The Blindboy Podcast - Gander Panderer

Episode Date: December 6, 2017

The History of Paint, The Brits, Sleep Paralysis Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

7 weeks to number one Hello. Hello. That was seven weeks at number one on the podcast charts. Seven weeks at number one on the podcast charts. And that song was sent in by Mark Almond, formerly of the 80s synth pop group Soft Cell. And Mark is an avid listener to the podcast. And he sent that song in.

And Mark is living in Bournemouth, which is in Dorset at the moment so thank you very much Mark Elmond for penning that tune for me and allowing me to record it thank you Mark of course we are seven weeks

at number one in the podcast charts because of all you princely kinds togging out every Wednesday morning in the rain and the sleet in your shorts and huddling together huddling together in the stadium of

life and getting existential slithers battered off your milky white thighs. Thank you. Week number seven of the podcast. Please continue to subscribe. Please continue to like the podcast. I don't think you can like podcasts, can you? You can subscribe them and you can leave reviews. Please continue doing this. It's very beneficial to me

and I'm awfully grateful. Last week we spoke about a very meaningful encounter that I had with an author and how this author caused me to mull on my safety as a male as I go out in the dark at nighttime wandering the river and this author caused me to ruminate on a story of murder that happened on the very river where I met him I returned to the to the Plassy River to try and find the otter again

but alas he'd fucked off he's an elusive boy so I mightn't see him again for I don't know another few years like I said his territory is 21 kilometres and I was very lucky that night to see that otter

prancing around as the sun set above the glistening water a couple of weeks back I made an incorrect assertion about about squirrels. I asserted that the pine marten preys upon the red squirrel. And I asserted that the red squirrel was an invasive species to Ireland.

I've been corrected many times online by concerned listeners. The red squirrel is native to Ireland. And the grey squirrel is an invasive species. And the pine martin has a crack off him. This week on the Blind Boy Podcast. I'd like to talk about. A semi-precious metamorphic rock. Called lapis lazuli.

And it's importance. It's importance on our culture and our history as people of the west apologies to the 16 people listening in Indonesia Lapis Lazuli it's this semi precious blue stone

that changed the world. It's particularly beautiful. It's particularly gorgeous. And it's hard to find. And if you know anything about painting you know if you've got a rudimentary knowledge of art of the past thousand years

there was a period called the Byzantine period and the Byzantine period was the Roman Empire was divided in two parts there was the Western Roman Empire which was governed from Rome

and then there was Byzantium which is from about Turkey which was governed from Rome. And then there was Byzantium, which is from about Turkey out to Eastern Europe. And this was the Byzantine Empire. And the Byzantines had their own specific style of painting and art, specifically religious painting. If you see any medieval paintings that use an awful amount of gold leaf, right? when you see them, they're made of gold. That chances are that's a Byzantine painting.

And the reason they used gold was because back then they believed that, you know, art was a magical religious process and the artist who painted religious art was in direct communion with God, essentially. Also, as well, the people who had money then, whether they be bankers or bishops or cardinals or whatever, they would use their money to commission pieces of religious art it was their way of kind of showing off you know if you wanted to have a Lexus

or a Maybach in the Byzantine period the best thing you could do was to commission a fantastic painting of Christ and Mary or whatever the fuck so the patrons in Byzantium would say to the artists what's the most expensive thing

that you can paint a painting with and the artists would go gold so fuck off there and paint paint Holy Mary in gold there for the crack so they would and this is why Byzantine paintings

are very much golden in colour. But then something changed. Something changed around the early Renaissance period of painting in Europe. Gold stopped being the most expensive colour and again this tradition existed if you were a wealthy bishop

or a wealthy cardinal and you wanted to show off to your friends and to impress people you would commission an artist to paint great works you would become a patron of the arts all the best painters

from that period Leonardo, Donatello the Turtles they all had patrons but along comes Lapis Lazuli this blue metamorphic rock. And they started to grind it down to create a colour known as Ultramarine.

And Ultramarine, if you've ever seen it, it's a very pure blue. So quite quickly, when the patrons would ask their artists can you do me a painting of Holy Mary or Christ I can well what's the most expensive colour you've got fucking blue cuz there's this stone called lapis lazuli

if you can get me some of this I can make it into blue pigment and I can paint you a painting that's blue and I can paint you a painting that's blue and I swear to fuck when everyone sees it they're going to go discount

he's commissioning the best most ostentatious art going because he can afford all of this blue that comes from the very expensive lapis lazuli

and that's why in images of Holy Mary That comes from the very expensive lapis lazuli. And that's why in images of Holy Mary, that's why she's blue. Holy Mary is blue because of lapis lazuli being the most expensive pigment that was available at the time. When you see a painting of Holy Mary or anything that contains a lot of blue from the Renaissance period culturally what that painting was saying it wasn't too far off

like 50 cents lyrics when a painter painted in blue or even red to a certain extent because red was quite expensive too. You have to remember we're painting pigments. Painting pigments. Let me rewind a bit here lads because I can't assume

that as an audience you're au fait with the mechanics of the art world. Paint throughout history, the fine art painting, right, paintings that you'd make a paint a picture with traditionally it's oil paint

okay oil paint I think it came in around the 12th century and oil paint is essentially you start with a pigment a pigment is a powder a very brightly coloured powder, you mix this powder with

linseed oil, you know that's the oil from the flax plant and you mix the two of them together and you get oil paint different pigments have different kind of, different pigments have, they have different qualities

some of them are opaque. Which means you can't see through them. Other ones are. Transparent. Which means you can. Light is allowed through. Like em. Like a thin sheet of coloured plastic.

But anyway. Back in the early renaissance. In the middle renaissance. If you were a painter you had to make your own paints you got delivered pigment and you had to make your own paints it wasn't until the industrial revolution

that paints became available in tubes and you'll notice this in if you look I spoke a couple of podcasts back about modernism and post-modernism right if you look at the paintings of Monet from the 18th century and the

Impressionists, if you've ever heard of the term Impressionism, what the Impressionists had access to, they were the first artists who could walk into a shop and buy a tube of paint which meant they could take their paints outside on plain air they called it, they could take their paints outside on plain air they called it they could

take their paints out into a field with a little canvas and they could paint the light of outside as they see it that's why impressionism was so revolutionary because they were capturing light and color in a way that had never been seen before painters in renaissance times by which I mean 14, 15, 16th century they had to paint the outside based on memory they were painting the memory of the outdoors from their sketchbooks or whatever

because they had to paint inside in studios with candlelight a lot of the time but the Impressionists like Monet, they were able to fuck off outside and paint light as it happens if you want to see a beautiful example of this go on to Google Images and look up Monet's paintings

the Haystack series where he paints a haystack at different times of the day Impressionism was called impressionism because the painter was trying to get not reality as it actually is but rather an impression

of a fleeting moment of light and they discovered a lot about colour as a result of that but yeah so paints come from pigments and a vehicle, the aisle. And throughout history, there's been many fucking mental pigments, right? One that I can think of in particular, there was one called Mummy Brown,

which was an incredibly expensive pigment because it was made from actual ground-up Egyptian mummies. The pre-Raphaelites were into it for some reason they were like look get me a mummy either a human or a cat grind it down with a bit of pitch and a bit of mirror and I'll get a class brown out of this so as you can imagine that was quite fucking expensive you had that dragon's blood red and um it came from a type of South Asian tree. Very expensive. Of course Lapis Lazuli that I'm talking about.

White Lead was another one. The painter Vermeer was using this. Very difficult to get your hands on White Lead. And then you had one called Tyrian Purple. And there was a Mayan maya blue which came from the indigo plant but of course all these pigments they were expensive and they were hard to get okay and the wealthier you were as an artist the better pigments you had the better colors you had you'll see this today if you walk into a shop into an art shop and you go to the oil paint section there's two types of oil paints there's standard oil paints

and they're all regardless of color and size they're all pretty much the same price but then at the top tier there's the artist's oil colors and just look at the prices on these little oil colors right the artist's oil colours. They're the exact same size tube, but we'll say the yellow might be 16 quid, and then the blue is 28 quid, because artist oil colours today are still using these precious natural pigments, whereas the regular oil colours today, they're synthetic chemical pigments.

And if you're a painter today and your paintings are worth more than a couple of grand you're kind of legally obliged to use the expensive artist oil cutters because they don't fade over time and if you're spending money on a painting you want to be able to have an investment you don't want that to fucking

to fade obviously but I just digressed into the history of pigments but i do think it may have been necessary because i can't assume that ye cunts know about pigments pigments my apologies so i'm going to take you back now again to lapis lazuli, the post byzantine period and the early renaissance okay. Colours that you could get out of the earth easily like browns, greens and blacks, anyone could use them but you had to have a rich patron in order to afford the reds and the blues. So a painting with a lot of red and blue back then was the same as saying I'm up in the club drinking Cristal with all the bitches

and I've got loads and loads of money and I'm throwing loads of money on strippers, culturally that is what that art communicated to the observer and it was the patrons way who by the middle ages, it was the religious patron but it was also

the big banking families of Venice the the Medici's they were just showing off going here look at my artist with his blue painting

so this is why Holy Mary is blue and if you look at you know for further evidence of this get a squint at Leonardo's paintings right at different stages

in his career and not just Leonardo but you know someone like Titian as well Vermeer even look at their paintings at different stages in their career when they're younger painters and they're only starting off

and they don't have patrons give them a fuck ton of money. Their paintings contain a lot of dark greens and browns and blacks because if you wanted brown this came from ochre. You could dig ochre out of the ground, out of the soil. Anyone could get ochre. Black, just burn a bit of wood and get charcoal. You make your black paint out of that but as the painters developed in their careers

and became more wealthy that's when they could afford to add blues and reds and the more expensive colours which keeps me thinking about a boy called Caravaggio now Caravaggio was an incredibly interesting

character but before I speak about his character or speak about his paintings you know at this point that this podcast is about my hot takes. It's about borderline conspiracy theories and I have a bit of a hot take about Caravaggio and his impact on on current culture now Caravaggio togged out

from about what was it 1571 to sometime around 1610. And he's an unbelievable painter. If you've never seen a Caravaggio painting, it's just the drama, the drama that the man was able to imbue into a painting had never been seen before. The way he would use facial expressions

of people he was painting photographs before photographs were a thing he was truly capturing emotion on the canvas and creating dramatic still scenes of people interacting usually

usually you know there was a lot of religious themes to his work but most a lot of normal people doing normal shit too but always something dramatic but what you will notice with caravaggio's paintings is the way he uses light now his paintings are massive they're fucking huge I had the privilege of seeing a few Caravaggio's in Italy they're the size of a wall

and they're mostly black with a single light source illuminating the figures that are other figures coming out of the distance, coming out of the background, coming out of the black here's my here's my hot take on Caravaggio and his use of black and how it relates to pigment. By all accounts, Caravaggio was a bit of a bald boy. He was an anti-social character.

He was a bit of an antisocial character. His biographer said that Caravaggio would work intensively for a couple of weeks and then go right and finish painting. And then, I quote, Swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side from one tennis court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument so Caravaggio was going around 17th century Italy with a sword

starting scraps in tennis courts, that's what he was about right and like a gangster rapper, he was a gangster rapper of his time he was brought to trial 11 times. Charges were, he swore at a constable. Did a bit of time for that. He wrote some satirical verses against a rival painter. They didn't look too well in that in the 17th century. And

he fucked a plate of artichokes into a waiter's face, and was brought to trial for that, so this is a, he's a gangster, do you know, but then, in 1606, he had to flee to Rome, because he had a brawl,

and he killed a man, over the game of tennis of course, starting scraps in tennis courts, with his sword, he killed someone, and, spent the rest of his life on the run didn't paint no more on the run eventually 1610 he wanted to go back to a bit of painting so he tried to travel

to Rome to get a pardon from the Pope for the murder but he died along the way but here's my theory about there's a few things about Caravaggio when I was over in Rome there's a lot of Caravaggio's knocking about and you go into a little church in Rome and there's a lot

of Caravaggio's on the wall but here's the thing with his paintings you have to know how to be able to tell the difference between a Caravaggio painting as in one of his actual his own paintings and a painting that's considered to be the school of Caravaggio he used to get his students who he would teach in his style to paint his paintings and then he'd sign them off as his own so we can't really tell which is which at this point

that's number one balled by gangster move now number two this is my hot take I think Caravaggio used such vast amounts of black and brown in his paintings as a way to scam his patrons.

So if Caravaggio's patron came to him and said, look here's a hundred grand or whatever it was at the time and said, paint me a massive, massive painting of Christ and his disciples. paint me a massive massive painting of christ and his disciples caravaggio would cover a good 80 percent of the canvas in black and brown which i which i've told you already are incredibly cheap colors and then just in the center he'd use the expensive blues and reds just to slightly illuminate the characters in the middle. And I think his style exists. Because the cunt was trying to save money. He was trying to. Alright I'll do it like a cowboy builder. Caravaggio was a cowboy builder of his time.

He's like. Come here to me. Yeah yeah 100 grand not a butter cuz. And then he keeps 70 for himself. Cuz he's digging up blacks and browns out of the earth. And then he's using the 30. he's digging up blacks and browns out of the earth. And then he's using the 30 to get his blues and his reds and take the rest of the money for when he fucks off for the rest of the year, getting pissed, hanging around tennis courts and starting fights. So that's my Caravaggio hot take. But another thing about Caravaggio's paintings that make them so brilliantly unique.

thing about Caravaggio's paintings that make them so brilliantly unique. At the time in painting, I described earlier that he uses emotion and realism in his paintings. The models that a painter would use, traditionally they tended to be from the upper classes. If you're painting a painting, you want it to be hanging around, you know, the king's court. You want it to be using models that were maybe concubines belonging to one of the royals, but people that would have been considered of the higher classes. Caravaggio did not do this. Caravaggio was hanging around with prostitutes and thieves, you know. I often wonder was he one of these wealthy hipsters? Do you know, hanging wonder was he one of these wealthy hipsters

hanging around Stoneybatter hanging around with lads that are smoking heroin for authenticity but Caravaggio used to use the the poor people the criminals and the thieves and prostitutes as the models for his paintings

and it's said of Caravaggio's paintings that you know if if a model had dirty fingernails he would paint those dirty fingernails if they had teeth missing he would paint them and this hadn't been seen in art before because art was about perfection but Caravaggio was about realism and I think all of this was that so he could simply save money he was scamming his patrons because he was a gangster motherfucker but how does Caravaggio's paintings

and his style relate to our culture now well I'll tell you I'm going to hand you over for a little bit to the words of unbelievable director Martin Scorsese who's directed such gangster classics as Goodfellas and Casino and he directed

Wolf of Wall Street but also his earlier work Mean Streets and this is what Scorsese had to say about Caravaggio with the Caravaggio, colours in my mind, when I see the compositions and when I see the light, the way light is used, usually from a light source,

one light source is coming out, it's as colorful as black and white, in my mind. And this is the kind of thing we were looking to do back in the 70s. He sort of pervaded the entire bar sequences and mean streets, there's no doubt about that. The way I shot the camera movement, the choice of action, So there you have the genius Marty Scars, Martin Scorsese,

speaking about the direct influence that Caravaggio's style has on his own filmmaking, you know? Scorsese's one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, hands down, simple as that. And you have him right there admitting the effect that Caravaggio used to use in his paintings, chiaroscuro it's known as, which means light and dark.

That's Scorsese saying right there that that's what he was trying to emulate in his films. And if you look at a film like Mean Streets from 77's all light and dark same with goodfellas and casino uses extremely um extremely contrasted lights and darks almost like a beam of light on on people's hands and faces and he's got scorseseese has another film called Nicolas Cage is in it as an ambulance driver. It's not that popular. It's from the mid-90s.

I think it's a good film. I think it's called Bringing Out the Dead with Nicolas Cage. That film, Jesus, fucking Nicolas Cage is driving an ambulance

in the pitch dark and Scorsese shines a beam onto his white shirt. That's the most, from a cinematographic point of view, that's the most Caravaggio-esque thing I've seen Scorsese do. But also what Scorsese mentioned there when he took it back to Main Streets was how Caravaggio's choice of using, we'll say, the pimps and prostitutes

in his paintings directly influenced how Scorsese casts his films and how Scorsese uses, you know, real people in his own fucking films, right? And did this all start because of my theory that Caravaggio was just trying to save some money because of pigments. I don't know. You'll see this today too, this exact style kind of copied. I don't know if you've been watching. There's a fantastic show on HBO at the moment called

The Deuce. D-E-U-C-E. and it's set in the 70s in manhattan 42nd street and it's written by david simon who wrote the wire and if you haven't seen the juice give it a squint it's fucking unreal it's about the pimps in manhattan in the 70s. It's fantastic. It's the best thing David Simon's done. I think since The Wire. But. It's. It's visual style. Is aping. Mean Streets.

Which in itself. Is aping Caravaggio. But. Back to Scorsese. And his use of real people. A recurring character. In. Scorsese's film is his actual mother. Scorsese has used his mother for a few scenes in his films. She's in a casino but her best role is in Goodfellas. There's an interesting little story here and how it relates back to Limerick.

And there's an interesting little story here, and how it relates back to Limerick. There is a phenomenally violent scene in the film Goodfellas, where Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci are in a bar. And there's a character in the bar, played by Frank Vincent, an unbelievable actor who died recently. And Frank Vincent is a made man, which means that he's a full time mafia member he's hardcore, he's untouchable and De Niro and

Pesci are not full time members, they're low life low level mafia members so what happens is this Frank Vincent character, he starts talking shit to Joe Pesci

Joe Pesci takes it personally and stabs him into the neck with a biro and then fucking De Niro gets stuck in, anyway they end up beating a mad man to death, which means that's against the rules of the mafia which means the boys if they get caught, they're dead so they fuck Frank Vincent's

body into the boot of their car to try and bury him somewhere. Oh, Frank Vincent, if you've seen him, he's got a big head of white hair and a white beard. So anyway, they're driving off to the woods to dig a hole and to bury him. But halfway there they get a bit peckish so they call in to Joe Pesci's mother's house with the intention of eating a bit of food and getting a knife so they can cut the body up. So anyway Joe Pesci's mother is played by Martin Scorsese's mother in real life and that's Scorsese using that Caravaggio technique if you want an Italian mother an authentic Italian mother then you get my fucking mother because that's what Caravaggio would have

done so Joe Pesci's mother is in this scene and she's fantastic because you can tell she is not a real actress you can tell she is not a real actress. You can tell. There's even points, to be honest, where she almost looks into the camera lens. And what you get in that scene, it's the type of beautiful honesty that you get in a Caravaggio painting. It's the honesty of an untrained actor trying their best. And she gets away with it because she's got Joe Pesci on the left and De Niro on the right

and they're fucking real actors so anyway the conversation goes on and Joe Pesci's ma she takes out a painting and the painting is of

a man on a river in a boat with a white beard and on his boat are two terriers two terrier dogs and one's looking left and one's looking right and joe pesci and deniro joke about the painting because the mother is going what do you think of my painting i did this lovely painting and pesci says look at the guy with the beard in the painting he reminds me of somebody two boys start laughing they're talking about the fella that they've got outside in the trunk Frank Vincent but anyway I did a bit of research about this painting that happens that you see in in the the goodfellas film that fucking the mother is holding and it turns out the painting is based on a photograph of a man from Limerick

it's a banker from 1978 called John Weaving and his two dogs Brockie and Twiggy and they're on the river Shannon just out by just out near Shannon Airport on the river near Dirty Nelly's pub

and this photograph ended up in National Geographic magazine. And then it was found by the co-writer of Goodfellas, Nicholas Pelegi. And Nicholas Pelegi, he got his mother to paint the painting of the photograph of John Weaving and his two dogs from Limerick. And then Martin Scorsese's mother was the one holding the painting so Scorsese and Pelleggi they both conspired with both of their mothers

to put this painting of a Limerick man in fucking Goodfellas so that excuses why I just gave you half an hour about the history of paints Caravaggio and how that all relates

back to Limerick Yart jeez I hope you like art and culture this week lads because that's all I seem to be

talking about I'm in an art and culture mood and I hope the chat there about Caravaggio and art history

and painting wasn't too isolating because as well it is quite a challenge to talk about the history of fucking painting via an

aural format that's quite difficult just drinking some lovely warm tea did you see the Saturday Night Live did a sketch there during the week with Saoirse Ronan and it was about

it was a piss take of Ireland it was a piss take of our national airline Aer Lingus and it was very strange it was quite absurd it didn't seem to have any point it was it was Saoirse Ronan playing an air hostess and a lady and it's the plane is delayed because there's loads of dogs on the runway and the pilot owns loads of dogs and it's about the air hostess is going Asher you know there's a dog on the runway and the pilot owns loads of dogs and it's about the air hostess is going, you know there's a dog on the runway and I kind of liked it you

know I like the elements of it now they made some rather lazy potato jokes as people do but I think the writers were just catering for idiots with that one were just catering for idiots with that one with the dog bit I think there might have been a bit of a deeper a deeper satire behind it which I appreciated I'll play a little excerpt right now

laughter laughter laughter laughter laughter laughter laughter What's the delay then? I heard it was a dog. Oh, here's the lady with the orange sticks now. Maybe she has more information. All right.

Folks, we've got a dog on the runway. It's got sad eyes. The soul of Oscar Wilde. So we're going to have to wait. We're going to let the dog choose when he's ready to move. It's his will. It's his story, not ours. Do you understand? Good. Good then. Right. Let's do our safety presentation. it's his story not ours do you understand good then right

let's do our safety presentation do all of you have your pamphlets see I don't mind that there's a dog on the runway and he's got sad eyes and the soul of Oscar Wilde I quite like that I think that's quite imaginative that's you know

that's a line that's searching for something deeper and what I do like about you know like I said there's a bit of laziness there, there's a few stereotypes but this business of the plane not running because there's a dog on the runway

it's like a commentary it's like the Yanks striving to understand the Irish work ethic. Because in Ireland, when we're faced with a problem, we'll say, Asher, it'll be grand.

It'll be grand. Don't worry about it. It'll be grand. That's our response to everything. And we're not lazy cunts. We just, you know, it'll be grand, and we understand what it'll be grand means, it'll be grand means someone's gonna sort it out, I'll sort it out, but don't worry about it, let's not get our knickers in a twist, it'll be grand, all right,

but it doesn't mean we're not gonna work, it means we're going to do it we're just not going to get all serious about it we're going to chill out you know the brits have keep calm and carry on we've got it'll be grand but the yanks don't get this the yanks are like what the fuck do you mean it's going to be grand are you people mad and they interpret this as our innate absurdity they see this as us being absurd and we are we are an absurd people and I'm incredibly proud

of how absurd we are absurd our culture is you know you see this in your fucking Samuel Beckett Jesus Christ imagine a yank watching Samuel Beckett fucking two hour play

about a lad eating dog biscuits in a bin but I do enjoy I like that sketch I did like that sketch I thought it was aside from the tokenism it was an interesting probing into Irish culture

and the Irish work ethic but on the other side of the pond this week the Brits if you've been following politics the Brits are trying to get the fuck out of the EU they've got Brexit and they need to come up with a deal pretty quickly

but someone's come along and stuck a lollipop into the dog shit because the Brits know for the first time ever are having to realise that there is a Someone's come along and stuck a lollipop into the dog shit. Because the Brits now, for the first time ever, are having to realise that there is a border in Northern Ireland. Which, to be honest, to the average person living in Britain, they don't even think about it. A lot of them don't even fucking know what Northern Ireland is.

And some news agencies went onto the streets and asked british people to draw the irish border you know in our country to actually to get their reactions as to you know why do you think the irish care about this border and the people the british people that were asked they haven't a fucking clue and some of the responses were downright offensive she says she says the southern Irish are just going to have to lump it I do think the Irish are just making trouble because they lost

it's a bit petty really isn't it you can't always have what you want in life I think every single Irish person in the country when they heard that statement wanted to reach for a balaclava and some semtex and it radicalised us, something deep inside us it radicalised you and then

you have to push it down and cop onto yourself, like fucking hell, that there sums up the kind of, a lot of the British attitude towards us as an island, it's like you're looking at that woman going, do you not understand you know, why this border exists, do you not understand how much we went through as a nation to get our independence

do you not understand the 800 years of shit that you put us through and the penal laws and all this stuff and of course when I say this I'm not you know to the British listeners I'm not trying to put you on a guilt trip I'm speaking about your imperial overlords

not you I don't expect you to take any responsibility for the actions of your grandparents this pretty much and I like to analyse this from a post-colonial perspective because I'm a cultural Marxist the Brits

they kind of take us seriously but when it comes down to stuff like this you can tell they really don't you know it's like contrast that with the Yanks and the Saturday Night Live. I mean, the Yanks have a misty-eyed vision of Ireland

as being, you know, the land of fun and whatever. And like you saw with the SNL sketch, there was a bit of absurdity there in how they read us. But the Yanks don't have, they never colonised us what the British did

were a former colony of theirs and what this recent Brexit bullshit is showing us is that when you go as an Irish person when you go to England people generally meet you

quite favourably they think you're really funny and a bit of crack. And people really love the Irish there. But what Brexit has shown us is that they're treating us like a child that's crying over their boy band splitting up. When it comes down to it, we are not taken seriously. We're really not. We're not respected. We're not seen as a real country. We're infantilized.

And that is something that a former colony, especially a large colonizer like Britain, they tend to infantilize and other the culture that they colonized and we're seeing that quite blatantly in the response to the to the Brexit thing a lot of the people ask

they don't even know what the border is or why it exists and we're being infantilized we're a child who's thrown its ties out of the pram I'll entertain you but as soon as you speak up as soon as you try and be assertive We're a child who's thrown its ties out of the pram.

I'll entertain you, but as soon as you speak up, as soon as you try and be assertive, as soon as you say that you have rights, that you have a right to exist, they will go, oh, come on, really, come on. Come on now, Paddy. Go back to your fiddle and your Guinness and do that over in the corner. Have a bit of crack.

We like you when you're doing that, but not when you're speaking about your right to exist not when you're speaking about your independence come on now really this is serious business this is Brexit this is serious Paddy that's the vibe that I'm getting and it's a shame to see and you know can you blame them and you know, can you blame them British people have an education system that when it comes to the history of Britain

it's geared towards getting the non-academic students to join the war effort to join the RAF you know, that's what the British education system is geared towards if you're not academic get a career in the army

which means you need to have a degree of nationalism and pride, and they're certainly not going to talk to them about how the British Empire raped the world and Ireland so it was a shame this week to see that you know and I'm just, I'm contrasting those two moments in culture this week.

You know, the Saturday Night Live, where they allowed us a degree of complexity in our kind of cultural identity and consciousness. And the British post-colonial reading of the Irish as infants with sick rolling down our bellies who need a little smack in the bum and are not allowed to talk when the adults are talking fuck you lads but to the the now 40,000

British people that tune into this podcast every week a few things earlier I did mention there that woman's comments radicalised us and made us want to reach for Semtex and a Bata Claiva that was a joke ok it didn't literally do that

ok Irish people know what I'm talking about I'm not saying the IRA are coming back most Irish people don't don't want the IRA or support them at all, but what it does is it, there's a little thing in Irish culture, there's a little thing, there's some little heartbeat within us, that when we hear a rebel song or whatever, it does make us very, gives us a national pride, and one of the things that we do have pride in is that we actually, we beat the British Empire,

we beat, you know, we invented fucking guerrilla warfare and beat the British Army, and that is something, we beat the British Army with its own weapons, okay? Get a look at Ken Loach's film, The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Get a look at that film. A lot of Irish people had grandparents in the old IRA. Now, that's not the provisional IRA that were blowing up London, but the old IRA that fought for our independence. My own grandfather was in the old IRA, now that's not the provisional IRA that were blowing up London but the old IRA that fought for our independence my own grandfather was in the old IRA and my granduncles down in West

Cork in Tom Barry's Flying Column which is what the film The Wind That Shakes the Barley is about so it does we're quite proud of that we're quite proud of that our culture is to be one, to be the underdog

that fought and that won, so when we hear a British person say that we lost to have such an ignorant position, it's triggering to say the least the other thing too, you know our culture

is the Irish flag. The Irish flag, I think, is one of the most beautiful things about our culture because it's not, it's the opposite of a flag of colonialism. It's green, white and orange. And the green represents the Irish Catholic. The orange represents the Protestants, the orange men the DUP that now live in this country

and the white represents the potential for peace and a shared future between those two different cultures and communities I think that's beautiful, I think that's class and our flag is not stained in the blood of

taking over other people that gives us a great sense of pride because it's all we fucking have in our history that's that's all we have um we're a young country but to the british people listening please don't be sending me direct messages uh apologizing or explaining yourself okay you don't need to do that at all. Nobody is holding you responsible and especially to the British people who've gone out of the way to educate themselves and are embarrassed by that woman's comments.

I don't expect an apology and it's not your fault. If you want to if you want to know, Jesus, that must be shit for you what can i do as a british person i i what you can do is just learn go on to wikipedia learn about the irish war of independence learn about irish history go on to youtube look at a decent documentary

about irish history and just learn because we we don't want British people feeling guilty. But what's very, very hurtful to us is when a British person is ignorant around the pain of our history that was caused by the imperial colonialism that was carried out in your name. So just educate yourself and we'll be grand, alright? And it's no hassle don't worry about it cuz

I'm you know you're just as entitled to a podcast hug as anybody else listening and I'm here for you to give you a podcast hug too little Brit

don't worry about it before I move on I'm going to leave a slight pause here for an advert to happen which you may or may not hear. So actually, do you know what, I'm going to leave the pause, but if an advert doesn't happen, I'll play a small bit of my ocarina, which is a little Spanish clay whistle, where the advert should be. The birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't.

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Okay, you either heard an ocarina or an advert. Okay, moving on. Every week I like to recommend an album that I think if you enjoy music, you should have a listen to. This week I would like to recommend Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys. Go on to Spotify. Preferably listen to the stereo mix, please. Now you might be wondering, you know, if you're not into your music, you're going, the fucking Beach Boys? The Beach Boys?

What do I listen to the Beach Boys for? The Beach Boys, especially Brian Wilson, the songwriter and producer, fucking genius, okay? And just one of the greatest producers of all time. And he took his sound from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound of the 50s, but he took it on to another level.

And get a listen to Pet Sounds. Unbelievable songwriting, unbelievable production, and a truly revolutionary album for 1966. And if I'm not mistaken, it was a year before Sgt. Pepper's by the Beatles, and I think the Beatles listened to Pet Sounds got freaked out and said fuck me, listen to what the

Beach Boys are doing and then the Beatles went to George Martin, their producer and said can you do what Brian Wilson is doing please because they're beating us I'm about 80% sure that's what happened I think it is time for me to answer some of the questions that you ask me every week on Twitter at Rubber Bandits please keep liking the podcast not liking it please keep subscribing to the

podcast and leave in pleasurable reviews and also buy my book of short stories, The Gospel According to Blind Boy. Get it for an aunt for Christmas, okay? Kieran McDonald asks, What do you think about the abundance of manky cunts on the comment sections of Irish news websites versus the lack of a far-right party in Irish politics compared with the rest of Europe? The Pegida Ireland setting up, for example, and how they got fucked out of it, that was class.

So what Ciarán is saying there is that if you spend time on Irish social media, specifically common sections of news articles, the Daily Mail, the Irish Times, the Journal, whatever, if it's a subject about refugees, there tends to be a fierce amount of Irish racists, a lot of Irish racists. But however, we don't seem to have any strong, extreme right-wing, Nazi-esque movement or party going on in the country, right? So there's a bit of a dichotomy the people are there but they haven't properly organized and when Pegida which were a European um far-right party tried to set up in Dublin they were they got their heads kicked in by left-wingers and it was a combination

of kind of Irish Republican communist socialist people and kind of an anti-fat element and i think the answer to that question is and now this is just opinion and this is a hot take as well so tell me to fuck off if you disagree but it's just my opinion it's because um the irish republican culture is too strong in this country and the Irish Republican culture is too strong in this country and Irish Republicanism, whether it be more on the socialist side or not, it tends to be quite intersectional. You know, if you look at the up north in Belfast, you look at the murals in nationalist or Republican areas,

you'll see solidarity with Palestine and things like that. So I think it's a bit of a hostile environment for the far right group to set up because there's people there who just fucking kick their heads in and that's what we saw outside the GPO when Pegida tried to set up there's people around going

no no no we've been here longer just back to a few tried to set up. There's people around going, no, no, no, no, we've been here longer. Just back to a few, you know, a few podcasts ago, I mentioned Bernadette Devlin when she was given the key to New York. She gave it to the Black Panthers because traditionally Irish republicanism has been intersectional. It finds solidarity with other communities around the world

who are fighting an oppressive imperialism. And that's quite strong in Irish culture and it's a force for good in that respect because I don't want fucking Nazis on the street stay on the fucking internet you know if they're on the internet that means they're scared to mobilize and that's a good thing. Julio Bartolozo who if, if I'm not mistaken, is one of the few South African fans of this podcast. He asks, Albert Ellis said, The world isn't for you or against you. It doesn't give a shit. Can you talk about this, RE Mental Health? Would the Dalai Lama agree?

That's an interesting one. Albert Ellis is a psychologist who founded the field rational emotion a rational emotive behavioral therapy which is the parent of cbt cognitive behavioral therapy and ellis was kind of ellis was very rational you You know, Ellis would believe, you know, it does not matter what happens to you in your life, whether that be good or bad. Your personal happiness depends on the attitude that you have towards what happens to you. I kind of agree with that to an extent. To an extent I agree with that. I believe in accepting personal responsibility

for how you react to things, I allowed myself to get a bit angry earlier about the, that British woman who said that shit about Ireland, you know, but at the same time, you know, on reflection, I'm not going to allow it to get in the way of my own personal mental health or emotional boundaries I do not agree with that woman's words but I have complete and I cannot control that woman's words but I do have full power over how I react to them ultimately I would like to react to her with a degree of compassion

for my own mental health and that's where you bring in that Dalai Lama stuff I suppose my own mental health kind of practice for myself I bring a bit of CBT in I bring a bit of existential psychology a bit of Buddhism so I would ultimately like to have

compassion for that woman I would like to go this woman said these comments out of an ignorance. And maybe if she was enlightened and had it explained to her in the right way, she might react with compassion and change her opinion. Some people might disagree with that. The reason I do that is, again, for my own mental health. I don't want to carry anger around would the dalai lama agree with albert ellis's position the world isn't

for you or against you it doesn't give a shit i would think the dalai lama would agree with that because buddhism is a very personal thing i mean one of my favorite things about buddhism is i think someone asked the buddha once is there a god and buddha responded if you're worrying about whether or not there's a god then you're not living in the present moment which i thought was beautiful and some people use that to argue that buddhism is an atheistic religion and some people use that to argue that Buddhism is an atheistic religion you know what or would the the world isn't for you or against you it doesn't give a shit I'd say the Dalai Lama would agree that the world isn't for you or against you

but I don't think he'd agree that it doesn't give a shit he would argue that there is a compassion out there in other people and I'd like to think that too people do give a shit about you some people don't if you want to go evolutionary psychology on it we'll take it to Dunbar's number there's an evolutionary psychologist called Robin Dunbar and in his research he found that the maximum amount of people that a human being is capable of caring about is 150 that is Dunbar's number and he found that we cannot have empathy or compassion for anyone outside of that group of 150 for chimpanzees, it's smaller. It's 30. Maybe that's what it is.

150 people. You can give a shit about them, but beyond that, that's when you can fully dehumanize and go genocide. And that's how genocide happens. That question really confused me, Julio. Thank you. Matthew Branigan asks, what's the crack with sleep paralysis sleep paralysis is interesting have you ever had sleep paralysis it's highly unpleasant it's when you wake up in the middle of the night and you're half awake and half asleep

and you can't move your body and you try and scream but nothing comes out and some people some people even imagine that there's someone in the room with them touching them sleep paralysis is and i can't talk about this now in in the correct psychological terminology because i've forgotten but there's a little switch in your brain and when we go asleep like when when you dream, you run in your dreams, you move in your dreams, right, so there's a switch in your brain that turns off your muscles, so that when you're asleep, and you dream about running, you don't actually start running in bed, and wake yourself up, so this switch turns off your muscles, sleep paralysis happens when you wake from sleep,

when you wake from sleep but this switch does not come on so you're paralysed for a little bit but some people and they say that it's people that are electromagnetically sensitive and live near pylons they experience intense hallucinations

during sleep paralysis I've never gotten that I've just gotten standard sleep paralysis but it's something but it's something that's been present in art throughout the years sleep paralysis it's represented in paintings through a figure called the hag if you type the hag paintings into google images you'll get loads of paintings throughout the years of somebody asleep with an old woman kneeling on their chest because this is what people used to dream they used to dream that

they were asleep and an old woman came in and sat in their chest and today what people dream when they get sleep paralysis is being awake in the room and an alien coming in and abducting them because the hallucinations that you get with sleep paralysis are relevant to your culture at the time. If you don't want to get sleep paralysis, don't sleep on your fucking back. For me anyway, it only happens when I sleep on my back, so I stop doing it. When I do sleep on my back, I'll get sleep paralysis,

and it's not pleasant at all. God bless. Credmo asks, Do worms get drunk when they Bury alcoholics Erm I doubt that But I tell you who does get drunk

Do you know in Around August And September When wasps are really aggressive Right They sting you more. They piss you off more when it's getting cold. And when you're growing up, people say,

oh, the wasps are dying off. And when the wasp knows it's going to die because of the cold, he acts like a cunt. Well, what I found out is the reason wasps are aggressive in the autumn, in the late autumn, is that because they're drunk. They're going up into trees and eating apples that are going rotten or they're trying to get into the apple that has the worm in it and it's going rotten because the worm is in there and the

wasps are getting drunk off rotten fruit and then like human beings they just get aggressive when they're drunk and they come down and sting you into the nose so that half answered your question I don't think a dead alcoholic is going to have enough alcohol in his blood for a worm to get pissed off at but you never know

Mark Devlin asks where do you feel Irish comedy in general is at in relation to the US and UK? Irish comedy is in a fucking terrible place, because, here's the thing, right? The national broadcaster, RTE, has got no money.

I started off, in comedy, well, I started off by myself on the internet for 7 or 8 years but I was able to get a TV gig when I was quite young on Republic of Telly and I was given 4 minutes each week on national television to write a comedy sketch and what this allowed me to do was to work with a team of professional people with producers with directors to see how things are actually made to understand how to make a piece of comedy for television to learn things like story writing and structure very important mechanics of making a piece of professional work. This system is now gone. There is no sketch comedy show on RTE

for a young comedian who's only learning their craft to work with a team of professionals. This doesn't exist anymore. So as a result, when you now look at Irish Facebook video comedy, okay, it's very, very poor. Some of the ideas are there, but Irish Facebook video comedy completely lacks structure, or editing, or any of this stuff that you have to, the craft that you have to learn, because young Irish Facebook comedians, they have no outlet to actually receive

experience, or training,ish comedy in general is always going to be a tough one especially if we're trying to do it on television because here's the thing if you're trying to do anything creative or different to do that means you're going to reach a smaller niche audience now to reach a niche audience in america that means you go into a channel like adult, you still get millions of people watching that. In the UK, if you're niche, like we'll say the Mighty Boosh would have been, or Brass Eye, you still get quite a lot of people watching, enough money and viewers to sustain the program. If you try and do something niche and weird on Irish

television, we've got a population of 4 million million you could be dealing with 5,000 people watching your niche comedy show and that is financially not enough for the channel to commission it so in Ireland the only comedy that gets commissioned is incredibly mainstream bland stuff because that's economically kind of how it has to work we did a four-part tv series there last year for RTE. Kind of mainstream but. We got to be very very creative with it. I mean one episode was a half hour about the history of philosophy.

No one fucking watched it. Nobody watched it. Because that's just how it is. And as a result. i'm not getting any phone calls off rte i'm currently working on two projects with british television but with rte they're broke they can't afford to take a risk on something nuts so they'll just go with something boring and mainstream and i can understand why that's the case. And that's Irish comedy. Final question by Ludo Payne. What does space smell like?

That's quite interesting. There'd be no smell in space because there's no air in space. And the molecules of scent need to travel on air. There's also no sound in space. Because sound is the vibration of air molecules. And there's no fucking air in space. You can hear nothing. There's no music in space. Because sound is the vibration of air molecules. And there's no fucking air in space. You can hear nothing. There's no music in space.

This is what I love about music. Music is symmetrical vibrations of air. And when we listen to music and we hear it as pleasurable. That's our brains doing the mathematics. That's our ears. Seeing shapes like triangles and squares. Things that are balanced and symmetrical. So when you listen to music it's like looking at a pleasurable painting.

That's very well balanced and symmetrical. Just with sound. Isn't that lovely? Alright. I'm going to leave you go this week. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for talking out. Please subscribe to the

podcast recommend it to a friend and uh leave a nice review i had a lot of fun this week we had some very diverse topics and what i would ask of you for the rest of the week look after yourself um have some compassion for yourself. Forgive yourself if you embarrass yourself. If you speak. If you get angry with somebody. Forgive yourself. You know?

Have some self-compassion. And that will lead towards some compassion for somebody else. And before you know it, you're feeling happy. And you're happy with your life. And the other thing. This time time of year the weather is shit and a lot of people find themselves getting a bit depressed over this over the shit weather because it's bleak and it's cold

go out into that weather and go for a walk and try not to view you know the trees with no leaves and the hard ground try not to view that through a negative lens view nature as that that's part of nature's process you know and that there is a beauty and happiness to winter don't be viewing it through that human lens because we're looking for sunshine and we're looking for flowers because that reaffirms our existence but there's many animals out there and they're all about winter there's little you know the

toads are off or not that the frogs are hibernating having great crack having a good bit of sleep and there's that the worms are happy they're underneath the ground there's lots of little animals that are not at risk of predators because it's too cold and they're hibernating. The trees are just resting. They're chilling out. They're waiting for new growth. They're leaves that have died.

Those leaves are now going into the ground and getting ready to fertilize the earth for new growth in the spring. So find the beauty in the winter don't let the weather bring you down don't let the the short evenings like even though it's getting dark at five o'clock in the evening the sun is at a really beautiful angle and you'll get gorgeous colors in the sky in the evening if you look for them there is a beauty in winter and there's a beauty in fucking autumn. And you have a choice about whether that upsets you or not. Don't let it get you down.

The rain as well. Rain can be beautiful. Find the beauty in it because it's natural. It's the real deal. And there's no such thing as ugliness in nature. Yart. 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 center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only

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