Dead Sirius

New podcast with Bill Griffith, driving while dead, a bunch of links, Hegelian art & more

Intro

On my way back from picking up lunch today, the 1st Wave station on Sirius XM (it came with the car in 2019 & I renew every year) seemed to be programmed by, um, me, playing 4 of my all-time favorite songs in sequence See a Little Light • Heroes • Don’t Dream It’s Over • Europa and the Pirate Twins.

It’s rare that I can just leave a station on and get a great run like that. Too often, I click around the moment there’s a break between songs, or if I’ve heard something too often lately, or just want to hear what’s on another channel. It can be maddening to passengers, so when Amy’s with me I’ll usually just put on the Yacht Rock station (during summer) or 1st Wave and let it go.

On Saturday, I had a LONG day of solo driving to record this week’s podcast with Bill Griffith. It was ~135 miles each way, but much of that was on 95 in Connecticut, which always has a ton of volume-related traffic. Out and back each took 3 hours. I’d only restarted weightlifting the day before after 3 weeks off, and my body was killing me. (Dumbbell deadlifts were not my friend.)

The drive home — following ~2 hours of sitting down w/Bill for our conversation — was particularly wearing, even though I kept reminding myself of how it was all worth it, what a great talk we’d just had.

For the first 40-50 miles, I clicked around and around to listen to music, while I sat in pocket after pocket of traffic. It was never to the point of distraction, but always chasing some music was getting me out of my mind.

With about 90 miles left, I had an idea: Channel 23, the Grateful Dead Station. I decided that until I got home, I wouldn’t touch the dial and would just listen to the Dead.

Please understand: I’ve never actually listened to the Grateful Dead. I only know a handful of their songs, from classic rock stations, their brief hit-period in the mid-80s, and the time I saw them play with Dylan at the Meadowlands in the ’80s.

But Summer Pierre recently wrote about Box of Rain and a bad concert experience on her Patreon, and David Leopold wrote me about Ripple a while back, so I thought it’d be an education for me. Plus, every song would be at least 10 minutes long, and that’d eat up the miles, traffic or not.

Turns out I kinda enjoyed it. I don’t have any terminology to describe their music, but I dug the mix of styles from song to song & the extended riffs of the live stuff. The channel mixes live shows with studio recordings, and I managed to get into a decent groove even as 95 was stop & start.

The only not-great part was at 7pm, when I was about 20 minutes from home, and This Day In Grateful Dead History started. That led off with a lengthy monologue by the Dead’s archivist, David Lemieux. Not that he was a bad speaker or anything, but his explanation of the significance of the particular 50-something-year-old live tracks they were about to play was kinda … numbing, at the end of a long drive.

But then they played an early version of their cover of Good Lovin’, and that was fine by me.

Glad I went with that instead of the Phish channel.

And now, on with The Virtual Memories Show!

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 552 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. the return of Bill Griffith as we celebrate his fantastic new book, THREE ROCKS: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created NANCY (Abrams ComicArts). We get into his lifelong history with NANCY, why Bushmiller and Crumb are the only two cartoonists whose work gives him 100% pleasure (and don’t inspire criticism or jealousy), how the idea for Three Rocks percolated for a few decades until he read Paul Karasik & Mark Newgarden‘s book HOW TO READ NANCY, and why he decided not to draw Bushmiller’s characters in his book (he collages existing Nancy, Sluggo, & Fritzi art instead). And we talk about the death of Bill’s wife, the great underground cartoonist Diane Noomin, and how he’s gotten by in the year since. We get into the new comic Bill made about (& with) Diane, The Buildings Are Barking (Fantagraphics/FU), how he still hears her voice, what it’s like to work on a new book without the person who read every panel of his for 49 years, keeping Zippy going while grieving, how having a daily strip all this time seems to have immunized him from anniversaries, the ferry ride he & Diane used to share, how the death of Aline Kominsky-Crumb two months after Diane’s brought him and Robert Crumb closer, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read THREE ROCKS & The Buildings Are Barking (& go listen to our 2015 and 2019 conversations!)

Last week, I posted Episode 551 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. Jerome Charyn rejoins the show to celebrate his new novel, RAVAGE & SON (Bellevue Literary Press), a fantastic noir about the Lower East Side in 1913. We talk about his love for the LES and the Bintel Briefs in The Forward, and how adopting a cat changed the course of this amazing novel. We also get into the music of the sentence, why so many of his characters attend Harvard, the holiness of books, treating writing as an apprenticeship rather than a career, and how he got overwhelmed for a year after writing in Abe Lincoln’s voice. Plus we discuss his reverence of Joyce Carol Oates and Cormac McCarthy (and ambivalence toward Henry James, who makes an appearance in Ravage & Son), the sense of being transported by the ballet performances of Allegra Kent, why gender fluidity is essential to human nature, and the one advantage to living long enough: understanding that nothing remains and everything disappears. Give it a listen! And go read RAVAGE & SON (& go listen to our 2019, 2021, and 2022 conversations!)

Other recent episodes: Ron Rosenbaum • Karl Stevens • Howard Fishman • Christopher Brown • Rian Hughes

Links & Such

• RIP Bob Barker . . . RIP Léa Garcia . . .

• I loved this piece by W. David Marx about the uncool coolness of They Might Be Giants and how the band characterized the early days of the internet.

• Neat profile of literary critic Merve Emre, whom I need to follow up with about recording sometime.

• Lauren Weinstein is doing portrait commissions. She offered complimentary ones to some of her Patreon supporters, of which I’m one, and she e-mailed over the below. They’re $100 for 5”x7” portraits ($200 for a 2-head portrait); you can DM her on IG or I guess zap me & I’ll connect you.

  

• Stoya wrote about masculinity & sharing in the comments section of adult sites, & how they may get legislated out of existence.

• I liked this piece about women & aging.

• Caleb Crain wrote about intelligence, artificial and otherwise.

Current reading

Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon

Art

I didn’t get back to inking or painting that buck I drew last week, although I keep it on my mini-easel on the drawing table so I can look at it and wonder how I managed to get something so beautiful on paper. On Sunday, I did a quick sketch of Hegel for his birthday. It was so bad, I immediately did it again and that was better. The first one started w/the shape of his head, and when I wrecked that I realized I should start w/the nose & the eyes. Learn something every time I pick up a pen, apparently. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

As mentioned above, I finally got back to weights on Friday, after a 3-week layoff. I was so sore on Saturday, there’s no way on earth I’d have tried my yoga workout, even without that long podcast-drive. I did weights again on Sunday, still sore AF, passed on yoga on Monday, and was pretty busy all day Tuesday, so no workout then either. On the “plus” side, I managed to slip below one of my arbitrary Target Weight goals on Monday, after 3+ weeks of little solid food. Haven’t been that light since late 2020, so that’s nice. Or scary, since it means I dropped more than 12 lbs. since Aug. 7.

Until Next Week

Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back next week with a new podcast, some great links, maybe some art, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something.

You’re a nasty schoolboy with no place to go / Try again tomorrow,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Twitter • Linktr.ee