JB Minton

For several reasons, The Last Of Us is more morally relevant than The Walking Dead.

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From November 13, 2011, Scott and Josh discuss the downfall of great television shows. Why did they die, and how did they die? Happy Days, Twin Peaks, Moonlighting, Sex and the City, Deadwood, The Wire, Everwood, Arrested Development, Seinfeld, and more are discussed.

We are naive and just wrong about a few things. It was fun to see how far we've come in 11 years.

My family has deep roots in the American Lutheran Church. We are Protestants. We protest against the sins of Humanity before an angry but supposedly merciful God.

Our God is constipated.

Our God struggles against punishing us beyond our deaths.

Lutherans seem to be natural authoritarians, admiring and aspiring to order in all facets of life, personal and institutional. After all, what true revolutionary would build an almost identical church just with a different colored robe for the priests or preachers or whatever they call them nowadays? In the 2020s, they’d call this spinning up a start-up competitor, and the Catholic Church should have sued the early Protestants for copyright infringement if such a thing had been around back then.

A true revolutionary would have ultimately walked away from their Church as Krishnamurti did. Jesus would have dumped the wine on all these fools heads and told them, “Hit the f**k outtaheah.” A true revolutionary would have found a better story to listen to and then mostly kept it to themselves because words like violence break the silence, come crashing down through our tiny worlds, right on the heads of all the boys and girls. That’s religion in America, that old-timey, take over the Supreme Court, and gag all the women kind of religion. It’s been b******t for centuries.

Why is it so easy for a child to get ahold of a gun in America, but they can’t find God inside themselves, even with these supposed Sunday morning maps these Churches hand out?

The goal of the first half of our lives is to find something beyond ourselves inside ourselves.

The goal of the second is to find something beyond me outside of me. If I can’t find whatever that word “God” points to inside my heart, I’ll never find it in a baby’s smile, a lover making love with me, a puppy playing, or a stranger scowling at me when I pass by them on a busy city street.

I was blessed to have a religious awakening happen to me when I was 19; it changed everything about my life and character. But I belong to no church, except the one in my home office, where I keep all my books and guitars. Everyone needs a room of their own to worship inside, especially all the well-intentioned atheists, those poor souls who put their faith in the creaky leaky wooden vessel instead of the mercy of the Ocean, where it belongs.

A drunken Lutheran might philosophize that order occurs when human beings consistently obey Laws Of Moral Righteousness as interpreted by a select few, and maybe just One.

The Human Year Book has too much pain, suffering, theft, and murder. It could drive a good person mad thinking about it.

Pink Floyd recorded a song titled Us And Them about the lines we draw and defend on the maps of our hearts. That song was on a record named Dark Side Of The Moon, and the whole album was about the things that make Humans crazy.

Rumor has it that this all began when the rock the Church was built on put a cannon up and realized that it paid well and felt pretty good to kill people and take their lands for peace while pointing to the sky to try to cry.

Pointing to the sky with crocodile tears, while poor people with darker skin suffer and die to preserve a sick peace, is the same philosophy modern conservatives in America have about putting high-capacity firearms in children’s hands. Most of them would call it a necessary evil. But people with hearts and minds that work together just call it evil.

I went to Lutheran Church as a boy with my grandma, and the focus of Lutheranism is mainly on the suffering of Jesus. My grandma was a devout Lutheran to her last breath. She died from Covid in 2020, holding her Bible and cross while merciful nurses sang a hymn to her because no one from her family was allowed to watch her die. Yet, she was ready to meet Jesus the entire 45 years I knew her on this planet. No one’s faith was as strong as my grandmother's. And she suffered much in this life. Yet, like her poverty, she wore suffering as a cloak of dignity.

The suffering Christ hanging on the wall behind the pulpit was the biggest icon in the Church she took me to every Sunday. I went with her until I grew old enough to put my foot down and tell her it was a waste of my time. I’m sure it broke her heart, but I couldn’t take it any longer, and I have a mean streak like a badger that often hurts the people I love most, which is also a form of suffering. It wasn't nice when I was a child. It was worse when I was a mannish boy, but it has gotten better since my children taught me how to love unconditionally, even through blinding anger and pulsing neutron stars of all the things that annoy me about living.

Suffering leads to salvation; that’s what good Lutherans believe. But I was never a good Lutheran. I do not think that the natural state of Human Beings is to suffer. Neither did Krishnamurti, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Bagwan, Jesus, Chief Seattle, or the Buddha. All of those great teachers say the same thing, “F*****g get over yourself, big mouth.”

I’ve found from my white cis upper-middle-class perch of privilege and whatever passes for safety nowadays that suffering is the residue of intense and active emotion. Whether joy or misery, suffering has a brief and fleeting shelf life. It passes, or at least it can pass if we let it.

I think of our Human suffering as a screen door. The small spaced screens let nothing but a little bit of air through. But a screen with larger spaces in the weave could even let the big bugs pass through. Trauma and suffering are big bugs, and if the screens are woven wide enough in the doors of our souls, those big bugs will pass through without even grazing the sides. It’s like a perfect game of Operation.

Those big trauma bugs fly on past us to other places, and we let them go.

What do we care about where our trauma goes after it passes us by? So let it go and be gone; it’s the only way we’ll find out what happens after suffering ends.

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Josh Minton: We are ready to talk about Severance and really get into it. But we have a special guest we'd like to introduce always welcome in the Red Room, Mr. John Thorne; how are you, sir?

John Thorne: I am doing great. It is good to talk to both you and Scott at the same time. How nice is that?

Scott Ryan: Yeah. And I guess one could say all your friends are here.

John Thorne: Well, well, yeah, I guess you're probably right about at least,

Scott Ryan: That wasn't meant to be a put-down, that's what they say in the Red Room. And I know John gets that reference. There may be people at home who might think, oh my God did he just say John really has no friends? No, that's a line from Twin Peaks.

John Thorne: I know that millions of people are listening and all of them are my friends.

Josh Minton: When you can turn a Twin Peaks line into a pun and then it sounds like an insult that's master-level Twin Peaks knowledge right there. Well, John, if you don't mind, how about you give us a very brief overview of the mechanics of what this show is at the highest level. We've already done a kind of nonspoiler introduction, but let's really start to get into the details here, if you don't mind.

John Thorne: Well, you're talking to John's outtie so I don't know anything about it, sorry. Severance is a television series that's on Apple TV+. The first season has aired is that there is this company called Lumon industries, and there are people who work at this company who can choose if they want to go through a procedure called severance. And when they do that, they have this chip installed inside their brain, so that when they come into work and they get in the elevator, all their memories of their home life, are removed completely. So they have no idea of who they are outside of work. And so all they do when they get there is they know the people that they work with and that they have some idea, some vague sense really of what their job is. Essentially it's sort of a computer data type work and they don't really even have a sense necessarily of the bigger picture of what their job is. They work I guess like a nine-to-five type of job with their coworkers and then when they leave work, they get back in the elevator, and all their memories of their outside life return, but their knowledge and memories of their work-life completely disappear. So their outer self known as an Outtie in the show does not know anything about what they do at work, has no memory or awareness of their coworkers.

Scott Ryan: Let me interrupt you because you said something that I find interesting already. You said some of the workers can choose. Do we know that's the truth? Are we certain that there are workers there that do not have to go through severance? Now I'm not talking about Patricia Arquette. I'm talking about workers, not management, but workers?

John Thorne: I don't know. It was implied and maybe there was some dialogue having only seen the series once. So unlike when we talk about Twin Peaks, pretty explicitly, I've only seen the series...

Josh Minton: I feel like they, they do say that it's a voluntary program.

Scott Ryan: But who says that? So I don't know that I believe that, I mean, why do you guys think that? I don't remember.

John Thorne: I recall there was some discussion about the severed floor or the severed section of Lumon implying that there were non-severed sections of the company. I don't know for sure, Scott, you may be right, but I do seem to recall that at least early on there was this implication anyway, that there were severed and non-severed workers there. That may be something they've kind of moved away from and you're right, it isn't true, but I think they did imply it.

Scott Ryan: We'll see, I think while someone in the press may have implied this.

John Thorne: No, it was in the show.

Scott Ryan: Well, no, I'm saying to the outside world, not the press in our world, it's just, I'm talking about in the series. This is just a guess on my part. There is no one who works there, that's a worker, again, I'm not talking about the upper management, that is not severed. That would be my statement, which I thought was interesting when he said that because we haven't seen other people, like when they walk around that building is empty.

Josh Minton: Yeah, I don't know John I'm with you. I've kind of always assumed that it was a voluntary program. And I do think that that was hinted at in the Pilot.

Scott Ryan: I want to say it is voluntary, but it could be you wouldn't work there if you didn't do it; it's voluntary to work there.

Josh Minton: Are all the people in the Christopher Walken area, are those people severed?

John Thorne: They are on the severed floor. Don't forget. They're all on the same floor. Even though there is one department that's separated from the other that you have to walk down this maze of hallways to get to the other department, they've all gone through the elevator apparently, or multiple elevators that get you to this floor. I think you do see the main character Mark walk into the lobby and he goes in he's in the building. He goes to a locker. He puts his personal belongings that would be part of his outer self into a locker. He passes a guard, who is on the floor before he enters the elevator where the severance process is activated. And then he goes to work. And in the process of going down the elevator, he forgets his outer self. So I assume the guard is not severed because he didn't go down that elevator. I assumed that the other people who were walking around in the lobby and who are maybe taking an elevator up or just working in other offices on that upper floor lobby floor are not severed. They didn't go through an elevator.

Josh Minton: And the doctor in the episode we just watched at the beginning of the seventh one, I think it was titled "Differential Jazz," the doctor doesn't seem to be separate and she was an employee. Right?

John Thorne: We're really getting into the minutiae.

Scott Ryan: It's a good first bit though. Yeah. I mean, I'm not, I'm not saying any of us are right or wrong. I'm just saying as far as the debate within the show, I have a theory that there is no one else, that it's those four. And then it's the people in the Christopher Walken department. And that's it.

John Thorne: I think you're onto something there because the interesting thing is we rarely see many cars in the parking lot of this giant company, at least, you know, from the establishing shots that we've seen so far it looks like there not many cars there. There are not many people inside. So that struck me too, while I was watching it is, how many people really are in this building? And maybe it's just exclusively this smaller group that is being probably experimented on. And so as the story progresses, we see these various characters begin to question what they're doing, where they are, and whether or not what is happening outside of work. We follow the main character Mark. We only see his outer self, and he has various reasons for having gone through this procedure, cause he's been through a tragedy, his wife was killed in a car accident. He's undergone some trauma and he's decided to escape into severance to get away from it. But he starts to question whether or not he should have done that, and then of course there is some conspiracy storyline that starts to unfold, that there are people who are watching him outside of work. And there are people who have escaped severance and have been able to reintegrate themselves, their outer and inner selves. So all of that is the plot that is bubbling around the characters as the story progressed.

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Josh Minton: The elevator that you mentioned, is a passageway that's not just a philosophical conversion that happens there. It's a technological one and it's a moral one. So that concept within the show operates on all three of those levels simultaneously. And those characters undergo essentially a moral, philosophical, and technological conversion every time they enter the severed floor. And that is fascinating. I never even thought that concept could be done on TV.

Scott Ryan: Not that we have to get into specifics, but just to set the table, I'm curious if both of you have had a job in real life that you truly hated?

Josh Minton: Yes, John?

John Thorne: Well, I mean, there were jobs I had that I was like, I should be doing something else, which is why I quit. I don't have one now.

Scott Ryan: When I walked into the building of Time-Warner cable and McGraw Hill, walking up those steps both times I was on the second floor was horrible. I mean, just that walk in the morning, you just feel it suck out of you. I don't know a damn thing about the writer of the show, but I think he had a job he really hated.

Josh Minton: That’s different than a job actively out there to enslave and try and kill you. Severance is taking it to a different level.

John Thorne: I think that's one extreme we can talk about; hating your job, and that maybe some of the impetus for how the show came to be. But I think a lot of people have worked at an office gone in every morning and worked with coworkers in cubicles and it grinds you down a little bit. I didn't hate it, but I didn't always want to be there. I wanted to be outside of work, but had to be there and had to kind of go through the motions of what that work entailed and the various obligations you had to that work and so that grinds you down a little bit, and I think everyone can relate to that. Whether you hate your job or just have one of those kinds of jobs. The British version of The Office explored that idea; they would frequently cut away from these mundane things that were happening. People making copies or people standing around a water cooler. And the implication was that it was dull. It was a dull place to be, even though the show was funny.

Josh Minton: It's interesting, the timing this show came out, I'll call that peak COVID, which did something to the workplace that has never happened before. The office office building was second only to hospitals in terms of the dread and the danger around dying, literally dying, when you walk into these places. And I feel like Severance just grabbed that emotion and put it right into the show.

Scott Ryan: But that is a complete coincidence. So I just heard Ben Stiller on a podcast with Dana Carvey and David spade. It's about Saturday Night Live. I don't remember the name of the podcast, but he said that he bought this script six years ago, and it's taken six years to do it. They were just about to film the pilot when COVID hit and it shut down. I don't think they even filmed a lick. They were just prepping and it shut down and then came back and they filmed during covid. The concept of the show was written six years before.

John Thorne: The creator of the show is Dan Erickson. The show was somewhat inspired by the movie Brazil, which is one of my favorite movies of all time byTerry Gilliam. Brazil is sort of a 1984 ish kind of story, but the main character goes into this sort of bureaucracy, this workplace where he's almost like a government employee and a lot of the people around him have very tedious work, and he dreams of being a hero and a fantasy to escape the tedium of work. That's a part of the tale. And apparently, that was some inspiration for the show. And I think Dan Erickson said that Ben Stiller was what steered it away from some of the craziness of Brazil because a lot of crazy things had happened and wanted to focus more on the characters and emotions.

Scott Ryan: Ben said what drew him to the pilot was that these people had the normal office banter of any office, but that they didn't know what they did.

Josh Minton: So they had nothing to small talk about their lives.

Scott Ryan: And he just said, he liked the idea that you had office workers who didn't know what their actual job was. And he said that's what drew him in just the idea that you would go to work and not know what you did.

Josh Minton: By the end of the season, they still don't know what their job was.

Scott Ryan: Josh throw out a topic from Severance that you would want us to discuss.

Josh Minton: Let's talk about the psychology of separating your home life from your work life. I work in tech and we talk a lot about life balance (and not work-life balance). There is no work-life balance. There's only life balance and work is a facet of that. So what happens when human beings remove the element of their productivity from their psychology? What does that do to people? And I think that the show does explore that. So let me ask you (Scott), in the job that you hated the most, if you could have severed yourself, would you have done it?

Scott Ryan: And I didn't expect to have to answer that question, which might be stupid. I should have considered would I ever have severed myself from it? I don't think I would have, because that job was soul-crushing for me. What I used to say, and I think everyone will enjoy this analogy, is my job was to stand under a pipe of vomit and the best part of the day was if you could only be vomited on half of you, that's what I used to say. When people ask them what I did for a living, I said, I stand under a pipe of non-stop vomit.

Josh Minton: Customer Service.

Scott Ryan: So the only thing that kept me alive was my sense of humor, fooling around with my coworkers, just like they do. That's one of my favorite parts. I wrote my first book there.

Josh Minton: So, that fed your art.

Scott Ryan: Yes. So it was me who kept me through that, which I think is an interesting concept. What do you think John?

John Thorne: I would definitely, absolutely not sever myself because the outside self was the motivator to get through the work I was doing. And I will tell a story. I'm sure you can relate to this, Scott. It sounds like you may have already had a similar story. As you mentioned, writing your book. I can remember distinctly. This was after Twin Peaks had been on TV in 1990 and 1991. I was at work and I had had someone who worked in England. We had, you know different parts of the company all over the world and they really, really came down hard on me for something. I can't remember what it was. It was petty, and it was just something that I was like why am I putting up with this? And that day, I applied to go back to graduate school in television and radio. And because I decided that I'm getting out of this. I'm going to become a better writer and learn more about television. And that combined with the fact that Twin Peaks had been on, put me on this trajectory for Wrapped In Plastic and then leaving that job. I can remember calling Southern Methodist University cause they had a TV radio program here in Dallas that day, and saying, I'm interested in joining your graduate program and they were like, we'd love to have you. And I got all the information and I went and I did it, and that's why I have a Master's Degree.

Scott Ryan: Very interesting. So do you consider that person to be one of the most important people in your life?

John Thorne: No, I think he's one of the least important people in my life.

Scott Ryan: But it's just interesting. I mean, that person changed your life.

John Thorne: He motivated me at that moment. I think I would've met Craig Miller would have done Wrapped In Plastic, whether or not I was going back to school or not. I happened to also feel like, okay, I want to know more about how television is made and it was sorta like a breaking point. Do you know what I'm saying? It wasn't like it was, oh, I was fine until that happened. Do you know what I mean? It was like the straw that broke the camel's back kind of thing, not to get off the hot topic here, but I think it allows us to talk about all our shared experiences of working in a corporate world and how, and why Severance appeals to us all because we can relate to these characters. But you know, the interesting thing is sort of flipping the question around a little bit is the characters have volunteered. Apparently, the characters have volunteered to go through this procedure. The company has not forced them to now we may learn more after this season, we don't know. But so far from what we see the characters, there's something in their outside life that they're unhappy about. The main character Mark is certainly unhappy in his outside life. He's trying to escape that by going to this place where he doesn't have to remember it. The reverse is sort of the case for me and I think for everyone else's, when you were at work, you wanted to remember your outside life. You didn't want to forget that. Maybe there are some people who do have unfortunate lives outside of work. And I've heard of this situation where people immerse themselves in work because they don't want to think about their bad marriage or the problems they have outside of work or whatever they might be. And so they escape into work to forget or remove that part of themselves. So I can't relate to that. For me, outside life was so much more interesting than inside life. And so I couldn't wait to get back home and watched Twin Peaks or read a book or go out with friends or whatever. And, and those are the things I thought about while I was at work.

Josh Minton: Well, there's a lesson from nature here. You know, when the cell needs to specialize in a certain way, it divides itself. And that new cell becomes a specialized version while the original cell does the same thing. So this ability to vivisect ourselves and dedicate a portion of our psyche to labor for a corporation and the other portion of our psyche, for whatever personal purposes we have, from a company's perspective, that's the best of all worlds, because they’ve got you without this influence from your outside life. You're not talking about your wife, you're not talking about any of that stuff. You're trying to figure out what those numbers on the screen mean, how do they make you feel?

Scott Ryan: Again, I think John's bringing up a really interesting point. Is it voluntary? And of course, yes, it is in the fact that Mark chose to do this. But the more interesting point is, do any of us have a choice? We really don't. We have to live. We have to eat. So you go there and that's what's interesting about the show is do the poor actually even have a choice? You have to give over whatever your corporation wants or they're going to take your house and you won't eat and you won't live. And so it's voluntary in the way that you check the I agree box on your Apple update.

Josh Minton: That's a great point. I will bring in one other element around the voluntary piece. In the language that the people who are protesting severance use, they use anti-abortion language in the show. The idea of, “You chose to bring this life into the world and you've sentenced it to a life of slavery. You, you brought this identity into the world. You're responsible for it. You're a horrible person.” That's the vernacular that's used against severance. So I would say that that adds an element of credibility to this being a voluntary program. But it's also very interesting how that anti-abortion language is applied in the show.

John Thorne: You know, I think you're touching on one of the most fascinating things about the show, which is the fact that the inner and the outer selves are not equal. The outer self has more power than the inner self. So there's the inner self, the person at work who's been severed, who cannot say, I don't want this anymore. People who are outside can choose that they no longer want to do that. They can say, I want to stop. I'm not going to go through this anymore. But the inside people have no choice and they really are second class. They really are almost slaves. We could use that terminology or serfs or endangered servants or whatever. But they, truly are victims of their outer self. And I think that's a fascinating part of the show. Let's talk about the character Helly, who's one of the most fascinating characters. We don't know a lot about Mark's three other coworkers. We know a little bit about them, but not too much. We only really see them from Mark's perspective. So at work, Helly is one of those characters who has been severed as she came into work. And the severed version of Helly does not want to be there. And she tries over and over again to get out. And to one point even willing to kill herself rather than be in this situation. And we find out later that Helly is actually an heir to the company. She's the daughter of the company's President or owner of the company. And she has chosen, for perhaps political reasons, to go into severance so she can prove to stockholders how great this situation is. And so the inner Helly is extremely unhappy, to the point where she's willing to kill herself to literally end her life if it means ending her outer self’s life. And the fascinating dynamic here between essentially two different selves. I mean, in a way, and I don't mean to get into Twin Peaks, but we're talking about two halves. We're talking about one half and another half and maybe not a good and evil, but a separate personality. And this inner personality is subject to the whim of the outer personality. And you start to sympathize with those inner selves, perhaps more than the outer selves. And in Helly's case, you're really rooting for the inner self because the outer self is kind of a bad person. And that's fascinating; they haven't explored that much and I look forward to what happens in season two with that.

Scott Ryan: And Helly is my favorite, the inner Helly. That was me. Everything she does, that was totally me. I was that employee. I was the troublemaker. I was always pushing management. You know, whatever rule they put down, I kicked it, I pulled it, I pushed it. And the thing about this show is the characters. You've got the employee that fights the power. You've got the employee that just works, the guy with the glasses. He just wants his koozies and his waffle parties. And he's just working. You got the old guy who's turned it into a religion. You know, it's a religious extension, I'm doing something here. And then you've got middle-management. He has no power. He has no authority. He also has to work, which was my problem at my corporation is you'd get this management that was making maybe 25 cents more than me, had no power, so the only thing they really could control over me was to try to belittle me. That's all they could do. And that's where Mark sort of is that he doesn't belittle them, but he is getting pulled, especially with Helly at the beginning where she doesn't want his s**t.

Josh Minton: And Mark is a recent promotion because his boss has gone crazy.

Scott Ryan: Petey, I'm assuming that happened within the last couple of days before the pilot, right? One assumes very recently before the pilot.

Josh Minton: So that's in the pilot. All of that stuff is. They dump that on you and the only thing you can learn is about the characters going forward. But then the mystery unfolds through these characters. And that is very Lost-like. We talked about Lost as a comparison in how it approached unfolding the mystery through the characters.

John Thorne: Yeah, we've talked for the last 15 to 20 minutes here about the themes and the idea of characters and what's happening to them on a very personal and interior level. But there's so much more to the show in terms of the larger story that may be taking place of which we are getting only glimpses. We don't know everything like the inner workers at Lumen; we don't know everything that's going on. And so there are forces at play. Part of what makes the show so fascinating, like Lost, is that you get little glimpses of odd things that are happening in the company, or you get some news, like the previous worker Petey who was the supervisor, has made it outside and has some memory of what it was like to be inside. And he contacts Mark outside and there seems to be the implication that there's a larger group at work outside who are trying to help people, almost like an underground railroad, from being enslaved in Lumen to being freed outside. But we get glimpses. We get hints at that. It plays out over the season, but we don't get the answers to all those questions. Again, like Lost, we build to a climax with a lot more questions than we have answers, the implication being that there's a much bigger story at play. We haven't talked about Patricia Arquette, but she plays Mark's boss at work and she's kind of a hard-nosed boss. She's not the nicest person. We also find out that she is Mark's neighbor outside of work and she is not severed. She knows what's going on outside of work and what's going on inside of work. And the implication is she's spying on Mark and has another game at play where she's keeping an eye on him, wary of what may be going on with him, but also perhaps rooting for him potentially. I don't know because it doesn't spell it out yet.

Scott Ryan: That's an interesting thing. This is pure speculation, which is, to me, the most fun part of Severance is right now, we get to think, and we get to dream and we don't know. To you, John, what do you see in the Patricia Arquette character? Where does she lie? Why does she have that altar? Why did she freak out? What would be your speculation on that character?

John Thorne: You're absolutely right, Scott, we are at a place in this story where maybe it will never get any better than this because questions without answers and the answers that we imagined may be better than the ones that they will deliver for us. I certainly hope that they've thought it all through or thought it through a great way. We've all been in this place before where we're watching the first season of a show and it kind of turns out that maybe they don't know where they're going, or they're making it up as they go, and then it becomes less satisfying, particularly if you watch it again. But with the Patricia Arquette character, I guess I would maybe just throw out the idea that she's been passed over or she has a different philosophy than her higher-ups do. And she is subverting perhaps some of what the company is doing for her own ends. And I don't know whether they're nefarious or good, but certainly seem nefarious given the way her character behaves. But nevertheless, she does seem to want to reunite Mark with (big spoiler here) his wife, who is not dead and is inside Lumen. And she seems when she's watching them on a closed-circuit monitor, she seems to almost be rooting for them to make a connection. She's saying, come on, come on. And so, why is that? I don't know. Because she has this altar outside of work, it seems like she is faithful to the concept of Lumen and so is, it is not someone who's trying to subvert it, is someone who wants to support it. And yet she's also doing these hard-to-explain behaviors inside of work. So given those few clues, I tend to think, oh, well, maybe she really believes in Lumen but not the current path of Lumen and wants to see this technology used to different ends. She's obviously at odds with the board who tend to call in and there were some other clues again, having only watched once...

Scott Ryan: Josh, what is your take on Patricia Arquette?

Josh Minton: The first hint that we get is in her name, which is Harmony. What is the opposite of severance? Harmony. So John and I, we've discussed this previously, we both had the same reaction to that scene that he's talking about, where they're engaging in a room and Patricia Arquette is overseeing this thing. And I, like John, had the reaction that she's actually wanting them to break the severance. And I asked my wife and she said no, not at all. Harmoney is against them; she definitely wants to keep them apart; she’s just making sure that they're not getting back together. And so we had a totally different reading of that scene. And it sounds like you (Scott) probably had my wife's reaction to that scene where John and I, we were like, no there's something else going on here where I think she's subverting the severance. And then when I went back and realized that her name was Harmony, I thought oh okay well that does change things.

John Thorne: To support that argument, the Patricia Arquette character does go steal a candle from Mark's house, which was a candle that had important meaning to the relationship between Mark and his wife. And she tells his wife to use the candle as if she's trying to prompt the connection there.

Scott Ryan: I just want to pause and say to our listeners, this right here, this moment that you're experiencing, this is why Severance is so good. This is why television that you have to think about and television that happens when you're not watching it is the greatest of all television. Watching boring, straight down the middle TV. I mean, not that every show should be Severance, but our imagination needs shows like it. So, I totally disagree with you guys and I never even thought of it before. I don't think she's rooting for them. She is wondering if this is working? I think they chose Mark; they chose the wife and they want to know if he doesn't recognize her. She goes and gets that candle as a test. It’s not, I hope they recognize each other; it's, I hope they don't. I also have a theory that Patricia Arquette is related to Helly. I don't know, age-wise if sisters would work, but I think that she has been ex-communicated by the main guy who, by the way, I think looks like Matthew Reese. I think Patricia Arquette has been kicked out of that family or something. That's why she was so upset when she got fired because now she lost everything. I think there's a family connection between her and the leader, which now means Helly. Patricia Arquette has a lineage.

Josh Minton: So here's the first question. Now you all, everyone can go back and rewatch the season and we can come back and...

Scott Ryan: ...then decide. I just never thought she was rooting for them. I think she's curious, is this working? So I love that you see different things. That’s the greatest thing you can hope for from television is for people to see what they see. Very interesting. One of the things I just want to throw out is that I love the guy's glasses on the end of his nose. I've never seen that on TV before. Whoever thought that sets his character and he doesn't push them up, he doesn't care and that tells you who he is. He isn't a troublemaker. He doesn't even want to push his glasses up. He's the one that's going for the koozies.

Josh Minton: He's a computer.

Scott Ryan: Yeah. He just wants to work and nothing distracts him even his glasses. You just want to say push those damn things up and it's wonderful. Good job!

Josh Minton: How about the upper management guy who's wheeling the waffle cart in?

Scott Ryan: Ah, what a great actor!

John Thorne: Yeah, I think his character name is Milchick and Trammel Tillman is the actor.

Scott Ryan: I think Patricia Arquette is going to win an Emmy and she should, but if I could give an Emmy to anyone, it'd be to him. He did that dance, it was so creepy.

Josh Minton: We assume he's not severed, right?

Scott Ryan: We assume. But do we have any reason to think he is or isn't, I'm not sure we do?

Josh Minton: He can come onto the severed floor and does Patricia Arquette's character ever come onto the severed floor?

Scott Ryan: Yeah, because she was waiting for him when he came up the elevator; saying come to my office. Yeah, so she does come to the severed floor.

Josh Minton: Yeah. I don't think he's severed. John, do you have an opinion?

John Thorne: No, I don't think he is. He appears to the guy with the glasses (Dylan) outside of work.

Scott Ryan: I think we believe that he knows Dylan outside of work. I mean, they have a relationship.

John Thorne: Maybe, or just has a file on it and knows everything about everybody. I don't know. Again, we're at a place here where...

Josh Minton: ...lots of assumptions.

John Thorne: ... we're making a lot of assumptions. We can make all kinds of guesses. I mean, your guess about Patricia Arquette, Scott, is excellent! Of course, it could easily be that she's she was ostracized from the family and is working. Everything you described makes perfect sense from what we've seen.

Scott Ryan: It's the altar that made me ask why would you have that? Because there is something mystical that this goes back to the 1800s? So there is some mystical aspect to this show.

John Thorne: What if she's reintegrated successfully so that it doesn't work on her. So she goes outside of work and they think she's severed, but she's not. It's just another idea that I’m throwing out there.

Scott Ryan: I think she did take a phone call...

John Thorne: ...yeah, she did.

Scott Ryan: But I guess they could have turned her on. They can be turned on and off. So I guess that isn't proof. That's why I was asking about Milchick. Have we seen him outside? But John is right; we did see him outside at Dylan's house. For a while, I thought maybe he is severed, I don't know. But we’ve seen him out.

Josh Minton: I want to throw out one of my favorite things about this season is they established the scariest character on the show, the Head Of Security, and then they killed him. That is great. And the show is still just as scary, where all those elements that are frightening are still there, but they just showed that this it's not a person that you should be scared of.

Scott Ryan: Right, it's the corporation.

Josh Minton: It's the Lumen Corporation and what they don't care about is what's inside you.

Scott Ryan: Yeah. Very interesting. And let's talk about John Turturro's character and Christopher Walken. We haven't mentioned that at all. Josh, what did you think of their relationship?

Josh Minton: Well, first I love that Christopher Walken's only job seems to be dressing the place up with specific art in specific places. And that is where he and John Turturro connect is through this art. And the initial conversations that they start to have unlock something inside of them. So when we compare this to the scene earlier between the therapist and Mark and are they gonna look at this candle and have this connection? These two people actually did have a connection. And I would argue that it opened up something inside them that has almost allowed them to unsever. That was the impetus for John Turturro's character.

John Thorne: Fear and love open the doors.

Josh Minton: Are we talking about Twin Peaks again?

John Thorne: I can't help it. It's interesting. So John Turturro is Irving and he is attracted to Christopher Walken who plays Bert. They share this interest in art because Bert is the caretaker of the various paintings that they hang up, I don't know where they hang them up cause we never see them anywhere, but apparently they do. And what's fascinating, this sort of gets a slightly different topic, but the idea that maybe there's some bleed-through from the outer personality to the inner personality because Irving is interested in painting. He's interested in these paintings and we find out later that he's painting when he is at home. His outer self is painting an image from inside Lumen. So there's this bleed over that's happening. There is some overlap between the Inners and the Outers. And I'm getting off-topic of the relationship between those characters, but it reminded me of that. I think there's something there and the candle also implies the possibility of that maybe there could be some triggering or something. That's a fascinating thing to explore because, philosophically, then you come up with that idea that, well, if you really did erase your personality, would your personality re-present itself? Would the you that you are come back? That's the title of Ricken's book The You You Are, and even though it's a silly, stupid title, and that's where a lot of the comedy of this show comes in, it's sort of the core idea of the show is can you be separated into two different personalities or do you start to overlap? You started as a Venn diagram and the two circles come back together. That would be something that would be really interesting to explore. I don't know if the show has the time or a tendency to go in that direction, but we're seeing hints of that. And it's just a fascinating idea that if you lost your memories completely, would you still restore yourself?

Scott Ryan: So there's a negative thing that I wanted to talk about and this is going to show my age. I absolutely hated with a fiery passion that they had to put a warning that says someone's going to kill themselves in this episode and it happens at the end and we made it really tricky. So, you're going to be shocked when it happens.

Josh Minton: No, you're not!

Scott Ryan: You just told me and then you end the episode that way, like, oh my goodness. You're kidding. I can't believe she tried to kill herself. And it just made me think that if I ever get to do a TV show (and I think we all that will never happen), on my show, I'd like to say that if you need a warning, don't watch this show. You are consuming art. I'm sick of that. If they made The Sixth Sense today, would they say, warning he's dead? I don't like this idea. It's art. It just annoys me and you can say warning grown-up topics or whatever, but to say someone's going to kill themselves and have that be the end of the episode. It just frustrates me; that really burns me. I'm sure that Apple did that, not the writers of the show. We're all grown-ups and if you can't handle that kind of thing... That's my one complaint about the show. Do either of you have a criticism of the show?

John Thorne: Well, first of all, I agree with you, Scott, it was a trigger warning. Oh, there might be something in here that upsets you and I understand that for some people who may have undergone some similar type of trauma and they're watching a television show; they don't want to relive that. It was well-meaning. But I also agree with you that you just have to turn on the news and see how atrocious humanity can be to humanity and how terrible people can be. And that's the way the world is and we can't just shelter ourselves from that.

Scott Ryan: And before the woke police come and get me, I'm not against a trigger warning, I'm against a specific spoiler trigger. They could've just said there's violence.

Josh Minton: Adult Content. They've been doing it for 40 years.

Scott Ryan: You just didn't have to say suicidal attempt, but go ahead, John.

John Thorne: My criticism is for something that doesn't exist yet, so it really isn't fair at all, but the show upended itself at the end of the season and we can't go back to the way it was. We can't reestablish the show as it was when there's no way those characters can come back and work together in the office. And I think if they try to do that, if they try to go, okay, let's kind of put things back to where they were before, I will be disappointed. It has to move forward in the trajectory from where it is now. So it's not a criticism, it's a preemptive criticism. If anyone out there who's listening, who has anything to do with the show, do not try to go back to work. Keep going forward. Keep moving this story into new territory, because there's so much territory to explore. I will not buy if suddenly Helly and Mark and Irving are back at work sitting in their cubicles. I just can't see that. They would have to bend over backward to make that happen.

Josh Minton: I agree with that. I do have one criticism, and it's self-imposed. The show that really jumped out to me in comparison to this one was Lodge 49, which had a wackiness to it and a comedy that was built into the narrative and woven throughout. But there are very similar themes and elements to this ancient conspiracy, this workplace drama where it all unfolds and there's more than meets the eye, a bunch of really quirky characters. And so my only criticism, early on, was this show isn't funny enough. This show isn’t wacky enough. I'm not getting enough comedy out of this. And I made a comment to Scott. I said the show was not funny at all. And I think this is just my initial watch. Yeah, I know, you're going to argue that the guy with the book is hilarious. It turns out to be really good comedy.

Scott Ryan: And the sister. I think the sister too has a lot of really good lines. We haven't talked about the sister.

Josh Minton: These are people outside the organization.

Scott Ryan: Going to what corporations want; they don't want you to be funny at work. They want you to sit there and work and not have a life and all these things. So it's not directly comedy, but I think Dylan is funny.

Josh Minton: He is funny. John, what do you think about the humor part of it?

John Thorne: Mark's brother-in-law and the outside world writes these self-help books. He's sort of a famous self-help guru and, objectively, if you look at the book, it's just crap. You know, it's just silly statements. It's not well written. It's a junk book. Although I think he, the author, Ricken is his name, truly believes in it. He believes in what he's saying. So they take the character seriously. He's not trying to scam anyone. He believes this stuff, but he's sort of deluded himself to some extent, but anyway, that book finds its way into the work. And so the characters were reading the book without any context at all, which I think is the fascinating element here. And without any context to it, the book becomes very profound to them. And there are sequences where you hear the book being narrated and you hear some of it juxtaposed with their serious take on it. And I find that hilarious because some of the lines from the book are just so absurd. They're absurd and yet they make an impact on the inner workers, particularly the inner Mark. The outer Mark kind of dismisses his brother-in-law as a joke. He's kind of a joke. But the inner Mark who gets out for a brief time in the last episode has nothing but admiration for him. He's profoundly affected by him. The two different selves, where they integrate, or the way they separate what context means. All of us as television critics could look at something and think that it's just absolute junk, whereas someone else might look at it and say, you know what, I get a lot out of this. Beauty is in the eye of the holder, I guess.

Josh Minton: Yeah, it definitely is. And I'm usually that other guy, John. I'll find stuff, and say, this is incredible! And other critics are saying, what are you talking about? I was reading your Twin Peaks essay in the latest Blue Rose Magazine Issue 16 (get your order right now). And you had a statement in there that really jumped out to me, asking how do you navigate the world when you're essentially separated from your memories? And it just hit me, right here, that's what we're talking about with Severance. These people have been separated completely from their memories and in a much cleaner way than Twin Peaks The Return, but it's the same essential conflict. And I was wondering, John, did that jump out to you, that connection? Obviously, you wrote the sentence, but did it jump out to you with Severance?

John Thorne: Well, now that you mention it, I can make a connection. It's interesting in a way you've kind of reminded me of what I guess will be a very minor criticism of the show is that you have to take it on faith that these characters forget some things but not other things. So these characters are not blank slates. They know how to speak. They know how to recognize other people. They understand concepts. When Dylan finds out he has a son, he knows what a son is. The idea of severance is, how much are they removing? And so that's the conceit. You let that go. You're like, okay, well, we just assume that they've perfected this technology that removes the outer world.

Scott Ryan: I've never thought of this until just now, but the egg bar and the waffle party are ridiculously strange and they find it to be absolutely normal, as if you were at work and someone brought donuts.

Josh Minton: Or when you go to church and they say, here, drink this blood. It seems absurd. Doesn't it?

Scott Ryan: So, maybe it's just that when you get into that world, they accept the concepts and the normal person would say, what do you mean we're having an egg bar? There's no such thing as an egg bar. So the outtie would know that but the innie just accepts it because there's an egg bar. And they don't know any better. So I never considered thinking of why don't they think it's strange, but it could just be they have no idea that this is strange because they don't have that experience.

John Thorne: It's almost like severance does more than just remove memories. It also sort of resets you into sort of a childlike place, where you do accept some things that are naive, you know, like young children believing in Santa Claus. It doesn't seem crazy to them. It's only when you get older that reality comes in.

Scott Ryan: Why does Helly not have that childlikeness? Is that why she's fighting it so far?

Josh Minton: She's the one that screws it all up for everyone. She's the one that brings this swarm on.

Scott Ryan: She's from the family that's doing it. So that is an interesting thing. Why is she not childlike?

John Thorne: That gets to the idea of what was your motivation for going in? So Mark was motivated. He wanted to forget and so deep, deep down, he's like, this is great. I'm here and I'm going to do what I need to do. And you get the sense that maybe the other characters have similar motivations. Whereas, she went in maybe even against her will. She volunteered to go in for the good of the company but she might've been pressured by her father, or she knows deep down that this is a stupid idea but I'm just doing this for profit. I'm not doing it for any other reason, but I'm going to make more money in the end. And so that motivation for going in sort of carries over a little bit. And now she's not a happy person and not an accepting person inside.

Scott Ryan: What are you looking for in season two? These are not expectations because we know when you go into art with expectations, you get burned. But from where we are, where do you see this going?

Josh Minton: I would like to see all of this narrative wrapped up in season two so that season three could be something completely different, like Fargo. This concept (severance) could be applied in multiple future settings like the military or government. Imagine what a Severance season would be like if you were to take it and apply it to these different industries and the ways that we work with one another. I love these characters, but I don't think that they have like a six-season arc. I would like to see this wrapped up pretty quickly so that we can start to, as John said earlier, explore a bigger story of what's happening with this technology.

Scott Ryan: Interesting.

John Thorne: John, do you have any wishes? Well, you know, I slightly disagree. I mean, it's just in terms of what I want to see from the show. I'd like to see these characters for a while. I think there's a chance for layers of these characters to be stripped away or added on and we can see a larger story at play with them. There's a reason why Mark is there. Obviously, there's a conspiracy going on because he thinks his wife died, but she did not die. So they manipulated something outside in order to get her in there with him. So there's this much larger story. I don't want this show to go backward. I don't want in episode three of season two to see Bert, Dylan, Helly, and Mark sitting at their computers going, what do the goats down the hall mean? Let's go find out! I want something else to happen. Mark has the motivation to go back in now because he knows his wife is in there. So, obviously they're going to see these characters return to Lumen, but I almost want to see them infiltrate it now, instead of just going back. The show is sort of re-established that base story premise. I want it to move in a new direction.

Scott Ryan: My wish, I suppose it's kind of similar to John's, it's just a little more specific. I don't want the backstories. It's fine if they did a two-minute on how Mark was severed at some point. That doesn't bother me, but if next season starts and we're back two years or something, I want to go forward, because while that was kind of cool on Lost, it just didn't work for six years. Eventually, you're just like, I'm sick of that s**t. And I like that I don't really care who Mark was before or what Helly was like. Don't do time jumps to get around because we have to drag it out. As soon as you get into, “We’ve got to drag it out,” your show is no good. And there's so much and the characters are great. I would be interested in all of them. So you don't need to give me time warp razzle-dazzle.

Josh Minton: Well, you know your pet peeve about second seasons, when they separate all the characters. John said he doesn't want them to be back at work together, but do we all agree that they should be together? Do not separate them, please.

Scott Ryan: Right, don't do an episode that just has an hour of Helly and then an hour of Dylan. That is a typical second season. Writers and producers love to do that.

Josh Minton: Yeah, don’t do that; it’s lazy writing.

John Thorne: I think they're not going to do that, necessarily, but I do think they're going to separate them. I think they all have motivations to go back in. Helly obviously has the motivation to go back in because her outer self wants to go back in. Mark has the motivation to go back and find his wife. Dylan doesn't really know about his outer self yet, so he's basically still in the same situation. I'm not sure what Irving’s motivation is to go back in, except that it seems like his outer self has all kinds of documentation on trying to uncover the secrets of Lumen. It's very possible that the characters will end up going back in but be reassigned and we will see them in different parts of the company and they may be trying to find each other again. Lost's tactic from season one to season seven always was to separate the characters and most of the plot is them trying to get back together again.

Scott Ryan: So, if you're listening at home and you're yelling at us, “What if their outties don't know?” But the management does know there's no way Patricia Arquette would let those four people get together. It's not just that they don't have the motivation to go in; the corporation knows Helly just screamed it to the entire board.

Josh Minton: They cannot let these people get back together. It's literally a liability to the company.

John Thorne: My biggest fear is that season two opens up and the characters go back to work and they're re-severed and we're back to where we were. They don't remember anything that we all know they went through, which would be a really cheap way of doing this. The show has gotta move forward.

Scott Ryan: Right. I think we've got it. And I think that they will. I believe in Ben Stiller as a producer, and I believe in the writing, music, set design, and costumers. These are all people working at the top of their game and I have faith in the show. I think they'll take us somewhere good.

Josh Minton: I do too. And just from a thematic perspective, this idea of where does love come from? Where does joy come from? These aren't intellectual byproducts. These are things that unite us on the deepest, most fundamental levels of our humanity, and I think this is truly the most interesting conversation happening with this show. And as long as they stick true to that north star, I feel like this is going to be one of the great shows of the 2020s.

Scott Ryan: Well, it really could be, because corporations are given so much power, and there's fewer of them, and they're asking more of workers, and they're firing people, or making them do three or four jobs and still get paid for only one, all those things are there. So these are the buzz of 2022 & 2023. Any final words on the show, John?

John Thorne: Only that I can't think of anything else I'm looking more forward to than season two of Severance.

Scott Ryan: My imagination was lit on fire for nine weeks this year and that was incredible.

Josh Minton: First time since Twin Peaks The Return for me.

Scott Ryan: Yeah, you always wondered during The Return, you wondered…

Josh Minton: …What the hell am I watching? (laughs)

John Thorne: Aren't you glad this was a weekly show and not dumped? I mean, gosh, can you imagine if the whole thing had been there, people would have burned through it in one weekend.

Josh Minton: Bring back the weekly shows. It's enough already with this binging.

John Thorne: Because that experience of talking about it, that experience of thinking about it, is so valuable. You remember the show better that way, too, than having watched it all in one dump. Yeah, and you can always binge it before season two comes out. So you can have that experience.

Josh Minton: I recommend that there is a value in watching the show back to back to back to back after you've seen it the first time. Because you will see commonalities between things that you wouldn't have noticed before, it's important to have that space.

Scott Ryan: Yes. Well thank you for joining us, John, and thank you, listeners. And I want to apologize to our listeners that we didn't cover this show and warn you about it early. I feel like we let our listeners down and then I remember we don't have any listeners, and then I feel better,

John Thorne: But maybe with Severance your listener audience will grow.

Scott Ryan: Maybe

Josh Minton: Well, thank you, John. We really do appreciate it.

John Thorne: My pleasure.

The Guests

John Thorne (@thornewip)

is the Co-Creator of both Twin Peaks magazines, the original Wrapped In Plastic, and the current periodical The Blue Rose Magazine.

John is also the author of the book The Essential Wrapped In Plastic: Pathways to Twin Peaks

and Co-Creator of the In Our House Now Podcast: An Inquiry Into Twin Peaks The Return.

Scott Ryan (@scottluckstory)

is the Co-Creator and Managing Editor of theTwin Peaks The Blue Rose Magazine, Co-Creator of the Publishing Company Fayetteville Mafia Press, Co-Creator of the Red Room Podcast (smart talk about Television).

and author of the following books:

FIRE WALK WITH ME: YOUR LAURA DISAPPEARED

Thirtysomething At Thirty

The Last Days Of Letterman

Moonlighting: An Oral History

Scott is currently writing a book about how cinema ended after the 1990s.

JB Minton (@joshuaminton)

is the Co-Creator of the Red Room Podcast (smart talk about Television) and Co-Creator of the In Our House Now Podcast: An Inquiry Into Twin Peaks The Return.

and author of the following books:

A Skeleton Key To Twin Peaks: One Experience Of The Return

Ey Up! An American Engages With This Is England

Josh is currently publishing the “Small Awakenings” newsletter on Substack (this one) which includes essays, short fiction, a serial novel, and his basement music. He is also working on a book exploring the moral and civic implications of Norman Lear’s prime time television from 1971-to 1990.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jbminton.substack.com/subscribe

He woke up alone this morning with his unit onand by the time he showered it was all gone.Ain’t no job for praying, puts his headphones on,sits down, and closes his eyes. The girl next door is at it again,scratching up her arm with a big old knife.She’s been working toward the end since it began and they’re both just sick of life.They got their loneliness together into a planand ran to the nearest holy man.The ring was on her finger and the singer sangMaking all the love that they can.The old ones sayjust walk awayhope and pray X2They sent him off to battle just for something to doand took away the love that he had.His heart it got corrupted like it's stuck in the gluethe only thing he's left is mad.Just before the moment when he told her goodbye,the sky grew pregnant with rain.A lightning bolt hit her and she fell down and died.Everything grows through pain. X2

Author’s Note:

I grew up thinking that song lyrics were poetry, especially classic Hip-Hop music, but most certainly 80s Pop and 90s Grunge. These are all the poems of my youth and I didn’t understand that poetry was so much more than rhyming song lyrics until I reached college and was told to read these words on a page that didn’t have a soundtrack to them.

And yet…

…of course they had a soundtrack! Language is a form of music and when language meets the sounds of music, there are truths conveyed that go beyond intellectual understanding. Combining images with words and the emotions that music can bring is one of the most powerful forms of art that it is possible to make (Film is the other most powerful format of artistic expression).

I make Basement Music, the kind of music that amateurs really shouldn’t be sharing out loud in a public space. They aren’t real songs in the same sense that self-published authors don't write real books. The term Basement Music comes from (of course) Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, which is the music he created when he completed murdering the first mask he wore as an artist, which was the poet-prophet savior. It was all horseshit put together by the record company and reactionary elements in the counter culture. And Dylan wasn’t having it. He revolted and changed the business of producing art in the process of his multiple costume and personality changes over the years. And a lot of the music Dylan made over the past 60 years has been songs that should have never been heard, but has. His songs are perfect because they are each of them in Dylan’s unique voice, created in unique moments.

Every song I make is a basement song that has unplanned flaws. My voice isn’t what it used to be when I could sing any Pink Floyd album, note for note, from start to finish. Back in college, I once walked into a party where a house band had no singer and they were playing Alice In Chain’s “Don’t Follow,” which is one of my absolute favorite songs of all time. And there was a band without a singer, playing my song. I picked up that microphone, rocked the house, and then walked out like I owned the place. That was a good night.

And I’ve been reading Jeff Tweedy’s book How To Write One Song, and it’s all about approaching art like work, but still getting the joy from the doing. I read this week that for the first time in polling, more people are willing to be unemployed than work at a job they hate. Isn’t that something?

Creating flawed art is the most revolutionary act an individual human being can undertake. Even if you’re not as bananas as I am for sharing it openly, and despite the inevitable flaws our artistic expressions have, making art every day is a measure you can undertake to make your life more enjoyable.

We must invite joy and then give it away or watch joy seep out of our lives like a Photoshop filter gone wrong.

I have a theory that lovers of poetry are either Walt Whitman fans or Emily Dickinson fans. Either you are someone who wants life to blast you full force in the face as Walt Whitman did (have you ever read “Song Of Myself?”).

Or you’re the kind of poetry fan that worships a comma and keeps words close in tight like cryptocurrency, hiding away in your upstairs bedroom, pining for a life the world isn’t leading; that’s the Dickinson way and it was never mine. I guess I’m too old, white, male, and American. I can’t change those physical and social attributions about myself, but I accept them with both hands open in gratitude, honoring all the diversity in humanity, and that is why I will always be a Walt Whitman guy.

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Particles ejected from the Sun travel at 45 million miles per hour towards each of us every day. They are caught in our planet’s magnetic field and redirected towards the North and South Poles, where they become the most fantastic light show that nature provides the denizens of Earth. It is a blissful display of nature in balance that should invite gratitude from every living being capable of rational thought and action.

The first episode of Northern Exposure was released on CBS Prime Time on July 12, 1990. This was a rarified time for television drama, and Northern Exposure was far from the only cool, weird, and wonderful television show being broadcast that year. 

Twin Peaks concluded its first season on May 23, 1990, about seven weeks before the Pilot of Northern Exposure aired. So there is no reason to think that one show impacted the other’s first season, and yet, I have a question.

What would Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks have been like if dreams were extracted from their narratives?

Let me back up. Northern Exposure is an ensemble drama-comedy that centers on Joel Fleishman, a Jewish New York Doctor who sold his education for indentured servitude to the State of Alaska for several years. Joel thinks he’ll be working in Anchorage, which has a semblance of civilization, but they don’t need him there. Elated at first, he has images of returning quickly to New York City with a free degree, ready to set up practice and buy a better apartment on the Upper West Side. But, alas, that fast exit was not to be for Dr. Fleishman. Instead, he will be sent to Cicily, on the cusp of the new Alaska Riviera.

Joel rages against the dying of the Broadway Lights he won’t see for years and years, but there is no fighting fate. Instead, he is to be indentured for a segment of his life to the People’s health in the Alaskan Bush. And what a wonderful cast of characters they are in Northern Exposure, which concluded its eight-episode first season on August 30, 1990, exactly one month before Twin Peaks returned to reveal who shot Agent Cooper in Season 2. 

These two shows are forever caught in a nexus of American history and culture, airing between Fall seasons at a time when Americans watched content on so significantly few television stations, compared to the overwhelming choices we have now.

And both of these shows rely on dreams to drive their powerful narratives. Something was going on in the zeitgeist of American Television production at this time, immediately after the collapse of Soviet Russia. America was soul searching for a proper new enemy to fight. Writers, directors, producers, and actors across television were starting to reach deep inside and bring these shadows of our American character into the light. Dreams in the narrative are a critical bridge to executing this maneuver in Art.

For Northern Exposure, the season one finale “Aurora Borealis” is a masterpiece of television storytelling. In my own opinion, two of my favorite long-term narratives are introduced in this episode, and one of the established narratives takes a big step forward. You don’t need to have seen the show to enjoy the situations I layout below:

Adam

Adam Arkin stepped into a strange costume for this episode. His character starts as some version of Bigfoot, a peculiar creature walking the Alaskan wilderness in bare feet that seem human. 

During a period of strong, full Moon that is like the Sun shining at night, Joel has to take a bottle of pills up to a Ranger who is stationed at a high elevation watching for forest fires. On the way back home, with no civilization in sight, Joel’s Chevy breaks down on a logging road, and for the first time in Alaska, he is alone and at the mercy of a true wilderness. New York may be the concrete jungle, but it is leagues safer than where he finds himself at this point in his journey.

He falls asleep in his truck to the sound of wolves and owls (they are what they seem in this show). Joel is woken to the sound of something rambling through the bed of his truck. He sees a man and calls out to him, angry at first, then begging him to come back and help him. “You can rip me off; just come back!”

Hours later, Adam returns to the truck out of mercy and invites Joel to follow him back to his remote cabin, where he proceeds to cook Joel a gourmet meal of Dim Sum from scratch. 

Adam reveals to Joel that he was in Vietnam, saw the fall of Saigon, and lived through the aftermath. He also says that he taught one of the great chefs of New York City at a school in Buffalo. Something doesn’t add up, but the noodles are incredible!

Adam lectures Joel on his table manners and life skills. Adam is fussy, but there is also something loveable inside this character who, for some complex reason, has chosen to walk away from human civilization despite the obvious gifts he has to offer.

Adam is the opposite of Joel in nearly every way, though they both share a misanthropic view of their fellow human beings despite each having their brilliant talents to share with their those people. Of course, if they can meet in the middle, they will still be perfectly flawed people, but they may have a shot at being happy. And this is what Northern Exposure is about, seeking happiness through the annoying struggle of dealing with other people.

Adam is a recurring character that only grows more wonderful throughout Northern Exposure’s six seasons. Also, his wife is named Eve. She completely controls Adam to protect him from himself, which is a brilliant and straightforward introduction that makes this complex character even deeper and funnier.

Bernard

Most people think of Chris In The Morning when they think of Northern Exposure. John Corbett’s innocent and star-light-filled portrayal of dreamer Chris Stevens should be remembered as an icon of this show. A former convict, Stevens made his way from the poor white mountainside towns of West Virginia to the cusp of the Alaskan Riviera, looking for redemption. He has found it and is on a journey. Reciting Jung over the airwaves with Louis Armstrong’s Moon River as a soundtrack, this episode finds Chris Stevens as an artist caught in a current obsession. 

The strong Moon is mixing with the Northern Lights in a way that is messing with his dreams. He creates a metal sculpture that includes (dramatic pause) two mountain peaks. In season one of Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper instructs his fellow investigators, “When two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention.” And so we shall.

Unbeknownst to Chris, a strange leather-clad biker has rolled into town. Bernard Stevens is a black man, and he’s not lost; he just doesn’t know where he is. By chance, Chris sits next to Bernard at The Brick Tavern and they start to converse. Strange things are happening in Cicily, Alaska, this day.

Bernard reveals that he’s a tax consultant from Portland, Oregon. But he started having bizarre dreams about five nights ago. So he jumped on his motorcycle and started riding to follow those dreams. And he’s ended up here with these people, utterly open to circumstance and chance.

Chris and Bernand immediately bond, and when Chris shows Bernard his artwork, they commit to completing it together. What follows is the beautiful beginning of an excellent sibling love story. It turns out that Bernard and Chris have the same father, who was a long-distance trucker. They were also born on the same day, forcing their father to miss every other one of their birthdays. They become entwined in each other’s dreams. They are fraternal soul mates and remain that way for the entire six seasons of Northern Exposure. Their love rises above race, class, and petty squabbles (though there are at least one of those to come). 

Through their love and devotion to one another, Bernard and Chris Stevens become better human beings, capable of being more alone because they are together.

Joel and Maggie

Joel takes Maggie and Ed to the site of Adam’s cabin. No one believed Joel when he told them that he had spent the evening in Adam’s place and ate one of the best gourmet meals he’s had in his life. They laughed him out of the Brick. In this scene, Joel is giddy over finding a forgotten garlic press in the dirt, proving that Adam was indeed here and objective in this new reality.

For the first time, Joel has changed Alaska. It won’t be the last.

And Maggie has fallen deeper in love with this selfish man despite her best intentions, sinking another level into his heart in this scene. Oh, the journey these two go on, getting ever closer together one throat-ripping argument at a time.

Dream Connections

 In Twin Peaks, Cooper’s dreams occur in the Red Room or some extension of it until The Return (Season 3, Showtime 2017), wherein I maintain the entire season takes place in Cooper’s damaged, dreaming mind. But in Season 1, Cooper’s Red Room dreams were the strangest thing seen on television that year (and maybe ever).

Cooper plays a dangerous game, chasing Laura Palmer’s killer through the psychology of his dreams in a town that hosts powerful supernatural forces that bend towards dark endings.

In Northern Exposure, dreams are also experiences of revelation, but towards much happier ends. For example, dreams bring Chris and Bernard together. Portals in dreams will also drive the narrative forward to a conclusion in Season 6, much like they function in Twin Peaks The Return and Glastonbury Grove during the original series.

I don’t believe that Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure have any commercial connection besides being broadcast on opposing channels off-season in the initial series run. But I do believe in Synchronicity, which is defined as the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

Artists never create in a vacuum, and though these stories differ wildly in their elements, they each tell a hero’s journey about selfish males who think they run the world around them but are revealed naked and broken by fate.

Joel Fleishman and Dale Cooper must become more than they think they are to become what their world needs them to be. But, like us, they dream and their dreams melt into their destiny.

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Love Light

Recently, I completed a focused therapy project with a licensed counselor. I’m working on some recent struggles I've had communicating with someone I love, someone very close and special to me, someone who doesn’t think as I do, who doesn’t feel how I feel about others. This person is a very kind soul to those they call their own. This person thinks very differently about people who aren’t included in that category of “their people.” It doesn’t matter who they think their people are. Everyone has people who aren’t their own kind, whatever lines we draw to make that determination. But it’s how we treat the people outside our circles that determines our moral worth as human beings. Relationships, it turns out, are very complicated when we stare too closely at them.

But relationships can be simple, too. When you truly love one person, you can love all people. Love really doesn’t stare too hard or too long. Instead, Love breathes a sigh of relief in the waking moment, and then Love moves on to appreciate the next moment. Love is not an emotion because all emotions have a beginning, middle, and ending. Love is a light that, when it’s turned on, stays on.

Past And Present, As They Are

One phrase my counselor taught me was, “The past and the present as they are.” I love the poetic quality of this phrase because it requires some creativity to interpret. Past is all the things that have happened up to this moment. All the laughter, the crying, the dreading, all of it. We can each take all of our experiences, with all the emotional baggage associated with them, stuff it all in a mental bag, and then write PAST on the tag of the bag. We’ve lugged that bag up to this spot, which is the present moment. We can reach into that bag and respond to this moment the way we have a million times before. Or, we can set the bag down and start living our lives, see other people as they are right now. And then we can choose to be better people together. What a powerful choice that is, to choose to be better than we were yesterday.

We should expect each other to be better people. But, unfortunately, we cannot control the behavior of other people. We can’t force them to think or feel how we desire them to think and feel. We can only control our own behavior in this life.

From here, the question should be, “What is my behavior?” Obviously, we have to start looking at what we are saying and doing in our relationships, but it’s more than that. We must become aware of what we are thinking and feeling at all times. The most crucial part of self-analysis is to understand one’s intellectual tides and the emotional gravity that moves them.

During my counseling session, I learned the technique of using open hands when I’m talking with other people. Palms up, as if receiving a gift, they said. It changes the way we communicate. I thought it sounded dumb when I first understood the task. And I forgot a lot at first. Eventually, I caught myself and became aware of when I was using my hands when talking and flipped my palms up and this was a good change of behavior. I started to move past some barriers of humility that have been holding me back.

And then, I moved into managing my responsive behavior when challenged. I’ve had an enormous struggle with this my whole life, losing control when challenged. I was a little guy growing up, tiny and frail. The whole world was bigger than I was, and I was just this little thing floating around in it. But early in life, I learned that one’s will has no sense of height, and as emotional creatures, we can exert our will on others with significant impact. Sometimes, winning a confrontation comes down to who is most emotionally inspired to scream. That was me. In grade school, a mean girl called me “Shrimp.” I was so angry that I tensed all of my muscles up and screamed until I broke nearly all the blood vessels in my face. That’s how angry I could get as a child. Imagine when I grew up.

I was saved by the love of so many people, including this person I’m struggling with now. The struggle is that we only have so many minutes to live in this life. I don’t want to waste a single one of them, not experiencing Love so that I can suffer under strife; call me selfish, but that’s what my best friend dying last year taught me. Seize the day. Gather ye rosebuds because, in this life, Robin Williams went from making Dead Poet’s Society to hanging himself in an empty house because he couldn’t take another second of it. People are in real pain out there. And this person is in pain right here. I am working on this pain so that I can either move past it or learn to live with it so effectively that it doesn’t mess up my personal relationships anymore.

PAUSE —> NOTICE —> CHOOSE

I learned this technique, as well. Pausing means taking slow, deep breaths when my nerves start rising, and I can feel the chokepoint triggers of my anger coming up fast. Slow, deep breaths in a misty red fog and I’m trying to inhale all that red vapor of anger and exhale clean transparent calm, letting that anger float by me like a meteor shower I just passed through in outer space. Just because I’m angry doesn’t mean I need to let that anger out whenever my nerves get up. But if I’m pausing to notice what my feelings are right now, what I’m thinking right now, then I’ve created distance between reacting to a tense situation with anger and responding with wisdom. This takes work, but it’s short work because it happens in the living moment. Mostly, it’s just a tax on pride.

Over time, this sensitivity about one’s inner emotional wave patterns becomes an awareness that powers patience. Meditation helps with this; it’s training for a state of calm as the resting baseline of our awareness and behavior. This is real power, the most we can hope for as living souls in this crazy world built on this beautiful planet. We carry this state of grace with us when we leave. I like to tell myself this because it makes me feel better and it makes me think of my late Grandmother, who I called “Memaw” for 45 years.

My Memaw

She passed away from Covid in 2020, died poor and alone in a hospital room, surrounded by the nurses who took care of her during those final days. Those wonderful nurses sang hymns to her and made sure that she had her Bible in her hands, and passed away with dignity. What a service offered in a time of total darkness. So she was not alone, even though I was not there with her, but she was lonely without the presence of the ones she loved most in this world.

When I finally stand before her grave, I’m going to thank her for showing me what dignity is in this life. My Memaw may have been poor in resources, but she was a monarch in spiritual grace. And she and my Uncle just didn’t get along the last several years. He wouldn’t come to see her in the hospital in the days before she died, even though she begged him through all the channels she could light up and ask. Finally, he did come to her funeral. I watched over the webcam that the funeral home had set up to allow extended family and friends during the pandemic. I saw him walk up to her casket and look down, but he walked away pretty fast. That’s all I saw, but that’s not all that happened. He went home and shot himself that night. I don’t know what that time was like for my Uncle between when he walked out of the camera’s frame and pulled the trigger on that gun, but I think it was probably a living Hell. It makes me terribly sad and it scares the s**t out of me.

And because I’m scared nearly to death about ending up in such an awful emotional state, I want to learn to live with my anger and grief or learn to let it all go entirely. This is where CHOOSE comes in. “What would a calmer, wiser version of myself choose to do right now?” Imagine asking ourselves this question before we respond to a situation that isn’t life-threatening. What are three options to choose from? Flip my palms up and ask the question again: “What would a calmer, wiser version of myself choose to do right now?” Give me three options to respond to this situation.

Validation

It turns out that validation is critical to reconciliation. It’s okay to validate someone without approving what they have said and done. I learned this during my counseling sessions because I read it in one of the therapy modules. How can I validate this person’s anger without agreeing with it, or rising to meet it? Our expectations for how other people should behave almost always extend beyond that person’s capacity to deliver; this is especially true if there isn't communication established in mutual dignity that is delivered with clarity and received with impact.

I wrote this down: “Validation is acknowledging that a person’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors have causes and are understandable, based on that person’s perspective and situation.” In other words, while I don’t have to agree with someone to validate them, I can’t make proper amends until I validate that person’s dignity, which we both share by nature of being humans living on this planet. We must validate the person (or people) on the other side of the lines we draw between my people and those people. Suppose there isn’t validation on the other side of that line. In that case, we’re all just modern-day emotional Vikings, pillaging what we can to survive another day, existing but not living.

Love With Curiosity

If we do not love with curiosity then we die from boredom. We must do this because it is the marker of being fully alive in this living moment. I sat down one day, towards the end of my counseling, and I wrote out a simple code that I will seek to live by in this life of purpose:

I want relationships in my life with people who expect the following from me:

* I will not manipulate their affections or intentionally say things to upset them.

* I will tell them honestly how I feel when they ask or when I feel they need to know.

* I will accept them as they are, provided they do not deliberately harm themselves or other people.

In return for my commitment to live by this code, I should also be able to expect these morals reflected in the behavior of my friends and family, and so should you. We each deserve this because of our common human dignity.

Calling Out Amends As Made

Suppose we can agree on rules that acknowledge this shared dignity. If so, we can move on to validating each other, and when we all feel validated, this is what trust feels like.

With trust, we can finally call amends out as made.

Amends are only authentic when they happen simultaneously on both sides of a conflict. If contrition only happens on one side of a damaged relationship, this is like a sinking ship bailed out on only one side of the hull. The boat still sinks; it just takes more time to do it.

Human relationships are like ships that sail. The vessels built with sturdy materials, crafted with kindness and care, are the ships that sail far and take on no water from the Sea of Trauma. But, on the other hand, shoddy ships, built fast with careless hands and reckless hearts, take on water quickly and sink before they can even leave the harbor.

We are humans with hearts birthed from the sea and we are born together to sail until it ends.

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Coming in 2024, by the author of A Skeleton Key To Twin Peaks and Ey Up! An American Engages With This Is England is an exploration of the American moral soul through primetime art.

I was born the year All in the Family broke its fifth season. The Jeffersons just started. Maude was a runaway hit. Sanford and Son was already in syndication, and Norman Lear was still just getting started. He would run challenging shows in primetime for another 15 years and is still producing American art as I write this.

No other American artist has impacted my system of morals and behavior like Norman Lear. His shows matter. They taught me how to think about poverty, race, and class, but most importantly, they taught me how to laugh with people who didn’t look like me, didn’t talk like me, and didn’t think like me.

But it wasn’t all roses for Lear. He was put on Richard E. Nixon’s (a Bunkerism) enemy’s list. I would argue that no other artist fueled the rise of the Religious Right that became the Reagan Revolution like Norman Lear. All those shows in prime time, making America laugh at rich white people, at bigoted white people, and see deeper into the pit of hypocrisy that binds us all to this day.

But did these shows and their impact make Americans better people? Did we treat each other better because we watched them together? Or did the backlash against the culture these shows helped to create, result in an America that is crueler and is no longer sustainable as a country of The People, For The People, and by The People? Can we even call ourselves a common People anymore?

I will be interviewing people on all sides of the question. I will be digging into my prejudices and moral values as I progress on a project to watch every episode in the order they were broadcast in prime time over 20 years of our American Lives. This Analysis & Appreciation will include insights and conversations about:

* All In The Family (1971 -1979) 209 episodes

* Sanford and Son (1972-1977) 135 episodes

* Maude (1972 -1978) 141 episodes

* Good Times (1974 - 1979) 133 episodes

* The Jeffersons (1975 - 1985) 253 episodes

* Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976 - 1977) 325 episodes

* The Facts of Life (1979 - 1988) 201 episodes

* 227 (1985 - 1990) 116 episodes

In the comments, let me know what you think about this project, especially if Norman Lear’s art made you a better person. It may end up in the book!

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Wayne Shorter was born eight months after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Wayne Shorter had a giant supply of human talent and artistic expression and is one of the most incredible saxophonists in musical history. His music immensely helped my mental health during the global pandemic that caused so much of our world to shut down these past two-plus years.

There is one period of Wayne Shorter’s music (that I’ve found so far at least), where he progressively published albums that, when savored over and over again sequentially, emotionally convey the soul’s sublime journey of the turning in on itself and then back out to the world again. Wayne Shorter builds an epic tale of descending into Hell and clawing back to the surface. Beginning with 1964’s Night Dreamer, Shorter shows us the human soul flipped inside out and back again. So let’s start with Night Dreamer, but first, we need to go back a few years to Wayne’s previous album, which was produced for another label and recorded in another city.

The city of Chicago looked like it was on fire. It was November 6, 1961, and steam billowed from the depths below ground. Still, it parted for Wayne Shorter, who made his way along the avenue toward the final recording session for a new record titled Wayning Moments under Vee-Jay’s production label. Wayne was ending his work with Art Blakey over the past few years. Art Blakey didn’t just create great music by bringing the most talented musicians together on stage and in the studio; Blakey created incredible artists. Famous for giving his musicians a place to develop themselves individually within the context of a group making music for the living moment, pick up any Blakey album across the decades, and you will be transported into one of the dozens of musical conversations about the things that matter to our short, flimsy, and important lives.

Wayne Shorter entered Universal Records studio and walked to find Sid McCoy, the engineer, and the fellow musicians he’d be playing with for this recording. They all readied their instruments, poised and waiting for McCoy’s signal to play. Finally, the sign is given, and Wayne Shorter’s tenor saxophone starts shouting out lovely and lively combinations of notes played over the chord changes as they were passed off between the rhythm of the double bass and drums and the melodies of the trumpet and piano. Wayne Shorter was starting to understand how to paint with sound, but he wasn’t the only one, and he wasn’t the first one. Another gargantuan musical visionary and talent, John Coltrane, also used the saxophone to carve out unexplored and exceptional sonic spaces inside our collective human soul.

Wayning Moments was recorded on November 6th, 1961, at Universal Records, Chicago

Wayning Moments was technically perfect in many ways; it also barely belongs with these other records. It wasn’t a Blue Note record and is far too pristine. But it’s an excellent place to measure how far we go in musical storytelling. When you listen to this album, you will know that Wayne Shorter is a musician capable of creating perfection from his musical ability. However, the musical narrative we are about to walk through requires the act of destruction and creation. Unfortunately, music that destroys to create is scarce, and my primary reason for writing this essay is to celebrate this gem of artistic scarcity.

The songs were a potent blend of Shorter’s compositions and key selections from other artists whose work allowed him to build entirely new expressions from the ground up. How incredible that we live in a world where one artist can pick up the work of another, even from other times, and create something new and exciting that shines a light of appreciation on both versions of artistic expression.

But perfection in Jazz music is a lie. This is a truth you can’t look up anywhere. You either feel it, or you don’t. And these songs are too perfect, well made, over-polished, and shiny when combined. Shorter left Art Blakey’s band, a new kind of musician. He was now playing with Miles Davis, who was digging all kinds of tunnels in entirely different areas of music than Wayne had excavated with Blakey. Miles Davis gave his musicians a different sort of freedom, the freedom to follow with humility and grace. There is a time to lead and a time to follow; the wise know which before it happens, and the lucky realize it afterward.

Something seemed to have unlocked inside Wayne Shorter’s heart in the two and a half years between that cold Chicago day and the pleasant late Spring day in Englewood, New Jersey, where we started this journey together. Wayne Shorter was ready to start telling a different story that may not have made sense to him back then. I doubt that Shorter understood how the next three years of work would progress. I write this not because I know but because I strongly feel that proper art, in James Joyce’s definition, is not created by intention but by emotional reflection channeled through artistic expression in the living moment. That’s not mumbo jumbo to me. I’ve experienced moments of composition that evoked my spirit to ascend beyond where it was before I started typing. That, to me, is one of the great experiences of being alive, being able to express myself in a creative bit of nothing that feels like everything. I wonder if Wayne Shorter felt this ascension when he started playing sounds into the microphones at Van Gelder studio because I sure feel it when I listen to this record with knowledge of the journey to come.

Night Dreamer was recorded on April 29th, 1964, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

Night Dreamer is the first song and the title of the first album in this journey, and it begins with a lovely and cascading roll of the piano that leads into the swaying horns of Shorter’s tenor sax and Lee Morgan’s trumpet. These two men create an emotional scene that reminds me of the moments in The Nutcracker when you suspect and then know that Clara is now asleep and dreaming.

If Wayning Moments was about bopping around a crowded city on a beautiful day, smiling at everyone you saw, Night Dreamer is about what happens after lying in bed after a very long day of walking, those soothing seconds when the body feels its burden lightened and settled into comfort. These are moments of bliss, and this first song captures that feeling and will shepherd the listener through the gates of the dream, where chaotic forces will draw the dreamer across the darkness to the edges of mortality.

Night Dreamer is a record that calms the needle of my soul by dragging it through these grooves. It tells the story of a dreamer floating through layers of dreams painted in sounds that move erratically but with grace. Nietzsche wrote that when one stares into an abyss, the abyss gazes back. Maybe you agree that Night Dreamer is a story of descent into darkness and solemnity. With its final song, Armageddon, this record has delivered its Hero and we, the listeners, to a deep new arena of the spirit, where something sublime will happen to us all.

Nat Hentoff interviewed Wayne Shorter for the essay on the back cover (Blue Note Records have truly excellent essays on the backs of their albums). One gains directions for listening to the record from these essays on what to think about as you focus on the sound; this instruction is the hallmark and purpose of significant criticism. In this interview, Shorter makes a few statements that give us insight into his feelings when he and these musicians created this work of art.

Shorter told Hentoff:

“What I’m trying to express here is a sense of judgement approaching—judgment for everything alive from the smallest ant to man. I know that the accepted meaning of Armageddon is the last battle between good and evil, whatever that is. But my definition of the judgement to come is a period of enlightenment in which we will discover what we are and why we’re here.”

We deal with dark swirling forces that float through beams of light, but the light grows more intense the closer we get to the edge of consciousness, where even the dream must settle down into the depths of our universal mind. This brings us to Juju.

JuJu was recorded on August 3rd, 1964, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

Three months later, Wayne Shorter was ready to record the next exploration phase in the underworld of the human psyche. This record loses Lee Morgan’s horn, leaving Wayne’s tenor saxophone as the only brass statement, but he makes up for the trumpet’s absence.

This album starts in a wild cacophony, a frantic disruption of the soul with the title song Juju. Again, we are staring into the abyss and witnessing the unknown staring back at us. This milestone of disorder is a much different emotional scene than what we left in Night Dreamer, yet we can hear faint callbacks to some of those questions asked in the last album. With our identity moving from objective to subjective, as in dreams, we suddenly confront a force beyond ourselves as the dreamer alone.

Deluge asks a question and gets an answer over and over again. Does the answer change by the end of the song? That’s up to each of us to judge for ourselves. It’s a complex but beautiful inquiry, petitioning someone to see if they are pure of heart, an honest question seeking a direct answer, which I believe is given by the end of this song. Shorter’s sax starts very confident and open but is soon joined by the piano, and they swing in a joyous rhythm of commitment, underscored by the drums. This is a marriage song. Shorter told Nat Hentoff:

“In the opening statement of the song [Deluge], I tried to give the feeling of something coming down—descending octaves—and then overflowing.” The soul has wrestled with its dark side and finally accepted it.

This record works through some dark forces but ultimately comes out triumphant. I feel like there is either a balance restored by the last song, Twelve Bars To Go, or light has indeed overcome darkness, if only a little. When asked about the positivity in the record, Shorter told Hentoff:

“Since being with Miles, I find my playing has steadily veered toward expressing the happier side of life.”

Night Dreamer moved us from the waking world into a world of amorphous and, at times, chaotic dream life, where identity dissolves and morphs, becomes subject and object at once and then dumps it at the edge of a dark and wild abyss. Standing on the edge, casting our soul’s attention into the abyss, is what Juju shelters us through. By the end of this album, we see both sides clearly, and it is up to us to choose. As for Wayne Shorter, he walks back into Van Gelder studio on Christmas Eve, nearly four months later, to record a masterpiece that says very clearly what his main character is going to do after staring into the abyss and seeing both the darkness and light that resides within us each and all.

Speak No Evil was recorded on Christmas Eve, 1964, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

I have much to say about this record, but it ties my tongue up. You must listen to it in its entirety, preferably in a low-lit room with no distractions, your favorite beverage close by, or maybe a dog or cat curled up in your lap. Close your eyes and slip on your headphones, or turn the music up until it surrounds and comforts you without agitating. Go on this journey alone and then come back to tell others about it like I am working on saying to you now.

Blue Note President Don has steered me right in the path of Wayne Shorter’s gifts. A few years ago, I took a chance on a vinyl record box set from Vinyl Me Please to celebrate the 80th Anniversary of Blue Note’s excellence. I didn’t know much about Jazz music then (I still don’t know enough right now). As Ted Lasso says, “I got curious” and vowed to stay that way about Jazz music. Like Bob Dylan and Twin Peaks, Jazz will be a lifelong puzzle that I work my soul against solving or at least coming to an emotional stasis of understanding. This record, Speak No Evil, is the one that made me truly fall in love with the emotions that Jazz can make me feel like no other music has done. And Don Was steered me to Wayne Shorter’s album Speak No Evil in the podcast that the purchasers of that box set were sent. I am forever grateful for that recommendation from Don Was.

With Jazz music, I ask myself, What would happen in a scene in a film that was scored to this song right now? This question is an excellent starting point for identifying the emotional tone of the music you’re listening to. Once the emotion is identified, one can better place it in the proper context, asking the next question. What are these instruments saying to each add or detract from this mood? Sting sang to us that we are all spirits in the material world, and Jazz is a conversation between the spirits of musicians through their instruments in the improvised and living moment. The best Jazz music is a complex conversation where different instruments say different things. True diversity in musical expression is difficult to achieve in other forms of music, especially those that involve someone singing lyrics.

There are only six songs on this record; for me, they are a continual conversation between good and evil. Here’s what seems to be repeatedly happening with the calls and responses we hear throughout the songs. The rhythm is the constant drumbeat of what evil says in the conversation. Ron Carter’s bass fuels the fire that Elvin Jones lays down in the most masterful swinging and swaying waves of groove.

The voice of Evil is always surrounding us and informing the world; it may also be the ground we walk on. Of course, Good is represented by the horns. Freddie Hubbard’s trumpet melts with Wayne Shorter’s tenor saxophone, and they weave a golden rope around the rhythm, leaving the melody to decide for itself. Herbie Hancock seizes the void between the parties and gives us a vehicle to ride on this journey. Good should pierce the rhythm and pull the melody towards what it has to say, which (for me) is the following, over and over:

Good Says To Evil: “I see you.”

“I see you clearly.”

“But forgiveness and mercy are stronger than your pain.”

“And here is what that mercy feels like...”

Listen to the title song for the album, and you may agree with my premise here. This record slaps forever and all time. As an album of music telling a story, Speak No Evil feels like Christ turning away from the Devil after the last temptation. But it doesn’t have to be that dramatic. The best of us turn away from evil every day. This record is a fork in a soul’s journey toward enlightenment. Interviewed by Hentoff again, but for this album, Shorter said:

“I was thinking of misty landscapes with wild flowers and strange, dimly-seen shapes—the kind of places where folklore and legends are born. And then I was thinking of things like witch burnings, too.”

Now, my own experiences with this record came into my life shortly before I first visited Scotland. I will write about that experience under a separate banner, but I will summarize by saying something remarkable happened in my heart just stepping off the plane in Inverness. I was lifted. I was home in a way I’ve never felt when visiting an alien landscape. I could feel my Nordic and English ancestry stir in that land. This album stokes that fire inside me. I experience a depth of righteousness whenever this album concludes, and I always fight the urge to flip the record over and hit play again on the turntable. What a blessing it is to find art that one can continually walk through while finding new rooms filled with different emotional alchemies.

Speak No Evil is the power of righteousness at the moment before it becomes humble in the presence of the divine. This leads us to the next album, The All Seeing Eye.

The All Seeing Eye was recorded on October 15th, 1965, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

You are dreaming, and you’ve traveled far on this vessel of rhythm, harmony, and melody over this past year. We had just made it through a world of mist and legend when we last left this journey. We wrestled with the Devil, and both walked away exhausted. The mist parts, just at the end, and we are staring at what appears to be...

…The All Seeing Eye.

If you’re Wayne Shorter, you’ve got to know in ’65 that you’ve already created an epic tale on the scale of Lord of The Rings. The soul has journeyed so far by the end of Speak No Evil, but as the man wrote, time is short, so you gotta keep on keeping on in the service of whatever it is that we each call lord. You gotta serve somebody, after all.

At the beginning of this record, the listener is being questioned alongside the Hero we’ve been shadowing this whole time across three albums. So now we are in the hot seat in front of this...being...entity...what would you call it? Remember that scene in The Neverending Story where Atreyu comes to the oracles who will shoot him down with eyeball laser beams? This feels like that moment, and I’m here for every second.

In the Pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Encounter At Farpoint,” the Enterprise D crew encounters a god-like being who can create a reality around them. John Delancie’s Q is one of the most significant characters created in a fictional narrative. A true trickster, Q is not entirely malevolent. He is beyond good and evil and stands in the judgment of every human being. Does such a cruel creature as Humanity deserve even to continue drawing breath? Q sets out to determine this when he puts Captain Jean-Luc Picard on trial as the primary spokesman for his species’ banality, weaknesses, and terrible choices.

That trial is also happening in The All Seeing Eye, where we walk through the brutality of our shared history, understanding that historical events are composed of human beings behaving in the living moment as if there were no mercy or salvation, and that is a spiritual sin that has spawned an ocean of moral crimes.

There is a large cast of musical voices over these five epic songs. After all, when the entire species is judged for a spiritual crime, it deserves to be a spectacle. Freddie Hubbard adds the flugelhorn to his trumpet. He is joined by Wayne Shorter’s brother, a great musician (bless their families for supporting them in pursuing music as their gift to the world), supporting Hubbard with a second flugelhorn. Grachan Moncur III rises to the eminence of his name with the trombone. James Spaulding wraps the output of his alto saxophone with Wayne Shorter’s tenor saxophone to create a single, complex voice. Look at all this brass that Wayne brought to speak for the best of humanity. Like Picard and his trusted crew, all this brass will join together and argue before The All Seeing Eye that mankind is worth saving despite our sins.

* Honesty

* Humility

* Mercy

Ron Carter’s bass and Joe Chambers's doubtful drums create a thin-lipped response to the evidence presented before the court’s honor. As humble citizens, we must become penitent before the Law as it has been written on the human heart since the dawn of consciousness. When man’s law veers from that universal law, trauma and strife are the effects of that unnatural ripping away. The All Seeing Eye is the story of our species begging for another chance at redemption.

So we’ve been introduced to the almighty in the first song, which is also the album’s title. The next song is Genesis, and Shorter had this to say on the back cover of the album when it was published:

“Genesis goes into a 4/4 straight time to indicate that everything is beginning to settle down, routines are starting, patterns are emerging. There are clusters of stars species of life. And overall, I tried to give Genesis a feeling of open-endedness because once creation begins, the creative process keeps going on.”

Carl Sagan probably loved this song if he ever heard it because he told this story a million times throughout his life. He thought about it and talked about it to others. Carl Sagan found a profound spiritual truth through science's behaviors and language. Simply studying the natural world by staring at it without judgment can allow for a tremendous and deep reservoir of humility and gratitude, the genuinely religious experience in our lives.

For the next song, “Chaos,” Shorter says:

“Chaos is what man has done, to a certain extent, to God’s creation. The music mirrors conflicts, wars, disagreements—the difficulty men have in understanding each other. As for its structure, it moves—in its use of time—from fighting with clubs and bows and arrows to the atomic age and beyond. You can hear, for example, the age of gun powder being introduced in a particularly staccato section.”

When we make it through the chaos of our trauma-filled history, we are met with the “Face Of The Deep,” which is the moment of judgment. We might expect cruelty, but we are satisfied with tenderness instead. This is the mercy of your Lord, whatever face you choose for it. Even cynicism is a religion with an idol and rituals. Here is where we lay down all those burdens of the past, where we walk away from the hope that institutions will save our souls. They won’t.

And finally, like Agent Dale Cooper in the final moments of Twin Peaks The Return, we must sacrifice even our most sacred identities by emptying our pockets of memory; all the precious and terrible moments of our existence pour to the floor and turn into dust that dissolves and wafts away into the same mist that we journeyed through to get here. We are naked and empty before The All Seeing Eye. Shorter said this on the back cover:

“Face of the Deep is hopeful..the indication is that we don’t know what will happen and therefore, there is still hope..I wanted to indicate that God’s thought processes are so powerful that He can overcome all of the goofs of man and some of His own too. He keeps thinking forward. When I say some of the goofs may be His too, and that possibility is raised in Chaos as well—I mean that if He had wanted to create a world without conflict, He could have done it.”

And there we have it. The All Seeing Eye is asking for our forgiveness. The price of that forgiveness is that we must always deal with the extreme opposing force that manifests in this character of chaos named Mephistopheles, the machine maker. We must learn to co-exist with this annoying entity of malice. The last song, "Mephistopheles,” reveals this character who will sing sweetly to us in the next album, Adam’s Apple. The last minute is a war cry right in our faces. The Devil just threw down the gauntlet and wants to know what the f**k we are going to do about it. A playground bully who just slapped the precious coins out of our hands and scattered them all over the ground. With that last scream, the Devil pushes us hard to the floor and stares down at us, mean and hateful, daring us to get back up.

“Once you begin thinking about the nature of the universe and the nature of man, there’s no way of stopping. It’s all so open, so without finite limits. The universe keeps changing, man keeps changing, and I keep changing.” - Wayne Shorter.

Adam’s Apple was recorded February 3rd-4th, 1966, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

Nearly four months after recording The All Seeing Eye, Wayne Shorter walked back into Van Gelder Studio on a late Winter’s day, almost two years after the first session where they recorded Night Dreamer in this same studio. In the life of an artist, this had become a period of immense critical value. These records were vital. They still matter, equivalent to a sound sculpture on the level of Michelangelo’s David or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Hell, the story is the same story on that ceiling in Rome.

Mephistopheles is not all fire and brimstone. That villainous character can groove as no one else can, and it also speaks in the language of horns. There is a reason the proverbial Eve was seduced by the snake's hissing. Adam’s Apple is all about taking that precocious first bite. In Batman (1989), the Joker asks his prey, “You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?” In Pulp Fiction, Jules Winnfield quotes the Bible Ezekiel 25:17 about feeling god’s wrath through a finger that touches you after being judged and found wanting. There’s that spiritual crime again. The path of the righteous cleaves through the inequities and tyranny of selfish and evil men.

The human being who speaks no evil passes through the land of shadow under the protective gaze of The All Seeing Eye. Judged and found willing, the righteous one is released to walk in grace even under a cloud of darkness. But you gotta give the Devil his due, which is what Adam’s Apple is about.

The instruments and musicians are a fraction of the crew that came together for The All Seeing Eye. Shorter is the only brass with his tenor sax. Herbie Hancock regulates the temperature on the keys, and Reggie Workman’s bass melts into Joe’s Chambers to pace the rhythm of Mephistopheles’ groove. When the final song, “The Collector,” ends, and the listener is released to the final phase of this epic journey, it feels like a symbiosis has been reached. A being as complex as a human can never be completely good or evil. Like these horns that solo on top of this piano that meanders between the polarities of morality, the human being drifts in space, pulled by the gravity of a force greater than ourselves in many directions over what feels like a long period. Perhaps emotion is dark, which holds together objects in space separated by vast distances with little light.

By the end of Adam’s Apple, it’s time to return to the waking world, what will become the opposite of that happy, bouncing, and fake smiling person from Wayning Moments so long ago. We have forgone the luxury of joy through blissful ignorance. We have stood before The All Seeing Eye, and the wormy tongue of Mephistopheles has assaulted us. Now, the Hero must walk between polarities and move beyond Good and Evil with the righteousness they have maintained from the beginning of this journey.

Schizophrenia was recorded March 10, 1967, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

We’ve got a flute, friends. Four brass instruments welcome us back to the waking world. Shorter’s tenor sax, Curtiss Fuller with his trombone, and James Spaulding played that flute and the alto saxophone. Herbie Hancock is back on the keys, and Carter and Chambers are back together on rhythm, having not played with Wayne on an album since The All Seeing Eye.

I want to briefly discuss the epic story emoted over these six records (not counting Wayning Moments) in terms of this diagram illustrating “The Hero’s Journey,” as was taught by Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), the late master of Human Mythologies, Anthropology, Psychology, Philosophy, and Cosmology. Consider this diagram as a journey that begins at noon with the Call to Adventure, where the protagonist feels a deep uneasiness and finds some helper that guides them to the threshold where there is no turning back after the choice is made to descend into the underworld. This all happens in Night Dreamer.

Things turn dangerous once the Hero descends into the underworld to face their trials. They could be killed and dismembered, forced to sacrifice everything, and then scattered to the winds by cosmic forces much more significant than they could ever hope to be. Instead, the Hero confronts forces of judgment and mercy far beyond good and evil, ancient and complete. This happens in Juju, where the Hero has proven their worth to the grand judge, deriving authority from the universe and whatever force of intelligence created it. The Hero has been granted the gift of light to bring back to the world. But there are still trials on the outward flight back to the waking world. In Western mythology, this obstacle comes from Mephistopheles, who we are introduced to later in the final song of The All Seeing Eye.

Speak No Evil is where we wrestle with understanding and accepting the nature of Evil, where our Hero wrestles with the Devil and turns him away like Christ did all three times (and maybe a fourth if you count The Last Temptation, which I always do). The Hero of this story traveled to a spiritual and intellectual place opposite from where they descended into the underworld. They have begun their flight back to the world, which will offer new trials that often involve an ordeal of resurrection. Christians consider this the second birth. Similar concepts are equally poetic in expression and form, but they all say the same thing in the end. They are lost, and now they are found. They were blind but now can see. These lyrics from Amazing Grace bring tears to my eyes if they catch me giving them suitable attention.

That story of redemption, forgiveness, and grace through humility is one that I can rewatch and appreciate over and over again. It’s Star Wars. It’s Lord Of The Rings, Harry Potter. It’s Twin Peaks, and This Is England. All stories I adore rereading and rewatching. But I’ve never found it in an album before, not even where it should be with records like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a story never quite slaps hard enough to leave a mark, despite its perfection. But these Wayne Shorter records do. I think about them often when I’m not listening to them. I try to remember the riffs in those calls and responses. I can usually get pretty close. It puts me in the story, and I’m ready to listen to it all over again.

So the Hero, rising out of the underworld where they confronted forces of darkness inside the soul and psyche, now stands before The All Seeing Eye with total humility, on bended knee, head down. The light they have carried from the depths of all existence is now blessed by supreme knowledge with divine intelligence. Light fused with knowledge is the gift that must be brought back to the world to reforge what was torn apart but still so sacred that it can never be destroyed. In Twin Peaks: The Return, this is represented by the golden seed of all that is good within Agent Cooper. He has to smuggle it through his nightmare to save his soul. In Wayne Shorter’s epic, we have gone through the trial of ordeals with our Hero and now stand with them before The All Seeing Eye.

We are given a tour of the history of trauma that is life. We are judged and shown mercy, but with a catch. We must live with Mephistopheles in our ears daily, but we must never let that creature into our hearts. It’s the price we pay for the blessing of mortality, to each know ourselves as a unique collection of experiences smeared across emotional collisions through time.

Finally, the Hero leaves the gaze of The All Seeing Eye and begins the journey home with the elixir of life, a precious totem or piece of wisdom that will heal the world. The first leg of this trip back is Adam’s Apple, another conversation with Mephistopheles. Have you ever danced with the Devil in the Noonday Sun? They agree, and from the emotions I detect in myself after listening to and considering Adam’s Apple, I think the Devil is laughing at the Hero. In my mind, Mephistopheles is saying, “Alright, young one. Do you think you’re a badass with that little golden orb of yours? Go ahead and take that into the world and see what happens. This is my world, b***h. Good luck!” Laughing at the Hero as they walked away.

And, sure enough, when the Hero tries to take that little ball into the world, people slap it out of his hands and stomp on it with their muddy feet. They kick our Hero when they bend down to grab it and try to protect it. No one wants to know about that little orb, bringing us to Schizophrenia.

What does a magician do with the magic no one wants to see or hear about? Does the magic dissolve if it doesn’t find an audience to witness its evocation? There is a good chance the Hero will develop a psychopathic breakdown. According to the album’s back cover, written by Leonard Feather:

“Schizophrenia, in one of the strict dictionary senses, refers to an enormously complex emotional disorder, involving distortion of the usual logical relationship between ideas, a separation between the intellect and the emotions, a retreat from reality. In the more common sense, it simply means a split personality.”

This is all part of the Hero’s journey, and the successful ones make it through the mental and emotional breakdown of having all this magic and no one to cast it on and save. Consider the social media platform algorithms that amplify hatred and negativity because they’re the path of least resistance to stimulating engagement. We each suffer minor psychological breakdowns daily just by participating in this wreck of human society as it has been redefined through the Mephistophelian lens of whatever this evil Metaverse is about to become. The question is always about getting back up when you get knocked down.

So the Hero comes swaggering into this old world that feels like a New World to them. But it’s still the Old World for everyone else. That swagger of faith is fully displayed in the opening song “Tom Thumb.” The next song, “Go,” is the world’s response to the Hero, “Go pound sand, a*****e!”

And so we get a potential schizophrenic crack-up. Will the character be foolish enough to identify with The All Seeing Eye? That’s a sure path of martyrdom and torture in a world that is only too happy to keep nailing people to the cross of their unfortunate circumstances. Life is regrettable, after all, because it ends. But the other side of that assertion is that life is glorious because it ends, that the ending is what brings the potential for definition and distinction. The border of death in our lives gives us the appreciation of existence as a fleeting experience filled with an ocean, nay a universe of it over time.

The Hero will either succumb to this Kryptonite or become Kryptonite. To succumb or become is the final choice of the Hero in this journey. Some don’t make it. Their stories of failure at the gates of Paradise are sad. But those Walter White stories of loss and tragedy don’t mean as much as the Heroes who overcome this final barrier of their ego and hubris.

We know that our Hero in Wayne Shorter’s story has chosen to become that Kryptonite and continue casting their bread over the water. Listen to “Miyako” and know that our Hero has made it safely through that breakdown and is ready to cast his bread on the water, even with no creature to receive it; this is key for the Hero to maintain their precious sanity. Faith floats where needed in this world, and farmers must sow seeds with complete confidence that they will grow over time with care and attention by the earth that receives them. Isn’t it nice that things tend to grow where we plant them?

The final song of this journey is titled Playground, and our Hero finally sees the world as a playground filled with necessary suffering. Consider what Professor Campbell has to say about this in The Power Of Myth (1988, Doubleday Hardback First Edition):

Conclusion: The End Of Wayne Shorter’s Blue Note Hero’s Journey

Life as a playground is an excellent metaphor for what we each live through daily; a playground filled with suffering abounds. But there is also a chorus of childish laughter and screams of joy. No demon was slain during our journey here, but demons were overcome. It’s more adult to think about overcoming challenges rather than killing someone to try and solve complex problems, which is all so childish.

In the end, each may mean the same thing, but if we are lucky enough to live in an environment of relative security with general respect for the Common Good through Common Law, may our only demons to overcome be the metaphors of the dark forces that lurk in our hearts as we struggle to live with them every day of our lives. The best art helps us with this burden by imparting the wisdom we need to unlock, both intellectually and spiritually, our ability to become humble before The All Seeing Eye, which gazes at each soul in unique ways; this is what I’ve learned from my time enjoying these six records of musical storytelling.

Every night, we descend into an underworld of consciousness in sleep. For my part, I believe that I have experienced the lowest depths of the deepest edge of my existence as a mortal soul drawing breath on this planet. I have stood before my own All Seeing Eye and learned why it makes more sense to be kind rather than cruel, that there are times for war, but that all time is for peace. I believe Love is a force of nature, antecedent to all others. These are all just my dumb beliefs that I lean on like fractured crutches, which I use to bumble around this children's playground.

Now and then, as I bumble, I stumble upon some fantastic unit of human expression about this journey of our soul’s redemption. I pick it up. I stare at it for a while and put it in my pocket. I f**k with it in my pocket all day, fingers drawing traces around the surfaces, learning it from different angles. I’ll pull the gizmo out and stare at it. I’ll shake it next to my ear and see if it rattles. And then I’ll set it on the table and walk around it, looking at it in different lights from different angles. Then I sit down and crack my knuckles because it’s time to get to work. This is the best way to describe how certain expressions of art have chosen me to write about them. I often trip over things because I’m looking up at the sky when I should be looking down at the ground. Most critics stare at the ground and never trip at all. How unfortunate for them.

The three years (1964-1967) during which these records were produced followed the death of a President and the death of many dreams of Justice around the world. Too many people stared at the sky or looked down at the ground. More of them should have been paying attention to what they were walking into straight ahead. This is still our problem.

The artist enjoys the luxury of staring at the sky as much as they desire. But the artist is a Human before they are anything else. And the Human Being is a Citizen before they can ever be an Artist. Citizens share respect for one another and adhere to the Common Law as a measure of the Common Good.

For my part, I’m one of those rare middle-aged starry-eyed dreamers who still believe, despite the reasonable cynical conclusion, that art can heal the world by changing the internal emotional landscape of any Human Being alive. In this essay, I have labored to explore what I found to be a profoundly moving narrative being told over these six records that Wayne Shorter recorded between 1964 and 1967.

A lot can happen over three years. Jesus’s entire ministry was about that long. In three years, civil wars are fought and lost by everyone on all sides. But it is also possible for Human Beings to rise above themselves in the living moment and string them together like prayer beads into the most incredible soul expressions over three years. What happens when one of the world’s most brilliant and talented musicians brings together the most talented musical teams for different sections of the most epic story they create through sound? I hope you’re about to discover this experience on your own.

These musicians who created the rhythm and melody that allowed Wayne Shorter to solo his tenor saxophone, blended with all those other outstanding horned instruments, assigned that brass as the voice of the Hero in this journey of descent into the underworld to conquer the dark forces within the soul. Then, the Hero ascends to be granted an audience with The All Seeing Eye. Here, they are judged worthy to return to the world with a boon of salvation. Unfortunately, this journey through the counsel of the repulsive Mephistopheles sees the Hero returning to a world that neither recognizes nor receives this boon brought to them through the flames of desire and fear. So, what is the Hero to do now?

The Heroes that proceed onto the Playground are the ones who lay down their pain, joys, mission, and ultimately their identity. Like poor Agent Cooper, who doesn't even know what year it is at the end of Twin Peaks, the Hero stumbles forward without a light. Yet, they continue to do the work, to cast their bread upon the water. The Artist’s valid reward is not money or fame but the experience of Nirvana in the living moment. Consider this statement from Wayne Shorter himself on the back cover of the final album of this series Schizophrenia (Blue Note Records, 1967):

“When you’re playing, the music is not just you and the horn—the music is the microphone, the chair, the door opening, the spotlight, something rattling. From soul to universe.”

Here is a list of all these albums and songs for you to enjoy and think about:

Explore More About Blue Note Records

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jbminton.substack.com/subscribe

🏆BONUS: After the reading of this letter 🔼, I have included the Red Room Podcast conversation between myself, Author John Thorne, and Andrew Grevas (Owner and Chief Editor of 25YLater Site).

Every aircraft Pilot has to prepare to make an emergency landing in a critical situation, where every decision could mean the difference between the life or death of dozens of people. There are laws strictly regulating how much sleep, time off, and travel that pilots can endure before their skills and abilities are considered unsafe to operate commercial aircraft. These measures are for our public safety.

Like Commercial Airline Pilots, Fiction Writers also deliver lives from one place to another, though seldom safely. These fictional creations on the page are deliberately manipulated into situations of extreme tension and (when it’s done right) this is followed by a release. Music is also about consciously creating tension followed by release through the language of sound. Films do this with sight, sound, and story.

Our lives are overflowing with tension, and too often, our poor souls have such minor releases. Art can help us bring some of that release. Meditation can also bring the experience of letting go, and so can physical exercise. And finally, our relationships with human beings around us, our family, friends, neighbors, and strangers, can also bring us either spiritual freedom or emotional bondage. Finding release in this life requires an incredibly intricate and focused act of balancing emotional and physical forces into a high wire walk across a razor’s edge. As David Gilmour sang, “One slip and down a hole we fall.”

Personally, I like to keep my drama in the Art I consume. I have made some painful cuts from my garden of friends and family over the past three years, for multiple reasons. I’ve had a few friends and family cut me off as well, and it still hurts, though I mostly understand where they’re coming from. Sometimes you just can’t agree to agree, as Dylan sang in Caribbean Wind. And so it goes with these emotional blockages in our lives, but nowhere does it say we have to live every day filled with soap-opera-level drama that never ends. And so, in working to keep the dramas of my life confined to the Art that I consume, I try to think deeply about the characters in these fictions and what I would do in their situations.

Today, I want to explore the first two episodes of And Just Like That… (the Sex And The City reboot on HBOMax) and seasons 1 through 3 of Succession (also on HBOMax). I tried to limit the big spoiler to their own sections, clearly marked with small bold font. Don’t read those if you want to avoid knowing the twists. The rest are light positioning spoilers, nothing major.

On Episodes 1-2 of And Just Like That…

In my opinion, by the end of Sex And The City (six seasons and two films), Carrie Bradshaw was an awful, superficial, and petty person who destroyed other peoples’ lives in her blind ambition to possess a man whose superpower and proof of life was that he could not be possessed, that even in marriage he would be his own man. He was Mr. Big, after all. But Carrie wanted John Preston to define himself through the lens of her love; nothing short of that was going to stop her trail of tears in that emotional war. Their love was as much about power as it was about sex.

During season 3 of SATC, Carrie has found a good man (Aidan) and for a few episodes, actually strikes a healthy balance of happiness and physical intimacy without the typical conflicts she escalated if not outright instigated. Unfortunately, Carrie betrayed and emotionally decimated Aidan, while causing the breakup of Big’s marriage to a much more suitable spouse and partner (Natasha). As people in the real world, the wisest among us understand that emotional affection and physical attraction only get us so far in long-term relationships that may even become marriages and parenthood. It takes a lot to make those relationships work.

It’s not sex but friendship that was always the infinity crystals of Sex And The City, and those friendships held for all six seasons and two films.

A month ago, I was not interested in a reboot of Sex And The City. It just wasn’t a group of characters I wanted to visit with again. We had our memories and those were good enough. But, of course, I still clicked play on the first episode of And Just Like That… because when I no longer had to wait for it in some far-off timescale, I discovered that I did want to see these people again.

So Carrie and John Preston have been married for years now, living in a beautiful high-rise apartment (probably on Fifth Avenue). Carrie Preston (Bradshaw) finally got the man she wanted and it didn’t cost her any of her friends, except Samantha, but that’s a whole other thing. Samantha was Carrie’s publicist from the beginning; through all the s**t with Big, and Samantha ultimately saw her girl Carrie done right by life and love. Personally, I think Samantha Jones was one of the most intelligent and empowered female characters in any show I can think of from that time. This show does suffer from Samantha’s absence, explained below.

Carrie was a newspaper column writer at a time when newspapers were dying. Samantha helped her transition to writing books and that worked for a few years, but the tectonic shifts in how readers consume writing for free online through platforms where writers control so little of how their content is presented was too much for Carrie Bradshaw. Her writing faded in priority behind her marriage. She was still writing, of course (Carrie couldn’t turn that self-therapy spigot off), but she also couldn’t afford a publicist any longer, no matter how close a friend. So like she did with Aidan and Natasha, Carrie had to cut Samantha loose, but only in a business sense. For Samantha, however, there was no separation between business and personal business and she felt devastated and betrayed. Samantha ended up cutting off ties with all three of her best friends. She moved to London and stopped returning their calls and texts from Manhattan. And that’s where things lie in the pilot episode of And Just Like That…

Cutting people from our lives is something we’ve all likely experienced over the past few awful years. In America, we’ve been dealing with the pandemic combined with a Christian fascist uprising that has highly polarized our neighborhoods into small political cold war battles, where neighbors are walling themselves off from each other mentally based on their social media profiles and attributions, based on the cars we drive, the signs we hang, the places we go and whether we wear masks for the protection of others as well as ourselves. Because cutting people off has become a common experience in our lives, so it must also be an experience explored through the tensions and releases in our fiction.

Cutting off others is important for self-protection in some cases. I had an old friend that I recently had to cut off and block because every time I engaged with this person, I came away feeling drained and down. It was no longer a relationship where I was gaining anything, not joy or memories to enjoy later, and so cutting them off was a defense mechanism. A good gardener’s highest skill is knowing where and when to prune dead leaves from the branch.

⚠️SPOILER ⚠️

Mr. Big dies in the pilot episode of this reboot. Mercifully, the writers gave him a heart attack after a Peloton ride, and he sat down in that beautiful Park Avenue shower and waited for Carrie to come home so that he could die in her arms. F*****g heartbreaking, honestly. Writing about that scene right now is making me sad all over again. I loved John Preston’s character in Sex and the City.

What happens to Carrie felt something like justice, like Carrie being punished for her past sins. The writers gifted Carrie Preston with years of fictional happiness. She and John were outstanding together in this first episode. They found their balance and built a life of happiness, joy, affection, and, of course, sex. They had it all, but it had to crumble to have a story to tell. After all, there is a difference between a reboot and a reunion.

I loved almost all the male characters in Sex And The City. The show was revolutionary in how it presented males during the time. The turn of the century in TV was when female characters with money and prestige were all the rage, as something odd and interesting. But the main characters, these white women in SATC, were interesting because they acted like stereotypical white men at the time. They also ended up getting the results that those stereotypical ambitious white men got on TV shows, which was money and power. But the show rarely explored the cost of material happiness and emotional fulfillment at the expense of trauma inflicted on other human beings. SATC was never that brave to go beyond the safety fence of the emotional needs of its main characters.

But the men on Sex and the City were essentially good people, imbued with stereotypes that typical women characters had at the time on TV. Charlie, Steve, and Aidan were all sensitive partners, though they had rough spots. Each of them was composed to bring tension and release to the emotional needs of these empowered women running loose in Manhattan. And by the end of that journey, I was ready to say goodbye to these people, and likely never see them again.

As this reboot show starts, I’m looking back at my anger over what happened with Aidan and Natasha but also seeing Big and Carrie’s happiness now. And so, I shrug my shoulders in forgiveness. “There but by the grace of God go I,” right? I believe that everyone should be allowed to pursue their own version of happiness, provided they do not harm another person while seeking that happiness. It’s the part after the comma of the previous sentence that is troublesome for Carrie Preston in her modern time of trouble. She had to get wrecked so that she could recover; it’s the only story worth telling for this character in this time and place.

There is also a ray of hope. Samantha breaks her silence and sends a gorgeous funeral wreath for John’s casket (we can stop calling him Mr. Big now), and as one door closes, another opens back up in the wind of forgiveness and the possibility of a reforged friendship. That’s wonderful storytelling there, friends. It will be a joy to watch these rich white women in their fifties stumble around Manhattan and fall on their faces into this new world’s barriers and challenges.

"Someone's quick with their pronouns!"

This story has depth and I think it wants to be told. So I’m going to give And Just Like That… a shot this season. I’d like to see these friends fight against Manhattan and the world, but win one for us all this time.

On Seasons 1-3 of Succession

Succession is one of the top three best shows on television right now, maybe ever made. It takes the best of The West Wing and burns off the fat, the cruelty of Game Of Thrones but carves out the fantastic distractions. And it takes the tragedy of Shakespeare’s plays and potently injects that into one of the most important stories being told in dramatic fiction today, how we lost our souls as people and are about to lose our social stability to the global forces of organized crime and corruption.

In thirty hours of drama so far, Succession has shown us why power and wealth have deserted We The People and become concentrated in the hands of the cruel and largely useless few. Like these characters in Succession, we each now live in this phase of human civilization where religion now means the worship of wealth and power instead of becoming morally aligned in spiritual values that dictate kindness and compassion towards the poor.

In the wealth and the power-soaked world of the Roys in Succession, there is no such thing as charity. Logan Roy has built a media empire of print and cable journalism along with many companies across many industries; one of them is even a vacation cruise line. Logan Roy is arguably the most powerful man on Earth; he’s undoubtedly one of the most religious men on the planet as defined above.

Logan Roy is proof that when media combines with politics and business, the corruption of the human race inevitably follows. In a fair and just world, there would be clear lines of demarcation defended between these institutions in the same manner that the American Bicameral Legislature was built to push against an impartial Judiciary, while both of them collide with a dedicated Executive branch. Unstoppable Forces meeting Immovable Objects is the fire that moves fiction and government. When these tectonic shifts break down is when chaos looms.

Fiction falls apart and governments get bought out by dark money criminals who will use whole governments as weapons against the poor and unwanted. Like Charles Foster Kane, the hopeless ambition of becoming immortal while still alive and engaged in sin is all that Logan Roy is, even though he has four children and the world in his pocket. He’s still going to die and, to him, that means he’s going to lose. Logan hates to lose. He’s at his best when defending his power from every angle and every predator known to man and nature. Logan was built for war, but at his age and health, it’s become a great burden. Protecting his children is particularly difficult because each of them is uniquely challenged and none of them are prepared to take over this empire.

The first two and a half seasons of Succession explore the process that Logan goes through to determine which of his children he might be able to pass his empire on to and be sure that the family’s legacy of strangling the poor to turn their suffering into money continues to grow over the next generation. Logan’s children ultimately come up short, and some come up far shorter than others.

The Roy children each have an element of what it will take to lead Waystar RoyCo (and the world it drags behind on a golden leash) into the new wars to come. But his children can’t stop taking bites out of each other’s throat when they’re gathered at the trough to gorge on the fat of the land. They can’t figure out how to work together and fill each other’s emotional gaps to become the unified team of leaders that their father and his empire need before he can let go of it all and die with some possible satisfaction, to maybe lessen the misery of knowing he ultimately lost to death before he could achieve immortality.

Logan does finally choose the right person to hand his moral monstrosity over to protect and keep. Lukas Mattson will become the next Gollum for a new generation. He has a clear and dispassionate view of how to wield unlimited power in the bitter economic culture wars for profit that are already in motion. But to hand over power and control to this perfectly heartless man means that Logan Roy may have to cut each of his children off from his legacy entirely. Of course, they may end up still working for Waystar RoyCo or GoJo or whatever name they put to the abomination that will inevitably result from combining them. Each child could end up with an important but toothless executive title and lifetime payout. But none of them will be running battleships into cruisers out where the action is happening. After looking into his eyes and heart, Logan now knows that Lukas Mattson will do what needs to be done in order to get what needs to be gotten. Mattson will order people to the gas chambers if necessary, and in the world that Logan Roy has built to pass over during this succession, there will always be working gas chambers without benches or comfort (in his eyes, what’s the point of even pretending that comfort matters in slaughter?).

As the Psalm says and Bob Marley sang, “The stone that the builder refuses, becomes the head cornerstone.” Shiv’s husband Tom has always seemed a goofy, mildly cruel, but a generally harmless fool. With the Cruise Line scandal, he walked blindly into a sewer of corruption, banality, and actual crime. Tom was willing to go to prison for the family, for Logan, and for Shiv if she’d had gotten pregnant with his child, given him a sign that their love was real. Tom was clear that having a child and building their own legacy was his price for sacrificing his freedom for Waystar Royco. And his willingness to sacrifice his freedom was taken as a genuine gesture of loyalty to Logan, as it is for all crime bosses. Going to jail for the family is just behind taking a bullet for the Don in the actions that speak loyalty from the heart to the corrupted soul.

His wife, Shiv (Logan's only daughter), doesn’t care about Tom's needs. She’s not interested in building a family legacy with him. So Shiv uses Tom like every other man in her life, all useful idiots in her eyes. And so, of course, Tom betrays his wife and his brothers-in-law by revealing their plans to Logan and giving him a vital few minutes to prepare to nullify their threat like an autonomic judo move. At the end of Season 3, Tom has the last laugh on these spoiled and rotten human beings, and he’s bringing Greg along with him. Those on the bottom will be on top for a bit, but I’m sure Tom will find some way to s**t the bed in Season 4.

Connor Roy, the eldest and single child of Logan’s first wife, is seeking his way out with his fiancee (who used to be his prostitute), and he should work to leave this family in his past where they belong. If the others were smart and kinder, they would realize this is the only path for their salvation and happiness.

And Kendall, poor obliterated Kendall, who, like Don Quixote, went swinging at dragons but ended up actually hitting one, realizing only too late that it’s hard to put out dragon fire once it starts; it burns the whole world down around you. He comes undone in the finale during a scene that will haunt me forever. Kendall breaks down and admits that he murdered another human being out of apathy, elitism, and whatever else you want to throw in there. That man’s life didn’t matter to Kendall Roy, and that is a moral mark on the soul that, like Lady Macbeth's curse, can’t be wiped away with any solvent found in nature.

Roman Roy, who favors his parents’ adoration above all, but can never seem to get it, has become a broken and almost hopelessly deranged human being. Unlike Kendall, he hasn’t killed anyone yet, but it’s probably just a few years away.

The kids do come together in the finale of season three, and they stand for themselves. They bet it all on black, and the spin comes up red. They are all still poisoned in their souls, but they are not irredeemable yet. Logan Roy lost his soul long ago, and Lukas Mattson is well on his way to the lowest depth of Hell, where power in the material world originates and seeps out like a poisoned fume.

Damn, this is such a great show! Make sure to listen to the podcast at the top of the page and you’ll hear my discussion about Succession with my friends Andrew Grevas (Owner of 25YLater Site) and John Thorne (Twin Peaks Author and Evangelist).

A Hard 🛬, Hot❤️‍🔥Landing

The purpose of tragedy and comedy in drama is to push characters and the audience uncomfortably forward toward revelations impossible without the fictional framework of narrative art performed in the modern-day public theater of our screens of many sizes. This kind of art helps us break through the barriers that are holding us all back.

To successfully bring back Carrie Bradshaw and give her a shot at redemption, the writers had to take away what matters to Carrie Preston, which was her perfect life with Mr. Big. To save his company, Logan Roy has to destroy his family. Power and Joy both come with enormous though very different costs. For the lucky among us, fictional characters should be the ones to pay those costs, instead of real people with real pain. Whether through art or trauma, the sins of the world get paid for through suffering and sacrifice. The best of us make sacrifices; we bear any burden and pay any cost for the happiness of the ones we love, and sometimes we even do it because it’s what’s right and good for the poor who have no choice. But, unfortunately, the worst of us pass suffering off to other people, and the evilest among us amplify the impact of that suffering to capitalize on the cancer of trauma that follows.

Logan Roy is the worst of the evil among us. Carrie Bradshaw was the best of the worst but could still become one of the best. What will she do with the wealth she is about to inherit? We already know what Logan is doing and it’s awful. They’re both just trying to land their planes on fire. One of them is sure to fail and it’s better them than us.

Outtakes

And Just Like That... this isn't just a Manhattan show anymore. By the end, I want to see these friends in the city doing battle in the Meth-Averse against the forces of cruelty. To remain relevant, And Just Like That… will have to move to the edge and beyond (like The Good Fight on Paramount+). No modern American drama or comedy created in the 2020s is going to be able to avoid addressing the Maga rebellion that now threatens our entire empire of commercialized consumption along with the hole in the center we’ve dumped our shared morality into; that hole is where our Common Good use to live.

See, you can always tell whether a “religious” person is full of s**t by how they talk about and treat the poor. There is no other litmus test of a person’s spiritual worth than how they treat poor strangers who can do nothing for them but ask the smallest charity from them. How we respond to the genuine ask of wealth from the absolute penitence of poverty is the only measure of our humanity that carries weight when we leave this world. Call it the weighing of the heart against a feather; it’s as good a metaphor as any other and better than most.

Ask me right now and I’ll tell you that Succession is one of the most important dramas ever made, but I like to speak in hyperbole about the art I love in all the right nows of my life. I’ve probably said that same statement about twenty shows over the past two decades. It drives my wife crazy. My Red Room Podcast co-creator Scott Ryan says the same thing. They think I love every show that comes along, and I do admit to a much broader spectrum of value than most critics are capable of maintaining. I adore it when someone s***s on something that I love because, when given the opportunity, I can typically bury their cynicism and apathy in the ground and set their frustration on fire when I apply my writing talent through the filter of my burning enthusiasm. Writers can be ruthless, too, when we’re landing planes on fire.

LINKS

* Just today (Dec. 16th, 2021) after this letter was sent out, Chris Noth, the actor who played John Preston in Sex And The City & And Just Like That…, was accused by two women of sexual assault after each reporting they were triggered by seeing him act in this reboot. My affinity for John Preston’s character in the show is not a defense of the actor’s behavior should these allegations prove to be true in a court of law. [LINK to Hollywood Report article]

* Andrew Grevas’s Succession Essays for Season 3

* S3E1: “Sets the Table For an Intense Season”

* S3E2: “War is Coming & It’s Going to be Ugly”

* S3E3: “‘The Disruption’ — A State of Nirvana”

* S3E4: “The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For”

* S3E5: “The Generation That Just Won’t Die”

* S3E6: “The Dark Choices Made Behind Closed Doors”

* S3E7: “Self Destruction In Every Direction”

* S3E8: “No Calm Before The Storm”

* S3E9: “The Finale To End All Finales”

* Buy John Thorne’s book The Essential Wrapped In Plastic: Pathways To Twin Peaks [Amazon Affiliate Link] $21.99

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