The Moon Under Water: A Pubcast with Kel Daniels and Deke Gould

Way back in the Twentieth Century an underground comic artist named Gary Panter wrote a list of stuff budding countercultural artistas should or should not do and then published it in the catalog of an avant-garde music label. Later, a trippy cafe in Rock Island, IL was named after this manifesto. Later still, a couple of vile and lazy do-nothing podcasters recording in said cafe talked about the manifesto. And now here you are, about to listen to their talk.

Behold the wave, unbroken and forever breaking.

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Full Text:

The Rozz-Tox Manifesto

Gary Panter

Item 1: The avant-garde is no corpus. It merely lies in shock after an unfortunate bout with its own petard. It feigns sleep but one eye glitters and an involuntary twitch in the corner of the mouth belies a suppressed snicker. The giggle of coming awake at one’s own funeral dressed in atomic TV beatnik furniture. A mutant with a mission.

Item 2: There are twenty years left in the twentieth century. Twenty years to reap the rewards and calamities that have been put in motion in this period. At this time a current of aesthetic function is emerging: the inevitable culmination of concepts and experiments pioneered and conducted in this century. We declare society an amusement park and one to be dead reckoned with.

Item 3: A deadly texture and tone have taken the cereal Nirvana: a misanthrope born of capitol realities, tendencies, and inter-office memos. Sightless businessmen-posed-entertainers shovel up tons of soulless Saturday morning animation. Would that you could make cost effective the rubbery genius that was the Saturday morning of our youth.

Item 4: We say enough to the instigators of game show design for we are sick and dizzy. Show us the backs of these monstrous facades, for even bare plywood is a healthier texture. Oh you seekers of the new who run terrified from history into the clutches of an eternal life where no electric shaver can be built to last.

Item 5: Close the bars! We require well lit media centers that serve soft drinks and milk. We require that top-40 radio stop it. And this for extant executive entertainers: We know when to laugh. Machines don’t, and it is irritation to hear them laugh at the wrong time. They laugh at nothing and nothing isn’t funny.

Item 6: Find the evil doers, the merchant peddlers of Pavlovia who use our unmentionable parts against us. Will you hide behind a scrim of two-dimensional phosphorescence when Biology exacts its reward?

Item 7: Profound faith in glamour is a surefire way to not see that you kill what you eat. We believe and worship a two-dimensional world. No god printers save us when we stand naked and brainless before an uncompromising and impartial physicality. We are sick now/get wise to the media. Join the art police. We call for posting of cow pictures in every fast food franchise. And for vegetarians, recordings of screaming vegetables at every salad bar.

Item 8: Beautiful and effective communicative marketing and aesthetic media are not innately evil; merely seductive. However, seductive aesthetics and media are prone to undermine common sense and vision in a capitalistic culture. Our own creations have shamed us. Teaching us that the hand and opinion of the individual are not as legitimate as that of opinion transmuted and inflated by broadcast ... especially when that opinion is on 80-pound coated stock, in full color ... or when that opinion steals invisibly and incomprehensibly into a box in our homes. Would that society reveled in certain varieties of vandalism and disarray. May we mow our lawns and remain civilized.

Item 9: It is unfortunate and unacceptable what vile and lazy do-nothings are given unwarranted credence for mouthing such foul and mean clichés as “rip-off” and “sell-out”. They have no understanding of our economy and the time it takes society to go. Confess and shut up! Capitalism good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim. Inspiration has always been born of recombination.

Item 10: In a capitalistic society such as the one in which we live, aesthetics as an endeavor flows thorough a body which is built of free enterprise and various illnesses. In boom times art may be supported by wildcat speculation or by excess funds in form of grants from the state or patronship as a tax write-off. Currently we are suffering from a lean economy. By necessity we must infiltrate popular mediums. We are building a business-based art movement. This is not new. Admitting it is.

Item 11: Business: 1. To create a pseudo-avant-garde that is cost effective. 2. To create merchandising platforms on popular communications and entertainment media. 3. To extensively mine our recent and ancient past for icons worth remembering and permutating: recombo archaeology.

Item 12: Waiting for art talent scouts? There are no art talent scouts. Face it, no one will seek you out. No one gives a shit.

Item 13: Market saturation was reached in the sixties - everyone knows that. Fine Elitist Art is of diminishing utility. There is no more reward for maintaining or joining an elite and sterile crew.

Item 14: Elitist art cannot help the emergent complex through its painful and potentially stupid, dangerous adolescence. Start or support primitive industry, propaganda to no dogma, and environmental jarrs.

Item 15: Law: If you want better media, go make it.

Item 16: We are born capitalists and manufacturers of alternative goods and services. We are made propagandists and propose an antimedia to no dogma. We call for popular environmental manipulators, primitive industry, an avant-garde placed squarely in the entertainment field, for archaeologists and synthesizers.

Item 17: A call for mutant intuition and wrestling is real. A current that synthesizes ideas and entertainment .. an antimedia that creates, participates, and services and broader-based lunatic fringe and one that is capable of finishing the century outright. An avant-garde that has no mean diversion and stocks the supermarket.

Item 18:b> Our lack of popularity in high school has led us to think and thinking has lead us to this. No war is waged here; only a strain, a virus, a toxoid, a Rozz-Toxoid. The emergent complex asks for just twenty years of your time. Now, stand and sing ...

Final Note: Capitalism for good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim, and stocks the supermarket.(Copied from an old Ralph Records Catalog, circa 1980 - reprinted here in deep respect for its prescient nature.)

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Lit segment is a poem by Mark Halliday called “Why We Must Write,” from his book Jab.

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SOLUTION TO LAST EPISODE’S PUZZLE:

It is impossible for either a knight or a knave to say, “I’m a knave,” because a knight wouldn’t make the false statement that he is a knave, and a knave wouldn’t make the true statement that he is a knave. Therefore A never did say that he was a knave. So B lied when he said that he was a knave. Hence B is a knave. Since C said that B was lying and B was indeed lying, then C spoke the truth, hence is a knight. Thus B is a knave and C is a knight. (It is impossible to know what A is.)

THIS EPISODE’S PUZZLE:

When I came upon the above problem [last episode’s puzzle], it immediately struck me that C did not really function in any essential way; he was sort of an appendage. That is to say, the moment B spoke, one could tell without C’s testimony that B was lying (see solution). The following variant of the problem eliminates that feature. Suppose the stranger, instead of asking A what he is, asked A, “How many knights are among you?” Again A answers indistinctly. So the stranger asks B, “What did A say? B replies, “A said that there is one knight among us.” Then C says, “Don’t believe B; he is lying!” Now what are B and C?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keldaniels.substack.com

Today’s story that matters is a little on-the-nose, but I’m afraid we’re living in rather obvious times, at least in some ways. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice has been around for a long, long time. The earliest written version comes from the second century Rome. Later, Goethe wrote it as a ballad in the 1700s, and after that it was made into an opera, I think. I and most of us these days know it from Disney’s Fantasia. I watched a lot of Disney animation as a child, but this one probably disturbed me more than any other. Somehow, the danger we pose to ourselves feels truer even to a child than the danger of monsters or villains. I still recall the alarm I felt as the mop Mickey had animated into relentless and mindless laborers dumped bucket after bucket of water into his lab, threatening to drown him, and who knows, maybe the entire world. And then when Mickey tried to destroy the mop, it divided, and soon began to madly reproduce itself into a crazed army. The message was shocking, how quickly things can get out of control.

The connection is clear. According to the experts who know the most about the subject, we are rapidly losing control of various A.I. entities, which are now on the verge of “recursive self-improvement,” the precise moment when Mickey’s mops begin to split and proliferate.

In the old stories and the Disney version, the old sorcerer comes home and, though angry, cancels Mickey’s spell and puts the house in order. The problem we face is that there is no sorcerer. We’re all apprentices, casting spells we do not understand.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keldaniels.substack.com

Welcome new co-host (and art and music director) Deke Gould. Daniels is still doing his shtick, but otherwise, the pod has a new setup, new location, new vibes, new segments, and a juvenile groundhog without a name.

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A link to the original publication of “Work” by Denis Johnson in the New Yorker.

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Full text of main article:

The Moon Under Water by George Orwell, courtesy of the Orwell Foundation

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of ‘regulars’ who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.

If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its ‘atmosphere’.

To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece — everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.

In winter there is generally a good fire burning in at least two of the bars, and the Victorian lay-out of the place gives one plenty of elbow-room. There are a public bar, a saloon bar, a ladies’ bar, a bottle-and-jug for those who are too bashful to buy their supper beer publicly, and, upstairs, a dining-room.

Games are only played in the public, so that in the other bars you can walk about without constantly ducking to avoid flying darts.

In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.

The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women—two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades—and they call everyone ‘dear,’ irrespective of age or sex. (‘Dear,’ not ‘Ducky’: pubs where the barmaid calls you ‘ducky’ always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)

Unlike most pubs, the Moon Under Water sells tobacco as well as cigarettes, and it also sells aspirins and stamps, and is obliging about letting you use the telephone.

You cannot get dinner at the Moon Under Water, but there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses.

Upstairs, six days a week, you can get a good, solid lunch—for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll—for about three shillings.

The special pleasure of this lunch is that you can have draught stout with it. I doubt whether as many as 10 per cent of London pubs serve draught stout, but the Moon Under Water is one of them. It is a soft, creamy sort of stout, and it goes better in a pewter pot.

They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones which are now seldom seen in London. China mugs went out about 30 years ago, because most people like their drink to be transparent, but in my opinion beer tastes better out of china.

The great surprise of the Moon Under Water is its garden. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with iron chairs round them. Up at one end of the garden there are swings and a chute for the children.

On summer evenings there are family parties, and you sit under the plane trees having beer or draught cider to the tune of delighted squeals from children going down the chute. The prams with the younger children are parked near the gate.

Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.

And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children—and therefore, to some extent, women—from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.

The Moon Under Water is my ideal of what a pub should be—at any rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.)

But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.

That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don’t know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities.

I know pubs where the beer is good but you can’t get meals, others where you can get meals but which are noisy and crowded, and others which are quiet but where the beer is generally sour. As for gardens, offhand I can only think of three London pubs that possess them.

But, to be fair, I do know of a few pubs that almost come up to the Moon Under Water. I have mentioned above ten qualities that the perfect pub should have and I know one pub that has eight of them. Even there, however, there is no draught stout, and no china mugs.

And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.

Evening Standard, 9 February 1946

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This episode’s philosophy puzzle: Knights and Knaves

The Scenario: On an island only inhabited by knights and knaves, you meet three natives: A, B, and C. You know two facts about the inhabitants: knights always tell the truth, and knaves always lie. You ask A: "Are you a knight or a knave?" A whispers an answer, but you can't hear it over the wind. B then says: "A said that he is a knave." C points at B and says: "Don’t believe B; he is lying!"

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Thanks to our ideal pub, Rozz-Tox, for hosting us.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keldaniels.substack.com

Does this mammoth work of philosophizing autobiography “matter,” in the sense of containing crucial survival information? I’m not sure. In fact, the opposite may be true. The ideas and observations in this these “novels,” like pointing out the emperor has no clothes, may well reduce one’s chance of survival. Nonetheless, it’s a significant work of storytelling, and I’m here to grapple with the implications.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keldaniels.substack.com

Folks, meet The Moon Under Water’s forthcoming co-host, the philosopher, Deke Gould.

Deke is an instructor and devoted life-long student of philosophy. His areas of research specialization include the epistemology and metaphysics of logic, as well as the philosophy of technology, but his personal interests are very wide-ranging. He is currently teaching courses in philosophy of science and 20th century analytic philosophy of platonism (with a lower-case ‘p’). When he’s not talking, reading, or lecturing about philosophy, he enjoys reading science fiction and sharing experimental electronic music with friends at Rozz-Tox, where he also regularly organizes public philosophy events.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keldaniels.substack.com

Kel starts the annual meeting off by asking how to go viral on social media. The fellas use his recent near-viral comment and its 245 angry replies as workshop fodder. Tune in for the invaluable answer! Steve follows this up with a SHOCKING announcement. The Moon Under Water will never be the same again.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keldaniels.substack.com

A story about good intentions leading to disastrous outcomes. Also, stay tuned to the end to find out the verboten word George Saunders refused to read aloud on a New Yorker podcast.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keldaniels.substack.com

The fellas are continuing with the writers-who-Daniels-knows-personally run with two bangers by C. Sneed. One’s full-length and deep and thought-provoking and touching, all about lousy parents and lame siblings and how annoying it is to be the one competent person on the fricken planet. Do I have to do everything!? Yes, you do. The other is a flash and is over in a flash and jeez just read it (but maybe wait until you land if you’re on an airplane).

https://anotherchicagomagazine.net/2023/06/15/maam-by-christine-sneed/

https://flashfictionmagazine.com/blog/2026/05/12/tax-day/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keldaniels.substack.com

Today’s Story That Matters is more a genre of story retold than any particular story. You can start with Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humans, who naturally made a mess of things. Frankenstein’s subtitle is “the Modern Prometheus,” and we know all about the dangers of “playing God” from that constantly retold story. Nowadays, stories of AIs gone rogue abound, and have been for years. I particularly like Ex Machina, where a mad scientist intentionally creates and unleashes what he assumes will be humankind’s successor, a really smart and ruthless robot. I just finished book two of a Sci-Fi series called Hyperion, about a distant future where people have become dependent upon technology they don’t understand and can’t control, leaving them totally vulnerable to a federation of emancipated AIs who just may not have their human creator’s best interests in mind. The lesson is simple and we know it well: careful with your inventions as they might might come back and bite you in the ass.

What interests me more than the lesson is what we’ve done with it. People certainly haven’t stopped scientific and technological advancement. We keep making new stuff, and every time, we pay in surprising ways. It seems a law of nature that with every benefit comes an unintended consequence that tips the balance back toward suffering. Just in the last few generations we made nuclear bombs, industrial food, the internet, smart phones, and now LLMs that are pretty much smarter than 99% of us. Do we ignore our stories that supposedly matter? I don’t think we do. I think we take our Prometheus stories to heart. It’s just that we don’t know about all the ways we’ve stifled innovation. At least, we don’t think about it much. But we have restrained ourselves in many areas.

We edged up to the brink with nuclear weapons, and then the global leaders got together and made some real moves to step back. The nukes are still there, but they just don’t feel as scary as they were at the start. In general, we have left a lot of military weapons on the table, from biological to self replicating nanobots, to fully autonomous lethal weapons. We haven’t pursued genetic engineering of humans to the degree that we could, not yet at least. We don’t have the kinds of biological toys we see in the movie Bladerunner, or the organ harvesting clones described in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. All to say, things could be worse, if not for the stories we keep telling, the warnings we can’t quite ignore, as hard as we try.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keldaniels.substack.com

The fellas are down to clown in this can’t-miss episode about a kick ass story.

Read the story then listen to some world class bloviation. https://sandjournal.com/clown-school-by-rachel-swearingen/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keldaniels.substack.com