Series
Malcolm talks about food trends, Gabe talks about his troubled history with food, and Adam talks about Roger Ebert’s cookbook this week on 3 Things. Is food an artform? What is “skin egg”? Did you know Roger Ebert used to bring a rice cooker with him to film festivals and cook up his favorite dishes in the pot while watching foreign dramas before his many unfortunate surgeries?
This week on 3 Things we talk about learning to be a beast to better learn how to be a human, whether or not we have as a society given up on the ideas and principles of the Enlightenment, and whether bartering is a viable economic option. Does smelling poop lead to better vision? Can our world continue to exist on a diet of fake news and geopolitical posturing? Would you barter poetry for a nose-hair hairdo? These are just some of the questions we grappled with this week.
As we end this installment of Jackson Cole's face-off with the beyond, the obfuscuting darkness has only become more infuriatingly bright. How are we to judge this lost junkie? Searching for answers to questions he hasn't thought to ask? Stumbling into rooms without any clear dimension. Walking down streets invaded by the cannibalists among us. Where will he end up? And why did he have to end up there?
The show below, pasted between two nights of Bedroom Theater, features avant punk musical stylings, a monologue of a teenage girl flowering as a multi-dimensional lifeform in the abyss, candid unplugged versions of classic songs from Mutable’s Glitter Tracks [by the Box Kites] and No Place to Die [by Normal Feelings], as well as a few brand-new numbers, a four-person retelling of The Nightingale by Hans Christian Anderson, and a recorded round table discussion of contemporary politics. Enjoy!
This week on 3 Things, we go from EST and other cults, both real and imaginary, to what it means to live a good life, from the purchase of high quality steaks to being nice to people—how are these two ways of thinking the same and how different—to dream science, and our own ideas of dreams. “I’m creating my own nightmare.” So says Gabe. Join us for yet another kooky bit of conundrumery while we discuss things that we have no right discussing.
This week for Three Things, we talk about drugs that enhance our ability to count and not sleep, Gabe’s idea of the 4 basic emotions, which turns out to also have been someone else’s idea, which fact Gabe cannot accept, and places we’ve lived and would like to live—from industrial spaces filled with raw sewage to the unfinished homes of our youth and everywhere in between. We’re crapping on each other’s souls this week.
This week we talk about flow, what it is, and whether it’s really all that good of a thing, alternative forms of plastic surgery—for example, will people ever carve themselves into perfect replicas of pigs? Does it make sense to turn our noses upside down? And megalomaniacs as the drivers of progress, and whether or not madmen are the drivers of change, and specifically… what’s up with Walt Disney?
This week, for Three Things, we discuss brutalist architecture—whether it’s a throwback to nostalgic sci fi or a soul-crushing example of urban planning—how time travel can go terribly wrong, and what’s up with net privacy. Should we be concerned that our most intimate moments are so easily accessible? Who would want to access them? And generally speaking are slurring words in each other’s general directions.
You know it might seem kind of trite considering how everything’s being exploded all over the place by the authoritarians among us, but—I woke up one day without a brain. The other morning I woke up and thought, Gee. Where’d my brain go, only to then have realized that—gosh. Someone’s going to be so upset with me. I should be out parading in front of the fascists and screaming in their faces in a tight-fisted squadron—but I got no brain.
What I mean by this is—wow. I actually just said that. I can say anything and act like it’s actually true. Wow.
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This week on 3 Things, we look into the possibility of colonizing one of the planets orbiting Trappist One, Elon Musk’s claims about taking tourists to the moon in 2018, and remember our old friend Bob Caution, the man who once lived in the basement of the Coolidge Corner Theater, and days gone by when living in the basements of theaters was a thing.
“The dust always makes progress!” What a brilliant amateur rendition of the first three pages of a brilliant play. If you have no idea who Sarah Ruhl is, I encourage you to explore her surrealist dramas. If you have never thought of performing plays in your bedroom, I beg you to consider transforming your home in this manner. If you have never thought anything, I pity you. Enjoy!
1. Categories
1.0.0 :: Does the ground consist of spires?
What is and what is not within the world that you are planning to create? Does the ground consist of spires that reach to the tips of the atmosphere, or is the entire orb made up of a teaming mass of encephalocapsules? (Brain capsules.) All of this begins with categorization. Create a series of types, beginning with animate and inanimate matter, or god and mortal, or up and down, and from these preliminary dichotomies you can create the great font of being, the million hordes and so forth.
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This week on Three Things, we talk about the madness of Chinese TV, how we ended up where we have, and the quantum brain. Join us as we wonder through the corridors of media, our lives, and the larger universe as we do every week. To see some of the Chinese TV we watched go here, here, and for a more in depth picture, here.
Click on Wes to read all our letters to him.
February 9, 2012
12:54pm
Dear Wes,
Have you watched the 1960s documentary Endless Summer? After drive-thru at In-N-Out I went home and turned on Netflix. The sunny California male voiceover truly lifts my heart. And I never say lifts my heart. That two surfer friends went around the world searching for the perfect wave is a cute representation of a philosophy of sport or aesthetics of time. Do you know Roland Barthes’ little masterpiece What Is Sport? I wonder what he would have said about surfing.
A detective in Beijing finds a dead foreigner up a tree in the small forest beside the new mall they’re building in Beijing-East, and ends up following a winding trail that may lead him nowhere, but will take him to the resort town of Yangshuo and in a seedy underbelly of Eurotrash and drugs here in among this sea of miniature mountains just north of Vietnam—where nothing is what it seems. Listen to Pt2 here and go here for Pt3.
This week, for 3 Things, we’ll be talking about Uber as a thing and whether it should be a thing at all, antenna TV as a thing as well as possible channels as of yet unaired, and whether or not perhaps our purpose on this planet is to help animals evolve through exposure to extreme radiation, thereby setting off the next great stage in evolution. As always, keep listening, and enjoying the curmudgeons as they visibly age while arguing the sticking points of their insanity.
A man can’t seem to leave his apartment—a manikin textbook at the end of time has a voice inside its head—a woman running towards a house in the snow is desperate to share some important information—a policeman in southern China is dealing with a strange foreigner in the Sober Up room—a CIA operative is giving a motivational speech about the end of America—a firm partner off to visit his ailing friend in an industrial city in northern China discovers his friend is more than just quaintly broken—a spokesman for a Chinese fast food franchise no longer believes he exists—and a pastor who gets some unlikely visitors in the middle of the night. These are the characters you will meet in this segment of Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite. Listen to Pt1 here and go here for Pt3.
This week on 3 Things, we talk about luxury preppers preparing for the apocalypse with underground bunkers, our serialized dreams, about our houses rejecting us and nostalgia for New York being surpassed by the epic New York of our dreams, and Gabe’s on-going vampire dreams taking him to outer space, as well as the Grammy’s, what went wrong, what went wronger and what went wrongest.
During the Chechen Wars, stories began to circulate about certain snipers—blonde-haired, blue-eyed, cold-blooded female snipers called beliye kolgotki by the Russians. The White Tights (or White Stockings) so named because they were said to only wear white, were rumored to be contract killers paid by the Chechens on a kill-by-kill basis. These assassins are/were said to be from small Baltic States with a grudge against Russia and are/were said to be members of a bi-athlon team, trained to cross miles and miles of rugged terrain then successfully fire a weapon and hit a target. The story got a boost when newspapers reported the capture of several female assassins—from the Baltics and from the Ukraine. However, other papers reported that the stories were absolute myth, attributing the creation of these mysterious female assassins to paranoia and convoluted historical facts.
At our most recent Bedroom Theater, audience members read poems written by Lina Vitkauskas inspired and penned to this mythical team of sharpshooters. The recording of these readings can be found below, and her book can be found here.
In the third part of this 3 part history within the larger Apocryphal History of the Parasite, we find ourselves in the minds of a seedy Brit hiding out in Southern China for mysterious reasons, a woman in a basement apartment full of holes, a teenage girl who is also a long-bodied lifeform flowering from one end of the universe to the other, the founding member of ELF in an interrogation chamber, and the younger brother of a dead man. They’re all being torn apart by something. What is it? Listen to Pt1 here and go here for Pt2.
