The Blindboy Podcast - Malibu Castle Bastards

Episode Date: March 21, 2018

Almost getting in a plane crash with Jedward, Why Adam from the Bible was a Cuck, the art of William Hogarth Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

God bless you sultry piss kissers and welcome to episode 23 of the blind boy podcast for your weekly podcast hug. very happy to announce that this podcast was included in a list on Radio Times, which is an internet site. It used to be a magazine. I think it still is a fucking magazine, but it was like the Radio Times best podcasts to listen to at the moment. And this podcast was included on it, which is class because that's international and I'm all about international cunts listening to this podcast if possible and podcast was included alongside such

podcast luminaries as Marc Maron who I've only listened to once or twice and he records in his garage he interviewed President Obama and I haven't

listened to Mark Maron once or much I stuck my head in once or twice but people on the internet told me that he talks over his guests too much so don't listen to him that much I still listen to

an odd bit of Bill Burr I like the chaotic approach he has to his podcasts and initially I hated the echo in his podcast

but now it's grown on me to the point that when I listen to Bill Burr's podcast I try and imagine the size of the room that he's recording it in based on what the echo of his voice sounds like such is my fanaticism for audio fidelity I'm recording this podcast in my temporary studio at the moment.

I haven't been back at my regular studio for a while because I'm moving it into a new space that will hopefully be even better than the first studio space. But I've got a tiny bit of an echo in here. Tiny bit. But I'm quite close to the microphone, my current podcast setup as well is quite strange, because it's a temporary studio, my podcast microphone, I don't have a pop shield, which is, a pop shield is a thing you put in front of your microphone for when you make popping sounds like that so i don't have a pop shield so instead what i have is a glove over my microphone and it's a glove of fragile masculinity it's a bit like my uh my my tin mug my stainless steel mug from a couple of weeks back, that exposed my fragile masculinity,

the glove that I have over this podcast mic, is known as a shooter mitten, and basically what it was, I needed mittens, because I like to keep my hands warm when it's outside, but I also don't like wearing gloves, because then I can't keep my hands warm when it's outside. But I also don't like wearing gloves because then I can't touch my phone. And so I'm like, fuck that. I need something that allows me to touch my phone. But also keeps the tops of my fingers warm.

So I'm like, this has to exist. And it does exist in the form of what's known as shooter mittens and what shooter mittens are are think of fingernails gloves right but there's a hood on the knuckle and it comes over and it covers the your fingers so you have the option of having fingerness gloves and then also mittens when you drag the hood over it it's actually yeah if i was to analyze these gloves for if i was to go cultural marxist on these gloves that i have they completely expose a fragile masculinity because the hood you know over this

men don't want to wear mittens mittens are for children and women that's the cultural narrative around mittens mittens even sound they don't even sound masculine it sounds like kittens

so men don't want to wear mittens so what the companies have done is they've managed to appeal to our fragile masculinity by inventing shooter mittens so number one the hood that comes over to protect my fingers from the cold it's a bit like a foreskin that's what it is it's foreskin on a glove. And then here's the best part. You know, it's like I said with my stainless steel Stanley mug that I had a couple of weeks back. For looking for York D. Ahern. These shooter mittens.

They're not for me. A fucking cock. A man who doesn't want to get his fingers called on his bicycle they're designed for soldiers shooter mittens are for when a soldier's hands are cold so he keeps them warm

until he sees an enemy and then he has to engage his fingers and pull the trigger so you pull back the foreskin on this glove and it allows your fingers then to pull the trigger and kill your enemy fucking hell this week's podcast is sponsored by

gloves so yeah I've got a shooter mitten this week over my microphone and this mitten is doing a very it's doing a very good job at maintaining audio fidelity and if i say a word that has a lot of p's in it you don't get that uncomfortable popping sound you know that you would get if the mitten wasn't present so what the fuck was i talking about? Yeah, my current podcast setup.

So on the microphone, I've got these Fragile Masculinity Shooter Mittens. And then underneath the microphone, first off the microphone, I don't have a handle, or not a handle, I don't have a microphone stand because I'm in my temporary studio.

So the microphone is resting on a children's illustrated bible and a book which is scripts of the comedy series The League of Gentlemen and I have to say the children's illustrated bible is fucking fantastic

I do recommend that you buy a children's illustrated bible my one is by DK Darlingk darling kinderly or something you'd know him but it's fucking brilliant it's actually really really good because the bible has some class enjoyable stories let's face it and when there's pictures it's even better because you get to see loads of these drawings of christ being all sad and pointing at things you know of these drawings of Christ being all sad

and pointing at things you know and it's split up between the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Old Testament is crack because it's nuts

so that's my current podcast set up if you're new to this podcast I suggest going back to the start please because that was a fucking 7 minute rant about foreskin gloves you know

and regular listeners are used to that but if you've just happened upon this podcast I suggest you go back to the start so I had a I was having a little flick through the children's illustrated Bible em

do you know I must do a few Bible podcasts in a while because I enjoy the Bible as an artefact of mythology which is what it is, you know. The Old Testament in particular. But I was looking at, I cracked open the Children's Bible and obviously starts off Adam and Eve, right? And I was reading the fucking Adam and Eve story.

and I was reading the fucking Adam and Eve story and as you know I've mentioned before I'm a fan of Carl Jung and his archetypes and his collective unconscious and I'm also a fan of Sigmund Freud and Freudian analysis and I was looking at kind of the story of Adam and Eve

and I couldn't help but kind of probe it from a Freudian perspective and I was thinking about it like in terms of like when the Bible was written right there's this theory of now this this again this is a fucking hot take this is a hot take and when i say when i say hot take it means you know just leave me ramble listen to it don't take it as scientific evidence but some some say that patriarchy, which is a society generally dominated by men and men's control over women.

Some argue that patriarchy wasn't always the way with human beings. That when humans lived in a hunter-gatherer society, that it was much more egalitarian, and men and women had kind of more equal roles, okay? And when patriarchy started to come into play, it only kind of started when when humans discovered farming right when you were i think i might have even dealt with this with a previous podcast but basically when humans discovered farming uh that meant that we could settle in one place and farming also meant that we had surplus

and we had land and the notion of property and the notion of property meant handing things down to offspring before farming and property we had territory that we freely roamed we didn't really own anything and when property became a thing maybe 15 20 000 years ago then towns became a thing and cities became a thing and ancient religion tended to be polytheistic which meant that we worship many different gods and some say when when when humans started to live in towns and cities right large communities that's when monotheistic religion became a thing monotheistic religion being the idea of one god and if you look at it historically the whole one god thing started to become popular about four thousand years ago in the levant the levant the area of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, where the Old Testament was born. And some say that monotheistic religion, from a cultural perspective,

the reason it kind of echoed with people and worked is it came out of the first kind of large cities. Out of the first kind of large cities. These large cities being. Ur. And Babylon. Which is now Iraq. Places like that. So that's what.

And that monotheistic religion. It echoed. The political structure necessary. For a large city to operate. Which meant one ruler. An emperor whatever. And to go Jungian on it. The structure of monotheistic religion. Echoes the political system necessary.

But I couldn't help but notice. That monotheistic religion. Is also. Very patriarchal. and that's what got me thinking about just how fucked up the Adam and Eve story is so

we all know it because we were taught it since we were three years of fucking age in school Adam and Eve living a lovely perfect life in the Garden of Eden and then one day Eve meets the snake the devil uh oh wait no they're in the Garden of Eden and God says do what you want lads this place is class it's for ye I love ye you're free you get to live to be as long as you want you can live your life is heaven

and this garden is heaven do what you want except for this one tree there's one tree lads and please don't go near this tree so Adam and Eve are like getting on grand enjoying the garden of Eden and not fucking with this one tree so one day the snake comes along and says to Eve the woman to my God he's only a goal have a lash of that apple on the tree

eat the apple off the tree so Eve does it, God finds out all hell breaks loose literally actually, all hell does break loose. That's the first time I think I've ever used the platitude, all hell breaks loose, in a correct context. Because I think hell became a thing after Eve ate the apple, didn't it? Yeah, humans were grand forever in the garden of eden then eve at the apple that the devil told her to eat and then humans were born

with original sin and hell became a thing so all hell broke loose literally but anyway so i was thinking about you know first of all it completely demonizes women, right? It's like, we're getting on grand, but she ate the fucking apple because she's weak and she was tempted. But then I started to go at Adam and Eve from the Jungian and Freudian point of view. Now, the Jungian approach is, like I said, archetypes. Humans are very complex. We have brains and we have language. So we use imagery to communicate our kind of instincts.

What Adam and Eve is about, I think, it comes down to cook holding. Eve made Adam a cook right and we still see this word used today by racists calling other lads cooks but there was no apple right

this is what I think like from an archetypal perspective right I think the like, from an archetypal perspective, right, I think the Garden of Eden story, first of all, there's no devil, how does Satan present himself, right, a snake, a phallic symbol, a fucking penis, right, there's no apple either, what there's no apple either what the Garden of Eden story is about is it's a specific male patriarchal fear Eve fucked another man

right and the apple, the fruit is the child and Adam is faced with the anxiety of she's after fucking someone else and now I'm stuck with the anxiety of, she's after fucking someone else, and now I'm stuck with the child. I'm a cuck. I'm being cuck-holded.

I think that's what Adam and Eve is about. It's the male fear of, and like I said, remember, this story was written at a time when property was a thing, when property started to become very important in human culture. And the fear of patriarchy kind of comes about when men are like, here's my fucking farm. I need a woman to give me a lot of sons so I can give this to my sons

and the great fear is what if she fucks someone else I don't know if it's my son or not and I end up handing my property to someone else's child and that's what the Garden of Eden story is it's the cook holding of Adam and the apple is the child

and the snake is the child and the snake is another man's dick and through this comes the great control of women the narrative that women are not to be trusted women are sneaky and you see this across

a lot of fucking religions Jesus Christ Islam went to fucking town with it do you know what i mean cover her up cover her up entirely please i can't have i can't have any snakes coming along to see her cover her up entirely i don't want anyone knowing what she looks like and she can't be trusted so she can't talk to him so they went ape shit with with it but of course you know Islam, Judaism, the whole lot they all kind of originate in the Old Testament and Adam and Eve

and that's my hot take on Adam and Eve Adam's a cuck he's a cuck and then to kind of probe it even further like Adam and Eve And then, to kind of probe it even further, like,

Adam and Eve, they had two children, right? Cain and Abel. Two lads, two brothers. Actually, yeah. Actually, that explains yeah yeah because you're always wondering like how did how did Adam and Eve have children

because it essentially means that Adam fucked his own rib so Cain and Abel were Adam's cook hole children and Satan was the dad snake wheelie Satan was the da but anyway to further kind of

interrogate the theory of the Old Testament and the notion of property like I said there you know the man would have his property and he'd hand it down to his two sons, The sons were important

and he'd divide up the land. So what did Cain and Abel do? One got jealous of the other and killed him. And that's often what happened. The dad would die, patriarchally hand the property down to the sons and then the sons would fucking kill each other so that one of them could come out with all the land, you know?

How did I turn this into the Bible? How did I turn this into a Bible podcast? It wasn't intended to be that. I just wanted to glance upon it. There's another thing I was thinking too as well, though, about the Old Testament and the Genesis, the creation theory, right? And... the Old Testament and the Genesis, the creation theory, right? And one of the most absurd kind of things that's posited in the Bible is that God created the world in seven days,

right? Now, as soon as you hear that, human logic says, well, that's bullshit because the world is massive and no one could do it in seven days but then I started to think about quantum physics and time right not even quantum physics and time but like if you're playing a video game right like Grand Theft Auto a day right? Like Grand Theft Auto.

A day will pass in Grand Theft Auto and you could follow your character around for a day and he's doing all his stuff in Grand Theft Auto and a day passes in Grand Theft Auto. But for me, playing it outside of his two-dimensional universe, in my three-dimensional world, and my character in Grand Theft Auto, he's

knocking around the place and that's his reality that's his that is his reality with its own set of rules but I'm outside the television looking at it in my 3D reality with smells there's no smells in Grand Theft Auto you know but I've got smells and all these other senses and I'm looking at this fabricated reality in Grand Theft Auto, and a day passes in Grand Theft Auto, and it might take maybe 15 minutes in my time, but for my character's time, it's a full day, so then I started thinking, fucking hell, because we know as well with modern kind of physics that time time as a time is kind of flexible and bendy you know and you know we experience time as just the simple passage of

events but shit can exist outside of time so maybe we, we're like in a, in a big grand theft auto, and God is in his, or, or whatever God is, maybe he doesn't, maybe, maybe God's a she, or an it.

And maybe, it's just looking at us, in a video game. And, he did create it in seven, seven days. Because infinity to us, could be a half an hour to him probably still a lot of bollocks though

fuck the bible I don't want to talk about the bible this podcast is supported by the generosity of people on patreon so if you're enjoying this podcast and you would like to contribute to it please go to patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast and give a little monthly donation please and you don't have to

I'm just appealing to your soundness you can quite happily go on listening to this podcast for free but if you're enjoying it and you like to support independent artists ask yourself would you buy me one pint a month for five hours of content and if the answer is yes

please go to patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast. I'd really appreciate it. Also, subscribe to the podcast. Leave some nice ratings and reviews on iTunes or Acast. And yeah, just be sound. Rub a dog. So anyway, what did we talk about other than the fucking Bible? A few people have been saying to me,

blind buy, how come you never talk about the podcast being number one anymore? The reason is, is that I just wanted to beat Brian Adams' record of 16 weeks. Brian Adams was 16 weeks in the charts with his song Everything I Do I Do It For You from the Robin Hood Prince of Thieves soundtrack. I beat that, and once that happened, I was like, I don't want to focus on charts anymore. Now, we have been number one fairly consistently. It kind of drifts in and out every week.

So I might be number one uh monday tuesday wednesday and then i'm number two and then i'm back to number one again but i want to stop focusing on podcast charts because it's kind of silly and stupid and it goes against the the ethos of this podcast to be focusing on numbers like that you know and so I'm going to increasingly try and ignore the podcast charts which are irrelevant I said on Twitter that I would speak because last week I spoke about art, I spoke about Impressionist art and I get good feedback

from you, you seem to really enjoy it when I talk about art which for me is really eye-opening, it really proves to me that art is kind of frightening to a lot of people because

we're told that it's a lot more important than it should be and it isn't art is just like you know visual art is no different to music as i said anyone can appreciate it so i have kind of a little hot take um some arty farty hot takes that I wouldn't mind exploring this week and it starts with a kind of a satirical painter and engraver from the 18th century from England

that goes by the name of William Hogarth actually no It's from England. That goes by the name of William Hogarth. Actually, no. Before I get on to William Hogarth. Because I just remembered. I wanted to talk about my weekend. I gigged in Edinburgh for St. Patrick's Day.

And there's this gig we do every St. Patrick's Day and there's this gig we do every St. Patrick's Day I'd say for the past six years we go to there's two kind of traditions we have around St. Patrick's Day

we go to New York sometimes and we gig in this place called the Mercury Lounge at this Irish American festival and I love doing that like we get paid fuck all for it because it's expensive to go over to New York

but we don't give a shit you know what I mean because you're getting a free three days in New York and I love going to fucking New York just walking around a lot of yanks it's just weird you know I get a bit of a culture shock from america and i thoroughly enjoy that and when we're in new york we always stay around near chinatown canal street usually stay around canal street and there's a place that i go to

there called the tenement museum which is it recreates tenements from the 18th and 19th centuries so i love walking around Chinatown Hell's Kitchen, the Bowery places like that and empathising with history you know I haven't been to, we didn't go to New York this year I think we went last year if it wasn't

the year before but this year we did our Paddy's Day gig in Edinburgh in a pub called the Three Sisters in Cowgate. Cowgate in Edinburgh, it's weird. It used to be known as Little Ireland. There was massive Irish emigration to Edinburgh over the past four or five hundred years. And Cowgate was this almost

underground kind of slum where the Irish lived James Connolly was born there and we gigged there and the Three Sisters is this

giant Irish super pub and they have this Paddy's Day extravaganza which is just it's mayhem. It's like,

there's an artist called Hieronymus Bosch from about the 13th, 14th century, and Bosch used to paint these massive, detailed visions of hell. Incredible paintings. And The Three Sisters and Paddy's Day reminds me of that. It's just

lots of incredibly drunk Irish people packed into this fucking slum this historical Irish slum and they're just

vomiting into each other's mouths it's a true spectacle so we gig at this every Paddy's Day in Edinburgh

and it's one of those gigs too because we gig the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in August we haven't done it in a few years but because we do that gig we have kind of a chin-stroking highbrow arty-farty following in Edinburgh and I always try and keep the Paddy's Day gig secret because it would be so disappointing for these people

because we do this gig we get shit-faced as well and it's basically us puking on the crowd and the crowd puking on us that's all I can describe the gig as it's sweaty noise and it's very cathartic you know I release a lot at that gig so anyway we did it there on paddy's day and it was good crack but what i wanted to talk about was the the journey over which was fucking surreal so we fly from dublin to edinburgh and this paddy's day a fucking snowstorm happened in Dublin and in Edinburgh. So the plane that goes from Dublin to Edinburgh is what's known as a Fokker. It's a small-ish, lightweight, propeller-driven airplane, and it doesn't fly very high.

And I'm alright with flying, I don't really get anxiety around flying because I've toured the world and shit so I'm kind of used to it but when I get into these fuckers I'm always a little bit frightened because I don't know you're you're when you get into a propeller plane and it's kind of small you're very conscious of how ridiculous flying is you become very conscious of i'm in a metal tube and those big giant spinning fucking blades are going to take me into the air and it's all it's you know you can see the puppet strings you can you know you can see the hand going up kermit the frog's arse at that moment and you become aware of how utterly irrational flying is,

so you get a little bit anxious. So anyway, first off, three of us head over, myself, Mr. Chrome, and DJ Willie O'Deejay. DJ Willie O'Deejay, I don't know what happened, his belly wasn't right or whatever, Willie O'Deejay misses his flight, so that's grand, we were only heading over with a laptop, we had the songs on it, so me and Mr. Chrome were like, okay, fuck it, we have to do the Edinburgh gig on our own, kind of sickened that Willie wasn't with us, because obviously it's more

crack if there's three of us but we were still able to do the gig so we get onto this fucking airplane and it's kind of delayed who's on the fucking plane with us jedward right now jedward, because we've got international listeners, Jedward are like a, they're an Irish novelty group who have tall hair. And they're just weird twins. So, me and Chrome are sitting on the fucking plane, right? And we're two seats behind Jedward, because, we realised it,

Jedward were gigging the same gig as us. So the venue had booked our flights as well. We were two seats behind Jedward. Now we've no plastic bags on. So no one knows who the fuck we are. Then we look around. And a lot of the people on this plane. Are Jedward fans.

The lads obviously maintain close contact with their fan base and when they're doing a gig in Edinburgh whatever they talk to their fans and say we're going to Edinburgh that these you know here's here's the seats that I'm sitting on on the plane so all their fans who were exclusively female had also booked on this flight to go over and see the lads in Edinburgh so me and Chrome are stuck in the middle of Jedward and all these girls on a plane and nobody had a fucking clue who we were. We certainly weren't going to fucking announce ourselves. And it was amazing. It was incredible to watch. It was actually quite beautiful.

Because the thing is with these girls is like, they probably would have been maybe 13 when they started to follow Jedward and become superfans. Now they're like 21 22 23 and they're women you know and I kind of had this perception you know from the outside looking in of like you'd think that they're kind of eejits you know it's like that's kind of fucking Jedward what are you following them for but it was actually really beautiful to see it was actually this lovely nice little kind of community thing and all the girls knew each other and Jedward were pure sound to all of them like they knew them all by name uh one girl uh in front of me I was sitting in one seat there was two girls in front of me and then Jedward three seats up

one of them was nervous about flying so they were all hugely supportive of each other and the two lads were talking to him and it was actually pretty nice to see it was um a very positive community and they were just having fun and this is what they like to do and it was great and one girl then who was crossed away from me which I thought was brilliant it's like here's a girl 21, 22

who has made a decision to follow Jedward to Edinburgh and all my prejudice and preconceptions would have been like oh she must be she's not right in the head or she's uh must be very silly and this girl you know two seconds ago she's there taking

photographs with Jedward and pulling silly faces then as soon as the plane kind of takes off she whips out a what was it Jeff Buckley's biography starts reading that and orders a neat Jameson pure classy and it was

fucking gas so then anyway we get up into the plane and the Aer Lingus fucking air hostess they'd turned the Irishness up to a hundred

as well on Paddy's day air lingus did so they warn us that it's going to be a bumpy fucking flight because we're flying in a fucking fucker with propeller wings at about 15 000 feet so we're just above the clouds getting battered by wind so it was an incredibly violent flight and oh man when we descended in extreme turbulence uh it was fucking amazing first of all i was overcome with a kind of a gallows humor a samuel beckett style gallows humor where there was a part of me a deep dark part of me that wanted to die on a plane with Jedward just for the fucking news headlines you know um of course that's quite a quite a quite a selfish thought

because there's other people on the plane but this was the workings of my unconscious mind not my conscious mind my unconscious wanted to die on an airplane with Jedward so I stuck in my earphones anyway as the plane was getting ready to land now it's shaking fucking violently it was a very unpleasant flight I'm used to turbulence turbulence is something that's alright with me I've done it enough times

but the other people on the plane were not okay with turbulence because turbulence is fucking terrifying so it was shaking up and down drinks were flying around the place and I threw on my earphones and I listened to a song by the band Primus and the song was

called Too Many Puppies and if you know the song Too Many Puppies by Primus it's an incredibly loud aggressive heavy metal song so this was blasting in my ear, this fucking almost like Slipknot fucking heavy metal song

the plane is shaking like mad and I'm looking around me, there was a girl beside me just bawling crying because of the turbulence to the left of me someone was blessing themselves and then Jedward were there with their fucking spiky stupid hair dressed identical to each other and there's all this terror and fear all around them and in my ears all I'm hearing is this very violent heavy metal music and Jedward start taking out their phones and making peace signs and pulling faces and doing crazy selfies

and it was the most incredible music video that I've ever seen in my life and it happened in reality I was just thinking what a perfect music video for a heavy metal song a fucking plane going down everyone blessing themselves and crying drinks flying everywhere and fucking Jedward with their spiky hair oblivious to the pain of the world marveling and fucking orgasmic in the inevitable fucking death crashing into the ocean it was beautiful so the plane landed

myself and Chrome kind of whispered into each other's ears like we need to go and hang out with Jedward tonight they're gigging the same gig we need to fucking because obviously we weren't going to go up to Jedward and go how are you getting on lads we're the rubber bandits because I don't think the two lads would be able to handle

that information with discretion they probably would have announced it and then that's a hellish situation for us we just want to mind our own business and be quiet and be fucking nobodies until the bags go on so we tried to kind of get in contact with Jedward later but but it's impossible,

you can't, they travel with their ma, who's their manager, and from what the venue told me, because we went doing our gig, and then we asked the people in the venue, look, can you hook us up with Jedward, because I wanted to just, you know, know we were backstage we'd load a fucking drink with our own private room it's like bring Jedward back here have a few cans with us because we wanted to sit him down and kind of talk and just go what's the deal lads what is the deal is this an act are you really this enthusiastic all the time and we couldn't get in contact with him because you're not allowed directly speak with Jedward apparently you can if you're one of the fans

but it's like if you work in the industry or you're a promoter or a venue or another artist you do not get to directly talk with Jedward which is beautifully strange and you know with all due respect

they're kind of their star is in decline you know they're hardly as famous as they were fucking five years ago

and yet they still you know they're still going around with these Mariah Carey rules fair play to them

fair play to Jedward em long may they continue being fucking mad bastards rules fair play to him fair play to Jedward um long may they continue being fucking mad bastards so then we did the gig it was good crack uh I went to bed early with some coronas

and then then what happened I uh yeah the fucking flight back was delayed by about 6 hours and I was in Edinburgh airport which is a very depressing airport it has a travel lodge aesthetic

um but I whipped out my laptop and I got about 6 hours of writing done for my upcoming book of short stories, so I was very happy with that. Six hours apiece to just fucking write, so I used my time in that airport correctly.

Now, let's talk a little bit about art, I think. Actually, I know I'm holding off the art now but we should do our ocarina pause I don't have my ocarina because I'm in my temporary studio space so I'm essentially as well like I said I'm talking into a glove that's resting on a bible

so every week there are digital adverts inserted into this podcast depending on your location if you don't hear the adverts you get to hear a Spanish clay whistle known as an ocarina which I do not have in my possession this week

so I'll do I'll whistle in the style of an ocarina and that will be our digital Angelus for this week ok you ready on April 5th you must be very careful Margaret

it's a girl witness the birth bad things will start to happen evil things of evil it's all for you no no don't the first omen I believe the girl is to be the mother mother of what Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't.

The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real.

It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The first omen, only in theaters April 5th. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats

for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. So you either heard a grown man replicating an ocarina with his lips or a recruitment ad for the SAS. So, I want to talk about the artist William Hogarth.

So Hogarth was an artist. He was a painter and an illustrator that would have been based in london in the 18th century he was knocking around about 1730 and what kind of what distinguishes hogarth is a few different things he's first of all he made use of the printing press. A lot of his work was drawings or engravings that were printed and passed around amongst the public. That didn't really happen a lot beforehand. You know, you had paintings and if you wanted to see a painting, you would go to a gallery to see it. And even then, if you wanted to see it in a gallery, you had to be kind of rich to have access to a gallery to see it. And even then, if you wanted to see it in a gallery, you had to be kind of rich to have access to a gallery to see a painting.

But Hogarth made use of the printing press and printed what I suppose you'd call the morality artworks. His work was satirical. He would caricature scenes of urban life in the 18th century with a kind of a moral twist on it. And what makes his work so important is that

it acts as almost a documentary evidence around the squalor and misery of the lives of people in the city of London during the Industrial Revolution. His work focused on vice, prostitution and in particular gin the drinking of gin now I mentioned gin

in a previous podcast but gin is essential to the work of Hogarth in particular two prints that were presented as a diptych the work of Hogarth in particular two prints that are kind of were presented as a diptych

you know they both worked off each other two prints called Beer Street and Gin Lane and they depict the misery

that befell London during the gin craze now the gin craze was the frenzied widespread consumption of

gin that happened in the 1700s in the urban centres of Britain there's a few reasons behind why that happened again it's worth pointing out that up until the industrial revolution

humans didn't really have open access to spirits spirits were very rare um complicated things to make that required a lot of time and then when the industrial revolution happened vast quantities of gin and other spirits were being made in mass quantities and it was very cheap and freely available so you had the first kind of onslaught of mass alcoholism you know it really really ripped london to shreds gin did and what made gin popular the main reason is, goes back to William of Orange. Now William of Orange is King Billy.

He's a Dutch, a Dutch man who ascended to the throne of England after winning at the Battle of the Bine. The Bine, he's who the Orange men celebrate, King William of Orange. he's who the Orange Men celebrate King William of Orange and he was Dutch and he defeated the Catholic King James and he was a Protestant and gin is a Dutch drink Genever

was the Dutch name for it it's where the phrase Dutch courage comes from so there was a kind of a nationalistic British identity to gin when king william ascended to the throne in england and so gin was promoted from the throne as this british drink because they wanted to take attention away from the likes of french brandy and stuff like that as well a lot of the

the grain british grain um barley and whatever the british government wanted to kind of up the consumption of british grain so they it was it was of use to the british government to promote the distillation of gin because it meant that this grain was going to be used up in gin production. They also put tariffs on foreign spirits. So this led to the gin craze. The other thing too, the gin that people were drinking back then, it's not necessarily what you and I would recognise as gin today. Gin today is essentially, you know, pure alcohol soaked in herbs and botanicals.

The gin that people were drinking in the slums of 1700s London, it'd be closer to kind of fucking poutine. You know, it was just... Gin back then was a blanket term given to any distilled grain alcohol. Also as well, the British government made licensing for gin distillation incredibly easy. If you wanted to distill gin, all you needed to do was apply for a license. It did not necessarily have to go through. So gin was fucking everywhere. It was incredibly cheap.

And the average Londoner was drinking two pints of gin a week, which is fucking massive. Gin as well was also, it was being counterfeited. They were mixing turpentine with gin to create that juniper flavor and it was like a giant heroin epidemic it fucking tore london to shreds now there is a one argument that could be made to was it gin's fault or was it the horrible conditions in industrial revolution britain because there is a a theory of addiction there's an experiment it's called the rat park experiment that's done around addiction where they basically get two populations of rats in two different cages and in one cage they have a small number of rats or maybe even one rat and that rat has no amenities he's got no wheels to play on

it's just a rat in a fucking cage and he's got two water bottles one of them is laced with cocaine and one of them is straight water. The rat in this cage will continually go through the cocaine-laced water until he gets a heart attack and he dies. Then they get another cage which they call Rat Park. In this cage there's several rats, they have lots of space, they have plenty of amenities, plenty of food, they have happy, pleasant lives. They too have access to two water bottles, one with water, one laced with cocaine.

In the Rat Park model, most of the rats tend not to take so much cocaine that they die because their environment keeps them happy. They don't have a negative environment, therefore addiction doesn't flourish so under the Rat Park theory of addiction did the gin craze happen because of

the free availability of gin or was it the horrible dehumanised conditions that Londoners had to live in in the 1730s because they had no fucking workers rights they had nothing, they were working in factories 17, 18 hours a day no fucking sanitation

living in tenements it was awful so what are they going to do when they get addicted to gin gin had some very colourful nicknames back then as well some gas nicknames it was called Madame Genevieve

Ladies Eye Water Cock My Cap and my favourite King Theodore of Corsica which is just a fucking brilliant name so anyway where does William Hogarth

fit into all this gin business so Hogarth had two prints, Beer Street and Gin Lane. And they were brought in. The British government introduced a thing called the Gin Act, right? And the Gin Act was the British government's attempt to curb the massive consumption of gin and what it was doing to society so Hogarth created these two prints incredibly detailed scenes almost like um where's

Wally and on the left it has Beer Street and on the right it has Gin Lane. And in Beer Street it shows a city scene where the residents are just casually drinking beer. And it's a very happy scene. People are seen kind of going to work, going about their business, leading prosperous lives. business and leading prosperous lives but then you contrast this with the illustration of gin lane and it's quite different and the most striking thing in gin lane is this lady sitting on us sitting on steps and all over her body she's got syphilitic sores, and her bare tit is hanging out, and dangling off her arm is her toddler, who's after falling off, you know, he's halfway falling off the steps,

ready to fall to his death. And that character, that woman, whose child is dying because she's so fucked on, Jane is apparently based on a true story of a woman called Judith Dufour in 1734. And she sent her two-year-old child to a workhouse just so that child could get a new set of clothes. And as soon as the child came out, she strangled the child and sold the clothes for Gin also in Gin Lane

there's scenes of prostitution there's scenes of fucking funeral undertakers burying people into the ground it's

a moral tale against the dangers of gin. Hogarth was kind of promoting the government line of gin is bad, obey the gin act, drink beer, you'll have a better life.

But one thing that interests me and specifically about William Hogarth and the composition of his paintings and his illustrations is how they're echoed in the work of a director, a 20th century director, Stanley Kubrick, in particular his film Barry Lyndon. Now Barry Lyndon is a class film to watch if you haven't seen it. Barry Lyndon. Now Barry Lyndon is a class film to watch if you haven't seen it. Barry Lyndon is it's set in the 17th or 18th century and it's filmed in

Ireland. Now Stanley Kubrick if you're not familiar with his work he would have directed Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket. He was a very obsessive film maker. But what sets Barry Lyndon apart is he obsessively studied paintings and illustrations of the era of the 1700s and the 1800s and tried to recreate them perfectly within his film and every scene in barry lyndon is like a painting in that the scenes kind of they visually tell a story

in the way that william hogarth's paintings and illustrations did as well and there's quite a few scenes in barry linden that are directly copied from hogarth's paintings straight up copied because that's what fucking kubrick was trying to do now barry linden it's got a mad history he filmed it in wicklow and it follows the story of i think it it's called the Seven Years' War, which was a war between Britain and France. Could be wrong with that now, but the film contains a lot of British redcoat soldiers. So when Kubrick was filming it in Wicklow,

it was filmed in 1975, which would have been at the absolute height of IRA activity. The IRA sent him several death threats to get the fuck out of Ireland because they're like, who's this cunt from America filming scenes with British redcoats in Ireland? Get out, we're trying to do a war, and you have your propaganda here. Kubrick was quite stubborn with the RA. He did eventually leave.

But another thing that distinguishes the film. Barry Lyndon from all others. And what makes it so. Utterly bizarre. And I recommend you watch it. It's three hours fucking long. But it is a visually stunning fucking film. Kubrick.

Refused to use. Artificial light. In Barry Lyndon, all right? If you're familiar with filmmaking, you have to fucking light a scene because cameras require extra light to allow light into the lens. Kubrick was like, fuck that.

This is a film based in the 17th, 18th century. I'm not using any artificial light. So when you look at outdoor scenes in barry lyndon you the clouds fucking change light every two seconds it feels very strange he has films in that scene that are filmed with nothing but pure candlelight and how he pulled it off is he had to get an actual camera from NASA that was designed for filming on the dark side of the moon and Kubrick had to use a NASA camera

for filming on the moon just to film Barry Lyndon without artificial light and what you end up with is this truly visually fucking stunning film unlike anything else because of this especially the interior scenes by Candlelight

and if you want to understand and appreciate 17th, 18th century painting Barry Lyndon the film is actually a great place to start another thing too is because Kubrick was working

with these very, with low light and what's known as on the camera a very high aperture which means that you open the aperture of the camera to let as much light in as possible when you do that with a camera it requires the actors to be very very still they must be still or else the image will appear blurry whether intentionally or not intentionally or not this technique echoed the 17th and 18th century paintings where the subjects in the paintings had to remain still because they're being fucking painted but with Kubrick they're not being painted but the aperture on the camera is so wide they may as well be painted

that was a long indulgent rant about gin William Hogarth and Stanley Kubrick and I hope you enjoyed it now before I go. I'm going to try and answer a couple of your questions. Because that was a.

This has been a long ranty podcast. Anthony Mulcahy asks. How about a hot take on the TV licence issue? Yeah the TV licence is a bit fucking weird isn't it? What is it now? 175 quid a year um i agree with the tv license in principle right i agree with having an independent no no not independent i agree with having a national broadcaster right that is an important thing it is an important thing to have a national broadcaster

that we should all support through tax right the problem with the TV license is how it's being spent by the fucking national broadcaster like do we really need to spend like does the TV

license need to be spent on fucking shit that you can see on other channels? I mean, in the 80s, RTE was important because you needed to, you know, you couldn't see, a lot of people didn't have cable, they just had RTE 1 and 2, so RTE needed to actually purchase and buy films and fucking British TV

shows and American TV shows which are pure expensive but what's the fucking point when you can see them on other channels how many people are left in Ireland with two channels like it's just absurd so I think

like if it was up to me rte should stop spending money on shit that can be seen on other channels and exclusively use the tv license for creating 100 irish content only um as well here's another issue that I have. The whole point of a fucking national broadcaster too is you should, like, when you're funded by the public, that funding should be for creative things. You should be able to make shit that definitely will fail. Like, the Abbey Theatre.

The Abbey Theatre receive public funding and the Abbey Theatre will commission a play that may sell no tickets but has great creative merit. And that's really important for fucking art. I mean, how many people went to see Beckett in his day? Not many. And Beckett's shit was fucking certainly not commercial,

but as art, it's hugely fucking important and needed to be funded. So I would like to see RTE move towards a model where genuinely groundbreaking, creative Irish programming is made, artistic fucking programming that takes risks and pushes boundaries and programming

that's like the best shit isn't going to be watched by a lot of people that that's just the way it is if something is challenging and new a lot of people aren't going to watch it and an environment should exist where that stuff can be funded and made because it's important for art and culture tg4 they're doing a right job of it

but what passes for we'll say rte and entertainment these days some of it's fucking waffle some of it's really really bad television and that's what the license fee is being used for so i do agree with the license fee i don't agree with how it's used as well in fairness too there's too much management in rte they're very top heavy and a lot of money is going do you know so we should be striving to preserve our national broadcaster because i do fear that it'll disappear we should be striving to preserve it and democratically kind of asking for more riskier content that is giving space to fail and And is actually creative. And that's how we use our money. And stop fucking spending money on. Shit that you can see on BBC.

Or shit that you can see on Channel 4. Or shit that you can see online. That's really really pointless. Who are you doing it for? 10 people who have 2 channels. Who aren't going to watch it anyway. I just don't get that. Laura Brady asks. Have you got any ghost stories either from personal experience or family

do you know i'd love you to send in some ghost stories please ghost stories or ufo stories please send them in on twitter or on the patreon and i'll read them out because they're dead interesting have i got any when i was about 10 i was outside um i was outside that i just realized now that the person that I was that I saw this this with only died two years ago one of my best friends and I lost him to heroin but

yeah fucking hell this is weird now that that just came into my head yeah when I was about ten years of age I was hanging around out on the road near my house and me and my buddy looked across in the distance and we saw um what appeared to be a white grim reaper character kind of digging up the ground in the distance and then when we looked back it was gone in two seconds and we both saw it

and it scared the living fuck out of us and we didn't know what it was and it was very strange and i'm sure there was a rational explanation but the reason i paused there is when that came into my head i just realized that the dude that i saw that with only he died two years ago a very very dear friend of mine em three of my brothers saw a floating monk down in Limerick

near where what I mentioned in a previous podcast where I believe the original location of St Munchen's church is yeah they were all hanging around on a wall and all three of them swear blind that a monk in full gear

floated past them and went straight into a wall so they're the only two ghost stories I have I don't know what the deal is with ghosts I don't know but if you have any decent stories send them in I don't really believe in that type of stuff but like I said

I witnessed with my own fucking eyes a white Grim Reaper style character digging up the ground and I witnessed it for about 3 seconds a bit longer maybe 5 or 6 seconds stared at it said to my buddy what the fuck is that what is that it's night time that's very odd it's in the middle of nowhere it's illuminated it shouldn't be illuminated because the area we're looking at is pitch black and then we looked away and looked back and it

was gone so that was odd last question Colm asks what would you do if you won the lottery if I won the fucking lottery I would pump lots and lots of money into making creative projects

I would cause like making TV and shit is fucking expensive you know em I would use that money to make high budget feature films and television that I fund out of whatever mad idea comes into my head, and I'd have nobody to answer to, and I'd have no one pulling the purse strings

saying, no, we need this to be more commercial i'd just be like i'm making this because i can afford it and i'm going to lose a lot of money on it but it doesn't matter i'm going to make some mad tv or a mad film that's what i would do if i won the lottery pump it into creativity because the worst thing about working in film and TV is somebody is investing a lot of money in it usually a TV channel and when people invest money in something they expect financial return and in order to get financial return it means that you're forced to make the thing that you're making you have to make it be somewhat commercial and to make something commercial you have to dumb it down and you have to use

cliche and you never truly get to make weird art that's what I enjoyed about my book of short stories with a book you can kinda

the medium of the book allows you to truly be creative and not worry too much about it being commercial because essentially what sells it is the cover and the front cover on my book

Gospel According to Blind Boy very commercial cover the name of it, the Gospel According to Blind Boy, and it's got my fucking stupid bag face on the front. It's a very commercial cover. But on the inside, I could be as creative as I liked with no boundaries. But with TV, different story. Here's a hundred grand, grand buddy make me that money back I don't care

make some fart jokes and that's how that works so I'll leave you go now because the podcast is 69 minutes which is a little bit too long go in peace have a bit of crack

I think next week or in the coming weeks I'll talk a bit more about mental health because I haven't spoken about mental health in this podcast and I haven't spoken about it in the podcast before I focused on art also as well

you might notice the tone of this podcast and last week's podcast. There's still a bit of a podcast hug, but I'm slightly more energetic, I think, and it's something I'm noticing myself. And this is just because I'm recording it in a temporary studio, and my posture as well isn't... When I record in my regular proper podcast studio

I'm almost horizontal when I talk I sit back in my swivel chair and I'm highly relaxed and I speak in a very a low measured fashion but for this podcast the past couple of weeks because I'm in a temporary space I'm kind of hunched forward in I don't know more of an engaged conversational mode so the pacing of my voice is a little bit quicker so hopefully in a couple of weeks

when I get my shit sorted and get back and set up my new studio which will be comfortable we can return to a more measured slower tone hopefully I'm also a little bit paranoid about the echo in this room which you probably can't hear

but I can so go in peace enjoy yourselves and as always I like to view this podcast as a collaborative effort. So if you have suggestions, if there's stuff that you want me to talk about, if you want me to do some new shit or return to some older shit in the previous podcasts,

let me know. Let me know and we'll work it out. Go and have a lovely week. Enjoy the longer evenings that's fucking lovely isn't it enjoy the slight rise in temperature feel the positivity of that look after yourself god bless oh it ended perfectly where the piano ended on my computer. Isn't that serendipitous? Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none.

Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock host the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.