I'll Follow You

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Myan Binder is a healer, clairvoyant, animal communicator, and spiritual  teacher. She has studied painting at the University of Wisconsin and art  direction at the Miami Ad School and has taught everything from  preschool to ESL to adult refugees. Currently, she teaches classes on all things psychic, including energy awareness, how to turn on your own abilities, how to heal yourself through working with your own energy, how to use your psychic abilities in your everyday life, and how to  communicate with other animals.

She is also the creator of the campaign Clean Your Energy, which engages people in becoming more aware of their own energy and the energy around them.

In our delightful chat today, we discuss why it’s harder to feel safe  when you get pulled out of what you know, how personal it is to create a grounding connection to the earth, the difference between knowing what safety is intellectually versus actually feeling and experiencing it, the magic of using your imagination, how not cleaning your energy can lead to stagnation and miscommunication, why cleaning your energy is more involved than just sitting quietly in meditation, and how the current increase in animal adoptions is giving us a chance to relearn that we’re all animals too.

And speaking of animals, throughout the conversation, we’re very actively joined by Myan’s cat Galaxy, who you will probably hear purring  into the microphone at several points.

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Today I’m delighted to be in conversation with Brian Westfall. Brian is the proprietor of the shop Rare Birds Musical Oddities.

Rare Birds is a shop dedicated to those elusive, beautiful, and  lovingly weird pieces that will bring character and vibe to your recording dates, home studio, and performances.

Vintage guitars, basses, and synths; cowbells once owned by real  cows; Casio keyboards once owned by real 1980s kids; maracas brought back from a great aunt’s college trip to Mexico; drum machines that used to sit on grandma’s organ; toy pianos from Christmas 1958; wheezing chord organs; middle school band orchestra glockenspiels, and much more  await you when you visit Rare Birds Musical Oddities.

As Brian and I nerd out about all things gear related, we also  discuss why this is a great time to be a musician streaming performances online, how nostalgia plays a part in the Rare Birds shopping experience, the frustration of how elusive the really cool stuff can be, why he actually encourages his customers to resell the gear they’ve bought from him, and why he’s more interested in what you’re doing with  your gear rather than what gear you have.

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Today I’m welcoming back to the show my first repeat guest--who also  happens to be the human I’m sheltering in place with--the writer,  musician, and scholar Brian Cremins.

Brian’s joining me today for a recorded version of an ongoing conversation we’ve been having basically since we first met a little over a decade ago, all about our favorite books about music.

Because we’re both writers and both musicians, it turns out we have a lot of thoughts about the intersection of those two disciplines!

We both chose a small stack of books that are important to us individually, though of course there’s a lot of overlap between our lists, and of course there were dozens of other books that came to mind during the course of this conversation.

In talking about those books, we also discuss the way music critics listen to music versus the way musicians listen to music; how descriptive language can mystify what a musician is actually doing in a way that might not be helpful; how the best books can feel more like traveling companions rather than destination points; and spending time imagining what certain albums sounded like in the days before everything was instantly available to us online. Plus, Brian finally goes on the record with his comparison between the Hall and Oates song “I Can’t Go for That” and Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place.”

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I’m delighted today to be in conversation with my very good friend and former colleague Yuval Taylor.

Yuval is the coauthor of the books Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop and Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Antioch Review, and the Oxford American, among other publications. His most recent book, as a solo author, is Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal, which was a finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography. It’s a deeply researched look at the  six-year-long friendship, and eventual bitter falling out, between Zora  Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. The book, which will be released in  paperback in July 2020, has been praised by NPR as having “a vivid anecdotal style,” by the Wall Street Journal as “compelling, concise and scrupulously researched,” and by the New York Times Book Review as “a highly readable account of one of the most compelling and consequential relationships in black literary history.”

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In my attempt to bridge the gap between not wanting to add to the noise about the coronavirus situation, but then also not wanting to ignore its presence in our lives either, I thought that a conversation with my brilliant friend Erin the Psychic Witch might be unique and helpful.

Erin is a gifted psychic teacher and healer with two decades of experience in the healing arts. With a substantial and wide-ranging background in bodywork, natural skin care, holistic and functional nutrition models, energy healing, and psychic development, she brings physical and energetic modalities together to create a practical path toward healing. Her work is nothing less than facilitating the healing, liberation, and multidimensional maturation of all beings, with the ultimate goal of full creative expression. She teaches and offers various containers for healing work online through her website erinthepsychicwitch.com.

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Paul and Angie Lowe were teachers for many decades at Lake Central High School in St. John, Indiana. During the weekdays, Paul taught speech and Angie taught French, and then on afternoons and weekends, they were heads of the theater program, known as the Lake Central Theatre Guild. As you’ll hear them elaborate in the course of the episode, they expanded LCTG’s program in the early 1970s to include former graduates and members of the local theater scene in their summer community theater productions. Nearly a quarter century after they first directed "Jesus Christ Superstar" in 1979, they revived the show in the summer of 2003 as one of the final productions in the old high school theater. Today, many years now after their retirement from teaching, they retain the LCTG initials by way of their new company, L’arc en Ciel Theatre Group, a dinner theater based out of Great Oaks Banquet Hall in Cedar Lake, Indiana.

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Welcome to the perfume episode!

Today I’m in conversation with my dear and brilliant friend Shiamin Kwa.

Shiamin is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures  and Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of  three books, the most recent being Regarding Frames: Thinking with Comics in the Twenty-first Century,  which was just released by RIT Press in February of this year. Her  written work explores relationships between form and content, text and  image, self and self-presentation, surface and depth, and the conflicts  between what we say and what we mean. Her research interests include  theater and fiction, food studies, graphic narratives, literary studies,  cultural studies, comparative and world literature, and literary and  narrative theory.

She also contributed an amazingly funny and tender essay about the band Wham! to my most recent zine The Last Band of My Youth.

In today’s deep dive on perfume, we talk about how smells can seem so  much richer in our memories when we don’t have access to them anymore,  the quiet spaciousness of perfume as object, how we’re meant to interact  with perfume on a time scale, how wearing Frederic Malle’s “Portrait of  a Lady” is like having to do self-promotion as the author of a new  book, and the difficulty of imposing order on things you love.

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Today, I’m incredibly pleased to be speaking with my friend, neighbor, and former bandmate, the poet Tony Trigilio.

Tony is the author and editor of 13 books, including, most recently, Ghosts of the Upper Floor (published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2019), which is the third installment in his multivolume poem, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood). His selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (published by Ahsahta Press in 2014), and the author of Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2012). Tony coedits the poetry journal Court Green and is an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly. He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Today we discuss his origin story as a poet, the possibilities that  get unlocked by asking a student “tell me more of what you mean by  that,” building bridges between the hemispheres of the brain, how  playing drums professionally helped Tony unite his practice as a writer  with his work as a scholar, and why the best art feels like a friend  saying to you, “I’m going to tell you something but it’s hard to say.”

For more information about Tony, you can find him online at starve.org.

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Keiler Roberts has been writing autobiographical comics for ten years.  Her six books include Sunburning, Chlorine Gardens, and, most recently,  Rat Time, all three of which were published by Koyama Press. Her  self-published autobiographical comic series Powdered Milk received an  Ignatz Award for Outstanding Series in 2016, and in 2019 Chlorine Gardens received Slate's Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Print Comic of  2018, which was selected by The Slate Book Review and The Center for  Cartoon Studies. Her work has been included in The Best American Comics in 2016 and 2018 and was mentioned on their Notables list for 2014. She  has taught at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago since 2013 and  lives in Evanston, Illinois, with her husband, the artist Scott Roberts,  their daughter Xia, and perhaps the most famous cartoon pet since  Snoopy, their dog Crooky.

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Today on the show I’m incredibly pleased to be in conversation with Angie Yingst.

Angie is a published writer, a sacred artist, a Usui Reiki Master Teacher, and an Earth Medicine Practitioner specializing in shamanic and crystal healing techniques.

Angie has been reading Tarot for thirty years and is a member of the American Tarot Association. She has also trained through the Hibiscus Moon Crystal Academy as a Certified Crystal Healer and an Advanced Crystal Master, and she now serves the school and its community as Curriculum Specialist and Crystal Coach. Angie has also been studying since 2012 with Pixie Lighthorse and has completed all four levels of her training through SouLodge Earth Medicine School.

Angie offers both in-person and distance one-on-one healing sessions that combine crystal healing, shamanic healing, Reiki, drum and rattle, breathwork, and plant medicine to facilitate healing in her clients, balancing her work with the moon cycles and seasonal energies to maximize healing potential. Angie teaches tarot, crystals and crystal healing, shamanic work, psychic development and intuitive work, creative and art workshops, and offers group healing sessions through the Alta View Wellness Center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Today we dig deep to talk about grief, addiction, perfectionism, and the dangers of spiritual bypassing, as well as the difference between being a guru and an effective space-holder.