Hola, Sneakers. Welcome to Episode 432 – what we’re now calling “the slightly less poopy episode”!
This week on the show: suggestible people; crush fetish; less cataclysms; at the talkies; hockey fun; the New Jersey devil; overtime is boring; no cheerleaders in hockey; lake monsters; crypto-zoology; whither Bigfoot; why Nessie; how Bermuda Triangle; who alien civilizations; plants make for boring TV; Dracula shocker; standing stones advocacy; drunkation; good ol’days of drinking and driving; seatbelts resistor; okay with death; big liar; some Top 10 trivia; shout out to Richard Chamberlain; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; more fucking Star Trek; tell us about your mummy; shout out to Boris Karloff; old horror movies; pop up scares; and, finally, ventriloquists are weird.
Thanks for listening.
Question of the Week: What is something cultural that a parent or guardian took you to see that had a big effect on you? For good or bad.
Sub-question: Who is your favourite (classical or modern) “fine” artist?
Yes, the same questions as last week! How about somebody answers one?
The Marx Brothers sketch from the old TV show Fridays:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The original Star Trek had a few infection-related episodes. In “The Mark of Gideon,” Kirk is kidnapped so he can infect a woman with a virus so she can infect others and decrease the population of an overcrowded planet. In “Operation Annihilate,” they beam down to a colony infected with giant one-celled parasites that attach themselves to their hosts’ backs so they can spread throughout the galaxy. At our house, we called the episode “the one with the flying pancakes.” In “The Naked Time,” the crew passes on an infection through their sweat that makes them act like they are intoxicated. The Next Generation crew runs into the same problem in “The Naked Now.”
A cultural event my mom took me to when I was young was the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. It inspired me to take up ballet and other styles of dance. She also took our family to an Emily Carr exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery. That let me know a woman can be a great artist. I’d say she is my favourite artist. There is now some debate as to whether or not her paintings of First Nations villages and totem poles constitute cultural appropriation, but I think they pay tribute to the power of indigenous art and culture. Less controversial are her landscapes. Her impressionistic and abstract images of west coast trees and forests are outstanding.
Hmmm- something cultural: I remember mum and dad taking me to the Royal Agricultural Show when I was about 7-8, and they had a giant squid that had washed up on the beach, preserved in alcohol. Must have been 30 feet long. I believe that started my love affair (figurative only!) with weird invertebrates. Also it was the first time I had fairy floss/cotton candy.
Favourite “fine”artists- Australian painter Frederick McCubbin, American photographer Cindy Sherman
I got lucky at an early age when I showed some talent for art along with the urge to pursue it. This gave my folks the reason to foster that talent by giving me anything I needed, lessons, tools and an education. So I guess I can safely say that my folks did everything they could to help me be successful.
I get my visual creativity from Mom’s side of the family which is full of artists and designers. My Dad’s side was full of musicians dating back to Vaudeville and the Circus but I have not a musical bone in my body. Dad was a Civil Engineer for 40 years and could only play one song on the accordion. Dad’s objective brain still fails to fully grasp my subjective path through the arts, even though he did his best to tutor me in Algebra and Geometry with little success. (Poor Dad) That side of my brain is dead and looks like that graveyard at the end of “Gangs of New York.”
I will say that I’ve done my best to turn this ship around and try to introduce some culture to my folks by urging them to visit museums and take in some art, but they just continue to put it off.
It’s really hard to pick a favorite artist I admire, I’ve gone through so many stages of inspiration. In the past though, I’ve gravitated towards Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt and Maxfield Parrish for their more illustrative approach to Neo-Classical styles.
The three modern artists who’ve influenced me heavily have always been Drew Struzan, Thomas Blackshear and Bill Sienkiewicz…those three wrote the book on the essentials of being an illustrator and they continue to inspire me.
Also, Thanks for the “Night in Tehran” video above! I’m sure I saw this years ago but I have no recollection of it. I watched Fridays faithfully and was already a Marx fan, so I’m sure I enjoyed it fully at the time with the notion I’d never see it again. Now here we are years later with the ability to watch anything, anywhere…
Now, about that flying car.
I’ve been brooding – brooding, I tells ya – to think of anything a parent or guardian took me to see that had a big effect. And the answer is… literally, nothing. Pretty much all the cool stuff that had a major impact on me, I found for myself through books, TV, comics and friends.
There is one example, though, that comes close – my sister’s record collection. See, young uns, I was born in 1961 and my sister Carol is ten years older. So she was in the sweet spot as a teen when some of the greatest music of all time was written and recorded. And I was right behind her, absorbing it all at a very tender age.
I remember Carol coming home from school one day with her friend, both of them in a state of high excitement, and putting a new album on her groovy dansette record player. It was A Hard Day’s Night, possibly just released. I just stared at the faces on the cover for ages as the music swept me away. The first bars of I Should Have Known Better always take me back to that transcendent moment.
She had loads of singles,too the pearl among them Strawberry Fields Forever / Penny Lane, which I played over and over whenever she let me. I also remember this weird looking white album with a peel-off label shaped like a banana. I was five. I had no idea why Lou was waiting for his man, or why he might need $26, but I dug it, daddy. And I still do.
Favourite fine artist? Impossible to choose, but top five would be Kandinsky, Miro, Matisse, Van Gogh and Diane (also wife).
Did you really need to ask why the Loch Ness Monster caught the public imagination so widely? The answer’s easy. All the others are fake.
Hi guys. I’ve always been a sucker for paintings that look like real life, and the more realistic the better. Norman Rockwell is one of my favorites, and so is Maxfield Parrish. When I become President, or even better yet, King of the Entire World, I’m going to make it mandatory at any modern art exhibit to have 20% of the “art” done by third graders, and not tell the visitors which ones are which.