The Blindboy Podcast - Hot Cheesecake

Episode Date: October 6, 2021

How to survive living with your parents in your 30's. Salt Bae. Literature. The Downing of Facebook. I answer yere questions Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Suck the dope from the Pope's nose, you broken Tobins. Short piece of prose there by Meryl Streep. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If you're a new listener, I suggest going back and listening to some earlier episodes. And if you're a regular listener, if you're a broken Tobin, you know the crack. Before I begin, I have a couple of gigs to plug. I'm playing three dates in Vicar Street in Dublin. The 1st of November, the 8th of November and the 29th of November.

These are gigs that would have went on sale in 2019. Then a pandemic happened. So if you bought tickets for those gigs, they're valid. Those gigs are going ahead, properly going ahead. Like a normal full capacity gig in November and they're also sold out however, I think a couple of people returned tickets

so if you want to come to those gigs on the 1st, 8th and 29th of November give it a go I reckon there might be a couple of tickets left. They're sold out. But I know a few people did return tickets. However, I added a fourth date

about three weeks ago. So on the 12th of October, which is next Tuesday, there is a Blind Boy podcast in Vicar Street in Dublin. And I forgot to promote it on the podcast. So there's tickets available for that. It's a reduced capacity gig in accordance with the guidelines

but yes, I have a gig in Vicar Street next Tuesday. I have a very famous guest. I have a Hollywood actor who I'm going to keep as a surprise. It's not Meryl Streep but next Tuesday October the 12th

Vicar Street there are tickets left for that gig. Come along. It's going to be good crack. Type it into the internet. So for this week's podcast I almost had a hot take. I do have a hot take. But I realised

I can't do an entire podcast about this hot take. because this hot take ties in with a previous hot take from another podcast so it's a miniature hot take that I want to speak about so I did a podcast about three months back called Lobster Purple and I really enjoyed that podcast. It was a real, it was a very focused, hot take. And it was about food and value. And specifically, it was about food, value and the spectacle of violence. Often very expensive foods,

foods that we see as being elite or posh, often they're associated with the spectacle of violence. Lobster, for example. If you eat lobster at a restaurant, which is very fancy food, the lobster is, you know, taken alive out of a tank and boiled in hot water, boiled alive, and then you eat it. Or veal, for instance. Another expensive meat veal is a calf that's put through a terrible ordeal in order to end up on a plate

or another dish is called artelan artelan is one of the poshest foods in the world for people it's a tiny tiny bird. That's eaten whole. And rich people eat it with.

Napkins over their heads. So that other people can't see them eating the bird. And so the bones of the bird crunch in their mouths. And don't fly around the restaurant. And then of course you have foie gras. Which is the fattened liver of a goose. So. Food that's considered elitist or incredibly expensive or very fancy is often accompanied by the extreme spectacle of violence,

which I find quite odd. And it got me thinking about a chap called Salt Bae. So Salt Bae is an internet meme, man. You've definitely seen it. It began as a video in 2017. And it's this man, very good looking man with dark hair, and he's wearing shades. And he's got a white t-shirt. And someone's ordering a steak. And Salt Bae is sprinkling salt on the steak. In this very performative and flamboyant fashion.

And when this video went on the internet it went massively viral. And this chef whose name is Nusret. He's Turkish. This chef went completely viral. And people called him Salt Bae. Salt because he's performatively distributing salt on food. And Bae, B-A-E, because he's a very attractive, good-looking man. So he was christened Salt Bae by the internet and he became an internet meme. Salt Bae has since capitalised on his fame and has opened up a series of restaurants

all around the world. Last week Salt Bae opened his restaurant in London and what makes this unique is first off, the food is prohibitively expensive. He's serving steaks for 700 pounds. And the thing is, restaurant critics, professional critics have gone to his restaurant and have basically said, no, this steak is, this is just pretty average steak. There's nothing special about it. This does not deserve 700 pounds. But that's not why people are going there. It's not about the food.

People want to eat at Salt Bae's London restaurant because Salt Bae comes to your table and he enacts the meme exactly. He takes the salt out of a wooden box and he sprinkles it all over the steak exactly as he does in the meme. Looking like he did in the meme. Performing salt bayoness. And that's worth 700 quid a steak for incredibly rich people. It's almost like an organic NFT.

You're not buying the steak, you're proving to other people that you have access to Salt Bae. It's very exclusive and you can only do this if you're incredibly rich. But there's one thing I noticed, which I found quite odd. So, if you're at this restaurant and you get your steak and Salt Bae comes to your table he doesn't just distribute the salt on your steak what he does

sprinkles the salt then he takes out a large knife he cuts the steak impales a piece of steak the first piece of steak on the edge of the knife. And then he dangles this steak on the edge of the knife above the mouth of the rich person. And the rich person extends their mouth into the air like a little bird in a nest waiting for food from its mother.

And one thing I found very fascinating is how much it looks like a beheading video. The rich people put their chin to the air and they expose the extreme vulnerability of their throat while a man dangles an incredibly sharp knife above it. There's that element of trust. If you freeze frame all these videos of people in Salt Bae's restaurant being served steak on the end of a knife, if you freeze frame it at a

certain point, it literally looks like a beheading video. It looks like somebody's going to get their head cut off or their throat slit, which sadly is an image that we've been conditioned to see over the 2010s because of ISIS videos and how they were played out on the news. There's also a potential Islamophobic undertone to the Salt Bae performance. Salt Bae himself is Turkish, he's Kurdish. I don't know if he's Islamic. I know that he definitely opened a mosque in Turkey. He was at the opening of a mosque, so that might suggest that he definitely opened a mosque in Turkey. He was at the opening

of a mosque, so that might suggest that he may be Islamic. And in his London restaurant and in his Dubai restaurant, a lot of the patrons are Western tourists, not Middle Eastern people. And under the social construct of Islamophobia, these people don't separate Islam from ISIS or from Al-Qaeda the whole point of Islamophobia is it's an ignorant narrative that makes sweeping assumptions

and I think there's some unconscious forces at play I think that when if you're going to a restaurant and spending 700 quid on a steak, you're exceptionally wealthy. And my batshit hot take is that the true unconscious allure of Salt Bae isn't necessarily to go to the restaurant and be in a video with an internet meme. I think what it is is that it's rich people taunting the guillotine. Incredibly wealthy people,

very, very wealthy people are always afraid of revolution. When the people rise up, they will come for me and just like in the French Revolution, they will behead me. They will pull out that guillotine. And I think that's what the spectacle of violence is

when someone goes to Salt Bay's restaurant. Instead of boiling the lobster alive or needing to know that the animal suffered, the person is spending 700 quid to safely engage in the performed ritual of their own execution, as an unconscious form of exposure therapy. I think that's what the driving force is there. And that's hard for us to relate to.

But if you're living in London and you come from generational wealth, if your great-great-grandfather was really wealthy, you better believe there's family discussions about guillotines, you better believe there's family discussions about what happens when the poor people rise up, that'd be part of your family culture and you could also flip it, there's another way to look at

Salt Bae that I find quite fascinating even though it's definitely unintentional I think Salt Bae himself he became a mean and he's like i'm gonna capitalize on this and i'm gonna earn a bunch of money and if these fucking rich people want to spend 700 quid while i get into a stupid video with him so be it but in the environment of climate change and the climate emergency like we're all aware of the huge impact on the environment that the beef industry has the global beef industry beef i should not be able to walk into a supermarket

and buy a sirloin steak for five euro that shouldn't. The reason that exists is because we have made beef into an unsustainable industry. One cow requires tons of water, acres and acres of land for feed,

in order to end up on our plates. But capitalism has made an unsustainable industry where this is just absolutely huge to the point that there's cows farting and creating co2 gas that's warming the earth and there's land being cleared so that the food can be grown for the cows to eat and there's water being used up so that the cows can drink we've made an unsustainable industry so that you and i can buy a steak for five euros but realistically 700 euros is probably what a steak should cost if a cow was raised sustainably and the value of the the amount of land and food

that that cow needs to eat and the amount of water that's land and food that that cow needs to eat, and the amount of water that's required, and everyone who works with that cow is paid properly, if it was done like that, then steak would become something that's really expensive, that you only eat once a year if you're lucky. Like how it used to be 500 years ago. So buy Salt Bae doing these 700 pound steaks or 700 euro steaks it works as an unintentional satire that highlights the true value of beef

so that's my miniature hot take on salt bay and like i said the reason i didn't do an entire hot take on that is i've covered this in a podcast called Lobster Purple. I went into great detail about value and food and the spectacle of violence. Go back and give it a listen. So this week's podcast, what is it about? I'm going to answer your questions. About once every two months, I do a podcast where I answer questions that you ask me because I get asked questions all the time on Facebook and on fucking Instagram. About once every two months, I do a podcast where I answer questions that you ask me.

Because I get asked questions all the time on Facebook and on fucking Instagram and Twitter. And I hold on to them and then I answer them. But also, you know, if ever you've listened to any of my question answering podcasts, I've always promised that I'm going to answer a lot of questions and I end up answering two I end up giving really long answers to two questions I'm really going to try this week to answer a lot of questions this week I'm really going to try

to answer loads of questions so let's give it a go Alan asks blind buy this week Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for several hours. How did you feel about this? Did you experience any anxiety? That was weird as fuck. So, this week, those three apps, all the apps owned by Facebook, they were down for a long time.

I don't remember WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram being down for a long time. I don't remember WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram being down for that long. It was about six hours. And I didn't really give a fuck. I didn't give a fuck. I was just going, this has happened before. It's grand. Initially I went into conspiracy theory mode. Facebook have been in a lot of trouble this week there's been some serious whistleblowers talking about internal practices within Facebook about how the Facebook algorithm is addictive

how the Facebook algorithm doesn't care about people's mental health today like the whistleblower was testifying to the US Congress about these unethical practices that were happening within Facebook. So my initial reaction when the Facebook apps went down was

this is deliberate. Someone very high up in Facebook is turning Facebook off for a day so that they can wipe some files or delete a bunch of shit I don't know that was my initial reaction also that stuff about Facebook

and about social media in general I did a documentary on that I did a documentary on that in 2018 called Blind by Understries they're all on YouTube now and I went in fairly deep into the techniques that the psychological techniques that

social media companies use to keep us on our phones and to keep us anxious and to keep us angry so that we continually engage to give them our data to give them our data in particular I went into the the psychological experiments of BF Skinner and operant conditioning and how social media algorithms basically condition our behaviour to become addicted

to using that app and staying on it as long as possible and then loads of our data is harvested but when those apps went down yeah I didn't really give a fuck it was like it's going to be back this is going to be back, it's grand And then loads of our data is harvested. But when those apps went down, yeah, I didn't really give a fuck. It was like, it's going to be back. This is going to be back.

It's grand. It's a bit of an inconvenience. I tell you one bit that genuinely did freak me out. So because Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were down, people didn't just put their phones down and go, great, I can relax. Everyone moved immediately to either TikTok or Twitter and at one point Twitter stopped working I'm guessing because it was getting so much traffic everyone who would have been on Instagram moved to Twitter for a couple of hours and there was about 20 minutes where Twitter stopped working now when that

happened I was like oh fuck Twitter's not working TikTok isn't working properly I immediately thought there's been a huge cyber attack from Russia or from China and for about a minute or two minutes, I started to get deeply anxious, and genuinely felt that there's going to be an invasion, and there's going to be Russian or Chinese soldiers kicking my hall door in any moment, they've cut the internet, and this is the opportunity that's being used for an invasion,

and then of course I said, don't be fucking ridiculous you silly, I said, don't be fucking ridiculous, you silly, silly boy. Don't be absolutely ridiculous. But in moments of panic like that, in moments of anxiety, you know, I'm not in control. So my deepest fears come to the furor.

And I investigated that fear and it made me realise how I associate personal safety with the certainty of having access to the internet. Forgetting the fact that like I grew up in the 90s I remember not having internet. I remember it. It was grand. I remember having to I remember being about 11 years of age and if you wanted to meet someone in town you had to agree upon a time and actually be there and you couldn't be late

because if you were late you'd have no way of contacting each other because no one had mobile phones. People congregated differently. Subcultures of youths would find certain areas in cities all over the world and they'd just hang around there like in Limerick for some reason outside the door of Brown Thomas I don't know why

but for I think because there was buses nearby when I was a child outside the door of Brown Thomas there would be about a hundred goths or heavy metal kids and they would just hang around there

and it's like yeah no one had social media and if you listen to Nirvana the only way to meet other people who listen to Nirvana was it just had to be agreed as a social construct that everyone went to the door

outside Brown Thomas all the time so you'd be walking past Brown Thomas and it's just all these goths in the street for no reason. That's not there anymore because these people can meet online. You don't really even see goths or punks or metlers that much anymore. Because, you know, why did teenagers become goths or punks or metlers? As a way to express their sense of individualism or to express their personality outwards.

So you'd have no choice but to wear it on your physical body. People don't need this now. If they want to communicate their identity to their peers, they can do it through their Instagram account. And if they want to be a goth, they can perfectly curate their gothiness via their social media. People used to write the names of bands on their school bags. There's no need to do that anymore. You can tell everybody on Twitter what bands you like. And one of the maddest things about pre-internet culture that I remember, well I don't remember this because I would have been way too young but I saw photographs of

music festivals from the early 90s like Fela so I was looking at photographs of Fela was I think it was in Tipperary so it was a big giant music festival like Electric Picnic and loads of young people would go there

and I saw these photographs so it's all these teenagers hanging about on the street but one thing stood out you'd see people sitting on top of road signs like you're looking at this photograph of here's all these people on the street hundreds and then you see road signs like a stop sign and on every stop sign is like a lad sitting on it and it's like what the fuck

why would you climb up a stop sign and sit on a centimetre of metal the fuck is that about and people don't do that anymore but like this seems to be a thing in every single one of these photographs of a festival from the 90s

you've someone sitting on a stop sign and then I thought about it no one had any mobile phones if you went to a festival in 1994 and you lost your friends you fucking lost your friends so the only way

is one of your buddies had to sit on a stop sign and then you'd see them. Like here's a fucking mad story. Wait till you hear this for a mad story. Now I've definitely, in one of the 200 and something podcasts I've done I've probably mentioned this story before. But this is a story that my brother told me.

Which I find it difficult to relate to mobile phones became a thing when I was about 10 so I barely remember pre-mobile phones I really, I functioned autonomously for probably one year of my childhood without a mobile

phone, when I was 9 I was probably allowed to go into town by myself and I would have had to meet people so that's's probably the only context I have. But my brother told me this story and this would have been in late 80s or early 90s. He would have been maybe 19 years of age. So he was going over to London, right? To meet his friend. I think his friend's name was Brian. So he's going to London to meet his friend Brian. Mobile phones don't exist.

Brian is just a young Irish lad in London who's after emigrating. He's not living in a gaff that has a telephone. So it's like, fuck. So you're going over to London to meet your buddy Brian you don't have a number to contact him and Brian's gaff is where you're going to sleep and you don't have money for a hotel so if you don't meet Brian

you're fucked you're going to have to sleep rough so I can't even fathom the concept of that I can't fathom the concept of go to London and if you don't meet your buddy, you've no way of contacting him and you've nowhere to sleep. That sounds mad. So what happened was my brother was like,

okay, I'm going to London and I'm going to meet Brian. What we're going to do is there's a Van Morrison concert on in London. So I know that Brian is going to the Van Morrison concert. So I'm going to hang around outside there and I'm going to meet him. We're going to figure out a way to meet each other at the Van Morrison concert in London. So that was the plan. So my brother goes to London. He gets to the Van Morrison concert. He's got his bags with him. The concert has just started. he's got his bags with him the concert has just started so my brother decides

right I'm waiting here outside the doors of the Van Morrison concert and I'm not fucking leaving and when everyone comes out at the end I'm going to see my buddy Brian and then I'll have a place to stay grand I'm just going to stay here because my brother doesn't have tickets for the concert

so anyway he's waiting there about 10 minutes and the concert has just started and this couple come out and they see my brother and they say, listen, Van Morrison is in there and he's not playing the hits. He's doing some weird Irish traditional music thing. I don't know what it is, but we don't like it. Do you want our tickets? So this couple just handed my brother their Van Morrison tickets. tickets so he goes fuck it yeah all right so free van mara son tickets i'm gonna take him i'm gonna go into the gig so he goes into the gig and then he realizes the fucking tickets are literally front row seats

so now my brother can't believe his luck he's like holy fuck i'm sitting at the front of the van mara son concert this is incredible so he's there and he's loving it because he's after getting a free gig but Van Morrison's up on stage he's not playing the hits and he has an Irish traditional band with him I think it might have been

Donald Lunny and them he was up there with an Irish trad band and it was a London audience and the audience were not happy they were not enjoying it it's like we're here for brown-eyed girl we're not here to see you do a free-form fucking Irish traditional session so everyone's booing no one's having any crack the gig goes on and it's getting close to the end and then my brother remembers oh fuck I'm gonna have to rush outside and be outside the door

before the gig fucking ends or else I'm not gonna meet my buddy Brian what am I gonna do and then my brother has an idea he's up at the front row and he says to himself Brian is somewhere in this audience so if I get up

at the front here and I start dancing really ridiculously he's definitely going to see me because I'm up near the stage and that's how I'm going to meet him so my brother gets up off his seat and starts dancing at the Van Morrison concert

where everyone's having a shitty buzz then what starts happening is that people see my brother dancing and that brings a bit of joy to the place. People start clapping. And as my brother's dancing, this other man gets up and starts dancing with my brother,

doing like this weird Irish jig. It was a fella in a long jacket and a hat. So that finishes anyway. And my brother meets his friend Brian. Fantastic. He's got somewhere to stay. Everything's perfect. But then the next day,

he opened up, I think it was NME newspaper, a music magazine. He opened up a music magazine and there was a review of the gig, the Van Morrison gig that he'd just been at. And it was a terrible review the gig, the Van Morrison gig that he'd just been at. And it was a terrible review. And the review was like, very poor Van Morrison gig.

He didn't play any of the hits. He just played Irish traditional music. The highlight of the gig was when Eric Clapton got up and danced with a man in the front row. So that's what fucking happened. My brother had danced with Eric Clapton and he didn't even know it was Eric Clapton. He just happened to be sitting up at the front and Eric Clapton was obviously disguising himself

in a long coat with a fucking beard or something. How did I get onto this? Yeah, so that's what life was like before the internet. So when Instagram and WhatsApp and all that shit went the other night and then when TikTok went the other night, and then when TikTok went and Twitter went, and immediately I thought,

oh fuck, cyber attack, we're being invaded by China and Russia. I had to just go, cop the fuck onto yourself. And I remembered, things were fine before the internet. Things were absolutely fine. And they'd be fine if the internet went as well Catherine asks can you recommend a good book? I'm reading an incredible book at the moment

it's recently been nominated for a Booker Prize it's on the shortlist for the Booker it's called No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood and I've never read I've never read a novel

that so perfectly captures the online world as part of the experience of reading the book like there in my previous The online world. As part of the experience of reading. The book. Like there in my previous. Previous answer to that question. I was talking about the.

How. When Instagram and everything went down. For a few hours. We all experienced the. Extreme boredom and anxiety. A separation anxiety. We. We were separated from the thing.

That we were. That we were addicted to. Our thoughts are different now. We think differently now because we engage so much with the online space. And for writers this is a difficult thing to navigate when you're writing.

It's something I always try and include in my short stories if my short stories are set now I try and include the landscape of the online world into what my characters are doing because it's a realistic representation of what's happening Sally Rooney's most

recent book contains shit tons of emails in it but even sometimes the way that Sally Rooney navigates the internet within her book, you can see that it interrupts the prose a bit. Like, in Sally Rooney's book,

she'll never say Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Instead, she'll say the character opened a social media app because you don't want to write Twitter, Instagram, whatever because these things will disappear Twitter mightn't mean anything in 10 years and Sally wants to have a book

that can be read in 50 years so she has to say she opened a social media app but Patricia Lockwood's book it's first off when you're reading it She opened a social media app. But Patricia Lockwood's book, it's, first off, when you're reading it, the way the paragraphs are spaced, it's a little bit like reading a timeline.

So she's changed the format of how you read a book. The paragraphs are like reading, like flicking through Facebook or flicking through Twitter. Also, here's the mad thing about No One Is Talking About This, the book. So in, I know that Patricia Lockwood is a, she's a huge fan of James Joyce and she mentioned Joyce a couple of times in the book.

And she likes Virginia Woolf as well. Virginia Woolf and Joyce would be similar enough. Both modernist writers with an interest in the unconscious mind Joyce's book Ulysses I've mentioned it many times before it's considered the most important piece of modernist literature, what made

Ulysses special in the 1910s when Joyce wrote it was, Joyce was looking towards the new field of psychoanalysis and the unconscious mind. So when you read Ulysses by James Joyce, which is over 100 years old, you're not just hearing the words that come out of the characters' mouths in the book, you're also reading their internal thoughts before the words are formed.

So Ulysses displays the free association of words in the character's unconscious mind. That's why Ulysses can be difficult to read. That's why sometimes when you're reading Ulysses, it's like, this doesn't make sense. And it's like, yeah, the unconscious mind sometimes doesn't make sense and it's like yeah the unconscious mind sometimes doesn't make sense but with Patricia Lockwood's book it's a bit like reading Ulysses if the character's thoughts and unconscious mind were interrupted by tweets it's unlike anything I've

ever read and the prose in it is absolutely gorgeous because Patricia Lockwood is she's a poet so every single word in this book every single sentence is fucking perfect you could open this book up on any page and just fall deeply into the most beautiful prose and that's something that you can also do with Ulysses you can open open up Ulysses anywhere, on any page, and you don't even need to know what's happening. You will be knocked back by utterly gorgeous prose. But where Ulysses explores the individual unconscious minds of the characters, Patricia Lockwood's book includes the collective consciousness of the online world,

the collective consciousness of Twitter in particular, and how if you use Twitter an awful lot, how it can really influence and change and manipulate your thought patterns. And that's what No One Is Talking About This is about. If you're someone who uses the internet a lot and you like books absolutely get that book it's fucking brilliant it's lovely and for me it was fantastic to read because i'm in the process of writing my next collection of short short stories and sometimes I get bogged down reading like I I love Sally Rooney and I thoroughly enjoy reading Sally Rooney's books right but sometimes I do get bogged down reading Sally Rooney's books because they can be quite solemn there's not a huge amount of humor in Sally Rooney's world that she writes. There's not a huge amount of

humour. There's not absurdity. Everything is quite documentative. Beautiful explorations of human relationships and human emotions but that's not how I write.

And that's not a critique of Sally Rooney. It's just that doesn't make me want to create. It's a passive experience for me. It's not how I write. And that's not a critique of Sadie Rooney. It's just that doesn't make me want to create. It's a passive experience for me. It's not a participatory one. Whereas if I read Flann O'Brien, I want to write now because it inspires my specific set of aesthetics. Like if you've read any of my short stories

or heard them on this podcast, they're quite surreal. They're quite absurd. I use a lot of humour and I love that. I absolutely love that. And when I read something like Sadie Rooney, I can get bogged down because I go, fuck it. Is this what's good writing now? Does everything have to be serious? Is it bad to have jokes or to have something weird happen? I can't write like this. I don't want to write like this. I need something bizarre to happen. But then when I read something like Patricia Lockwood, I'm like, this is mad. This is wonderful prose, lovely exploration of the human condition, and quite comfortably surreal and humorous and absurd at the same time. So when I read something like that, that makes me want to write. Sally Rooney makes me want to read, but it doesn't make me want to write,

because that's just not my style, it's not my comfort zone. And another thing about Patricia Lockwood's book. It's cyberpunk. It's cyberpunk. But we tend to think of cyberpunk as like William Gibson. Or something like that. Written in the 1980s. As a prediction of a future where people live their lives online.

And I do enjoy cyberpunk stuff like William Gibson. But again it's lacking in humour. It's science fiction. It's very imaginative. But there's very little humour. Whereas Patricia Lockwood's book is about characters right now in real life. And what happens to our brains as we consume and use social media all the time. to our brains as we consume and use social media all the time so it's a cyberpunk novel set contemporaneously in what's happening right now but it's utterly bizarre like earlier i

mentioned salt bay salt bay the internet meme where people are spending 700 quid for someone to perform this weird ritual with salt and then hold a knife to your neck this utterly absurd mad thing which is perfectly normal and that's because of internet culture cyberpunk didn't predict that cyberpunk didn't predict like william gibson didn't predict a future where people behave like absolute weirdos online. Cyberpunk novels failed to incorporate the utter absurdity of the human condition. But Patricia Lockwood's book does, because it's about cyberpunk right now. So the book is No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, just nominated for a Booker Prize.

I strongly recommend that book strongly recommend it also I recommend a book called it's a recent book, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez it's, she's an Argentinian writer, it's a collection of short stories, they're

very strange horror it's magical realism magical realism is one of these labels that I kind of have a problem with. It's like the term satire. When someone says something is satire, what they're basically saying is, it's comedy, but smart.

And when someone says magical realism, they're kind of saying, it's fantasy, but smart. And I'm not sure how I feel about that, but that's a cracking book and if you are a fan of the Argentinian writer George Louis Borges who's a bit like an Argentinian

Flan O'Brien you'll like The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez. Also what's another term I don't like? Speculative fiction. Speculative fiction is another word that's used in literary critique where it basically means science

fiction but for smart people. So I'm not crazy about that term either. Who'd be considered speculative fiction? There's an incredible writer called Ted Chiang. Get a book called Exhalation by Ted Chiang.

Again it's a collection of short stories Ted Chiang wrote that there's a film called Arrival it's this weird film where aliens land on earth but the aliens are like these weird elephant squid creatures but Ted Chiang writes speculative fiction

I don't know if he calls it that, but a critic would call it speculative fiction. It's basically saying, Ted Chiang writes science fiction, but it's for smart people. But Ted Chiang's an incredible writer. He just, he writes science fiction, speculative fiction, whatever you want to call it. Deeply, deeply imaginative stuff. And Ted Chiang will take an idea like time travel, something that will bend your brain, and he will manage to take something so unbelievably absurd

and then make it readable and understandable and believable on the page. And he's the master of that and it takes him like 10 years to write one collection of short stories and I usually don't talk about what books I fucking read because I like to hold my cards to my chest when I release my own collections of short stories but that ended up biting me in the fucking arse from my last collection of short

stories boulevard wren because i said on this podcast oh i don't do a lot of reading i don't do a lot of reading because i don't have time to do it and i said that to hold my cards close to my chest because i didn't want to list out a bunch of writers that i was reading and then have my work too heavily compared to those writers when it was getting reviewed but that ended up backfiring on me completely and someone in the Irish Times wrote a fucking review

it wasn't even a review of my book someone wrote an article about me basically saying well if Blind Boy says he doesn't read books then why should I read his I don't believe in gatekeeping literature but actual quote it was subtly read his I don't believe in gatekeeping literature but actual quote. It was subtly arguing that I shouldn't be allowed to write books

basically and I learned a lesson it means that it means that critics will only read your work at a surface level and they won't they won't go beneath that surface level so it gets written off as a distempered Jack Russell from Limerick

who's been handed a typewriter literature is one of the few art forms where you're expected to have like a knowledge of the canon you're expected to be able to list out writers in order for your work to have legitimacy

and I think that's ridiculous I mean musicians don't get that a musician can release an album without needing to list out every single influence they have and people will just take the music at face value but I think it's because literature is heavily populated by people who write books quite a lot of them tend to have studied writing in college whereas with musicians not a huge amount of musicians actually went and studied music

in college so there we are 40 minutes in I've only answered two fucking questions proving once again fuck it if I get answered a question, I'm going to answer it thoroughly. Alright?

Let's have a quick ocarina pause and then after the ocarina pause, I'm going to literally try and answer several questions quickly. Here's the ocarina pause. You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishi Keshe Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Jimeno in conversation.

Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder, April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca comes from you the listener via the Patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast

if you like listening to this podcast if you get a lot from it if you enjoy it then please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing this is my full time job this is how I earn a living my podcasts are mostly monologue essays which require a huge amount of time to prepare and a lot

of research. So if you're enjoying it just please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. If you met me in real life would you buy me a pint or a cup of coffee? That's what I'm looking for. Once a month via the Patreon page. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it.

You don't have to. You can listen for free. Alright? And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. You don't have to. You can listen for free. Alright? And if you can't afford to support the podcast, you're paying for the person who can't afford to listen for free. Everybody gets a podcast. I earn a living. Also, the Patreon model keeps the podcast independent.

I have a certain amount of advertisers during the Ocarina Pause to honour my contract with Acast. But advertisers can't tell me what to talk about or influence the content of the podcast in any way. And it's quite important to keep podcasts independent today in this brand new saturated environment where there's a new podcast every fucking week with corporate money behind it. Podcasts are turning into radio. If you're joining us here tonight, guys, the traffic is back to back on the M50. There's a Salt Bae.

There's a Salt Bae on the motorway and he's slitting throats in hell. And don't forget, guys, we're giving away a lot of tickets tonight. If you want to go and see Salt Bae's restaurant, ring up 576321 if you want to get your throat slit. Here's restaurant. Ring up 576-321 if you want to get your throat slit. Here's a new song from Ronan Keating.

Nobody wants that. Nobody wants their podcast like that. So, yeah, support independent podcasts. Not just mine. Any independent podcast that you listen to. Alright? Follow me on Instagram, BlindBuyBoatClub. Follow me on Twitch, twitch.tv forward slash

the blind buy podcast so business hammocks asks how can people learn to like themselves well what I'd say to that is

is if you have difficulty liking yourself if you're not too happy with who you are if you spend if you spend a lot of time being ferociously self-critical

or simply not being happy with you as a person when you think about who you are and you might feel disappointment I'd say the first step is don't set the bar too high don't don't say to yourself how do I learn to like myself begin by accepting yourself if you don't like yourself if you're not happy with with who you are it's probably because you're overly critical and you have quite a lot of strict rules about how you should be and if you have all these strict rules about how you should be. And if you have all these strict rules about how you should be, then it can be quite easy to not live up to those rules and then you're a consistent disappointment to yourself. So one way to foster self-acceptance is to recognize and acknowledge that you're a fallible human being.

That fallibility is part of being human. That means that you might disappoint other people. You might let other people down. You mightn't be as available, emotionally available to other people as you'd like to be. You might be frightened of things. There might other people as you'd like to be. You might be frightened of things. There might be goals that you'd like to achieve. But you don't take the risk of achieving those goals because you're afraid of failing. Rather than accommodating an internal dialogue.

Where for, when you think about those things about yourself. Rather than viewing them as bad things I'm a fucking shithead because I'm scared to go for that job that I really want or I'm a rotten person because my friend is in need

or my friend is upset and I'm not being a good enough friend to them instead of having an internal dialogue Or my friend is upset and I'm not being a good enough friend to them. Instead of having an internal dialogue that chastises yourself, you try and challenge that chastisement by accepting, this is where I am right now. Yeah, I am scared of achieving goals. I am frightened to do this thing that I want to do. I am jealous of other people.

Sometimes I think that other people are better than me or sometimes I think that I'm better than other people. And this is just how I am right now. And when I accept these things rather than fight them, I can acknowledge that not only am I fallible but I'm changeable I can gradually work on these things

and the fact that the other thing too if you're beating yourself up over things about yourself that you don't like the fact that you're recognising them is a positive starting point the fact that you're recognizing them is a positive starting point the fact that you're going here's a bunch of shit about myself that i don't like change the narrative to here's a bunch of shit about myself that i'm not too happy about right now in my life but here's a starting point to change, I can improve,

life is a journey, and through self acceptance, and then self compassion, and working on that stuff, you'll get to a place where you feel alright about yourself eventually, and it's hard fucking work, and it's daily work, and you'll have your ups and your downs,

but being overly critical of yourself, that you're putting yourself in a position where it becomes harder to grow and use empathy think about how forgiving you can be of other people if you're if your friend isn't achieving goals that they'd like to achieve, do you think they're a bad person? Or if you're having a bit of a rough patch and you'd like your friend to be more available to you, do you think they're a bad person? Do you assume that they hate you?

Or do you simply go, they might have their own shit going on right now? We're often quite forgiven an understanding of other people's insecurities and other people's shortcomings. And we'll be extra harsh on ourselves for the same shit. So accept yourself the way that you can accept other people. And the classic, if your sense of self-worth consistently comes from comparing yourself to other people, then it's very difficult to have self-worth. So that can mean if you're excessively jealous of other people, what they have or where they are in their life, and you spend a lot of time feeling jealous of them and going, fuck it, they're doing so much better than me. the time feeling jealous of them and going fuck it they're doing so much better than me or similarly if you like to look at other people and look down on them and say look at that fucking waste or they're

doing nothing with themselves fucking asshole look at that person's shit car look at their shitty clothes that also is unhelpful for your self-esteem and also don't allow your self-worth to be defined by any aspect of your behavior by which I mean if you've got a job that you're not too proud of right now you're embarrassed about your job or if you're unhappy with how much money you earn or if you're embarrassed about the fact that you're not in a relationship or if you live at home with your parents. These are just aspects of your behavior. These are temporary conditions that you should accept and you can work towards if that's what you want. But none of that defines your worth as a human being. You're better than nobody else and nobody else is better than you because human beings are too complex to evaluate against each other. It's that simple. I've definitely done a full podcast on fostering self-compassion before.

I can't remember the name of it, but if you look through them, you'll see it in the description. Dara asks, Blind Boy, can you describe the perfect scone? That's interesting. Who doesn't enjoy a scone? The perfect scone for me... There's a place in Limerick called the Lock Bar. It's a bar in front of a river

and in the morning times they do what I consider to be the perfect scone it's just a plain white scone it's not too sweet you have that subtle taste of bread soda it's salty but it's not salt

it's bread soda which is like salt's salty but it's not salt it's bread soda which is like salt's cousin so it's quite plain tiny bit sweet fluffy the memory of salt and then served

with whipped cream and decent jam so that's the perfect scone for me and the Lock Bar in Limerick in the morning time before about 12 that's where you get the best scone for me. And the Lock Bar in Limerick in the morning time before about 12. That's where you get the best scone in Limerick.

Maeve asks, Would you mind speaking about your approach to writing fiction? How and when do you write? How do you assess your own work? I'm sure I've done a ton of podcasts on writing fiction. Very simple. If you want to write, you must literally write you have to you can't think about writing you don't think about what you're going to write you literally have to write

and that's what I do right now I go to a cafe and I say to myself I'm going to leave this cafe with 500 words and that's the rule and I try not to think about what those 500 words will be because if I do that I won't create, I just simply do the 500 words and only in the act of doing, like cycling a bike

you're not going to get to the shop by thinking about cycling to the shop you actually have to get on the bike and cycle to the shop and then you end up at the shop. Writing is the exact same. Your creative imagination will only kick in when you are writing. But if you think about it beforehand, you'll pressure yourself. So that's what I do.

I literally write and set myself a realistic deadline of 500 words. And sometimes I might get a thousand, but I never leave. I won't leave that cafe without 500. Even if they're shit, I need to say to myself, I've done my 500 words. I was reading an interview recently with the author Kevin Barry, who I've had on this podcast before, and I'll have him back again. But Kevin does this interesting thing when he's writing and I might try and borrow it

if I can Kevin doesn't look at his phone or the internet until 12pm that's it he gets up in the morning he writes in the morning because he feels that

writing is quite similar to dreams so Kevin feels that in the morning his mind is most awake so so Kevin feels that in the morning his mind is most awake so he writes first thing in the morning and doesn't let himself near his phone or near the internet because once it gets to 12pm and he goes online

it changes the way that he thinks and I can completely appreciate that I'd love to write before my brain gets thrown into the anxious washing machine that is using social media. He makes a great point. Brad. Brad. Who the fuck is called Brad? He must be American. Brad asks, what is your favourite documentary? I can't think of a favourite documentary off the top of my head but I can tell you that

my favourite documentary maker is Werner Herzog who's a German documentary maker what would be a good Grizzly Man that's be careful with Grizzly Man actually that's quite traumatic

it's about someone who gets eaten alive by a bear any documentary by Werner Herzog Actually, that's quite traumatic. It's about someone who gets eaten alive by a bear. Any documentary by Werner Herzog. He is an incredible documentary maker. And what I enjoy about his documentary making style is sometimes he incorporates elements of fiction to make the most entertaining piece of work. So he doesn't...'t yes it's a documentary

he's also a film director and he brings the language of fiction to how he makes documentaries which which is how I write podcasts when I do a hot take podcast I'm trying to find the most interesting version of the truth rather than the straight up clinical truth. I'm not lying. I'm not misleading. I'm not giving misinformation. But I'm skewing information in the direction of the most interesting and entertaining story. And that's what Werner Herzog does. And the way he talks is interesting. I like the real stuff. I think I hated your poem. It's too artsy-fartsy.

I like the real stuff. He talks like that throughout his entire documentaries. It's ridiculous. Alan asks, How do I learn to not be down on myself for living with my parents in my 30s? So first of all Alan, that's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of because economic conditions have made it such that to live at home with your parents in your 30s is completely acceptable and a rational response to what's happening with the economy and rents and what have you. So in terms of any shame you feel, if you feel like you have failed in some way because of that, that's harsh shit. There's literally no need for that whatsoever. The

conditions of society have made it acceptable to live at home with your parents and to also count yourself lucky because some people don't have that don't have access to that privilege you know what i mean if you do get to live at home with your parents you have a roof over your head now that doesn't mean that we as a collective society should accept the fact that the economic conditions have made it normal for people in their 30s to be living at home we don't need to accept the system that makes that happen but on an individual level there's no reason to feel shame at all one thing i will say which isn't shame, about living at home with your parents is when you, as a fully grown autonomous adult, live with your parents, sometimes it can be difficult to find your adulthood

because your parents can speak to you in a way that triggers your inner child. parents can speak to you in a way that triggers your inner child so you can go about your day maybe feeling internally like a child the dynamic of conversation between you and your parent is going to be parent child even though you're in your fucking 30s and that isn't very good for our sense of self-esteem if you want to hear more about that, go and listen to my podcast about transactional analysis. Living with your parents can put you into a psychological mode of operating whereby you're internally infantile. If you want to know what I'm talking about there, You're internally infantile. If you want to know what I'm talking about there.

Think about. If you don't live with your parents. And then you go home at Christmas. For like a week. And you live with your parents at Christmas. Which a lot of people do. Think of what that does to your personality. Think of how your personality changes.

To. Your personality that you have in your family of origin. the one that you have outside of home in your autonomous adult life with your friends you you without thinking about it you can end up reverting back to dynamics whether it be communication dynamics or internal feelings that are heavily rooted in childhood because you're around your family or around your parents. And that's grand at Christmas, but if you live with your parents all the time, you've got to be very mindful of that. And one thing I will say, if you live with your fucking parents in your 30s try to be as autonomous as humanly possible and that means don't let your ma wash your clothes

don't eat your ma's dinners make your own dinner unless it's an exception don't revert into physical behaviours that would have been rooted in childhood such as your parent literally becoming a caregiver if you can avoid it, if you can avoid that maintain as much adult autonomy while living at home as you possibly can

and if you do that you get to hang on to a semblance of your adult self but if you're waking up in the morning and your ma's making you a fry up or your da's making you a fry up or you're waiting at 5 o'clock because your ma's got the dinner on then it's going to be really difficult to

find your adult self and once that happens that's when your self esteem might start getting affected one last question red asks do you have a hot take on why lesbian relationships move too fast no no i don't and what the fuck would i know that that's a question now that i would be very cautious around answering because any answer i could give would be utterly ridiculous because i don't have any frame of reference for what it's like to be a lesbian.

If I was to make a completely uninformed hot take based on being a fucking heterosexual man, one thing I did notice when I was younger, I had friends who were gay men and lesbians in Limerick Limerick City the gay men had lots more choices of lads who were gay who were their own age so gay men were just like there's not a huge amount of other gay men in Limerick, but there's enough, there's a pool for me to choose from. But my friends who were lesbians didn't have that pool, I don't know why, but they were like, there's only like five other lesbians and that's it. I don't know any lesbians my age. And that's the only observation I had that's it I noticed a scarcity of lesbians in

Limerick when I was growing up and this scarcity wasn't present for men who were interested in other men what do I know that's me answering a question that I was asked while having no frame of reference whatsoever so that's one hour of a podcast. Right there. Where I answered your questions. I'll probably be back next week with. With a hot take most likely. I don't know what I'll be back with next week.

I'm going to do that new thing. I'm doing a new thing. I started it last week. Where I end the podcast now. Then a little ad break happens and then afterwards I come back with a new segment where I play a little song for you that I wrote on my live twitch stream so if you're not interested in music if you don't give a fuck about my musical project that's absolutely fine it's not for everybody I bid you farewell and I'll see you next week.

And if you are interested, just hang around till after the little ad break. 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. So every week on a website called Twitch twitch which is a live streaming website i go on it usually on on thursday nights at half eight twitch.tv forward slash the blind by podcast and what i do on twitch is i i write songs live to the events of a video game and what I have with me is several different live musical instruments and then I have a looping pedal which allows me to record little loops and to layer multiple tracks

so I literally I make up songs in the moment and produce them in the moment completely improvised so I don't know what I don't know what the song is going to be about I don't know what the cards are going to be the entire thing is an act of play it's like I'm I'm I'm trying to be like when I was a little child playing with Lego and I didn't know what I was making I just knew that I was playing with Lego and I wasn't thinking about what I was going to make so I do that with songs and usually what I do is I write a song to the events of a video game that I'm playing live sometimes what I do is I'm chatting to people live in the comments who are watching and depending on what I'm chatting about or depending on what people say in the comments I write a song based on that so this song that I'm gonna play

ye now which I'd written on Twitch a couple of weeks back this came out of a conversation I was having

so when I used to do live gigs with the Rubber Bandits which was my musical group years ago when we used to go

on tour we had a fella working with us right and he he had this weird thing whenever we'd go musical group years ago, when we used to go on tour, we had a fella working with us right, and he, he had this weird thing, whenever we'd go to restaurants, so we'd be finished a gig,

and, we'd go and have dinner after the gig, but then anywhere we went, didn't matter where it was in the world, could have been in fucking New York, could have been in Melbourne, as soon as the dinner was finished, and it came time for dessert we'd just go

oh fuck I know what's going to happen next so this fella he was a tour manager he had an obsession with eating hot cheesecake and he used to have a ritual that he would do with the waiter or waitress so the waiter or waitress.

So the waiter or waitress would come over and say, would you like desserts? And this fella or tour manager would say, have you got hot cheesecake? And they'd be like, what? Hot cheesecake? It's cheesecake, but it's hot. And then the waiter or waitress would go no we don't have hot cheesecake in fact I've never even heard of hot cheesecake you've never heard of hot cheesecake so then a ritual would ensue where he would say to the waiter or waitress

what I want you to do now is go to the chef and ask him for a cheesecake and then ask the chef to get the cheesecake and put it in the microwave so he'd every time asking the waiter or waitress get the cheesecake tell the chef to get the cheesecake and put it into the microwave a lot of the time the waitress or waiter would come back and say the chef won to get the cheesecake and put it into the microwave a lot of the time the waitress or waiter would come back and say the chef won't put the cheesecake in the microwave it's it's not done go back to the chef and tell him i want hot cheesecake and to get the cheesecake

and put it in the microwave and it used to just happen and happen until eventually this melted cheesecake would come back. And then he'd eat the cheesecake and go, I told you, boiling hot cheesecake, I love it. Hot cheesecake, you just get it and you put it in the microwave. So this song, I was on Twitch telling this exact story. And then I just broke into kind of a little blues riff and the song is about hot cheesecake and again the purpose of this is to achieve creative flow so I didn't say to myself

can't write a song about hot cheesecake that's fucking ridiculous because it is ridiculous can't write a song about hot cheesecake you just simply have to do it is ridiculous can't write a song about hot cheesecake you just simply have to do it try it don't judge whether it's good or bad just get straight into the blues song about hot cheesecake just do it so that's what I did so what you're going to hear now is a two minute edited version because there's like there's like a six-part harmony in this so when I would have

done this live on twitch it would have taken about maybe 15 minutes if you were watching it live it would have been 15 minutes in total to play the guitar to find the chords to layer up all the vocals to have have it like that would have taken about 15 minutes so what I did here is I cut it I cut it it's all performed live it was all improv but I cut it down to two minutes to make it more like a song and again what I enjoy about this process is when I remove the song from the live visual and now it's just audio it takes on another dimension the, ok the lyrics are still about a fucking hot cheesecake

but when you can't see anything and you just hear it, the hot cheesecake can become anything it's just an object of desire I want hot cheesecake boiling hot cheesecake in my mouth, put it in the microwave put it in the microwave so that's what this song is. Put it in the microwave. Put it in the microwave.

So that's what this song is. Put it in the microwave. And it's a blues song. And I'm quite happy with the tone I got on my guitar. I'll talk to you next week. Dog bless. Fuck it. I'll introduce it as a...

I'll pretend it's on the radio and I'm going to introduce it as a 2FM DJ. Alright guys. Six weeks at number one. You've been waiting for it all night. His horse isn't outside anymore. He's got a cheesecake in the microwave.

It's Hot Cheesecake by Blind Boy Boat Club featuring Ronan Keating. And put it in the microwave And put it in the microwave And put it in the microwave And put it in the microwave And put it in the microwave And put it in the microwave And put it in the microwave And put it in the microwave

And put it in the microwave and put it in the microwave and put it in the microwave and put it in the microwave and put it in the In the microwave I put it in the microwave Hot cheesecake, hot cheesecake I want that hot cheesecake, hot cheesecake

I want the cheesecake cheesecake Hot cheesecake, I want that cheesecake Blighting in my malt I want a hot malt From some hot cheesecake Did you put it in the microwave? You put it in the microwave You put it in the microwave You put it in the microwave You put it in the microwave You put it in the microwave You put it in the microwave