The Blindboy Podcast - Krapps Last Jape

Episode Date: March 10, 2020

What are the philosophical underpinnings of a podcast? What are the influences for this podcast ? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wash your hands, don't touch your face, sneeze into your elbow. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast, you improvised Ivans. So, a couple of weeks ago, my mother rang me up on the phone and she sounded annoyed with me because she had just opened up the newspaper in Limerick, the Limerick Post. And in the Limerick Post, there were adverts for, like a night, like a community college, I suppose you'd call it, night courses for adults in the paper. And one of the classes that was being advertised was a podcasting course

so there was there was a a course on how to start your own podcast was being run in limerick in as a night course in one of the community colleges for adults one of the community colleges for adults and my ma was annoyed and angry with me saying why didn't you apply to teach this class? Why are you not teaching this class in podcasting? I had to step back from it and realise that you know my mother's she's elderly so she's very old school so she comes from kind of an Irish culture whereby

the job that you get must be the most secure so getting a job we'll say teaching in an institution is the best possible job because it can never be taken away

and that was probably the case maybe 30 years ago but anyone who knows anybody who works in academics now knows that teachers jobs aren't safe so I said to her no ma I'm I'm grand I don't need to be teaching a night course in podcasts in Limerick because my own podcast is actually doing quite well and I have to go on tour to Australia with it next week. So I put the phone down and then I had to reflect on the conversation I'd just had. because as adults, when a parent gives you advice, you have to be very mindful of the advice coming from the parent, because you can give it a lot more credence than it deserves. Like, emotionally, you're like, fuck, my ma wants me to become a podcasting teacher, I better do it.

And then I had to say to myself, no, you're a grown adult man, and you know what you're doing with your life, and you also have a, quite a successful podcast, and don't need to be teaching podcasts in, a night college in Limerick, so I put that aside, and then,

I just couldn't get out of my head, like how do you even fucking teach podcasting, how do you do what how would you if someone put a gun to the back of my head and said go in there and teach a podcasting class like why do you even teach people and it made me reflect more and more how often i get contacted to talk about what a podcast is. Like, not by you, the listener, as such. Mostly what I get asked by you lads is, is blind by what podcast do you listen to? But I get contacted a lot by journalists, mainly.

A journalist maybe once every two weeks would say, we're doing a piece on podcasting in Ireland, because podcasting has gone huge in Ireland, you know. We're doing a piece on podcasting. Mainly, what they want to know about is its advertisers. The advertising industry in Ireland is trying to get its head out of its arse and figure out that podcasts are a thing. Whereas they're still stuck in fucking 2016 looking at influencers on instagram

but anyway i get asked it a lot and it's like i don't know how you would fucking teach podcasting i mean what is it i can tell you what radio is i can tell you what television is because I've worked in both of them, mainly TV. And I can only define podcasting by what it isn't really, to be honest. So let's just take television. Television and radio are similar, but television is my area that I have 10 years experience in. What you have mainly is you're creating one piece of work,

but there's multiple people involved. Producer, editor, cameraman, researchers, this massive team. With radio, which is audio, for a radio show you've got the presenter, then you've got a researcher, then you've got a researcher, then you've got a producer, you've got an engineer, you might have an editor, several people coming together to make this one audio piece. So if you were to teach podcasting,

you're basically teaching all the skills of radio, but for one person to do. That's what separates. That's the difference for me anyway, the main one structurally between what is a radio show and what is a podcast show. Radio shows got an entire team of people, huge set of resources, and a podcast is one person. For this podcast, I present it, I write it, I edit it, I engineer it, I produce it, I do everything in one and

there's pros and cons to it okay what's the advantage of radio well you can have something that's factually quite rigorous because you've got a researcher you've got an editor you have all these other resources to make sure that what you put out is rigorously correct because as you'll know what with this podcast i make a lot of factual area errors week by week um i might get

dates wrong i might get names wrong things like that get names wrong, things like that. But the advantage of the podcast, we'll say, over radio or over television is... So when I, if I was, if I'm, we'll say my BBC TV series that I just finished, which you can still see on the iPlayer, by the way, it's called Blind by Undestroyed, that TV show or any other tv show the main disadvantage that i see with it and what makes me love this podcast is i could start off and me and my writing partner could have a creative vision of what the end result is going to look like. This, a creative vision that's based on ideas and feelings. But then by the end of it, after a year of making it,

because so many people have been consulted in the process and so many people have been involved with their own different opinions and skills, that by the end of it, the end result often is hugely diluted. It's about 20% of the initial original feeling and idea is now in the end piece with podcasting because I have complete and utter control over everything the final product that goes out is about 95% of the initial idea and vision that I had and that's incredibly rewarding

that's why I love podcasting it allows the person who's creating it to if they have the right skill sets and tools to truly deliver what is in their heart and soul

and for that to go out to the listener so that's why i like podcasting because it's fucking frustrating if you're an artist to start a project and then for the end result to be an approximation of what you initially wanted and the other thing too is money a radio show costs a hell of a lot more money to make than a podcast because you're implying so many people and as soon as a lot of money gets stuck into something then compromises have to happen and when compromise happens with entertainment it's usually risks aren't taken and instead uh you're reaching for the lowest common denominator

you don't have to do that with podcasts podcasts you can put them out and it's all risk-based but the downside is you lose rigor and factual accuracy and podcasts are rough around the edges which I think it's fine once your podcasts are honest they're honest and they're authentic and they're congruent if done properly and I think that's what people like to hear radio often isn't honest you know like listen to the radio and listen to how they speak on the radio like imagine if i was to do like when i do a podcast when i'm speaking about mental health and speaking about my experiences with it and trying to be as honest with ye as i would be with a therapist and imagine like i imagine a radio presenter doing that in this strange voice that radio presenters have like fucking they'd be okay guys uh this week i'm going to speak about my experience

with panic attacks now i used to get panic attacks in public situations my heart would be beating really fast it's coming up to nine o'clock now we We've got a lot of big traffic there on the M50. But my heart would be racing. And it ultimately came from a kind of an existential dread and a feeling that I was inadequate. What the fuck is that? Like, what is that? How did that happen? That this was universally decided upon

as an appropriate way to speak to people on an audio medium. I mean, they sound like a recently divorced Kermit the Frog on their fifth line of coke in the back of a fucking taxi. Immediately a barrier is set up that suggests that this person is lying to me. Like, who the fuck talks like that in real life? And they're roaring and shouting, and there's an advert every two seconds. And radio is more like

this aural invasive assault that's just designed to keep you awake. Whereas a podcast is a more relaxed and engaging listen, but they're also more relaxed and engaging. Listen, but they're also fucking hit and miss. There's millions of podcasts. And how often have you turned on a podcast and the idea for the podcast sounds unreal.

You're looking at it going, wow, it's a podcast only about Blade Runner. And you fucking play it. And they're recording it into a podcast only about Blade Runner, and you fucking play it, and they're recording it into a lawnmower, and they don't know how to present. So that's the thing, it's hit and miss. At least with radio, you're guaranteed a level of quality, but it doesn't mean that the creative heart and soul

is there to deliver something that's congruently authentic, and that speaks to your heart, That the creative heart and soul is there to deliver. Something that's congruently authentic. And that has that. That speaks to your heart. Whereas a podcast can. But it's rare when it does. So I don't know how the fuck you teach that. You can't. All you can do is teach people techniques.

But recording and editing. But the magic of what makes a good podcast. There's no teaching that. There just isn't it's it's it's art it's it's artistry it's creativity it's the same as any other art you can teach people how to mix paints you can teach people how to see the world differently but you can't teach people how to make art you just can't it's it's it's a spiritual and emotional thing now that's not me saying that to achieve this artistry i'm speaking about is something that's

now off limits to certain people no it just means all you can do is you can improve people's knowledge of what situations for themselves will get them into the condition of creative flow but you can't teach someone creative flow you can say here are the conditions that might work for you but beyond this point you're on your own and you have to find your voice i can't fucking help you with that i can't tell you how long it's going to take or if you're ever going to find it. Radio and television. Also doesn't allow.

For this spiritual and emotional experience. To be present. Within their mediums. Because there's too many people involved. Podcasting does. Because it's an intimate space. So this week's podcast. I think. What I want to do is

I want to look at that bit I'm not going to do a fucking podcast on here's how you edit here's how you record, fuck that what I want to look at is I suppose the podcast hug as I describe it. The. The bit of a podcast that makes you. Feel that fuzzy warm feeling of engagement.

And almost meditative calm. Which is something that I strive for. Very much on this podcast. I want to look at that. podcast I want to look at that and I want to look at my influences for this podcast because it's not something I'd really thought about I've been asked loads especially at the start of this podcast when I started making it two years ago you know blind by what podcast do you listen to and a lot of people were really disappointed when I said I don't actually listen to that many podcasts because I don't really I

mean I like this American life Bill Burr um Joe Rogan when he doesn't have a racist on but I'm not listening to podcasts loads once a week maybe and it's always been the pattern for me so loads of people were quite disappointed because they really liked my podcast and they were like that's a shame that you don't really listen to other podcasts other people then were flat out fucking don't want to say bitter but angry about it especially people in Ireland who were they'd been making their own podcasts for a while there's been Irish podcasts for fucking years

but a lot of them you know they weren't really getting a lot of listeners but I often find and this is just an observation and it's not just with podcasts this can go for writing and it can go for music generally the people who are very obsessive about about what they're consuming

like podcasters people who make podcasts who are also utter experts in other people's podcasts, their podcasts that they make tend not to be good. And it's a pattern I see with different mediums, whether it be literature or music or podcasts or whatever, right? the deal is if if you're obsessive about your creative medium and obsessive about other people's work and obsessing about what is the best podcast what podcasts are shit what's the best books right now who's writing the best literature what's the best music obsessing about who's getting the best reviews like there's a defensiveness to that level of nerdiness a kind of a judgy defensiveness i tell you how you know how someone's headspace is like that if their knowledge of podcasts we'll say or their knowledge of podcasts, we'll say, or their knowledge of literature, if you're scared to speak about podcasts or literature around them or painting because you're afraid that you're going to say the wrong thing because you're going to get judged, instead of them having a passionate knowledge about their medium,

which is welcoming and inviting and and not gatekept and i find that creators who have this attitude they tend not to create work which is engaging because they're not behaving like artists they're behaving like critics and criticality doesn't have any place in the creative process the creative process the act of creating is about freedom fun non-judgment and an utter embracing of failure okay and if you bring criticality in the part of you that's a critic into your creative process you're creating nothing you're creating nothing because you're in a state of fear you're afraid of failing you're afraid of getting it wrong you're afraid of what if it's shit like that or what if it won't be that good you can't create that way you're you're now stifled as an artist you're stifled and you're

creating with the critical part of your brain and not your fucking heart and soul and i'm not saying that there isn't a place for having knowledge of your of your medium sure i do fucking podcasts that are obsessive about music music and you know I love music but I keep a boundary between the part of me that's like no amount of encyclopedic knowledge about disco or synthesizers is going to make me better as an artist if I'm writing a song it has to come from my heart there There's a place for criticality. The part of you that's a critic and that appreciates the work that's within the medium that you're working in. There's a place for that. But it's not in the creative process.

It's not in the creative moment. It's in the editing process. When the work has been done and it comes from your heart and it comes from a place of feeling and you're dealing with this piece of work that was made fearlessly with tons of risk the next day that's when you bring your inner critic in that's when you have to hold the work up and go right how can this be improved and all an encyclopedic knowledge of your medium does does make you a better not a better artist what it does is that in the editing stage of your art whatever that is in the editing stage it gives you a much greater vocabulary and language

to understand what's wrong why it wrong, or where it can be improved. But you start bringing that shit into the creative process, forget about it. You're not making fucking a podcast that's authentic. You're not writing a story or a book that's authentic. You're not making music that's authentic. And it's, how do you get over it I don't truly conquer your fear of failure truly conquer the fear of failure and conquer the part of yourself that worships the artists in your fucking medium. Conquer that part and the part of yourself that wants to be seen as a great artist.

Everyone who makes art wants to be seen as a good artist. You want the people whose opinions you care about to look at you and think they make good art. You have to, that's one of the most destructive fucking things possible if your self and identity is based upon being seen as a good artist then that means to risk failure means not failing at art but failing as a human being so you have to confront that and how do you do it you embrace failure you invite failure into your creative process so that it stops being scary and instead of being scary you understand that failure is essential you have to fail if you're to create what got me into this yeah so i was saying that

at the start of making this podcast people would say blind by what's your favorite podcasts and when i would respond with i actually don't listen to podcasts that much it it actually made some people quite angry it made people who'd been making podcasts for a long time go who the fuck is this blind boy prick and where does he get the the neck to be making a podcast and for it to be doing well and he doesn't even listen to podcasts and i found that those were the people that were getting pissed off gatekeepers who were making podcasts themselves that the podcasts just weren't doing well and it's not because they can't make good podcasts that just at that time and place from what I can see um they were engaging

too much with their inner critic rather than their inner artist. And then you end up with this frustrated fucking art. Where it's like, I know what I like. Why can't I make it? Thinking like a critic. So this week's podcast is going to be about... It's not about the podcasts that have influenced this podcast. But rather... Like, I didn't pull this podcast out of my arse.

Okay? I didn't just... Fucking decide to sit down and start talking into a microphone. And it having no influences. There's a lot of influences for this podcast, and things that I, pieces of art that I've consumed over the years, that have informed what this podcast is,

because that's ultimately as well what creativity is, when you, a piece of art I care about, is something that makes me want to make a piece of art. And when a piece of art affects you deeply, it sticks into your kind of creative DNA and eventually forms part of your identity as an artist. Art is an ongoing conversation. is original nothing you're gonna take bits of the art that you enjoyed consuming the stuff that impacted and affected you

if you go on to create your own art the dna of that is going to be present in it and that's what i want to do this week's podcast about. So the first. I suppose. Influence I want to mention. And not just influence to my own podcast. But I think something that was quite prophetic. In predicting podcasts.

I want to speak a little bit about Samuel Beckett first. Samuel Beckett was an Irish playwright and author whose work focused on absurdity. And when I say absurdity, absurdism is an interesting word. Absurdity, when we use the word absurdity in referring to art, what we mean is absurdity as a philosophical concept. And absurdity is an absurdism. It's the contradiction, right? It's like I speak about meaning a lot I speak about the desire for finding meaning in life

a lot on this podcast well absurdity is the bit in the middle between trying to find meaning in your life but also being aware that the universe itself is utterly meaningless do you get me it's like if you critically go at the world and the universe and you look at the size of it you go

fuck this is utterly meaningless you're you're born and you die and so does every other living thing and what even is life this is meaningless if you remove god we'll say if you remove the concept of god or creation you just go wow life is fucking meaningless yet within life you have to try and find some type of meaning within it. So it's, absurdity is almost like a cognitive dissonance. The part of yourself that smokes cigarettes, even though you know that cigarettes will give you cancer. That's what absurdity is. It's almost the irrational, manic madness of searching for meaning in life when ultimately you know that everything is meaningless and that's absurdism and for with beckett and with his plays

and his writing anxiety is a huge theme for him. And he suffered from mad anxiety. He suffered from panic attacks. And he suffered from anxiety. And a lot of his work. I'm no fucking expert on Beckett. But when I look at Beckett's work. Something like Endgame.

You're getting kind of. A stream of consciousness. It's like the. There's an anxiety from Beckett's work. And the. Absurd anxiety of Beckett's work. It's not comfortable. It's not nice.

It's a little bit like. The internal. Washing machine of your own head. when you're experiencing a panic attack. Like, don't come away from this podcast thinking, oh, I better go see some Samuel Beckett. You probably won't enjoy it. These are plays that are a meditation on meaninglessness. And you'll sit there going going what the fuck is this about like in Endgame

there's two of the main characters are in a dustbin eating dog biscuits it's really manic and mad and dark and you're in the audience going what the fuck is this and that impact of being

at a Beckett play and looking around at other people and kind of going why the fuck am I here is he for real these people are on stage eating dog biscuits and there's no coherent narrative and there doesn't appear to be a story same with wait waiting for Godot it's just a play about two lads fucking waiting for a lad called Godot and nothing happens and imagine this now in the 50s and 60s when he was making him because since then obviously the absurdity of Beckett has gone on to influence um David Lynch I would say you know you look at fucking Twin Peaks things like that that's a hundred percent beckett so

we're a little bit more comfortable now with absurdity within our mediums but when beckett was doing it in the theater people would get uncomfortable and people would get angry and people would get frustrated and people would look around and go why are we here is this good how do i know it isn't good and it's almost like Beckett's plays are confronting the audience with the meaninglessness of existence do you get me if I said earlier that absurdity in an artistic sense is the little bit in between life having no meaning and then searching for life in it when you're at a beckett play you're confronted with it the feelings of frustration that you have with the beckett play are kind of what we should be feeling about life in general but we don't and you're left

searching for meaning in a beckett play and it isn't fucking there because it's absurd. So it's like he's inviting everyone into this strange fucking group therapy where you're confronted with that which you don't want to think about because for a lot of people if you spend too much time thinking about the meaninglessness of life, that can send people down a very dark path. Albert Camus, a philosopher who'd be associated with absurdity, he said that he had a bunch of choices that you could have when presented with the meaninglessness of existence.

I can't remember them all, but one of them was commit suicide and the other one was find god but that they're ultimately just distractions so i'm not like beckett's a huge influence on me in general because i'm fascinated by his work i'm fascinated i'm not saying I necessarily enjoy Beckett what I'm saying is I'm fascinated with how he uses absurdity and surrealism to create some uncomfortable emotions in the audience that's what I'm interested in but what I'm really interested in with Beckett and podcasts Beckett has a play and this play is from 1958 and the play is called Crap's Last Tape. And what I find so interesting about Crap's Last Tape is that it's an example of Beckett's Theatre of the Absurd. Theatre of the Absurd is a word that's used.

It refers to artists of that time who were operating within absurdity as their artistic medium right so beckett has this play called crap's last tape which is an example of utter absurdity but what it is is a man called crap right for two fucking hours sitting down in a dark room on his own listening to recordings of his own voice and basically this crap character we don't know much about him but he is someone it's his when the play occurs it's his 69th birthday and crap has spent his entire life recording his thoughts and what's going on from him inside every single day. This personal diary of his ailments and his feelings,

he decided to record every single day and store it on a tape. And Crap's last tape is him on his 69th birthday listening back to the recordings he made in private of himself and reflecting on him and what it is, it's him trying to find meaning in his life now in 1958

this would have been utterly absurd in 1958 you didn't record your fucking, anyone who was recording their voice would have been working in a radio station people didn't really have voice recorders at home

to record your voice you know to do an hour of talking every single day in 1958 would have been very expensive you'd have had to have had a huge reel to reel tape it was very expensive, it cost money it was heavy, you'd have had to store it to do it every single day of your life to have had a huge reel-to-reel tape. It was very expensive. It cost money. It was heavy. You'd have had to store it. To do it every single day of your life would have required a warehouse.

So it would have been a massively impractical thing to record your thoughts into a microphone every single day in 1958. But in this play, this lad, Crap, who's 69, is sitting at a desk in a dark room with a single light coming down on him listening back to his own personal recordings and you look at it in 2020 and it's just it's it's a play about a man who has a podcast that's all it is it's a play about someone who has a fucking podcast and it's no longer absurd you're listening to it now

every week for the past two fucking years I've sat down in a dark room with a light over me and a plastic bag on my head and have recorded my thoughts and within Crap's last tape

you find it's not just a prophecy of what podcasts are in general, but for me personally, when I look at Crap's Last Tape, this play that Beckett considered to be incredibly absurd and ridiculous, absurd and ridiculous i see in crap's behavior what i try to do with this podcast which is i record this podcast each week for you the listener but also there's an element of i do it for me too when i when i speak about we'll, my own mental health on this podcast, or if I talk through elements of my life, that things that have happened, that for me is actually a contemplative space

where I get to enter a state of flow, and it's a form of meditative therapy for me that I'm sharing with you to try and find. A moment of authenticity. Where. It just communicates. As something that's listenable.

And the thing with crap. In crap's last tape. Even though he's quite frustrated. You know. In the. I'm going to say vacation. Because I've never heard anyone. Refer to referring to beckett as vacation so within the vacation universe and absurdity and meaning why is crap in crap's last tape at 69 years of age listening back to all these recordings of himself when he was 39 and what's the other

age that's in it he listens to one when he's in his 50s i think he's trying to look back on his life and search for meaning he's trying to find meaning in existence through listening back through recordings and i achieve a sense of meaning each week by recording this podcast so I just think I think Crap's Last Tape and the work of Beckett

it's important for me but I think it's a nice comment on podcasts in general how what was once absurd is now not absurd at all and it's completely normal and the real absurdity to be honest

is radio which has become hyper capitalist and attention seeking and lacking in any type of authenticity another definite when I try and this isn't a deliberate thing on my part. I don't think, oh, I better bring a bit of Beckett into the podcast.

It's just, when you enjoy something and it affects you, even if it affects you in a way that bothers you, because a lot of Beckett's work bothers me, I don't like it, it makes me upset, it still creeps in as an influence and when I do a live podcast like I'm very much thinking of Beckett like when I do a live podcast I'm not I'm not trying to have it as just an interview with someone or I'm not trying to have it as come along and see two people talking that's not what I try and do with my live podcasts I have my live podcasts in where possible theater settings and I deliberately light the live podcast the way that Beckett would like the stage and Beckett's lighting in his theatre works, it's always very dark.

A single light, a lot of the stage in darkness, or maybe a wash of colour, and then the audience in complete darkness. I think with Beckett, a lot of what he was doing with his plays is he was trying to create sensory deprivation. He wants the people in the audience to forget that they're in an audience, and that's what you feel. If you ever go and see a Beckett play in the Abbey or anything that's what you feel you forget that you're in the audience and when I do a live podcast I want that I want the audience to be in complete darkness and to forget that they are in an audience and then when I bring my guest out on stage I have it lit like a play and it's me and my guest two stools and a table and I'm not looking for an interview what I'm searching for is a conversation that has the

intimacy of a conversation you'd have in a kitchen that's allowed to evolve and change and go wherever it needs to go and occasionally i'll bring it back to stuff that's relevant but if a chat with someone on a live podcast for me if it goes into an interesting direction then what's happening there is that theater is being created in the moment and i know it sounds pretentious as fuck but I'm a professional artist this is the type of stuff I think about this is the stuff that I spend my day meditating on really is you know if if I'm in a theater how can I bring theatrics to what is essentially two people talking and I think of Beckett I think of fucking Samuel Beckett's work and I do see it as creating live improvised theatre in the moment

around human stories and words and conversations that's what I see it as I know you can go chill out blind boy it's just two people talking on stage. Maybe it is. But my intentions. And my goal.

Is for it to have moments. Where by it's theatre. It is theatre happening in the moment. Same when I do. Outdoor podcasts. Part of the reason I fucking love doing outdoor podcasts so much, like, I did one two weeks ago, I can't remember what I fucking called it, but it was, I did a podcast two weeks ago in Sydney, lads, all right, if you heard it, go back two, three podcasts, hold on, I'll just find out what the fucking name of it is, I'll get up Spotify

here, see, I can't know the name of my own podcasts Blind Buy Podcast Ode to a Princely Bin Chicken so, the last three podcasts, I recorded this in the Botanical

Gardens in Sydney right and as you know I refer to them as my ASMR podcast it's about I use a stereo mic to capture the entire sound of where I am and I want it to be an immersive experience whereby you're you forget where you are you're involved in in the world of where i am at that time and the reason i don't do them every week because they can be hit and miss it's hard to nail it but when i do an outdoor podcast like that one that was in the botanical gardens in sydney ultimately what I'm looking for is, I'm actually, I'm trying to create, like a radio play,

in the moment, that is, fact and fiction at the same time. And by which I mean, and now this might sound ridiculous, but it's what I actively use as part of my process so if you want to speak for a fucking hour into a microphone and you want people to be able to listen to that what's key is storytelling you have to have the structure of story and what is a story very basic a story is set up conflict resolution

so when i would record a podcast like that one i did in sydney botanical gardens and i kind of have a rough idea of what i'm going to talk about have a bare idea but also what i want is i want my environment physical environment to confront me with things whereby I react in the moment to create new things to talk about so for that it was when I was walking around with the ferns and the lizards but also what I'm looking for is conflict and a beautiful moment of synchronicity happened on that podcast three weeks ago when I was in the Sydney Botanical Gardens. When I started the podcast, I gave you the setup and I said, right, here I am in the Sydney Botanical Gardens. And within five minutes, it started to rain.

Now, I hadn't planned it. I hadn't planned that. But it was so fucking perfect that that happened at that time, because all of a sudden now, conflict occurs. Here we are, we're in the Sydney Botanical Gardens, and then the fucking rain happens, and now we've got conflict, and because we have conflict, I now have a journey, and that journey became, how do I find shelter? So when I do that, as, again again as fucking pretentious as it sounds

I'm looking for a type of improvisational theater where I'm searching for the story in the moment by putting myself into situations where conflict occurs same with uh i recorded one in spain where i was in a park and some people were saying why the fuck go to a park if you're continually disturbed by noises and it's like that's the point i want to be disturbed by noises i i want to record an outdoor podcast and i want conflict i want my job is to speak to you and be heard and i want other things to come in and interrupt us because that interruption creates conflict and conflict drives narrative and drives story the sound of a leaf blower that's getting in the way of our podcast that's now a monster that has to be defeated and slain and you do it by walking away or navigating it you're introducing conflict which drives narrative and now all of a sudden you're telling a story and once you're telling

a fucking story you have meaning and once you have meaning you've got people listening and engaged record the same shit in a fucking hotel room and then different story stuff might not happen you might remember a podcast i did called poltergeist of a builder where during the middle of this podcast my fire alarm wouldn't stop going off then i went down and i went outside and i hit the fire alarm with a harley and the battery exploded like that wasn't planned what i did as part of my creative process in recording the podcast was i want to actively allow things to go wrong when I record this podcast. Something that would be considered on radio wholly inappropriate. It could be me getting a text message.

It could be that fucking fire alarm outside. The fire alarm exploding and then me making a song out of the sound of the battery that I recorded. That is experimental creativity in the moment and understanding in a creative setting that conflict and allowing things to go wrong in the creative process, if you respond to them flexibly with creativity, they don't have to fuck things up. What happens is things going wrong

can be worked with in a, like judo, and all of a sudden now they're driving the narrative. And that right there is embracing failure. Do you know what I'm saying? When I was saying earlier, when you're creating and you embrace failure, that's what I fucking mean. I'm recording a podcast outdoors, it starts to rain. Normally you'd say, fuck this, it's raining, I better go for coffee for a half an hour.

No. Embrace the failure of rain. Fire alarm explodes. Embrace the failure of the fucking fire alarm exploding. Do you know what I mean? That's how you embrace failure and bring it into your creative process by reacting to it flexibly. And you end up with all these happy

accidents that you would have never found in real life and the key to it is playfulness be playful with them don't get angry with the rain don't get angry with the fire alarm exploding or whatever in your creative process is going wrong don't get angry with it don't get frustrated with it notice and accept that it's there and playfully see what you can do with it in the in the moment and it harks back to Beckett because Beckett was a huge fan of failure in his work as well Beckett has a quote it's probably it's probably the most famous Samuel Beckett has a quote. It's probably the most famous Samuel Beckett quote. He said, Ever tried, ever failed, no matter.

Try again, fail again, fail better. And that right there, that's Beckett letting you into his process. Failure was a huge part of his process. Because with Beckett's work, which was so utterly mad and not aesthetic how do you even know what a fucking success is what's your new play samuel it's two hours of two people eating dog biscuits in a bin talking out of their fucking arse nothing happens how do you decide whether that's a success or failure do you know know what I mean? So before I continue on to some other stuff, let's get the ocarina paws out of the way,

you greasy pricks. What do we do? Ocarina paws, alright. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil.

It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey!

Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The first omen, only in theaters April 5th. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th,

when the Toronto Rock 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. Still longing for that original ocarina with the high octaves.

That one just got a, it's got a large chest on it and it's too bassy. So you probably heard an advert for some bullshit there. This podcast is supported by you via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash The blind boy podcast if you listen to this podcast and you enjoy it and you're listening to it each week then please become a patron this podcast is how i earn a living i make the podcast for free it's a huge amount of work and you can pay me for listening to it by going to the to becoming a patron at the patreon page some people listen for free other people if you can afford it please give me the price of a pint

or the price of a cup of coffee once a month that's all i ask okay and by doing that it means that if the podcast stays free and people who can't afford that then can listen to it too rather than me having to make it exclusive or charging for the whole thing you know so please become a patron and people come and go as patrons and that's why i always push it each week um i really got to keep pushing it. To know that this is what funds the fucking thing. Have any live gigs coming up? Yes I do. Just off the top of my fucking head.

Look this week I'm going to. Glasgow is sold out. I'm talking to Limmy. Liverpool and Birmingham. That's this week lads. 2020 March. There are still a few tickets left. Liverpool and Birmingham, London sold out, I'm going to be talking to Roisin Murphy, the legend, then on the 29th of March we've got Cork Opera House, very few tickets left for that, then Vicar Street Dublin, 1st, 2nd, 3rd of April, what else have I got, actually I have a few gigs in March Drogheda

on Saturday the 21st of March we've got the TLT Concert Hall then Monaghan we've got the Iontis Theatre on the 28th Ulster Hall in Belfast in April so come along to those lads. Alright.

So. Another. Again it's not a podcast. But it's. I suppose you'd call it. It was a radio show. An incredibly surreal. And absurd radio show.

That would follow in the Beckett tradition. That was a massive influence. That is a massive influence on not only this podcast but anything I do even even short story writing it was a radio show called Blue Jam and Blue Jam was created by legendary genius comedian Chris Morris, an English fella who'd be a huge influence on me growing up. Someone who really showed me that comedy can be deeply surreal, that in order to be funny,

it doesn't mean that you have to be crude or you have to be slapstick, but that you can introduce deep absurdity and surrealism in order to achieve comedy and it's what would always turn me on creatively towards comedy would be the work of chris morris and of course flan o'brien the irish writer but blue jam chris morris made brass eye Blue Jam. Chris Morris made Brass Eye, by the way. If you've ever seen Brass Eye, it was like a parody of the news in the 90s. Fucking genius. Go and see Brass Eye if you haven't seen it. You'll get it on YouTube. Chris Morris made Brass Eye. He wrote it.

Huge attention to detail on how it was made. Brass Eye, in my opinion, is the last great piece of British comedy television in the Golden age when there was a lot of money and there was enough money for something to be allowed to fail because brass eye spent more money than it made and there was huge amount of creative control that kind of ended as soon as reality tv came in brass about 1996-97, and I remember it when I was a child, I used to fucking love it, but Blue Jam was Chris Morris's radio show that I didn't hear at the time, I had

to hear it years later on the internet, but when I did listen to it, it blew my fucking mind, and Blue Jam, again, it was one of Chris Morris's projects that I really don't think he wanted it to succeed, or cared whether it succeeded, he simply wanted to make something that he enjoyed and was given the resources to do it and it went out Jesus I used to it went out at three or four in the morning on BBC radio it was so disturbing and strange the BBC wouldn't put it on in the daytime so they used to put it out on the early hours of the morning which made it even better because you're thinking who listens to the radio at three in the morning in the late 90s? Like taxi drivers, people working the night shift. There's a real loneliness to late night radio

There's a real loneliness to late night radio. That I find, I've always found really endearing. I've mentioned before like there's an album by Donald Fagan from Steely Dan called The Nightfly. Which is a concept album about a late night radio DJ who plays jazz. And there's always been something about late night radio. The loneliness of it that i found endearing it reminds me of a film noir where when you when you're relegated to that slot at two in the morning and there's barely anyone listening that that's the only time that radio has space to breathe and to relax and to make mistakes and be contemplative. And Blue Jam captured that energy perfectly,

but twisted it with this Beckett type of surrealism. And what Blue Jam did for me is it introduced me to the concept of the surrealism of Brass Eye, but also showed me that humour can be delivered through ambience that you can deliver surreal humor in a very trippy slurred laid-back ambience and a lot of that energy from that I find coming up in myself when I when I read my short stories any of the podcasts where I'm reading my short stories my heart goes to Blue Jam, that's where my creative locus is

like when you're in a state of flow I always say you're emotionally returning to a point when you first heard or experienced someone else's piece of art that deeply affected you at a young age so when I would have been

listening to Blue Jam when I was maybe 19, 20 it would have deeply affected me as just going wow this is fucking incredible this is amazing I feel like I'm witnessing these jewels that only I can see

and this is just tingling every part of my internal artist so when you then create art years later and you feel a sense of flow you're trying to search for that feeling you felt when you were first affected by someone else's art so when I'm if I'm reading a short story on this podcast and I feel that feeling of when i'm performing it i'm going back to that moment of first immersing myself in blue jam so i'm going to play a small little excerpt here of blue jam so you can get an idea of what i'm talking about and this is chris morris I had been in the pub three hours, talking to a guy I used to work with called Ian,

before I realized he wasn't Ian at all, and I was in the wrong pub. By that stage he was very cross. He poked me in the chest and asked me if I was some kind of puppy squeezer I didn't know what he meant He had me thrown out for it I walked the street until I came to a doorway where I used to lean when I was married to a wife

I think I've forgotten her name now No, I haven't It was Rosalind. Yes, I have. I had intended to empty the pub out of my bladder here, but the doorway was lit up and surrounded by film cameras. Hydraulic pistons poked out of the side of the building. A beautiful girl sat where I used to lean, holding a bunch of leaves to her face

and inhaling deeply while an assistant applied make-up to her nose and teeth. Next to her, an elephant was being made up too. It wore a special jacket with fireworks attached. Grey foundation was being applied to its trunk. The model was asking if the elephant had been given its breakfast. She said it shouldn't be expected

to do this work without eating homeopathically fireproofing seeds. She'd insisted on it in her contract. So that was an excerpt there from Blue Jam. And it's like sketches but also like it was later turned into a TV series called Jam. And bizarrely what they did to make it is they got the audio from Blue Jam, this thing that was made just for audio,

and then they kept the audio and made actors' voice, like, how do I explain it? They didn't record the actors. The actors had to mount the words of the audio sketches that already existed, and as a result, they kind of slowed it down a little bit and made it a little bit more slurred and jam the tv series which is the tv sketch version of blue jam it's one of the most surreal pieces of television comedy ever made it's it's i love it i fucking love it um but what drew me towards blue jam it was those monologues

that chris morris was doing there just an incredibly surreal ambient short story about something utterly ridiculous but delivered in such a way that it sounds more important than it is but delivered in such a way that it sounds more important than it is and that's what always drew me to it and it's my it's what i try and recreate i think when i'm reading a short story and when i began to research more into jam years later because of course there was only about there's only three seasons of it so once you're finished listening to the five six hours of jam of blue jam that exists i was like fuck it that was amazing and there's nothing else like it what am i supposed to do there's nothing else like blue jam and then through some amount of research that i did i found out that the main influence for blue jam and something that nearly i don't that chris morris heavily borrowed from was the work of a joe frank and joe frank

he is like i i love blue jam but when i discovered the work of Joe Frank that's when I truly found my heart and soul when it came to what I would like to do if ever I had an a purely audio medium where it's just me talking Joe Frank appears to be the one who invented surreal storytelling over a very ambient calming background where you're essentially hypnotizing the listener into a calmed state whereby you can deliver all level of madness at them in in a in a form that sounds authoritative so joe frank he would have been operating in the late 1970s and early 80s for npr who are i'll tell you about npr in a bit and why i think joe frank is important to podcasts but there was a show called npr playhouse which would have California and it was a one-hour radio drama is what NPR Playhouse was but Joe Frank would essentially deliver an hour-long short story as this incredibly surreal

monologue that had an ambient background and Joee frank his background he was an english teacher and he also was a student of philosophy and he was massively massively influenced and interested in the work of samuel beckett so joe frank was he was trying to get remember i spoke earlier about i said that when you attend a samuel beckett play you're left with this if the play is so absurd that when you're in the audience you're going, what does this mean? And you're struggling with the sense of meaning and that process of trying to understand Beckett on stage means that you're now confronting the meaninglessness of existence. Well Joe Frank did that, except he didn't do it in a way that was frustrating or anxiety inducing. except he didn't do it in a way that was frustrating or anxiety-inducing. Joe Frank would confront you with the meaningless of existence,

except you'd accept it. His work was so calming and ambient and meditative that you begin to accept how utterly ridiculous and absurd his work is and you go along with it and it hypnotises you. And when I first heard joe frank i was like fuck this is it this is what i want and i prefer it to blue gem i do prefer it to blue gem because it's longer it's deeper it's more philosophical it's much wider um to interpret the humor in there is if the search for the humor it's not as as deliberately surreal as blue jam it's true art it's true and utter art and i think one of his pieces that he

made in 1982 i think martin scorsese robbed it and made a film out of it and joe frank ended up successfully suing him but i'll play a little also a huge important thing for me with joe frank is when i speak about the importance of recording my voice in a certain way to give the podcast hug to make sure that the audio fidelity of my voice can come across in a podcast i'm trying to copy what joe frank was doing i still can't do it because he was using analog equipment but the way that he recorded his voice you could just listen to it all day long uh a couple with the fact that he just had a beautiful voice and the recording i'm going to play for you, I don't think it does it full justice, because it's hard to get your hands on Joe Frank stuff, so I don't know how good the quality of the recording is compared to the original,

but give this a little listen. It's an excerpt from a one-hour Joe Frank monologue called Islands. It was twilight. Dusk. I was in a deserted part of the city with a six-year-old boy, presumably my son, though I sensed somehow that we just met, that I didn't really know him. We were in a residential district of low-rent, single-dwelling houses

with beat-up wooden porches and small, untended backyards and sidewalks with grass growing up through the cracks. The sun was down, the sky was getting dark, and it was almost time for the streetlights to come on. There were no people, no cars passing, and no light in any of the windows of the houses on the street. I had no idea what part of the city I was in. The neighborhood was completely unfamiliar to me.

There were no street signs, and no evidence of public transportation, no bus stops, taxi stands, or subway entrances. It was fall and getting chilly. I walked along with my son

or whoever he was trying to hide my fear. In spite of the fact that I had no idea where I was there was a route I felt compelled to follow. I didn't know where it led or why I was following it, but we had to squeeze under fences, climb through prickly hedges of thorns, and go down back alleys. We made our way through yards with wash. So that there is joe frank right and

that's just an excerpt that whole piece would be like an hour okay and just me giving you that 20 30 seconds doesn't really do it justice but you can hear the tone of how he uses his voice the way that it's calming the way that there's an urgency to the calmness the way he uses the background and ambience of the synthesizer to make you feel unsettled the way he uses certain words to introduce the concept of menace you know when he says i was with a six-year-old boy and you're wondering what the fuck you doing with a six-year-old boy but then you don't know whether the six-year-old boy is real or not or whether he's speaking about himself you don't know whether the story is present in in now or is it some

ethereal thing that's happening outside of existence and he manages to perfectly encapsulate for me Beckett style absurdism but in a way that's actually aesthetically pleasing I don't return to Beckett's work I'm not going to sit down in an evening and put a stage play version of Waiting for Godot or Crap's Last Tape on the television it's it's confronting me too much but with joe frank he's lulling me away with his beautiful voice and his excellent storytelling to tell me something batshit crazy and i don't give a fuck what it is i'm just happy to listen so i i think joe frank for me is without doubt the biggest influence for me when I was trying to figure out what the podcast was going to be or what it was going to be about that's where my heart is you know definitely Joe Frank is a huge huge part of that

he died there two years ago I mean he died he was about 80 he was sick for the past 10 years of his life finding his stuff online was difficult the best way to get it was through his own website and he wasn't doing patreon but on his website you could do paypal and pay to support him and pay to buy his uh his stuff So that's what I was doing, especially when he was sick, when he was sick in the last 10 years of his life because he was living in America and their shit healthcare system.

He was selling his monologues that he'd done throughout his life to patrons who would pay for it. This would pay for his healthcare. So I was supporting Joe Frank all the way up into his death financially. He's someone who I would have absolutely fucking adored to get on the podcast to talk. But an incredibly elusive individual.

And if you want to hear Joe Frank's stuff you can still go to his website and buy it. I think the money goes to his wife. I do recommend you buy it. Yeah he's a huge one for me. Then another really really interesting fact about joe frank and what ties him in to podcasts and also nicely kind of weirdly ties samuel beckett into podcasts like i said joe frank's hero was samuel beckett chris morris's hero was joe frank but when joe frank sat down to do audio he

was going how do I do audio but make it like Samuel Beckett. That's who he's looking towards as his artistic guide and I mentioned at the start of the podcast This American Life which is one of the biggest podcasts in the world. It's a radio show technically but it's a radio show that set a lot of a lot of the templates for what podcasts are because this american life success it's more successful as a podcast than a radio show and i've been listening to it for years and ira glass who is the long-time presenter of this american life since 1996 which is an NPR program, Ira Glass was trained in to radio by Joe Frank, which I find fucking beautiful. So when Ira Glass was a young fella learning about how do you make engaging content for radio, how do you make a story out of nothing,

how do you speak and record your voice in such a way that it captures the listener in a way that radio doesn't joe frank showed him how to do it and i find that fascinating and nice i find it charming that it means that jo Frank. Does have a rightful place. In the DNA of what a podcast is. And then by that rationale. Samuel Beckett. Has a place in the DNA of what a podcast is. And that the fact that Beckett in 1958.

Created something like Craps Last Tape. A play about a man on his own trying to find meaning through the recording of his own voice in this dark room. And then Joe Frank, essentially, Joe Frank becomes Crap. If you were to look at what is Joe Frank's career, he does all these surreal monologues. No one really knows what he is. there's a huge amount of autobiography in his monologues but they're half fiction as well he

became crap in Crap's Last Tape that's what Joe Frank became he became one of Samuel Beckett's characters and had this career out of it and then trained Ira Glass who made This American Life. So that's all I have to say. I mean it wasn't a podcast about how to make podcasts. I don't think

you're going to come away from listening to this thinking wow Blind Boy did a podcast there on how to make podcasts. I did a podcast on the philosophy of in particular this podcast but also the philosophy of podcasts in general and i think if i had taken my mother's advice of going to limerick senior college and teach some fucking night classes in podcasting i'd be out the door in five minutes if that's what i would have delivered him all right god bless y'all i'll talk to you next week, you cunts. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30 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 pay as we play come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com Thank you. Thank you.