The James Donald Forbes McCann Catamaran Plan - moss man

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

My upcoming show in Brisbane: https://www.standup.com.au/event/james-donald-forbes-mccann-sit-down-comedy-clubPatreon: www.patreon.com/jdfmccann Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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I'm Jessie Cruikshank, and on my podcast, Phone a Friend, I break down the biggest stories in pop culture. But when I have questions, I get to phone a friend. I phone my old friend, Dan Levy. You will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know what thirsty meant until there was all these headlines and i get schooled by a tween facebook is like a no that's what my grandma's on thank god phone a friend with jesse crookshank is not available on facebook it's out

now wherever you get your podcasts a cast helps creators launch grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere a cast.com Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Hello, darling listeners. Welcome to this episode of the James Donald Forbes McCann Catamaran Plan. It's good to be with you. It's the end of the tour, but I'm still in Brisbane. I'm doing a show

tonight at the Sit Down Comedy Club, which you're welcome to come to if this comes out before. Yes, it will come out. It's Tuesday. What's it? Tuesday the 13th of June. Come on down. That'll be nice, but otherwise I'm just... I anticipate that I will have huge amounts of energy for that show, but right now I am flat as a tack at the end of the tour. There was a lot of flying. We started out in Adelaide, flew to Sydney, three shows in Sydney, flew to Melbourne, two shows in Melbourne, flew to Brisbane. And on that flight to Brisbane, something unusual happened to my ear.

I'm still not entirely sure what it was because I went to a doctor in Brisbane. I went to a doctor who was open late on a Sunday in the CBD. So you know it's a good doctor. And goodness gracious me, some sort of tired adult woman was trying to get in to see the doctor and said she'd been waiting there too long. And she said, I'm leaving, this doctor's rude. With the sort of accent that you sort of think might only exist inside a fevered stereotype until you see it live and in the flesh. And the doctor basically said, don't fly, your ear's no good. Which was hard because I had a gig booked in Cairns for the next night. I was going to fly up

and back to Cairns and then fly home from Brisbane after my show. And the doctor said, look, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be doing that. So I've just had a few days in Brisbane, winding down, seeing some chums, getting ready for this show tonight at the Sit Down Comedy Club. Door's open at 6 for a 7pm show and it's going to be nice. But there's something in me that gets very tired on tour. It was maybe only the last day of the touring that I got into the energy. Like if you look at it on paper, flying shouldn't tire you out.

There should be nothing tiring about flying. You wait in a line for a little bit, you sit down for a few hours, and then you leave and do some more sitting. It's not like a workout, but there is something deeply draining about having flown. Maybe it's the architecture. Maybe it's the people. Maybe it's the atmospheric pressure that bespoils your otherwise pleasant ear.

Something about it. And doing the show, doing stand-up comedy. What is stand-up comedy? You stand. I was doing the opener. I was doing 10 minutes a spots, two a night. So, okay, you go to a venue. You have a beer.

People are nice to you. You talk for 10 minutes. The physical act of what's being done there is saying words into a microphone for 10 minutes. And then you come back. You have a little lie down. You do it again. And it's really the only thing you feel capable of doing on that day. I don't know what's happening with adrenaline in the body. I don't know what adrenaline is. I don't know how it works. I never did health science. I never did chemistry. But it's something. you feel much worse the next day after you do stand up and then the

first night of the tour i oh i oh i really um oh i got on it in a big way it felt absolutely terrible the next morning didn't have anything to drink that night or really the night after and just continued to feel quite bad even when I wasn't drinking in the mornings because the stand-up takes it out of you why would you do it if you didn't think you had to stand up is a compulsion that's one of the things I've learned there's no if you didn't have to do it you wouldn't't do it. It's not nice. It's not good for the body. It's hard to be away from people. The money for the amount of your brain and emotion that it takes up and abuses, any other profession would get you more money, I'm pretty sure.

Yes, it's only because one loves it. I mean, I tell you now, I was so happy today to be lying in bed before doing this podcast. And now, as I sit here doing the podcast, holding the microphone, thinking about how I get to do a set tonight. I get to go up and I'm doing 50 whatever minutes tonight. I am thrilled to pieces. I can't. Oh, oh, the thought of being there with just 50-something

people. Those are the numbers that I get to pull down when I'm in Brisbane, I think. It's like 50. And having just played to 4,000, I can't wait for the 50. Something about the 50 is better. You can be

real with the 50. Anything less than 50 is much, much worse. But something about anything over 50. You're in business there, partner. That is a comedy show. It's a comedy club. That's where the adrenaline starts to pump through you. And the dopamine center in the brain is going off. And you'd rather be doing that than anything else in the world. I love stand-up comedy. I won't hear a bad word said against it. But I don't understand why people do it. I have some sense of why I do it.

Because to stop doing it would be more painful than to keep doing it. But boy oh boy. If you're just looking to hang out and do something. It's not this. And it's been hard on my family. I've been away for 11 days on this tour. It's been so hard on them. I've been talking to my wife on the phone.

She's doing an incredible job. Anna Freer has moved into our house to help with the children while I've been away. A stunning, magical, brave woman. I love doing the stand-up. I would happily not do her. If I just had a gig every night in Adelaide, if Adelaide was the sort of town where that was doable,

I think I would just quite comfortably do that. Travelling is weird. I was reading G.K. Chesterton in bed earlier. Fire! I'm an intellect. I'm actually going to get it. I'm going to get it. Hold on.

Okay, so he's talking about, this is on Mr Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small. And he's written a lot about how Kipling loves the military and discipline and how he's a globe trotter. and how he's a globe trotter. And Kipling says things like, who can love... Here we go. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has asked... I'll just start reading. I'll start reading the Chesterton writing about Kipling.

This is about halfway through the essay. Mr. Rudyard Kipling... I don't know if it's Rudyard, Rudyard, Rudyard. Mr Rudyard Kipling, I don't know if it's Rudyard, Rudyard, Rudyard. Mr Rudyard Kipling has asked in a celebrated epigram, what they can know of England who know England only. It is a far deeper and sharper question to ask, what can they know of England who know only the world? For the world does not include England any more than it includes the church.

The moment we care for anything deeply, the world, that is, all the other miscellaneous interests, becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping oneself unspotted from the world. But lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the world well lost. Astronomically speaking, I understand that England is situated on the world. Similarly, I suppose that the church was a part of the world, and even the lovers, inhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth. The truth that the moment you love anything, the world becomes your foe. Thus, Mr Kipling does certainly know the world.

He is a man of the world with all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet. He knows England as an intelligent English gentleman knows Venice. He has been to England a great many times. He has stopped there for long visits, but he does not belong to it or to any place. And the proof of it is this, that he thinks of England as a place. The moment we are rooted in a place, the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the whole strength of the universe. So that was the setup to the bit that I wanted to read that was this bit. The globetrotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always

breathing an air of locality. London is a place to be compared to Chicago. Chicago is a place to be compared to Timbuktu. But Timbuktu is not a place, since there at least live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men, diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa or in the ears as in Europe. Blue paint among the ancients or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all. But he is thinking of the things that unite men, hunger and babies and the beauty of women and the promise or menace of the sky. Mr Kipling,

with all his merits, is the globetrotter. He has not the patience to become part of anything. So great and genuine a man is not to be accused of a merely cynical cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism. He says it only one time, but I say it over and over again. Still. This episode is brought to you by Google Pixel. I'm Jessi Cruikshank. I host the number one comedy podcast called Phone a Friend. I also have three kids. I need help making every day easier. So I switched to Google Pixel. It's a phone powered by Gemini, your personal AI assistant. Gemini can help you summarize your unread emails, suggest what to make with the food in your fridge, and it helped me achieve a family photo where everyone is smiling at the camera.

I didn't think it was possible, but it is with Google Pixel 9. Learn more at store.google.com. Breaking news happens anywhere, anytime. Police have warned the protesters repeatedly, get back. CBC News brings the story to you as it happens. Hundreds of wildfires are burning. Be the first to know what's going on and what that means for you and for Canadians.

This situation has changed very quickly. Helping make sense of the world when it matters most. Stay in the know. CBC News. His cosmopolitanism is his weakness. That weakness is splendidly expressed in one of his finest poems, the Sestina of the Tramp Royale,

in which a man declares that he can endure anything in the way of hunger or horror, but not permanent presence in one place. In this, there is certainly danger. The more dead and dry and dusty a thing is, the more it travels about. Dust is like this, and the thistle down of the High Commissioner in South Africa. Fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy fruit trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile. In the heated idleness of youth, we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb

which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, who wants to gather moss except silly old ladies but for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right the rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock but the rolling stone is dead the moss is silent because the moss is alive i'm just going to keep going i was only going to read one little bit of this but isn isn't it? I mean, is this good? Is this good? The truth is, this is him again. The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller.

The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller. It is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long, the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world. The second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without a doubt to whiz in a motor car around the earth to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice fields.

But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them, it must not be as tourists or inquirers. It must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them. Likewise, the man standing in his own kitchen garden with fairyland opening at the gate is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance. The motorcar stupidly destroys it. Moderns think of the earth as a globe, as something one can easily get around. The spirit of a schoolmistress.

This is shown in the odd mistake perpetually made about Cecil Rhodes. His enemies say that he may have had large ideas, but he was a bad man. His friends say that he may have been a bad man, but he certainly had large ideas. The truth is that he was not a man essentially bad. He was a man of much geniality and many good intentions, but a man with singularly small views. There is nothing large about painting the map red. It is an innocent game for children. It is just as easy to think in continents as to think in cobblestones. The difficulty comes in when we seek to know the substance of either of them. Rhodes' prophecies about the Boer resistance are an admirable comment on how the large ideas prosper

when it is not a question of thinking in continents but of understanding a few two-legged men. And under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its Reuters agency, the real life of man goes on, concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its splendid parochialism,

possibly with a smile of amusement motorcar civilization going on its triumphant way outstripping time consuming space seeing all and seeing nothing roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system only to find the sun cockney and the stars suburban. That was from GK Chesterton's Heretics. And that was his chapter towards the end. Of On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small. Which we actually, I think, read. Yes.

We may as well have just read the whole thing. But we didn't. And I recommend. Oh, it's a joy. But anyway, that's how I feel. So I'm not going to bother saying how I feel now because that's how I feel come the end of the tour having traveled having seen all these cities one after another after another after another I just want to go home to sweet Adelaide I have had a gut full of this deracinated experience I want to be racinated. Racinate me. Put these roots back in the ground and take me to my family.

Hooly dooly. I have been seriously thinking about what I can do in Adelaide to make work that is fulfilling that I don't have to travel. And I don't know what this is going to end up being. But visions. Something is appearing to me at the moment and i've started writing it down and we'll see what it is and if it turns into something i'll take it to sam clark and if sam clark lights it up well i'll take it to a couple of other people and if if they all think it's something i think i've got my project for the second half of the year i think i've got

the plan that's going to get me the boat i may as well just tell you it's a feature film. I think it's a feature film. I don't know how we would make it. I don't know where we would find the money. But, you know, whenever I'm looking at movies, they always say what it costs to make and what the return was. And the return can be many millions of dollars, is what I've noticed. And we've made, I just think, well, what is a feature film? How hard could it be to make a feature film

in Adelaide with my friends and with Sam Clark? I'm just saying as an idea. So they may not want to do it. I have to finish the script first. We've discussed that. My dear neighbours, the Galashers, I'm always saying to them I always say wouldn't it be good to just if I could just go and make a feature film and they actually make movies so they know what's involved and they an eyebrow gets raised perhaps

and my dear neighbour Madeline in her Houston I've met an Andrew Youngblood who I was on tour with he's a Houstonian that feels like there are so many places in the world. What are the odds that the person that I'm a neighbor with on tour and the person I'm a neighbor with in real life are both from Houston?

Hmm? But she'll say, great, show me the script. Knowing that I'm too slack to ever do the script. But I think the script for a feature film has started to come with me. And if it finishes coming to me, every time I sit down with it, more comes. Keeps coming.

It's coming and coming and coming and coming. You think, shouldn't this stop coming at some point? Never stops coming. We'll see. It's nebulous. Yes, making a feature film making a feature film i'm not going to tell you what it's about yet but i have a very very strong idea i think it's a strong narrative anyway sorry this has been a bit all over the shop but i'm sitting in a very uh

hot room sitting in peter j room, sitting in Peter James's living room, surrounded by his books, all of which are either about comedy or basketball. Yes, you have here Fiona O'Loughlin, shoulder to shoulder with Kobe Bryant, and there's Stephen Fry, and there's A History of the Improv. Billy Connolly. Bill Simmons' book on basketball. They also have a real interest here, I note, in Greek mythology. Look at that. There's A Song of Achilles.

Heroines of Olympus. And the illustrated Odyssey of Homer. That's an interesting third prong there, isn't it? I won't say any more. I don't know the ethics of going to a person's house and then without their knowledge, making a recording of everything you see, putting that on a podcast.

I'm going to let you go. I love you. I miss you. let you go. I love you. I miss you. I want you. I need you. Next week, I'm looking forward to having an interview brought to you. It was a great interview that I did. This is not going to become like the interview in Zimbabwe.

There's a real Saskatchewan interview coming soon. When we return to our regularly scheduled broadcast, because I'm back in adelaide where things are large in a small town i love you i miss you i need you i want you i haven't even spoken about my ear don't talk about my ear the damage that i've done to my ear maybe i did talk about that and on that flight to br Brisbane, something unusual happened to my ear. Anyway, my ear will hopefully survive the plane journey. There's been some ear trauma.

Pray for me. Keep it real. Catamaran Ho. Much love. Much respect. And now it is time for the Whip Around featuring JDFMCP Chief Correspondent, Jake Ford. One of my friends is sick, so I thought we might do a little whip around there. All right.

Hey, you sick? Hello. Yeah, COVID? Yeah, that's okay. You know who else got COVID? James McCann. You can hear all about it on the James Donald Forbes McCann catamaran plan. Just check it out on Spotify, Patreon, wherever you get your podcasts.

He's had it like 15 times. All right, bye! If you would like to join in the whip around, simply record yourself telling a friend about the podcast and send it to James. Together, we can spread the good word about his aspirations

for boat ownership, even though this episode was potentially the least boaty of all time. Hey, it's Mitch from SideNote Podcast, and I'm here to tell you about the new Google Pixel 9 powered by Gemini. Anyone who knows me knows the Pixel has always been my favorite out of all the phones I've ever had. Now, with Gemini built in, it's basically my personal AI assistant. Since I'm truly terrible at keeping up with emails, I use Gemini to give me summaries of my inbox, which is a lifesaver. And if I'm feeling stuck creatively, I just ask Gemini for help and bam, instant inspiration. You can learn more about Google Pixel 9 at store.google.com. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.

Empowers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. I'm Jessie Cruikshank, and on my podcast, Phone a Friend, I break down the biggest stories in pop culture. But when I have questions, I get to phone a friend. I phone my old friend, Dan Levy. You will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle.

I didn't even know what thirsty meant until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like a no, that's what my grandma's on. Thank God Phone a Friend with Jesse Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.