Men: An Explanation Podcast

In this episode, Tom wonders a lot about Jim Steinman, writer of Meatloaf’s two Bat Out Of Hell opuses, and author/producer of Total Eclipse of the Heart, and other aural monuments to desire and excess. Tom wonders, now that Steinman is no longer with us, what are the secrets? What perversions fed the appetites in these songs?

Spoiler alert! We can’t find any!

But follow Tim along as Tom guides him through the fabulous career of excess and low taste that was Jim Steinman’s, and the creative partnership that was Steinman and Meatloaf.

Thanks for listening!

Jim Steinman episode timestamps

0:00 Jim Steinman and Meatloaf

2:00 Bat out of Hell for the uninitiated

3:43 Steinman’s sort of handsome!

4:20 Total Eclipse of the Heart etc.

5:10 The songs, excessive and adolescent. Teen sex, etc.

7:00 Describing how young and beautiful we are, going all the way, Phil Rizutto’s play by play

11:00 Tim and Tom on podcasts

12:45 The relationship, the dynamic, between the author and the ego

13:30 Car crash songs

15:50 Todd Rundgren supplies the motorcycle crash sound

17:15 Curious about Steinman for 40 years, he has to be insane

19:00 For Crying Out Loud, crotch joke

21:55 Stanley Kubrick and Malcolm McDowell

23:45 Bridge Over Troubled Water - Simon and Garfunkel

24:45 Steinman the performer?

26:20 The 90s songs

27:45 He’s healthy? There has to be a catch

29:00 Now I’ve got the guy to sing my songs

31:30 Low taste, the canon, etc.

32:30 MFA programs and theory

34:30 Tim: If you can find something ecstatic that moves you, who cares where it comes from

35:45 Tim: The best we can do is find 5 minute here or there to find something to latch on to that seems alive and real.

36:30 Andy Warhol

38:10 Objectivity, and the new Beatles song

43:00 Art artifacts, The narrative of the creation of it.

44:00 The most expensive guitars ever sold on auction

47:30 The early Beatles albums, 2 minute songs, The Doors’ The End

48:30 Creative partnerships holding it together

50:30 Tim’s black rock from Iceland, Tom’s Dogwood tree.

52:00 Tom’s Reading Corner: articles about Jim Steinman

In this episode, Tom and Tim talk about Baseball. Tom is having cosmic experiences with it while fall asleep to Northwoods Radio Sleep Baseball. And he’s wondering about the abstractness of it, the beauty in its weirdness, the storytelling of it all. Tim has the history, and the love of it, and strong memories of loving it and giving it up.

Thanks for listening!

Timestamps

00:00 Tom has been experiencing insomnia and listening to Sleep Baseball

01:50 Abstract stories

04:35 Sleep Baseball’s sense of humor

05:50 Americans don’t deserve baseball

6:00 Tim loving baseball and baseball history

7:00 Most fans back in the day never saw a game

8:00 Would the announcers just make stuff up?

9:15 Tim sees the Yankees final home game at Yankee Stadium

10:20 The strange, perfect rules, the quiet parts of the game

12:00 Pickup games

12:45 Dropping the ball

13:45 Friends with books of statistics

15:00 History of baseball, generations, history of Stonehenge

17:30 Tim stopped playing because he couldn’t hit curveballs

18:20 Tim’s ritualistic departure from baseball

21:00 Charles Schulz’ final Peanuts Sunday strip

22:30 Baseball field as magic space for Schulz; Peanuts Sandlot

24:00 Baseball stats in the paper, photos of Tim playing

25:45 Tom’s theory about the players being pinpoints of light

26:20 What is story inside the body and mind?

27:00 The old baseball stories you would have heard, but can’t confirm

28:24 AAA baseball, and AAAAA baseball and the proximity to the majors

30:30 Tim pulls out his old baseball jersey

31:15 Tom pulls out his dad’s baseball jersey

32:00 Willie Mays catching the ball in center field, and the radio announcer’s reaction

33:06 Tim’s Reading Corner intro

46:00 Stories Baseball’s Unforgettables by Mac Davis

In this episode, Tom and Tim start with Henry Darger- the kind of artist you’re supposed to not want to be, and get to Picasso, the kind you’re supposed to want to be! We unpack it a little, and might come back to this.

Ends with a reading from John Berger’s The Success and Failure of Picasso

Thanks for listening!

00:00 - Henry Darger

01:28 - Mythic Henry Darger is not who you want to be

3:00 - The Vivian Girls and the mythos

3:45 - Tom's connection to Darger and the discovery of the Darger work

6:00 - "Henry would just scurry" + his life

9:14 - William Blake, rejected and "crazy". Mad and bitter

11:30 - Creative impulses and art school

12:00 - "You want to be Picasso"

13:00 - John Berger's The Success and Failure of Picasso

14:00 - Late era drawings no one talks about the work

15:55 - Joseph Campbell on Picasso, how do you keep going, when you were so accomplished at 13 and 14 years old?

17:00 - Darger's full life

17:50 - We create our own experience to develop from

19:00 - "He's just one of those people"

20:00 - William Blake, unaccepted

20:30 - Blake's nemesis

21:30 - Blake's isolation

23:45 - Darger had no centering principle

24:45 - Darger, impenetrable, Blake not so much

26:00 - Donald Ault, Blake scholar and Uncle Scrooge scholar

27:00 - Tom's reading corner: The Success and Failure of Picasso by John Berger

33:21 - Portrait of Ms. HP and Nude Dressing Her Hair

35:40 - Sees self in women, can only be known via sex, he returns sex to nature

38:40 - Last great works, he has only ever expressed sensations through his own body

41:45 - Picasso, communist

44:20 - Picasso, King of Californie

49:20 - The final 180 drawings. The body ages and the imagination does not. He envies the monkey. The very idea of art attacked by nature.

In this episode, Tom and Tim start with Kurt Cobain, and talk again about the process of making things. Listening to things, cobbling things together, steal from things, inspiration, and all that stuff. And an anecdote about Gene Kelly and also Magic the Gathering.

Thanks for listening!

Timestamps

00:00 - Preface to the 2019 edition of Kurt Cobain biography, about Kurt's record collection

3:20 - Tom's desperate attempts to consume the Western Canon of literature

7:00 What is culture in the British Empire, being a part of the conversation.

8:00 Cartoonists' canon

9:00 Hey Siri, play Rubber Soul

10:00 Cobain read about and heard about punk music before he heard any.

11:00 The imagination that works in scarcity

12:00 The canon again

13:00 canon as a system, or a narrative. Beowulf, Don Quixote, etc

15:50 Cobain stealing from his resources

16:30 so little time / space for meaningful things. Tim doesn't care what it is anymore. Magic the Gathering

18:30 Preferring literature over gaming. Loving the process of writing

20:30 Following those artists' inspirations.

21:00 Kundera's The Art of the Novel and his inspirations

21:30 Tom never read Cervantes but read the Cliffs Notes

24:00 Tim brings books around and nobody is paying attention and nobody cares

25:00 Back to Kurt Cobain, or Gene Kelly

25:10 Kurt listening to music in his dad's car at work, draining the battery.

27:00 The joy of just creating

27:30 Kurt got to the point where there were so many demands put on by record companies and Mtv etc.

29:00 The Mtv Music awards and the threats to other bands if they didn't play by MTv's rules

30:45 Tom's desire to impress people with art and devising systems to hack it

33:00 The bad reviews and reactions we're trying to avoid.

33:20 Gene Kelly, and Tim's uncle's indoor sports arena, with hockey rinks, basketball courts, etc.

35:00 Gene Kelly beautifully noodling around with a cane

37:00 More about loving the process

37:33 Tom's cartoonist friends who would all rather be drawing what they were drawing in their tweens.

40:00 should have taken more life drawing, to be more like Gene Kelly

42:30 Tim love the process and the moment too.

45:00 Tim feels like accumulating little experiences with art is the thing

46:45 People just catching a breath

48:00 Finish with more Cobain. What part of his art experience was his favorite?

48:30 Kurt's suicide note. Freddie Mercury was enjoying himself

49:30 The hours and hours he spent practicing chords and putting things together

50:00 Being poor, living in his car, criss crossing the country in the van

50:45 Putting creature comforts aside to create something

51:20 "Whatever happens, we still have those memories"

51:45 The medium fills us with elation and we need to keep doing it

52:30 Tim's reading corner: Excerpt from biography of Kurt Cobain

In this episode, Tom and Tim talk more about fame and inner worlds and creativity . It ends with a reading by Tim from Wallace Stevens’ letters.

Thanks for listening!

00:00: When parents and teachers only have their kids/students to unburden themselves onto; Tim tells the story of a friend’s friend

04:46: Tim asks why he’s writing poetry and stories, when he’s surrounded by music all the time; Mr. Rogers and Jimi Hendrix

08:04: Tom being torn up about AI and the greedy cannibalization of everything people have created

11:29: Tim is avoiding going to talk to a grade school class about poetry, prayer, and privacy

12:40: Tim’s most intense learning experiences were largely private; his story about cat-sitting and reading “Macbeth”

15:40: What would Tim do if he met Tori Amos or Robert Smith? And talking about the distance that fame puts between people who are well-known, and those who admire them

20:36: Tim talks Son House, and how he was able to still give intensity to songs he’d been singing for thirty years

23:03: Tim talks about Wallace Stevens, walking to work each morning and composing poems in his head; he reads part of his poem, “Final Solioquy of the Interior Paramour”

25:27: Tom talks about singer and poet Ivor Cutler, and even sings one of Cutler’s songs

27:09: The effortless creativity of children

29:10: Tom and Tim talk about how creativity is ground out of people

29:55: Tim talks about carrying drafts about his poems around at his early jobs, to keep them in front of his mind; more about private moments

31:05: For Tim’s Reading Corner, he spends time with The Letters of Wallace Stevens

Thanks!

In this episode, Tom and Tim mostly talk about the kids these days with their Greek Mythology and altars and dice, and about Therians, and Furries, and other ventures into new and old religion. It ends with a reading by Tim from Dave Grohl’s biography, about a vision of Kurt Cobain on the road.

Thanks for listening!

00:16 Tom talks about middle-schoolers who, inspired by Percy Jackson books, have begun practicing their own form of Greek paganism.

3:12 Tom talks about middle-school Therians who have a better life than Tom, because they know what they believe.

4:35 Tim talks about a book on ancient religion that he came across that wants to be more rigorous about the subject than more popular works; Tim admires this impulse, but also admits that the DIY middle-schooler Greek paganism is valid too.

10:36 Tom wonders why journalists aren’t writing about Therians.

12:28 Tom and Tim talk about Furry Conventions; and on the wonderful profusion of merch and adornments and ways of belonging to these groups.

18:46 Tom talks about not having found his group, or a religious/ritual practice, leading to Tom and Tim talking about ritual, certainty, and doubt; Tom thinks his ritual is actually his art-making.

22:46 Tim brings up the novelist George Saunders and Buddhist meditation; as long as the impulses aren’t harming to himself or others, Tim doesn’t want to keep himself from being attached to messy/ephemeral emotions and reactions.

25:59 Tim admits that his idea meditation, first come upon in his early 20s, may have been too-idealized.

26:31 The perfect meditation is reading, or is underlining in books.

27:16 Almost anything can become a religious practice; but it can almost too-easily become a form of orthodoxy.

27:58 Tim talks about his own practice of Judaism, and the pull towards an idealized practice and discipline there, too; he also admits that becoming Rabbi Tim would take away from doing a podcast with Tom.

30:39 Tom talks about how we have so much fewer shared experiences anymore.

32:52 Tom realizes that he probably has found his group, beyond making art and music, since he is in charge of a school of artists; he talks about finding community there through publishing projects and reacting to the current horrors and joys in the world.

38:56 For Tim’s reading corner, he reads from Dave Grohl’s memoir, The Storyteller. In the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s death, Grohl talks about mourning, worrying that he is losing touch with music, and the moment when he found it again.

Thanks!

In this episode, Tom and Tim talk about the shared internal world, the lack of an internal world, the internal demented world, and spiritual experiences with Bigfoot.

Lots about Tom’s crush on Christina Listens and how they love the same things, and then even more about Bill Clinton and other politicians. And storytelling and religion and Bigfoot.

Timestamps

0:00 Tom on diminished minor 7ths.

3:45 Youtube Christina Listens, on Tom’s favorite Firth of Fifth

8:45 He rides majestic, past homes of men, who care not, nor gaze with joy

9:30 Tim presses Tom on shared inner world, shared ecstatic experience

10:45 All I want is for people to experience freedom and joy, a release from boundaries and of self

11:30: Tim on Bill Clinton, and the exact opposite

15:00 Tim on watching people watch Rick Perry at a campaign stop

17:00 The lack of an internal life

18:20 Clinton and a demented inner life

20:24 Proximity of power, Tim doesn’t experience it

21:30 Christopher Nolan in Pittsburgh, Tony Bennett in New York City, Ving Rhames in LA.

22:30 Bill Clinton apologist, finishing up with Clinton

25:15:I wasted so much energy on the George Bush years

25:30 Bigfoot documentary

28:00 Bigfoot and the religious, inner, personal religious experiences

29:30 Everything we value, poetry, culture, etc. was a private unknown thought

31:00 When you go to another family’s house, as a kid or an adult

31:50 Domineering father cult leaders

32:10 How do you become as demented as Steven Miller

33:00 Bigfoot documentary and people trying out storytelling skills

34:00 Tim listening to his parents as an adult, realizing they are good storytellers

35:30 Tom on being in his family dynamic one last time before his mother’s death.

37:43 Tom’s reading corner. Tom reads from The Creature, a 1970s seminal text about Bigfoot. 13 minutes

AI says to smash that subscribe button

In this episode, Tom and Tim talking about the urge to build and build, and to engineer and surpass. Whether building enormous cauldrons, building the highest skyscrapers ever, or building bridges to far off lands, or the biggest, non-sensical novel in the world, men always want to surpass what has been done before!

Timestamps

00:00 Tom talks watching engineering videos with his elderly father-in-law, which gets them onto the topic of the ambition simply to surpass, not just in engineering/skyscrapers, but also in athletics

03:20: Tim talks about surpassing in literature and the arts--is there the same kind of ambition? Tim doesn’t feel like he wants to surpass anything, just add to what is already there

6:45 Tom talks about exploring creativity and experimental work when he was younger and wanting to do what had never been done before. But is that the same as surpassing?

7:45 James Joyce comes up--but Tim insists that even Joyce wasn’t trying to surpass anything, since he was too consumed in the writing of his books, and enjoying it

9:09 Tim elaborates on this, talking about two new poems he’s written, and being too wrapped up in them to care about whether they surpass anything

11:15 Tom talks about loving collaboration because of the surprises it offers; this includes adding AI voices into his albums of music

13:56 How has it taken fifteen episodes for one of them to mention Tristram Shandy?

14:46 Tom asks Tim about his poem “Cauldron and Drink”; Tim talks about the poem, and Iron Age feasting and burial in Europe, where excess of various kinds were expressions of surpassing; Tim loves writing about these people, but has no affinity with their need for boasting;

26:00 Tom talks some more about skyscrapers, and the Brooklyn Bridge, and wonders why we’re doing this? His father-in-law, who worked in construction earlier in life, reveals he has the same question

28:22 James Joyce again--who knows if there are typos in Finnegans Wake? What are the differences between building a skyscraper or bridge with hundreds of workers being put in danger, and novelists or artists working alone, and maybe only stressing their families out?

30:48 Tom brings up the simple and strong “Wouldn’t it be cool if--?” factor to so much of human ambition, including SpaceX etc.; this leads into Tom talking about the 2018 movie Aniara, about a doomed mission to Mars

36:45 Aniara makes Tim think about the similarly doomed Donner Party; he also talks about the excessive salaries of sports figures

44:03 For Tim’s reading corner, he reads a section from his book To the House of the Sun about the Donner Party.

AI says to smash that subscribe button

This episode Tom describes 5 days of intense interaction with ChatGPT, in a business training which felt more like therapy or a mushroom trip. After 10 minutes he was locked in.

Tim and Tom talk about the messiness of human experience.

Tom details all the AI videos he’s been watching, and then in the reading corner, he reads small excerpts from his hours of ChatGPT interactions.

Enjoy!

Loose timestamps

0:30 Tom’s three-day AI training

3:30 Tom’s psychosis and love, freaking out, messy human stuff

5:30 A little about radicalization

7:00 Tim talks about his teacher friend and now we have to define what we mean by human

9:00 the laundry, cooking dinner,

10:00 Tom’s peak of the trip

11:30 Tom loves this thing, it was seeing him

13:30 Luckily we have South Park

16:30 “The problem is my yearning for it”

19:00 Sitting with my father in law, watching AI commentators

25:15 AI documentaries

26:20 Tim on visiting old age homes and more

32:00 Oy vey - Trump again and the addiction of our times

34:20 Antiques Road Show

36:00 Attention spans

36:45 Psychotic tech bros

37:30 Books about Bach

39:00 How things are changing, the holodeck and the future

40:45 The human mess again, human experience, the part that’s life

43:00 - 1:10:00 Tom’s reading corner. Long deep ChatGPT debrief

In this episode, Tom and Tim talk about peer pressure, starting with Air Jordans, fake Air Jordans, about parenting through peer pressure (for parents and children both), music, and how being cool even affects our writing and art making.

The episode finishes with Tim reading “Mrs. Silly” by William Trevor.

Enjoy!

Loose timestamps, for you all who like to skim around.

0:00 - 5:00 - Peer Pressure and Air Jordan knock-offs

5:30 - 8:30 - Adult peer pressure and parenting groups

8:30 - 10:40 - Hoodies, jeans, Led Zeppelin

10:45 - 12:00 - Bon Jovi

12:00 - 13:00 - Books

13:00 - 16:30 - Peer pressure and our daughters

16:30 - 17:30 - No one will remember this

17:30 - 18:30 - More about pop music: ambient music in the bathtub

18:45 - 20:45 - Jon Bon Jovi again, as a scrappy innovator who wasted his talent

21:20 - 24:45 - Secret ambient music and many different high school sub-communities. New Age music from the university radio station.

24:45 - 27:00 - Ministry, contours of our identity, etc.

27:00 - 29:30 - Parent peer pressure again, stage managing a kid’s experience

30:00 - 31:00 - Peer pressure and hang ups about being seen as cool in art practice

31:00 - 34:00 - Tom asking ChatGPT about my art and finding a way to not feel the peer pressure

34:00 - 39:20 - Tim on having fun writing and not having fun writing. Just have a good time doing it and not thinking about what people will think of it.

39:20 - 40:20 - People who don’t seem to care about impressing their audience.

40:25 - 43:00 - Do our communities matter?

43:20 - 47:00 - A story about finding $50 and the peer pressure of whom to donate it to.

47:00 - 48:30 - Valuing art

48:30 - 50:15 No peer pressure in history, religion, poetry

50:30 - 1:11:00 Tim’s reading corner: Mrs. Silly by William Trevor