In this second installment in the story of post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh and one strung out man's effort to get to the bottom of Chinook Electricity and his own unraveling in the world, we witness buildings come alive as they implode, and come face to face with some very unhuman characters in an otherwise abandoned park down by the Point, and generally speaking things just get that much uglier as we continue to follow Jackson Cole down his ever-constricting hole. Enjoy!
Series
Cars, Apocalypse, & Internet Irony
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
This week on 3 Things we talk about the cars we have owned, or in Gabe’s case, about the cars we never in actual fact have owned, the apocalypses we would like to see, and whether or not the apocalypse is even happening, although it is definitely true that the internet is killing irony, and I don’t mean it’s killing it, but more like it’s dead. Which is the third thing we talk about.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
That Moment, Adrian Ghenie (2007)
The Last Electrician
Michael S. Judge
Mean density of rubber buckshot thuds against the left side of your chest, where cardiograph blossoms tangled with the disk-image star’s genomic stutter, dulled cartridge juddering newly nerveless across grooves worked into kerogen wax and compressed exoskeleton, the milk we’ve wrung from insect marrow,
eaten sunlight feathering the wet-gate star’s medical imagery with chordate quills of charcoal, vertebral preamps each potential for the signal it might route and amplify to some englobing flesh, a dendrite map dwindling with heat loss till it terminates into such gasping syntax as the glyph must break across to get metabolized,
if partially, erratically, momentum altered by the buildup of its own approaching wreckage, swaddled in fallout, cinders to turn the morning richly gray as carbon-heavy glass, optical track snarled up with the feedback of a cell-disruption star and peaking hard on all immunologic frequencies to matte down any EQ’s osseous smile again, the helpless seething grin of the dentition underneath what meat could lend it the appearance of a face you might interpret, still, even this late, render decidable and then pass fractious inaccurate verdict upon, unsure, as we must be, whether that constitutes a habit more tenacious even than the habit of survival or survival’s best remaining chance.
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Roko's Basilisk, Workweek, & No Sand
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
For those of you who don’t know, Roko’s Basilisk is the premise that AI might develop to create virtual hells for those who didn’t help develop AI, and, speaking of hell, the 40-hour workweek is brutal—but worry not, because the Earth is running out of everything, including sand! As our three experts of nothing discuss these issues in their many infantile styles like overgrown babies as awlays. For the most part, they spend their time complaining about the future, the present, and the past, as usual.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
Click on Wes’ face to read all our letters to him.
The Wes Letters: Brett, Letter 2, Out to Sea, A Black Hole
in Excerpt, Story, The Wes Letters, Series
Brett Zehner
Dear Wes.
Hi again.
I just turned 28. I wrote a song called 28 with a sweater and a cup of tea.
Still no fame (that I know of) which is sort of good because I cleared the ol’ 27 hump with little damage.
But in fact it’s not true. There has been plenty of damage. A junkyard full of it. I tend to fib because I have a bad memory. But here are some true concrete checkable facts. A list in fact that I keep to help me fend off memory gaps:
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Stories, Road trips, & Magic lost
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
In this episode of 3 Things, Gabe, Mal, and Adam ponder stories and what makes them tick, their favorite most horrible road trips and losing the magic. Gabe has his own ideas of what makes a good story, Adam talks about wandering off in Alaska, and Malcolm consoles everyone about how great 90’s hip hop was, and maybe those days are done, but those were some days. There’s always spelunking.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
All About Food!
in Podcast, Three Things, 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?
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
"Beasts", Enlightenmentexit, & Barter
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
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.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
Myself from a Great Height (3)
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?
Myself from a Great Height is from a series of podcasts from Gabriel Boyer’s Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite.
The Bedroom Theater Variety Show
in Podcast, Bedroom Theater, Series
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!
Bedroom Theater began when my roommate changed the light bulb in my bedroom and ended in a five-hour crying spree in the Nevada desert. There is no audience, only people performing for each other. For more on this, please see Welcome to Weltschmerz.
EST, The Good Life, & Dream Science
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
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.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
Enhancement, Emotions, & Spaces
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
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.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
Flow, Plastic Surgery, & Visionaries
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
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?
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
Brutalism, Time Travel, & Net Privacy
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
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.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
My Asinine Life: The Metaphysics of Snot
in Article, My Asinine Life, Series
Gabriel Boyer
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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Trappist 1, Moon Tourists, Bob Caution
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
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.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
Sarah Ruhls Rules!
in Podcast, Bedroom Theater, Series
“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!
Bedroom Theater began when my roommate changed the light bulb in my bedroom and ended in a five-hour crying spree in the Nevada desert. There is no audience, only people performing for each other. For more on this, please see Welcome to Weltschmerz.
The God Game
Colin Jacks
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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Chinese TV, Cities, Quantum Brain
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
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.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
Click on Wes to read all our letters to him.
The Wes Letters: Feliz, Letter 2
in Excerpt, Story, The Wes Letters, Series
Feliz Lucia Molina
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.