April 1, 2024 • 27 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Listener mail.
My name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and it is Monday,
the day of each week that we read back messages
from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind email address. If
you're a fan of the show and you'd like to
get in touch, you can reach us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. All types of
messages are welcome, but we especially appreciate feedback to recent episodes,
(00:34):
and we really appreciate if you have something interesting to
add to a topic we've talked about. Let's see, Rob,
do you want to kick things off with this message
about the glass frog today?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Oh? Yeah. This is a response to one of the
Anamalia Stupendium episodes. This is from Jim Jim Wrightson and says,
as I listened to Argo Mandanese descriptions of the amazing
glass frogs organs visible beneath transparent skin, the words of
(01:07):
my email to Robert and Joe informing them of Fritz
Lieber's ghouls manifested in my mind. But no, the KG
Sorcerer beat me to the punch. I haven't read all
of the and I have to note, I'm I've never
been sure how to pronounce this character's name. I always
read it in my mind as Fard and the Gray Mouser,
but I guess you could pronounce it Fuffored. I'm not sure,
(01:29):
but I don't know. To me in my own mental
version of all this, it's Fard, but have it however
you will. But anyways is if you haven't read all
the Fafford or Fared in the Gray Mouser books, you
should love the wizard Stick and the D and D
framing in the Anomalius Topidium series. Please don't drop it.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Jim, So faf hrd is not a typo. That is
how this is spelled. There's not right a vowel left out.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah yeah. So these stories, for anyone not familiar with them,
these the stories. They were written by American author Fritz
Liber who lived nineteen ten through nineteen twenty two, and
his father was also named Fritz Leiber and was an
actor that was in like Shakespearean stuff and swashbucklers. So
(02:17):
it's interesting to go into the stories knowing that because
there's a fair amount of sword play in these tales.
These tales were one of the many inspirations on Dungeons
and Dragons, and I have not read them in many
a year, like it's been over probably fifteen years. It's
maybe been twenty years since I read these, but I
remember them as being a lot of fun, just classic
(02:39):
sword and sorcery adventures with this you know, kind of
beefy barbarian type and it's like smaller roguelike friend and
accomplice and they go on all sorts of magical and
daring adventures.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
So is the conan set up with a beefy barbarian
main hero with a rogue thief accomplice like a recurring
motif in this genre.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
It is, off the top of my head, I'm not sure,
like who really kicks it off? I mean, I guess
in a way you can, you can go way back.
Maybe you can make a case for like the epic
of Gilgamesh having something like who is Gilgamesh's beastly sidekick
in key Do? I think, yeah, I don't know, if
you it's maybe not one to one, but like you know,
(03:23):
it's kind of like the most ancient buddy adventure that
comes to.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Mind, though I don't know if in key Do is
is more of a rogue thief type or just a
different type of beef beef man like he's described I
think as a as a wild man, like a you know,
a strong man of the wilderness, whereas Gilgamesh himself is like, he's,
i don't know, more a symbol of civilization, like the
warrior king of the the he's the he's the city beef,
(03:50):
and in key Do is the country beef.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah. So anyway, these stories, these stories don't date back
as far as Conan the Barbarian and so forth. I
think these I'm just looking at a list of the
collections and when they were published, but they go back
at least as far as nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Well, I'm not familiar, but maybe I'll have to check
that out at some point there.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
I think I've probably mentioned this in the past and
the show before, but there was at least one collection
of these stories that I had where the illustrator decided
to envision these two characters as just Robert Plant and
Jimmy Page, like they're just straight up Robert Plant and
Jimmy Page. Way, which worked, but it was an interesting choice.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Okay, I'm going to do this next message. We're gonna
do some messages in response to our series on authenticity.
This one comes from Nathan. Nathan says, Dear Robert and
Joe and guest producer Paul. Oh yeah, Paul. Our coworker
Paul Deckins sat in to produce one of those while
(04:52):
JJ was out last week. Nathan says, Wow, I didn't
expect to have so many thoughts sparked by your great
commerc about authenticity. In part one, Joe mentioned existentialism's take
on living inauthentically. Their term for this is living in
quote bad faith. Jean Paul Sartre famously gave an example
(05:13):
of a cafe waiter whose movements Sartra thought were too
waiter esque, too eager to please. This waiter sees his
role in life exclusively as a waiter and fulfills only
that duty. Therefore, he is not being truly himself. In
Part two, you brought up how seeing a computer image
of a painting is not the same experience as seeing
(05:35):
it in person, and is in a sense, not actually
seeing the painting. This reminded me of one of my
favorite paintings, The Treachery of Images, often called this is
not a pipe by Renee mcgreet. Even though we see
an image of a pipe, macgreet also wrote the phrase
sorry for failing at French air to see nepaun peep,
(05:58):
this is not a pipe at the at the bottom
of the painting. This is to remind us that it's
merely a representation of a pipe, not a real one.
In fact, the print of this painting currently hanging in
my room is not the real image either, but merely
a reproduction of a representation of a pipe. You also
(06:18):
mentioned how artists both historic and modern would learn their
art precisely by trying to reproduce existing works of art.
This ties into the central thesis of a YouTuber named
Kirby Ferguson. In his video essay Everything Is a Remix,
he argues that there is no truly original idea, and
he boils down all creativity in art and culture to
(06:39):
three steps, copy, transform, and combine. For copying, he cites
a story of how, as a young young writer, Hunter S.
Thompson re typed whole pages of The Great Gatsby word
for word quote to get the feeling of what it
was like to write that way. Oh yeah, I don't
think I knew that about Thompson specifically, but I would
(07:02):
endorse this practice. I think this is also one of
the benefits of memorizing passages of literature, like passages you
really like, descriptive passages and stuff from fiction, or memorizing
speeches or memorizing poetry. I think it something about the
process of memorizing the order of the words kind of
helps you imagine what it would be like to produce
(07:24):
that style of writing from yourself, and therefore can be
one part of developing a kind of synthetic, composite, original
style of your own.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah. Yeah, it reminds me that it wasn't too long
ago that I saw in this is somebody's social media post,
but they are resharing something that was like basically saying, hey, Christians,
if you want to get a little closer to God
or feel, i don't know, more in line with your faith,
(07:54):
pick out some passages in the Bible and just copying
word for word. And you know, I think maybe there
might be an impulse for some to find that silly,
But of course I instantly realized, like, oh, that's exactly
the same exercise as this creative writing exercise, you know,
of going through and copying these words. So I mean,
regardless what your opinion is of a particular sacred text
(08:17):
or its translation and so forth, I mean there is
something too copying it word for word and having those
words travel through your mind in a slightly different way.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Absolutely. I mean this might sound strange, but I think
there's actually all kinds of There are all kinds of
details in a text that we can miss when we
just read it, and interacting with the text in a
different way, such as by memorizing it or by copying
it out manually or something like that causes you to
experience it again in a different way and to maybe
(08:49):
notice things that normally you would gloss over.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Yeah. So I would imagine it's probably a religious practice
one way or another in various religions. You know, all
these different face have sacred text. What happens when you
copy it? And maybe it brings you a little closer too,
whatever's being transmitted through it.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Okay, one more comment from Nathan here. Nathan says, lastly,
all the talk of filmmakers wanting us to experience movies
as originally intended felt vindicating. I have long spoken out
against watching movies on a phone for an authentic experience.
I watch movies not on a television, but by projecting
them onto my living room wall. That's the nearest I
can get to recreating a theatrical viewing, and I have
(09:30):
no regrets. Thanks as always for your thought provoking conversations
about Everything under the Sun. Nathan. Yeah, Nathan, I think,
as we talked about in the episode, I'm sort of
two minds about this. I mean, on one hand, sometimes
you're in a situation where all you can do is
watch on your phone, so you're gonna, you know, you
do what you can. On the other hand, I can
totally understand if you are a filmmaker and the experience
(09:54):
that you are imagining for the audience is like seeing
it in a theater with you know, with the sigh in,
the sound and all that it could be. It could
be kind of disappointing to imagine people watching the movie
you made on a phone, because that's not the experience
you had in mind for them. And not to say
there's anything wrong with them experiencing it that way.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, really the example, the most extreme
example is probably we've talked about in Weird House Cinema
in the past, is when we were looking at various
three D pictures, you know, and we felt some of
that frustration of wanting to try and watch these films,
even just some with some form of three D, not
the original form of three D that people would have
(10:37):
experienced in the theaters, but just any form, and it
was sometimes just difficult or impossible to do so, so,
you know, I do get it. But then again, at
the end of the day, it's like, am I going
to watch House of Wax as originally intended? Or am
I going to watch it in some other format or
just not watch it at all? Like, obviously I'm going
(10:59):
to watch it however I can. And if I'm on
an airplane, I got to watch something. So I'm gonna
cue up something to watch, and I'm just gonna have
to apologize to the directors that I'm not watching it
as originally intended. I can't think of a film off
and that was made especially to be watched on an airplane.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Yeah, better to pick your own movie, bring it with
you and watch it on a phone than to on
a slightly larger screen in the back of the seat
in front of you watch one of six Mark Wahlberg
movies that are available.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
I guess the thing is if it's worth watching, it's
worth watching again in a different format, so you know,
you can always come back later and try and make
it up. Oh, coming back to the this is not
a pipe. I was not familiar with this work, but
it is an interesting experience just to look at it
for the first time, because knowing what the text says,
it makes me want to see other things in the
pipe than the pipe, So it's it's kind of an
(11:50):
interesting experience, Like I want. Part of me wants to
lean in and interpret the pipe as some sort of
a otter like organism or see its curves as something
more like human or sensual. But then I have to
like fall back to like, no, this is a pipe.
My other attempts to interpret this otherwise realistic looking image.
(12:11):
It is not a surrealistic image, and it not itself.
Attempts to do so fail and I go back to pipe.
All right. This next one comes to us from Thomas.
Thomas says, Hi, Robert, and Joe, I just finished the
two episode theory on authenticity and wanted to share some
(12:34):
insight from my line of work. I'm a lawyer, and
before any evidence can be introduced in court, it has
to be authenticated. Evidence can roughly be divided into witness testimony,
physical evidence, and documents, which includes photographs and recordings. Legally speaking,
the distinction discussed in Part one between honesty and credibility
and authenticity if a person doesn't exist, all witness testimony
(12:57):
is evidence and it's up to a judge or jury
whether to believe it. A witness does normally need to
testify about how they know a particular fact to help
assess their credibility, and just hearing from somebody else hearsay
generally isn't good enough. Before physical evidence, for example, a
gun found at the scene of a shooting can be
introduced in court, the witness who collected the evidence needs
(13:18):
to establish that it is quote the same or substantially
the same condition as when it was found. This is
an interesting articulation of the concept of authenticity as history
that you discussed in relation to works of art in
Part two. If a piece of physical evidence has any
history at all since it was collected, that history has
changed the character of the object so that it is
(13:40):
no longer authentic. Authenticating a document is much simpler and
in line with a basic definition of authenticity that you
discussed in Part one. A document or photograph is authentic
if a witness with appropriate knowledge, usually but not always,
its creator testifies that it fairly and accurately represents the
information it contains, the layout of an area shown in
(14:01):
a map, or the events of a traffic stop shown
on dashcam footage. In other words, documents are authentic so
long as it's established that they are what they purport
to be. Always appreciate the deep dives you do. Keep
up the good.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Work, Thanks Thomas. That is really interesting, and I think
it adds a nice dimension because we were talking about
how we are constantly making authenticity evaluations of people in
like a social context, where in most cases you would
say the stakes are are very low, like you're making
judgments about people just kind of I don't know, to
(14:36):
decide whether you like them or not, or whether you
want to hang out with them or not, or something
like that, you know, where there's not a whole lot
on the line. Obviously authenticity in court cases the stakes
are very high.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, it's interesting, like you said, as to point out
the like the chain of ownership and an item, like
I wonder how this factors into the ownership of collectibles, like, oh,
this is the stop watch that once belonged to this
famous individual, but they weren't the most recent owners of it.
At what point do previous owners supersede the most noteworthy
(15:11):
owner of a given object and so forth, without even
getting into the whole ship of THESEUS.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Situation, Yeah, totally. So it is interesting to see the
difference here and how authenticity is applied to these physical objects.
These have more similarity to what we were talking about
with like works of art in the Walter Benjamin sense.
But also coming back to personal authenticity, I was trying
to think, well, does it really matter in a court
case whether somebody is being true to themselves in their
(15:38):
testimony or not. Wouldn't it just matter whether what they
are saying is factually correct or not? And in some
cases I think it would matter whether they're being true
to themselves, because there are cases where in courts you're
trying to establish what someone's true inner thoughts and feelings
are when you're searching for motive, like motive greatly implicates authenticity. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yeah, So anyway, it is interesting to approach something like
this from the legal standpoint because, like you know, legally,
you need to reach that point of action on something.
You can't just philosophize and say, well, you know, nobody
really knows what's authentic. Yeah, you need to get down
to brass tax at some point and say like, okay,
we've got to move on this. Is this person guilty
or innocent? Is are charges going to be placed or
(16:23):
are they not? And so forth?
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yeah, And I guess ideally in a court case you
would have really strong physical evidence to rely on, but
in a lot of cases that's not how it is,
and you actually do have to you know, you have
juries essentially doing vibe assessments on witnesses to see like
does it seem like they're telling the truth? Do I
get a genuine vibe from them?
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Yeah? And then of course, yeah, obviously you have cases
of evidence that has been corrupted but at the time
it's thought to be legit or you know, later on
looking back at genetic evidence and so forth. So, Yeah,
authenticity has an interesting trajectory through any given legal system.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
I imagine, Okay, I'm gonna do this. Next message from Aurica.
Aurica says, Happy Wednesday. I am enjoying your miniseries on authenticity.
It is such a large topic and hard to articulate
what qualities authenticity should encompass. One aspect that was left
(17:19):
out of Part one was how authenticity and mental health
are connected. The study of the NBA students was quite interesting.
I also think mental health was glossed over too quickly
and lumped in with mood, affecting self authenticity. As a
mental health counselor, I do feel I gauge authenticity as
a major factor in my career. However, I view authenticity
(17:42):
as the amount of energy one uses to be in
any given situation. People are extremely resilient and find themselves
in a multitude of uncomfortable circumstances. There are indicators from
the facial expressions, eye movements, tone, mannerisms, etc. To go
into determining how much effort or energy a person is
(18:03):
using to communicate. If there is a lot of effort
for casual conversations or vice versa, if there is seemingly
no effort for difficult ones, that is an indicator that
something is off. It's the idea of masking self for
protection or potentially grounds to explore further. Obviously, the everyday
person is not asking strangers in class. Quote have you
(18:26):
ever made a plan to hurt yourself or in your life?
Therapists look for patterns and responses, rephrase questions and ask
again to look for similar mannerisms or changing behaviors. Depending
on the goal of the session, Those minute changes would
be called to the attention of the patient, As some
have no clue what is actually going on inside themselves.
(18:46):
Most people try counseling because they do not know who
they are or how to access their inner world. A
slightly different take on authenticity, I do love the notion
that a person can never truly know another's inner self
and therefore cannot make a judgment about their external behaviors
as being authentic. People are so complex. It's worrying to
(19:08):
think how many decisions are made based on other's abilities
to determine authenticity. Thank you for this one, Aurica. Well
thanks Arca. Really interesting thoughts there, and I really like
your adding this other understanding of authenticity because I think
this is something that already squares with part of our
lay understanding of authenticity. Like, when you're making authenticity checks
(19:30):
on people outside of a therapeutic context, I think part
of what you are looking for is whether it appears
that they are are struggling in a social interaction and
that may lead to totally unfair judgments. But I can
see in the case of a therapist, how it could
be really useful for a person to get that information
reflected back to them like that. They might not realize
(19:54):
it's coming off like they are struggling to engage in
a simple interaction, or maybe they are seeming to be
very disconnected or take too easily a difficult topic.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah, yeah, all right. This next one comes to us
from Brittany. Brittany writes sa It says, Dear Robin Joe,
your episodes on authenticity prompted me to write in about
a recent experience. Salom dancing before herod and eighteen seventy
six oil painting by Gustav Moreau. It is one of
(20:28):
my favorite works of art. Last month I had the
opportunity to see it on a trip to Los Angeles.
It was wonderful to see the minute detail and brushstrokes,
the lush colors and crackling from age. I was able
to get very close and look at it from various angles.
It was a true pleasure, an almost sublime experience. Seeing
this painting in pixels years ago didn't lead to any
(20:48):
disappointment and seeing it in person, because I might have
never known it existed if it weren't for an online reproduction.
As Rob noted on Booklan's Isle of the Dead, the
lighting effected his viewing experience as it did mine. Of
the Moreau. It makes me wonder if any work of
art is truly authentic outside of the circumstances in which
(21:09):
it was created. That's interesting, Like is the can you
accurately understand the painting outside of the artist's studio, Like
you'd really have to go to Pablo Picasso's, you know,
his his art studio while he's there, while he's alive
in his lifetime, and have him show it to you.
(21:29):
And even then you're seeing it at the point of
completion and not the like you weren't there for the
experience of it being made. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yeah, maybe one of those things where you can't identify
what actually would be the true experience of a work
of art, but you can identify increasing layers of alienation
and artificiality as you get further and further from the
original experience. Does that make sense? Like there there there
isn't a one hundred percent true experience, but somehow there
(21:56):
are things that are more artificial.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
And of course, another thing to think about is that
when you go to an art gallery, and this of
course is going to be something that is exploited by
art galleries. You know, certainly if they're good, if the
person behind it is good and knows what they're doing.
Is that you're not just viewing individual pieces. You're viewing
pieces in sequence. You're viewing pieces in relation to other pieces.
They might be. It might be in relation to another
(22:20):
piece by the same artist, it might be in relation
to another piece in a similar vein a similar subject matter,
similar timeframe. You know, there's so many ways to approach it,
and that can lead to some very interesting things going on.
First of all, thematically, like what happens when I look
at this painting by this artist and then I look
at this other one that is maybe similar in scope
(22:41):
or something. And then likewise, when you get into pieces
that are more three dimensional and or potentially either cast
light themselves or reflect light in interesting ways, those can
create there can be an interplay between these pieces. For instance,
if you're in a room there's a piece piece by
Anish Kapoor, who often uses, you know, these these mirror
(23:04):
surfaced objects, and then there are pieces by other artists,
like his work is going to interact with those pieces,
and the way you experience those pieces is defined by
what else is in the room, including other people. So
it's it's fascinating to think about all that.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Yeah, yeah, you know. I was also just thinking because
I had to look up this painting that Britney shared,
the Salome Dancing before Herod by Gustav Moreau. It's a
great painting. I love this and I have seen this before,
I realized once I pulled it up here, but it
made me think about how there are just esthetic qualities
of a work of art, maybe you know, conceptual qualities,
(23:40):
but aesthetic qualities as well that can cause one, I think,
to have a a an either closer or further reaction
to it. To either react to it very much by
getting lost in the work and just experiencing it directly,
or qualities that cause one to kind of step back
and think about it. So I think a great example
(24:01):
would be the Treachery of Imagery or whatever it was,
the you know, the Magret painting we talked about earlier.
This is literally it's almost like an essay in a painting,
it's like presenting a concept to you and asking you
to think metacognitively about what art means and how you're
processing it. And then there are other works of art
that invite you more to just have an emotional response,
(24:24):
to imagine you were almost in the room with the
subject of the painting, or to experience it in a
less thinking way. And it's funny. I think this painting
by Moreau kind of does both at the same time.
In one sense, it's an incredibly emotionally evocative image. It
does invite me to get lost in it. But on
(24:44):
the other hand, it kind of makes me think because
the way it is painted, and this may just be
Moreau's style, I don't know Moreau very well. It looks
almost like an image projected into mist. It has this
very airy, cloud life like ethereal ephemeral quality. It looks
like the the image is almost like a dream that
(25:05):
could could disappear at any moment, and it makes me
it makes me wonder if it's suggesting something about the
ephemerality of art or of the story on which this
is based.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yeah, yeah, it's to me. It has the look of
like you can imagine that this chamber is just choked
with like incense, smoke or something, you know.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, anyway, thank you, Brittany.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah, some great, great points in this, and I think
we could go on and on just about the way
that viewing art is such a singular experience. All right. Well,
you know, at this point, we have so many more
listener mails that we had on the document here for today,
but we didn't have time to get to them, you know,
stuff dealing with other Weird House episodes, more Dune, more authenticity.
(25:48):
So we're just gonna have to come back to all
of this and the next Lister Mail. Lister Mail comes
out on Mondays, and the Stuff to Blow your Mind
podcast feed our core episodes come out on Tuesdays and
Thursdays short form episode ons that might be a monster fact,
an artifact, or Anamalia stupendium. Though I can't do that
one every week because the voice is a bit it's
(26:09):
a bit rough on the old throat here. But then
on Fridays, we of course do Weird House Cinema. That's
our time to set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird movie. So hey, go ahead and
write in about anything we've covered in the past, on
present episodes or potentially for future episodes of any of
these shows.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Listener mail.
My name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and it is Monday,
the day of each week that we read back messages
from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind email address. If
you're a fan of the show and you'd like to
get in touch, you can reach us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. All types of
messages are welcome, but we especially appreciate feedback to recent episodes,
(00:34):
and we really appreciate if you have something interesting to
add to a topic we've talked about. Let's see, Rob,
do you want to kick things off with this message
about the glass frog today?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Oh? Yeah. This is a response to one of the
Anamalia Stupendium episodes. This is from Jim Jim Wrightson and says,
as I listened to Argo Mandanese descriptions of the amazing
glass frogs organs visible beneath transparent skin, the words of
(01:07):
my email to Robert and Joe informing them of Fritz
Lieber's ghouls manifested in my mind. But no, the KG
Sorcerer beat me to the punch. I haven't read all
of the and I have to note, I'm I've never
been sure how to pronounce this character's name. I always
read it in my mind as Fard and the Gray Mouser,
but I guess you could pronounce it Fuffored. I'm not sure,
(01:29):
but I don't know. To me in my own mental
version of all this, it's Fard, but have it however
you will. But anyways is if you haven't read all
the Fafford or Fared in the Gray Mouser books, you
should love the wizard Stick and the D and D
framing in the Anomalius Topidium series. Please don't drop it.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Jim, So faf hrd is not a typo. That is
how this is spelled. There's not right a vowel left out.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah yeah. So these stories, for anyone not familiar with them,
these the stories. They were written by American author Fritz
Liber who lived nineteen ten through nineteen twenty two, and
his father was also named Fritz Leiber and was an
actor that was in like Shakespearean stuff and swashbucklers. So
(02:17):
it's interesting to go into the stories knowing that because
there's a fair amount of sword play in these tales.
These tales were one of the many inspirations on Dungeons
and Dragons, and I have not read them in many
a year, like it's been over probably fifteen years. It's
maybe been twenty years since I read these, but I
remember them as being a lot of fun, just classic
(02:39):
sword and sorcery adventures with this you know, kind of
beefy barbarian type and it's like smaller roguelike friend and
accomplice and they go on all sorts of magical and
daring adventures.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
So is the conan set up with a beefy barbarian
main hero with a rogue thief accomplice like a recurring
motif in this genre.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
It is, off the top of my head, I'm not sure,
like who really kicks it off? I mean, I guess
in a way you can, you can go way back.
Maybe you can make a case for like the epic
of Gilgamesh having something like who is Gilgamesh's beastly sidekick
in key Do? I think, yeah, I don't know, if
you it's maybe not one to one, but like you know,
(03:23):
it's kind of like the most ancient buddy adventure that
comes to.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Mind, though I don't know if in key Do is
is more of a rogue thief type or just a
different type of beef beef man like he's described I
think as a as a wild man, like a you know,
a strong man of the wilderness, whereas Gilgamesh himself is like, he's,
i don't know, more a symbol of civilization, like the
warrior king of the the he's the he's the city beef,
(03:50):
and in key Do is the country beef.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah. So anyway, these stories, these stories don't date back
as far as Conan the Barbarian and so forth. I
think these I'm just looking at a list of the
collections and when they were published, but they go back
at least as far as nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Well, I'm not familiar, but maybe I'll have to check
that out at some point there.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
I think I've probably mentioned this in the past and
the show before, but there was at least one collection
of these stories that I had where the illustrator decided
to envision these two characters as just Robert Plant and
Jimmy Page, like they're just straight up Robert Plant and
Jimmy Page. Way, which worked, but it was an interesting choice.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Okay, I'm going to do this next message. We're gonna
do some messages in response to our series on authenticity.
This one comes from Nathan. Nathan says, Dear Robert and
Joe and guest producer Paul. Oh yeah, Paul. Our coworker
Paul Deckins sat in to produce one of those while
(04:52):
JJ was out last week. Nathan says, Wow, I didn't
expect to have so many thoughts sparked by your great
commerc about authenticity. In part one, Joe mentioned existentialism's take
on living inauthentically. Their term for this is living in
quote bad faith. Jean Paul Sartre famously gave an example
(05:13):
of a cafe waiter whose movements Sartra thought were too
waiter esque, too eager to please. This waiter sees his
role in life exclusively as a waiter and fulfills only
that duty. Therefore, he is not being truly himself. In
Part two, you brought up how seeing a computer image
of a painting is not the same experience as seeing
(05:35):
it in person, and is in a sense, not actually
seeing the painting. This reminded me of one of my
favorite paintings, The Treachery of Images, often called this is
not a pipe by Renee mcgreet. Even though we see
an image of a pipe, macgreet also wrote the phrase
sorry for failing at French air to see nepaun peep,
(05:58):
this is not a pipe at the at the bottom
of the painting. This is to remind us that it's
merely a representation of a pipe, not a real one.
In fact, the print of this painting currently hanging in
my room is not the real image either, but merely
a reproduction of a representation of a pipe. You also
(06:18):
mentioned how artists both historic and modern would learn their
art precisely by trying to reproduce existing works of art.
This ties into the central thesis of a YouTuber named
Kirby Ferguson. In his video essay Everything Is a Remix,
he argues that there is no truly original idea, and
he boils down all creativity in art and culture to
(06:39):
three steps, copy, transform, and combine. For copying, he cites
a story of how, as a young young writer, Hunter S.
Thompson re typed whole pages of The Great Gatsby word
for word quote to get the feeling of what it
was like to write that way. Oh yeah, I don't
think I knew that about Thompson specifically, but I would
(07:02):
endorse this practice. I think this is also one of
the benefits of memorizing passages of literature, like passages you
really like, descriptive passages and stuff from fiction, or memorizing
speeches or memorizing poetry. I think it something about the
process of memorizing the order of the words kind of
helps you imagine what it would be like to produce
(07:24):
that style of writing from yourself, and therefore can be
one part of developing a kind of synthetic, composite, original
style of your own.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah. Yeah, it reminds me that it wasn't too long
ago that I saw in this is somebody's social media post,
but they are resharing something that was like basically saying, hey, Christians,
if you want to get a little closer to God
or feel, i don't know, more in line with your faith,
(07:54):
pick out some passages in the Bible and just copying
word for word. And you know, I think maybe there
might be an impulse for some to find that silly,
But of course I instantly realized, like, oh, that's exactly
the same exercise as this creative writing exercise, you know,
of going through and copying these words. So I mean,
regardless what your opinion is of a particular sacred text
(08:17):
or its translation and so forth, I mean there is
something too copying it word for word and having those
words travel through your mind in a slightly different way.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Absolutely. I mean this might sound strange, but I think
there's actually all kinds of There are all kinds of
details in a text that we can miss when we
just read it, and interacting with the text in a
different way, such as by memorizing it or by copying
it out manually or something like that causes you to
experience it again in a different way and to maybe
(08:49):
notice things that normally you would gloss over.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Yeah. So I would imagine it's probably a religious practice
one way or another in various religions. You know, all
these different face have sacred text. What happens when you
copy it? And maybe it brings you a little closer too,
whatever's being transmitted through it.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Okay, one more comment from Nathan here. Nathan says, lastly,
all the talk of filmmakers wanting us to experience movies
as originally intended felt vindicating. I have long spoken out
against watching movies on a phone for an authentic experience.
I watch movies not on a television, but by projecting
them onto my living room wall. That's the nearest I
can get to recreating a theatrical viewing, and I have
(09:30):
no regrets. Thanks as always for your thought provoking conversations
about Everything under the Sun. Nathan. Yeah, Nathan, I think,
as we talked about in the episode, I'm sort of
two minds about this. I mean, on one hand, sometimes
you're in a situation where all you can do is
watch on your phone, so you're gonna, you know, you
do what you can. On the other hand, I can
totally understand if you are a filmmaker and the experience
(09:54):
that you are imagining for the audience is like seeing
it in a theater with you know, with the sigh in,
the sound and all that it could be. It could
be kind of disappointing to imagine people watching the movie
you made on a phone, because that's not the experience
you had in mind for them. And not to say
there's anything wrong with them experiencing it that way.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, really the example, the most extreme
example is probably we've talked about in Weird House Cinema
in the past, is when we were looking at various
three D pictures, you know, and we felt some of
that frustration of wanting to try and watch these films,
even just some with some form of three D, not
the original form of three D that people would have
(10:37):
experienced in the theaters, but just any form, and it
was sometimes just difficult or impossible to do so, so,
you know, I do get it. But then again, at
the end of the day, it's like, am I going
to watch House of Wax as originally intended? Or am
I going to watch it in some other format or
just not watch it at all? Like, obviously I'm going
(10:59):
to watch it however I can. And if I'm on
an airplane, I got to watch something. So I'm gonna
cue up something to watch, and I'm just gonna have
to apologize to the directors that I'm not watching it
as originally intended. I can't think of a film off
and that was made especially to be watched on an airplane.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Yeah, better to pick your own movie, bring it with
you and watch it on a phone than to on
a slightly larger screen in the back of the seat
in front of you watch one of six Mark Wahlberg
movies that are available.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
I guess the thing is if it's worth watching, it's
worth watching again in a different format, so you know,
you can always come back later and try and make
it up. Oh, coming back to the this is not
a pipe. I was not familiar with this work, but
it is an interesting experience just to look at it
for the first time, because knowing what the text says,
it makes me want to see other things in the
pipe than the pipe, So it's it's kind of an
(11:50):
interesting experience, Like I want. Part of me wants to
lean in and interpret the pipe as some sort of
a otter like organism or see its curves as something
more like human or sensual. But then I have to
like fall back to like, no, this is a pipe.
My other attempts to interpret this otherwise realistic looking image.
(12:11):
It is not a surrealistic image, and it not itself.
Attempts to do so fail and I go back to pipe.
All right. This next one comes to us from Thomas.
Thomas says, Hi, Robert, and Joe, I just finished the
two episode theory on authenticity and wanted to share some
(12:34):
insight from my line of work. I'm a lawyer, and
before any evidence can be introduced in court, it has
to be authenticated. Evidence can roughly be divided into witness testimony,
physical evidence, and documents, which includes photographs and recordings. Legally speaking,
the distinction discussed in Part one between honesty and credibility
and authenticity if a person doesn't exist, all witness testimony
(12:57):
is evidence and it's up to a judge or jury
whether to believe it. A witness does normally need to
testify about how they know a particular fact to help
assess their credibility, and just hearing from somebody else hearsay
generally isn't good enough. Before physical evidence, for example, a
gun found at the scene of a shooting can be
introduced in court, the witness who collected the evidence needs
(13:18):
to establish that it is quote the same or substantially
the same condition as when it was found. This is
an interesting articulation of the concept of authenticity as history
that you discussed in relation to works of art in
Part two. If a piece of physical evidence has any
history at all since it was collected, that history has
changed the character of the object so that it is
(13:40):
no longer authentic. Authenticating a document is much simpler and
in line with a basic definition of authenticity that you
discussed in Part one. A document or photograph is authentic
if a witness with appropriate knowledge, usually but not always,
its creator testifies that it fairly and accurately represents the
information it contains, the layout of an area shown in
(14:01):
a map, or the events of a traffic stop shown
on dashcam footage. In other words, documents are authentic so
long as it's established that they are what they purport
to be. Always appreciate the deep dives you do. Keep
up the good.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Work, Thanks Thomas. That is really interesting, and I think
it adds a nice dimension because we were talking about
how we are constantly making authenticity evaluations of people in
like a social context, where in most cases you would
say the stakes are are very low, like you're making
judgments about people just kind of I don't know, to
(14:36):
decide whether you like them or not, or whether you
want to hang out with them or not, or something
like that, you know, where there's not a whole lot
on the line. Obviously authenticity in court cases the stakes
are very high.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, it's interesting, like you said, as to point out
the like the chain of ownership and an item, like
I wonder how this factors into the ownership of collectibles, like, oh,
this is the stop watch that once belonged to this
famous individual, but they weren't the most recent owners of it.
At what point do previous owners supersede the most noteworthy
(15:11):
owner of a given object and so forth, without even
getting into the whole ship of THESEUS.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Situation, Yeah, totally. So it is interesting to see the
difference here and how authenticity is applied to these physical objects.
These have more similarity to what we were talking about
with like works of art in the Walter Benjamin sense.
But also coming back to personal authenticity, I was trying
to think, well, does it really matter in a court
case whether somebody is being true to themselves in their
(15:38):
testimony or not. Wouldn't it just matter whether what they
are saying is factually correct or not? And in some
cases I think it would matter whether they're being true
to themselves, because there are cases where in courts you're
trying to establish what someone's true inner thoughts and feelings
are when you're searching for motive, like motive greatly implicates authenticity. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yeah, So anyway, it is interesting to approach something like
this from the legal standpoint because, like you know, legally,
you need to reach that point of action on something.
You can't just philosophize and say, well, you know, nobody
really knows what's authentic. Yeah, you need to get down
to brass tax at some point and say like, okay,
we've got to move on this. Is this person guilty
or innocent? Is are charges going to be placed or
(16:23):
are they not? And so forth?
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yeah, And I guess ideally in a court case you
would have really strong physical evidence to rely on, but
in a lot of cases that's not how it is,
and you actually do have to you know, you have
juries essentially doing vibe assessments on witnesses to see like
does it seem like they're telling the truth? Do I
get a genuine vibe from them?
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Yeah? And then of course, yeah, obviously you have cases
of evidence that has been corrupted but at the time
it's thought to be legit or you know, later on
looking back at genetic evidence and so forth. So, Yeah,
authenticity has an interesting trajectory through any given legal system.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
I imagine, Okay, I'm gonna do this. Next message from Aurica.
Aurica says, Happy Wednesday. I am enjoying your miniseries on authenticity.
It is such a large topic and hard to articulate
what qualities authenticity should encompass. One aspect that was left
(17:19):
out of Part one was how authenticity and mental health
are connected. The study of the NBA students was quite interesting.
I also think mental health was glossed over too quickly
and lumped in with mood, affecting self authenticity. As a
mental health counselor, I do feel I gauge authenticity as
a major factor in my career. However, I view authenticity
(17:42):
as the amount of energy one uses to be in
any given situation. People are extremely resilient and find themselves
in a multitude of uncomfortable circumstances. There are indicators from
the facial expressions, eye movements, tone, mannerisms, etc. To go
into determining how much effort or energy a person is
(18:03):
using to communicate. If there is a lot of effort
for casual conversations or vice versa, if there is seemingly
no effort for difficult ones, that is an indicator that
something is off. It's the idea of masking self for
protection or potentially grounds to explore further. Obviously, the everyday
person is not asking strangers in class. Quote have you
(18:26):
ever made a plan to hurt yourself or in your life?
Therapists look for patterns and responses, rephrase questions and ask
again to look for similar mannerisms or changing behaviors. Depending
on the goal of the session, Those minute changes would
be called to the attention of the patient, As some
have no clue what is actually going on inside themselves.
(18:46):
Most people try counseling because they do not know who
they are or how to access their inner world. A
slightly different take on authenticity, I do love the notion
that a person can never truly know another's inner self
and therefore cannot make a judgment about their external behaviors
as being authentic. People are so complex. It's worrying to
(19:08):
think how many decisions are made based on other's abilities
to determine authenticity. Thank you for this one, Aurica. Well
thanks Arca. Really interesting thoughts there, and I really like
your adding this other understanding of authenticity because I think
this is something that already squares with part of our
lay understanding of authenticity. Like, when you're making authenticity checks
(19:30):
on people outside of a therapeutic context, I think part
of what you are looking for is whether it appears
that they are are struggling in a social interaction and
that may lead to totally unfair judgments. But I can
see in the case of a therapist, how it could
be really useful for a person to get that information
reflected back to them like that. They might not realize
(19:54):
it's coming off like they are struggling to engage in
a simple interaction, or maybe they are seeming to be
very disconnected or take too easily a difficult topic.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah, yeah, all right. This next one comes to us
from Brittany. Brittany writes sa It says, Dear Robin Joe,
your episodes on authenticity prompted me to write in about
a recent experience. Salom dancing before herod and eighteen seventy
six oil painting by Gustav Moreau. It is one of
(20:28):
my favorite works of art. Last month I had the
opportunity to see it on a trip to Los Angeles.
It was wonderful to see the minute detail and brushstrokes,
the lush colors and crackling from age. I was able
to get very close and look at it from various angles.
It was a true pleasure, an almost sublime experience. Seeing
this painting in pixels years ago didn't lead to any
(20:48):
disappointment and seeing it in person, because I might have
never known it existed if it weren't for an online reproduction.
As Rob noted on Booklan's Isle of the Dead, the
lighting effected his viewing experience as it did mine. Of
the Moreau. It makes me wonder if any work of
art is truly authentic outside of the circumstances in which
(21:09):
it was created. That's interesting, Like is the can you
accurately understand the painting outside of the artist's studio, Like
you'd really have to go to Pablo Picasso's, you know,
his his art studio while he's there, while he's alive
in his lifetime, and have him show it to you.
(21:29):
And even then you're seeing it at the point of
completion and not the like you weren't there for the
experience of it being made. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yeah, maybe one of those things where you can't identify
what actually would be the true experience of a work
of art, but you can identify increasing layers of alienation
and artificiality as you get further and further from the
original experience. Does that make sense? Like there there there
isn't a one hundred percent true experience, but somehow there
(21:56):
are things that are more artificial.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
And of course, another thing to think about is that
when you go to an art gallery, and this of
course is going to be something that is exploited by
art galleries. You know, certainly if they're good, if the
person behind it is good and knows what they're doing.
Is that you're not just viewing individual pieces. You're viewing
pieces in sequence. You're viewing pieces in relation to other pieces.
They might be. It might be in relation to another
(22:20):
piece by the same artist, it might be in relation
to another piece in a similar vein a similar subject matter,
similar timeframe. You know, there's so many ways to approach it,
and that can lead to some very interesting things going on.
First of all, thematically, like what happens when I look
at this painting by this artist and then I look
at this other one that is maybe similar in scope
(22:41):
or something. And then likewise, when you get into pieces
that are more three dimensional and or potentially either cast
light themselves or reflect light in interesting ways, those can
create there can be an interplay between these pieces. For instance,
if you're in a room there's a piece piece by
Anish Kapoor, who often uses, you know, these these mirror
(23:04):
surfaced objects, and then there are pieces by other artists,
like his work is going to interact with those pieces,
and the way you experience those pieces is defined by
what else is in the room, including other people. So
it's it's fascinating to think about all that.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Yeah, yeah, you know. I was also just thinking because
I had to look up this painting that Britney shared,
the Salome Dancing before Herod by Gustav Moreau. It's a
great painting. I love this and I have seen this before,
I realized once I pulled it up here, but it
made me think about how there are just esthetic qualities
of a work of art, maybe you know, conceptual qualities,
(23:40):
but aesthetic qualities as well that can cause one, I think,
to have a a an either closer or further reaction
to it. To either react to it very much by
getting lost in the work and just experiencing it directly,
or qualities that cause one to kind of step back
and think about it. So I think a great example
(24:01):
would be the Treachery of Imagery or whatever it was,
the you know, the Magret painting we talked about earlier.
This is literally it's almost like an essay in a painting,
it's like presenting a concept to you and asking you
to think metacognitively about what art means and how you're
processing it. And then there are other works of art
that invite you more to just have an emotional response,
(24:24):
to imagine you were almost in the room with the
subject of the painting, or to experience it in a
less thinking way. And it's funny. I think this painting
by Moreau kind of does both at the same time.
In one sense, it's an incredibly emotionally evocative image. It
does invite me to get lost in it. But on
(24:44):
the other hand, it kind of makes me think because
the way it is painted, and this may just be
Moreau's style, I don't know Moreau very well. It looks
almost like an image projected into mist. It has this
very airy, cloud life like ethereal ephemeral quality. It looks
like the the image is almost like a dream that
(25:05):
could could disappear at any moment, and it makes me
it makes me wonder if it's suggesting something about the
ephemerality of art or of the story on which this
is based.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yeah, yeah, it's to me. It has the look of
like you can imagine that this chamber is just choked
with like incense, smoke or something, you know.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, anyway, thank you, Brittany.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah, some great, great points in this, and I think
we could go on and on just about the way
that viewing art is such a singular experience. All right. Well,
you know, at this point, we have so many more
listener mails that we had on the document here for today,
but we didn't have time to get to them, you know,
stuff dealing with other Weird House episodes, more Dune, more authenticity.
(25:48):
So we're just gonna have to come back to all
of this and the next Lister Mail. Lister Mail comes
out on Mondays, and the Stuff to Blow your Mind
podcast feed our core episodes come out on Tuesdays and
Thursdays short form episode ons that might be a monster fact,
an artifact, or Anamalia stupendium. Though I can't do that
one every week because the voice is a bit it's
(26:09):
a bit rough on the old throat here. But then
on Fridays, we of course do Weird House Cinema. That's
our time to set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird movie. So hey, go ahead and
write in about anything we've covered in the past, on
present episodes or potentially for future episodes of any of
these shows.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
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