, that's right.
John: But when you look at pictures of Venice in 1912.
John: I had no idea.
John: All those houses, those little art gallery, rickety surf shop houses, right next to them is a pump jack, pumping oil.
John: John, what's a pump jack?
John: It's the one that you see.
Merlin: Is that the thing that goes up and down like a giraffe or like a drinking bird but for oil?
John: Like a drinking bird, yeah.
John: Okay, all right.
John: All right.
John: And, you know, they move fast or slow depending on how much oil's coming out.
John: But, like, right on the beach, basically.
John: You know, like one block up from the sand.
Yeah.
John: Uh, and when you're there, when you're in Venice now, no sign of that, no, no sign of it at all.
John: Um, although, you know, you, there are places like you say all over LA, including that road out to LAX where you're suddenly in West Texas for years.
Merlin: Yeah, I think of... It must be Beverly Hills Cop, but I remember opening with like a sunrise and it has that Misty... You know what?
Merlin: I can't promote this.
Merlin: Play Misty for me.
Merlin: I want... I'm going to rephrase this.
Merlin: I hate when people open like that.
Merlin: I can't recommend this enough.
Merlin: Los Angeles plays itself.
Merlin: Very much worth finding.
Merlin: In a minute, I'm going to get everybody go and get yourself a piece of paper and a pencil because I'm going to ask you to write something down in a minute.
Merlin: So be ready for that.
Merlin: But yeah, I feel like the beginning of Beverly Hills Cop, it's like...
Merlin: the sun's coming up and it's all wavy, you know?
Merlin: And I don't, I mean, that, I think of that as Texas.
Merlin: I don't think of that as freaking Los Angeles.
Merlin: I don't think of that as Venice, but, but then the pump, pump jacks, they, they get pushed out by something more financially lucrative for the people who own the land.
John: well merlin if you were watching landman starring billy bob thornton on h probably stars gtv or whatever yes uh that that that show will tell you all about tv espanol i'll see if i can find it it's called it's called casa and carton never mind
Merlin: I had to change the spelling at Ellis Island.
Merlin: The oil, the history of America, oil and oil.
Merlin: You had a pop quiz and you prepared for the wrong pop quiz.
John: The thing about Uncle Jack, my Uncle Jack, is when he went up to Alaska,
John: He had a law degree, and he had no interest in work in the traditional sense.
John: You know, he was the youngest of three.
John: I have half of those credentials.
John: Yeah, there you go.
Merlin: I'm still working on my law degree, but the other one, I'm good.
John: But what he wanted was adventure.
John: And so Uncle Jack went up there and he met his wife up there and she was wearing blue jeans and her hair in a bun.
John: She had one of those like Rosie the Riveter napkins on her head.
John: Did she maybe have her shirt tied at the belly?
John: i'm sure she did i've seen pictures and she had like logger boots on and she'd gone and she'd gone to vassar and he was like oh my god and she's like i'm here for adventure and i don't need no man a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle and he was like i'm just a girl who can't say yes you're the one
John: but it was before like oil had really taken over up there and it was like what's going to be the thing it was like 50s 60s uh yeah like like early mid 50s he was up there and then the oil they started finding oil and at the time it was my he so uncle jack wrote a book called crude dreams about the early
John: Oil Exploration in Alaska.
John: It's a great title, but also kind of unfortunate.
John: Crude Dreams.
John: And the thing about Crude Dreams is it's a perfect example of something that in Alaska is a real thing.
John: His book up there was a real book.
John: It was like in all the newspapers.
John: People refer to Crude Dreams.
John: It's very much an Alaskan success.
John: But I don't know if anybody anywhere else has read Crew Dreams.
John: I never saw the sales figures for it.
John: I have a copy here if you want one.
Merlin: But as being sort of a new part of this empire, we have to reset the clock a little bit, right?
Merlin: Where there's still things where we're waiting for the first person to do this here.
Merlin: People wrote the first history of some city in Massachusetts, probably in the 1700s, whereas here, I mean, it's kind of analogous, right?
Merlin: We need to have a sliding scale to understand that Uncle Jack might have been writing crude dreams in the Alaska equivalent of 1720.
John: And I think that's right.
John: And part of the reason he wrote the book was he knew all the players in the oil business before Prudhoe Bay, before the big strike.
John: And it was important as somebody who'd been there to get all that down because I think probably 100 years ago, they will be grateful that he wrote that book.
John: But what he describes in the book is a time when the state of Alaska is trying to figure out what to do.
John: Like, well, if there's oil under the ground, people want it.
John: And so what do we do is it's basically like a gold mining claim.
John: You come, you put stakes in the ground, you say, I'm claiming this 40 acres or, or whatever.
John: And I get the mineral rights underneath it.
John: Right.
John: Basically like gold or silver.
Merlin: But then at that point, though, you still got to put it on a ship and go to, what, Long Beach?
Merlin: No, that's too far, probably.
Merlin: As your mom knows, twart no pipeline yet.
John: Twart no pipeline, twart no nothing.
Merlin: And is the infrastructure for oil – what was the infrastructure for oil refinement like on the West Coast in the 50s?
Merlin: Did it even – Well, I think Long Beach is – I mean, that's a really good question.
Merlin: Isn't that where everything goes?
Merlin: Okay, quick.
Merlin: But, like, just knowing that Long Beach – Biggest port.
Merlin: It's a really big deal.
Merlin: And I didn't know that – I didn't have an index card on that until COVID when I learned, you know, so much about how weird our supply chain is.
Merlin: Oh, remember that picture where there was just ships stacked up to the horizon?
Merlin: Do you remember the one that got cattywampus in a channel and they couldn't do nothing about it?
Merlin: Oh, the cattywampus!
Merlin: It's the good ship cattywampus.
John: Anyway, Uncle Jack went down around Soldotna somewhere.
John: with uh with you know aunt martha in her rolled up blue jeans and her and her and her logger boots uh and he had he also had logger boots and a flannel shirt and they went down and they put stakes in the ground literally and they were like we're claiming the oil rights for this whatever plot of land
John: And, and so the, the story of crude dreams is the story of when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay, the state of Alaska for a long time, considered the possibility that they would just give up those oil leases through a lottery system that anybody could join a liquor license.
John: Yeah.
John: So you would just throw your, you know, like, Hey, it's me, John Roderick, indie rocker.
John: I'm going to throw my, my name in this hat.
John: And I might get an oil lease that ends up being worth a billion dollars.
John: Wow.
John: And in the end, and it was like this incredible moment.
John: In the end, of course, the oil companies were like, look, don't do that.
Merlin: I've seen the Daniel Plainview movie.
Merlin: All these people make you offers, but are they going to be able to get that out of the ground in the same way that I am?
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: I've come from across the state many miles away to talk with you tonight because he knows how to extract that precious, precious black gold out of the ground.
Merlin: He and his son have come out there to make an inspection of the land.
Merlin: I'm not getting any of their lines exactly right and it's killing me.
John: But I think what the oil companies probably said was, listen, you're going to give these away to a thousand ding-dongs, and then we're going to have to come along and buy them.
Merlin: Isn't that kind of what I'm saying?
Merlin: You're not just going to give these away.
Merlin: It's one thing to say, oh, here's your scratch-off ticket.
Merlin: It's easy enough to go to the 7-Eleven and claim you're $1 billion.
Merlin: But if we don't get that out of the ground, that's not good for anybody.
John: You can't just give it to somebody who works in a cannery.
John: they would end up having to buy it from everybody.
John: And what that would mean is every single 10th person in Alaska would be getting some royalty check from the oil companies for the land that they had won in the lease.
John: And the oil companies were like, here's what we're gonna do.
Merlin: It's amazing they even pondered that, I have to be honest.
John: I know, it really is.
John: That's the great thing about this book.
John: It tells this incredible story where it's like, you almost had...
John: Like 200 billionaires in Alaska that happened to just be guys with suspenders on their blue jeans who got their names in there.
John: And instead of having 200 billionaires, you had four oil companies that were worth trillions, but, but my uncle Jack and aunt Martha actually got an oil claim before the state worked out.
John: And a lot of people did before the state worked out that that was insane.
John: And uncle Jack and aunt Martha struck oil on their whatever acre plot.
John: Oh my goodness.
John: Down in the middle of the bush.
John: And they sold the claim to Conoco or Arco or Sumco.
John: And for my, my uncle's entire adult life from the time this, this probably all happened when he was 30, I guess.
Merlin: Wow.
John: Until he died.
John: And now my cousins continue to collect a Royal, an oil royalty.
John: for the oil that is getting taken out of this weird little spot outside of soldan and my cousins his his daughters uncle jack and aunt martha's daughters are rabid environmentalists like radical radical environmentalists my cousin libby who we have a mutual friend who is very very very progressive but is married into an oil family
Merlin: No, I mean, it's complicated stuff.
Merlin: And that's where you get into that, what do they call it?
Merlin: Benign neglect?
Merlin: What's that thing they call where the rich guys act like they make a lot of money?
Merlin: Effective altruism, right?
Merlin: Effective altruism.
Merlin: Yeah, that's that thing all the tech guys talk about, where our point is to sexually assault the land, take everything we can.
Merlin: But then all the money that we make, we're going to use it on good causes.
John: Yeah, it's good.
John: It's good causes.
John: And I don't honestly, so I'm not good cause.
John: I talked, I talked to, you know, I talked to Libby all the time and, and losing her parents was really hard.
John: She was very close to them, even though they were.
John: you know uncle jack was and aunt martha were liberal democrats but libby believes that the you know one world peace and we meditate ourselves levitate or whatever i'm not sure i can't keep all the all the losing parents is hard but i don't honestly i have not talked to either of of my cousins about what is going on with that slow dribble of oil
John: that made it so uncle jack never had to get a job i know neither of you want to get a job um but you also believe that oil is killing the planet that's complicated yeah it is complicated and i so we never bring it up we never bring it doesn't come up i'm not the type of person that's going to bring that up at the dinner table you know why merlin because i don't drink
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And also, you have the sense to know that there are certain things in this world where no good can come of it.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: But if I drank... And that's something young people don't understand.
Merlin: Now, if you drank, you would want to take them to task a little bit.
John: If I drank, that would be the first thing I would say when I had my fifth drink.
John: So...
John: So, save the earth, what's going on with your oil factory?
John: Hey, I got a couple questions for you, Joan Baez.
John: And you know, that's why I quit drinking, because I saw that in my future.
John: I was like, you know, you're going to be that guy.
John: See, you are smart.
John: You think ahead.
John: You're going to spill your drink at Christmas, and you're going to say, what the hell?
John: Clean it up like the oil that you're getting out of your soldatina.
John: Yeah, shoot spider in the foot, the whole nine.
Merlin: You know, life is complicated.
Merlin: it is really it is really super complicated and everybody's got their reasons you know you know everybody's got their reasons i've heard you say that before that's the terrible thing in life is that every everyone has their reasons um uh wait was there anything else i wanted because you've covered so much good stuff here so you don't i don't know good stuff yeah i know i'm sorry
Merlin: But you have not – no, no, this is definitely something that perhaps separates me, maybe separates you from other people, is like you haven't looked up how that went or how that turned out or if the money really did go up the chimney.
Merlin: Is she still working in a cannery?
Merlin: You know, you haven't – are you ever curious to go back and see where some of your students and recipients have gone in life?
John: You know, the, the, the problem is so last night I'm sitting downstairs and I'm like, I know that there are demos that I made of some songs that I don't have on my 2014 laptop.
John: And if they're not on the 2014 laptop, it means they're in the Anna banana computer.
John: That I somehow didn't transfer over.
John: You missed a folder or something.
John: Yeah, and I don't know how... And I have the Anna Banana computer.
John: It's sitting right here.
John: But they might be in the Mac G4...
John: that I also have sitting here.
Merlin: Well, this kind of speculation, my brain just shuts down and I'm like, I will never find any of this.
John: They might be in one of these shoe boxes that have a ton of hard, like one, like, like 100 megabyte hard drives that have like pin connectors, uh,
Merlin: um that i'm making me very anxious right now john i have all of these things still now but those demos but something that tickles you about those demos that like oh maybe this is the one i remember i want to might want to revisit that kind of idea what would drive you to go go discover your pin connections
John: here's the thing i don't know if you if you have this kind of adhd because of course you and i have the same adhd oh okay sorry but um it's an odd week but as soon as i started thinking about it i was like what else is on all those sure
John: Probably more tame porn.
John: So I got... Right?
John: Before you really escalated.
John: I got all the boxes.
John: I didn't even know there was porn on the internet until like 2009.
John: Yeah.
John: That's the internet.
John: Mike Squires was like, you know, you can look at naked pictures.
John: You ever pop your baloney?
John: And I said, what?
John: Who would put naked pictures on the internet?
John: What a way.
Merlin: Was it an accident?
Merlin: Anyways anyways, yeah, no so now but now you've tickled yourself with with our ADHD you've tickled yourself to go Well, I know I'm interested in demos pins pins pins are upsetting, but I Kind of wondering what's on all these hard drives and let me guess does that become a project restart gathering all the things that need data taken off of them That's correct.
John: I pulled it all out.
John: Oh really actually started connectors pulled all that's great hooked them up to the 2015 laptop
John: And some combination of, uh, things popped up.
John: And one of them was like, do you want to upload the contents of this hard drive to Google cloud or something or apple cloud?
John: And I said, sure.
Merlin: And I pushed the button.
Merlin: And it told you not so fast if you don't have enough space?
John: No.
John: It told me, great.
John: We're going to cook on this for 12 hours.
John: Oh.
John: And for 12 hours.
John: I understand.
Merlin: It's like when you want your desktop and downloads to go to the cloud, that kind of thing.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Yeah.
John: And it sat with this churning gear just like chung, chung, chung, chung, chung, chung.
John: Hard drives used to be a lot louder, John.
John: It was loud and I was like, this isn't going to work.
John: And I actually plugged a couple of them in and they were like, we don't even see a hard drive here.
John: And I was like, damn it.
John: Damn it.
John: I knew it.
John: That's probably the one that has all the greatest tracks on it.
John: Anyway, so now then I got a course.
John: I don't know if you know anything about ADHD, but then I got bored and I wandered off.
John: And now I've got all of that stuff kind of half.
John: It's all hanging from strings.
Merlin: I bet you don't feel bad about it.
Merlin: I bet you feel great about it.
Merlin: I feel great about it.
Merlin: You put it away very neatly and with total emotional detachment, I'm guessing.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: That's fine.
Merlin: Done and dusted.
Merlin: On to the next thing.
Merlin: 7.30 p.m.
Merlin: Wonder what I'll do next.
John: But then, so this was several weeks ago where it's been hanging out now like a spaghetti monster all over everything.
John: But last night I was like, you know what?
John: You know what I need?
John: I don't want to put it in the cloud.
John: Fuck the cloud.
John: I need to get one of those 10 terabyte drives where everything is everything.
Merlin: And you can put your whole... So you can just crazy go nuts.
Merlin: I don't need to worry about size.
Merlin: I'm just dragging everything onto that one hard drive.
Merlin: Here's... Like you have a new folder in your home directory.
Merlin: You have a folder called Anna Banana.
Merlin: You have a folder called Busted S Pen Drive.
Merlin: But you're just dragging everything over and let God sort it out later.
Merlin: Let God sort it out.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And so I go on Wirecutter, which everybody does, I'm assuming.
John: And I go, what's the best big hard drive?
John: And they're like, have we got an answer for you?
John: It's this one and it's on sale.
John: Hmm.
John: And blah, blah, blah.
John: And so I was like, oh, well, I'll just get it then.
John: Cause it's not that expensive.
John: And so I ordered it and I'd never seen this before.
John: Amazon said this disc, this, this thing may come in the middle of the night tonight.
John: Like I ordered it at... Oh, you got it the same day?
Merlin: I ordered it at midnight.
Merlin: Yeah, this is a new thing they do.
Merlin: You know, there used to be everything was always if you had Prime.
Merlin: I don't mean to be talking down to you because, you know, you live in Amazon.
Merlin: You live near them.
Merlin: But, yeah, what changed was, you know, it used to be two day and then it was kind of one day.
Merlin: And now they have this option sometimes because of their distribution thing where you could say, you know, if we can deliver it overnight and have it waiting in the morning, do you want that?
Merlin: Or it can come during the day.
Merlin: Or you can, you know, get everything on Friday or whatever.
Merlin: It blows my mind.
Merlin: I did that last week.
Merlin: And it kind of freaked me out a little bit.
Merlin: Because I ordered, like, close to bedtime.
Merlin: And it was on the front porch in the morning.
John: I ordered it in the middle of the night.
John: And I didn't click any box.
John: It said, this is going to arrive...
John: in the night and i said it's the night now it's fucking 2 a.m or whatever and when i woke up it was on the port that's so crazy it i don't know when it arrived you know it arrived before you got a big hard drive john that's awesome well yeah but now so now i know and i know i know theracusa is it's probably listening and he's like he's oh i can just by my count i can already count three things that i should have told you that i haven't told you yet yeah
John: He's like dying, pulling his hair out.
John: He's throwing his coffee cup around the room.
John: Yeah.
John: Because I have no idea now how to hook up this terabyte, because I don't know what pin connectors it has.
John: And this 2014 laptop only has like... It's got different pins, John.
John: It has old USB.
John: It doesn't even have new USB, let alone... You should have saved all those 30-pin iPhone cables.
John: Remember how much you used to love those?
John: I am so many.
John: So I don't know how I'm going.
John: And I don't think maybe you can correct me.
John: I don't think you can just take an old Seagate 500 millibyte hard drive and just hook it directly to a terabyte drive and let them talk to each other.
John: Right.
John: There's got to be a computer in the middle.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, sorry.
Merlin: Are you asking for tech support?
Merlin: I don't know how interesting that will be to our listeners, but the problem is I will just compound the problem.
Merlin: And I just want to be super clear here.
Merlin: This is not a problem I've created.
Merlin: Like, this is your circus and your monkeys.
Merlin: He's over here with his own, like, he doesn't drink coffee.
Merlin: He has a Sprite once a year.
Merlin: But he's over here doing whatever, buying milk for his wife.
Merlin: He's got to go make ice.
Merlin: He's got all this stuff happening over here.
Merlin: Now, the thing is, I'm going to get it twice.
Merlin: Because first I'm going to get it because I didn't warn slash advise you about something he feels strongly about.
Merlin: But then also, whatever I'm saying right now will somehow get me into more trouble.
Merlin: It's why you never talk to a cop.
Merlin: A cop does not want to find out who committed the crime.
Merlin: The cop just wants someone to go to jail.
Merlin: Do you understand?
Merlin: And in Syracuse's case, it's always you that goes to jail?
Merlin: Well, it's kind of like a Serpica situation where, like, you know, he's always the bad cop.
Merlin: And the good cop.
Merlin: He decides who gets to be a cop.
Merlin: Why don't I have a podcast with John Syracuse?
Merlin: I ask myself that all the time.
Merlin: Are these naked hard drives in a couple cases?
Merlin: You've got like a regular old sitting around naked hard drive.
Merlin: What does a naked hard drive mean?
Merlin: Like the kind where you'd have to normally plug it in with the pins and stuff into the computer, like the little silvery box with ports on it.
John: Oh, no, these were always— They're in another computer.
John: They're consumer-based, outternal hard drives.
John: Yeah, okay, but it's not a naked hard drive.
Merlin: It's got a case and everything.
John: It's got a case, yeah.
John: Shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh.
Merlin: But some of them just go bonked.
John: But you might have, yeah, right, right, right.
John: And they don't have anything.
John: They claim not to have anything.
John: Oh, that's a whole process.
Merlin: I know they're lying.
Merlin: I mean, I know they're lying.
Merlin: Of course they have something.
Merlin: Can I make a suggestion?
Merlin: Find the one that you are the least confused about.
Merlin: Instead of saying, like, what's the worst case scenario for how I would hook up this one that I don't even know if there's anything on and it's clacking, is there one, if there is one that you feel more confident about, both in terms of whether it might have something good on it, you know, are there any low-hanging fruit, as we used to say, where you could say, okay, I'm going to put all my effort into just trying one of these and see how I feel about how it went?
Merlin: Because you kind of want to eat the hard drive one bite at a time.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: I see what you're saying.
Merlin: It's overwhelming.
Merlin: It's overwhelming to a person to think I need to solve all of these disparate and perhaps unrelated.
Merlin: Well, certainly, you know, they're unknown problems.
Merlin: You don't even know yet what you don't know about what you don't know.
Merlin: So start with the thing you think you know the most about and maybe just pursue one of those.
Merlin: And that might buoy you.
Merlin: If you open it up and it's got a fuck ton of good demo stuff on, it's got your original demo for Cannery Girls on it, you should definitely.
Merlin: And then you go, oh, that's cool.
Merlin: Or you might go, yeah, fuck this.
Merlin: This is just a bunch of bullshit.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: But you'd have more information than you have now.
Merlin: And you might even have more songs than you have now.
John: i love to be buoyed as you know yeah um i think for the for the for the first let's see when did i start using computers 1981 um i think you're ahead of me way ahead of me well you know because my mom is i know i didn't i wasn't gifted at them but from 1981 to the present what is how many years is that that's like 40 44 years older than most of our listeners
John: And in that entire time, I have not understood a single thing about them.
Merlin: They sure don't make it easy for you, John.
Merlin: No, they don't.
John: Anytime I put anything on a hard drive, it was because I was being told to do that by somebody and I didn't understand why.
Merlin: You sound like you've got exactly the right attitude and comportment for going into an unknown technical project.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
John: I remember I was on tour and I got a cell phone call from the guy that had mixed pretend to fall.
John: And he said, his name is Kip Bielman.
John: And he said, hey, I've got all these files on these hard drives from your record.
John: And I need to wipe the files off of the hard drives because I need this space.
John: I need to clear your stuff off of these hard drives.
John: Oh, did he just Gmail them to you or something?
John: Well, there was no Gmail then.
John: This was 2003.
John: Oh, right.
John: Yeah.
John: And I was like, well, whose problem is that?
John: That's not my problem.
John: And he was like, yeah, well, do you want these files or not?
John: Yeah.
John: And I said, I don't know.
John: Do I?
Merlin: Because you've been fully aware that that was your first big experience with Pro Tools recording digitally, right?
Yeah.
Merlin: Well, no, we recorded completely analog, but then he put all the tracks.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: Yes, the mix.
John: I understand.
John: These are the tracks that he imported.
John: I would think you'd really want to have those, I would think.
John: I really do want to have them.
John: But in 2003, when his discs were so expensive and that space was so prime that his version of dealing with this was not, let me send you these discs and you send me $100.
Merlin: This is why the BBC has such a spotty archive.
John: These are just recorded over shows.
John: They're Dr. Who's.
John: There's no there's no tonight show from 1960 to 1970.
John: And so I honestly don't know whether I told him to throw to dump it all or I don't know where I don't know.
John: Maybe I have those on one of these hard drives somewhere.
Merlin: So do you think they're on?
Merlin: Wait, did you you don't know whether you got the member?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, I think I either said something with old pins.
John: There'd be something with old pins.
John: I might've said to him, Oh yeah.
John: Okay.
John: Well put those somewhere and I'll give you $50.
John: Or I might've said, Hey man, I'm real busy.
John: Why don't you, why don't you figure that out for yourself?
John: Or I might've said, how did you get this number?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: I don't, you know.
Merlin: Because it probably didn't register.
Merlin: Like, you know, there's a lot of things like that happen.
Merlin: I mean, you know, a contemporary example is when you say to people something like, okay, well, you know, if you've made this change to your security settings, you're going to get this, like, one-time code that you've got to, like, print out and keep somewhere secret.
Merlin: But seriously, like, you really, if you're going to do that, you really, really, really have to, like, take care of that and know that, you know what I mean?
Merlin: You need to know that you've got...
Merlin: the key to a thing.
Merlin: And if not you, but if one just goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.
Merlin: And you move on because you're a very, very busy businessman.
Merlin: Like you could find yourself mega fucked.
John: You could find yourself living in a shotgun shack.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: In another part of the world.
John: I hope the canter girl's happy.
John: I hope I can find Cannery Girl's demo and put that song out.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: You know what?
John: She seemed happy.
John: She seemed like the type of person that was going to live a happy life.
John: She didn't need it.
John: She didn't need it.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Which is why she should get it.
Merlin: What if she's huge on TikTok now?
Merlin: Wouldn't that be wild?
Merlin: It could be incredible.
Merlin: She's the new jewel.
Merlin: Who will save your soul, John?
Merlin: I can name up the two singer-songwriters from Alaska now.
Merlin: Go on.
Merlin: Michelle Schacht and what's her name?
Merlin: Jewel.
John: But Michelle Schacht is from Texas.
John: No, she's not.
John: She just wrote a song about Alaska.
Merlin: Nah, I think you're confused.
Merlin: Tell me some other big Alaskan bands.
John: Portugal the Man.
John: There was a band called something like Diamond Fist Death Metal.
Merlin: Yeah, I think that's a Gordon Liu Kung Fu movie from 1979.
Merlin: Yeah, there was like a really big metal band that does like... You cannot fight my Anchorage style.
John: He does like Swedish metal.
John: They do Swedish metal.
John: Oh, sweet.
John: I am a fan.
John: I like me some Swedish ass metal.
John: and uh but they're like like all metal bands everywhere it's like hardcore bands they they live in a completely separate ecosystem so you can have you could have the world's biggest metal band living next door to you and you would just like never know not until the churches start burning right right or not not until they ever walk outside who will save your soul who will save your soul i gotta go to the bathroom anyway