Stuff To Blow Your MindOnce more, it's time for a weekly dose of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Weirdhouse Cinema listener mail...
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Listener mail. My name is Robert.
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, 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?
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 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, 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.
Jim, So faf hrd is not a typo. That is how this is spelled. There's not right a vowel left out.
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 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 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.
So is the conan set up with a beefy barbarian main hero with a rogue thief accomplice like a recurring motif in this genre.
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, it's kind of like the most ancient buddy adventure that comes to.
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, and in key Do is the country beef.
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.
Well, I'm not familiar, but maybe I'll have to check that out at some point there.
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.
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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 that style of writing from yourself, and therefore can be one part of developing a kind of synthetic, composite, original style of your own.
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, 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 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.
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 notice things that normally you would gloss over.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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.
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 owner of a given object and so forth, without even getting into the whole ship of THESEUS.
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 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.
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 are they not? And so forth?
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?
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.
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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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. 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.
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 are things that are more artificial.
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 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 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 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.
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, 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 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, 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 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 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.
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.
Yeah, anyway, thank you, Brittany.
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. 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 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.
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.
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