Wonderful! - Wonderful! 263: BoPo

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

Rachel's favorite poetry lovers! Griffin's favorite electronic pictographic communicator!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaFoundation for Black Women’s Wellness: http://ffbww.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. This is wonderful. And this is Rachel and Griffin McElroy, a real married couple. A lot of people have been saying in the tabloids, they're not a real married couple. No, we are. They're business associates who are doing a big play pretend.

We have a wedding certificate. We have a wedding certificate. We have two kids. Obviously, you can have kids if you're not married. I would say the wedding certificate is probably the best clue that we're married. It is a legal document. Yeah. You can't just print those out on your printer.

You can't just go on Microsoft Word and put it in landscape mode and then write- You probably could. Wedding certificate. You know, I keep calling it a wedding certificate. It's a marriage certificate. I think you don't get a special certificate for when you have a wedding you take this you so when you get married show we'll talk about things that are good things we like things we're into and also the marriage process marriage process when you get married you do have to take a test an exam oh i like this and once you do that, you get your license, your marriage license.

It's more of a permit at first for you to try things out for 18 months. I'm just picturing an old man sitting next to us being like, well, you got six, but you really fell apart on two of them. And so I'm going to need written exam for the driving test. And he stood up and just walked up to the counter right next to me and just said, hey, I failed. And I'll be like, all right, you can come back and take it in four days. He's like, all right, see you then. It was such a chill like, hey, I failed. I wish I had that kind of like courage of my convictions that when I fuck up, I can just own it that casual.

I know, no tears, no shame. No regrets, four days? Okay, what is that? Thursday? Okay, I'll see you then. Do you have any small wonders? We should talk about the show we are watching. Yeah, I was going to bring it.

I think maybe this is a joint small wonder because I could talk about this show for ages. It's Physical 100. I always forget what the name of it is. It's called Physical colon 100. Because it's not really an intuitive name. Maybe the translation makes it a little. Maybe the translation makes it a little maybe the translation this is a a korean reality competition show uh that is i would say equal parts uh american gladiators and squid game

now listen i know you're hearing that and you think is this the squid game adaptation that netflix was working on that was a real reality show where like a bunch of people got seriously injured. And then they were like, maybe this isn't maybe this isn't one that we should recreate. Maybe we're taking the wrong lesson from the Netflix television show Squid Game. It's not that in this one, 100 very physically fit people from a lot of different disciplines. Exactly. That's what makes it interesting, interesting right is there are all types of athletes in this world and some of them are you know bigger some of them are leaner you know you get to see all of them compete together with their various like you know talents right so there's uh you know bodybuilders and weightlifters there's mma fighters there are gymnasts. There's a lot of CrossFit people. A lot of CrossFit people.

Some like there's a dude who everybody on the show is obsessed with, who is an Olympic skeleton racer who just like everybody is just talking about his physique constantly. talking about his physique constantly. There's a tone of the show that is deeply supportive. Like all of the people are just constantly gassing each other up because of their tremendous sort of athletic prowess in all of these different forms and permutations that it takes. And I really enjoy that. We had a conversation about if this was like an american show same concept if it would have the same vibe of people like man your body looks really really cool because i feel like the american culture of

reality television is centered around backstabbing you know like like there's a competitiveness pretty frequently in like reality tv shows here that suggests like not only do you want to win but you want to take out your competition right it's just it's it's a very well-designed show it has uh a lot that the challenges are all very neat and challenge like they measure lots of different kinds of like athleticism which uh makes makes the whole thing work i was telling griffin it gave me like a new appreciation for athleticism because you really see the mental toughness associated with it yeah sure like the discipline like a lot of times you'll look at somebody who's strong and you'll think like wow i bet they lifted a lot of heavy things you don't necessarily think like the dedication that took and the like commitment to a very challenging schedule sure yeah there's

there's an element of like jocks are just body nerds is basically kind of what this show that's a really apt uh description i think dabbles in like it it disassociates itself from a lot of the kind of like toxicity that you would would assume would be kind of like pervasive in a a thing like this it's genuinely a very refreshing show that is just very uh it's just a sort of celebration of discipline and athleticism. And I realize that it probably sounds like I'm describing all sports. But I think what it really has working for it is that it is built around just constant David versus Goliath-like situations.

Well, and I will also say it moves quickly. Because at first I was like 100 people the show was going to take forever but like one of the first challenges they get rid of 50 and then the next one it's like 25 right they keep cutting in half i will say if you have seen squid game i think that it uh that some of the background vibe uh is kind of recognizable. You have not, and I have, which has sort of lended an interesting element to our watch of physical one. Yeah, because a lot of times I'll be like, oh, wow, they have a team challenge. And Griffin's like, yeah, actually in Squid Game.

Yeah, yeah. But it's not like a licensed show or product or anything like that. It's great. It's on netflix they there's six episodes of it out now and they're dropping two a week which is not nearly enough for us i don't think well especially because we're in the all-star break for hockey so it's been like almost two weeks since we've watched you know what i found out there are other teams playing right now i saw that last night i don't know why the blues are have this extended break i mean

hopefully it's good for them because they are not a great team lately no they're bad they're doing a bad job yeah one might say one might say they're doing a bad job they're in a place where their playoff chances are so slim that most of the fan base has has turned to a they should take a dive so that they can do a better uh have a better chance of getting an early draft pick. We'll see how that plays out. I don't want that to happen. Obviously, I want them to get some big, big nasty boys for next season,

but I also don't want them to lose the remaining, what, 30 games that are left in this season. You go first this week. Yes. What do you got? I see you're holding a book. So I'm going to assume you're not talking about, um, a music or a video games, which you usually, those are your two main.

Yeah, that's me all over. Uh, no, I realized it had been quite a while since we had been to the poetry corner. I realize it had been quite a while since we had been to the Poetry Corner. Evidenced by the fact that I had forgotten the intro walk-up music. The intro that we use every single time. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum um so my poet for this episode is donald hall oh yeah he um i actually came upon him he has edited poetry anthologies before okay so before i really read any of his work, I like saw his name on the cover of anthologies that I either purchased or read in school. Yeah. But I was excited to bring him because when I researched him, well, first I found a poem

I liked by him. I got this anthology. It's called Joy. And it's got 100 poems in it that are all like, you know, like good spirited, I guess. That's nice. Yeah. It's kind of a perfect fit for the show. So I was excited when I found it. But I did research on him and I realized he was married to another famous poet, Jane Kenyon.

Oh, sure. married to another famous poet jane kenyon oh sure uh and i'm always fascinated by people that are married that had to do the same job yeah i feel like here in dc we've met a lot of lawyers that are married to other lawyers yeah uh well you know how it is like when you're debating like that in front of the judge, the jury, the sparks, the flames, that friction. I mean, not all lawyers are trial lawyers. Well. Sometimes it's across a table, you know, and there's papers and you're like, ooh. Ooh, even more intimate. We should order dinner.

This could take a while. Kiss, kiss, kiss, while. Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss. And I think my research seems to indicate that Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon were perhaps among the greatest poetry couple,

poetry lover couple partners. Poetry lovers. Poetry lovers. See, I didn't want to make it. That sounds like you're a poetry lover. Yeah. One of the great poet romances, I think, of all time.

Okay. But I'm going to talk mostly about Donald Hall because that is a poem I found. Okay. Okay. So Donald Hall was born in 1928 in, and then went to Harvard. And when he was at Harvard, some of his other classmates included Adrian Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery. I think I have, if not brought all, most of those poets.

I recognize most of those names, which is wild. It's crazy to think that there was that community of people and then they all blew up. I mean, blew up again, a relative. Yeah, sure. They weren't getting stopped on the street necessarily, but it's just, it's always exciting when you find out all those little pockets of like creative people

that are all kind of getting started at the same time and then they just have tremendous success. Yeah. The brat pack of poetry. Donald Hall kind of checked every box that a poet can check uh he was the editor of a literary magazine uh he was a professor of english at the university of michigan which is where he met jane kenyon by the way uh he was a poet laureate in, I believe, 2006. He also got Guggenheim fellowships.

He wrote children's books. He wrote essays. He edited poetry anthologies. It's difficult to think of a, like, a poet-y thing that he didn't accomplish. Yeah, there are no worlds left to conquer for donald um so i wanted to talk about jane kenyon for a minute so they met from what i can tell she was not his student but she did attend as a student while he was a professor at University of Michigan. So she is 20 years younger than him. And that is significant because- It's two decades.

Yes, that does make it significant. It's significant because it's a tremendous span of time. I'm always hesitant to talk about these like May-December romances in a critical way because, I mean, you you know love is love yeah but 20 years uh so i bring that up because it makes kind of what happened next in their relationship kind of all the more tragic um so in 1989 donald hall was diagnosed with colon cancer. And even though his chances of survival were really slim, he ended up going into remission. And then like five years later, Jane Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia and died only 15 months later at age 47. So this was like

devastating for him. And a lot of his books following were kind of working through that grief. What was interesting is in those last months of her life, they were putting together an anthology of her work. And at the time, she was kind of commenting on his health issues, which I just mentioned with the colon cancer cancer so i wanted to read one of her poems about his illness and then read his poem kind of about her because i think there's like you appreciate his more if you have read hers okay uh so her poem is afternoon at m at McDowell. On a windy summer day, the well-dressed trustees occupy the first row under the yellow and white striped canopy. Their drive for capital is over, and for a while, this refuge is secure. Thin after your second surgery, you wear the gray summer suit we bought

eight years ago for momentous occasions in warm weather. My hands rest in my lap under the fine cotton shawl embroidered with mirrors that we bargained for last fall in Bombay, unaware of your sickness. The legs of our chairs poke holes in the lawn. The sun goes in and out of the grand clouds, making the air alive with golden light. And then, as if heaven's spirits have fallen, everything's somber again. After music and poetry, we walk to the car. I believe in the miracles of art. But what prodigy will keep you safe beside me?

Fumbling with the radio while you drive to find late innings of a Red Sox game. I feel like you Trojan horsed this a little bit with your book of joy. Here's the thing. The reason I read that poem, one, it's an incredible poem. It's incredibly good. Two, his poem that I'm about to read has some kind of similar themes and energy, which makes it like a really sweet kind of response to her poem. I have not read an essay or like theory making this connection. This is an original Rachel perspective. Okay.

So the poem I'm going to- World exclusive. Thank you. You're welcome. The poem I'm going to read by Donald Hall is called Summer Kitchen, which he wrote a few years after her passing. In June's high light, she stood at the sink with a glass of wine and listened for the bubbling and crushed garlic in late sunshine. I watched her cooking from my chair. She pressed her lips together, reached for kitchenware, and tasted sauce from her fingertips.

It's ready now. Come on, she said. You light the candle. We ate and talked and went to bed and slept. It was a miracle. That's... talked and went to bed and slept it was a miracle that's that's really good isn't that lovely it's lovely in the context of her poem particularly because they both use the word miracle and her miracle is kind of in the context of you know poetry and art and this kind of high concept, you know, of like, what is spectacular. And then his is just kind of like, we had an incredible life. And that was a miracle too. Yeah. Oh, so good. I have a little jar where I keep the sound you make when you do an air horn

noise. And I want to very carefully crack that open and have you put in the way you say the word miracle um because it's it's it's really really really doing it for me i don't think i know that i say it unusually try again now you're thinking about yeah now i can't do it do i do i put a pronunciation miracle oh do i say like mer more than mere yeah i like it though i'm not sure i don't know if that's regional or not. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think of you as having an accent, but those were two lovely poems. Yeah, it's kind of a bonus poetry corner in a way.

Yeah, a bo-po. A bo-po. That's what we call them. Can I steal you away? Yes. Oh, Ross. Yeah. Oh, I'm glad I found you in line.

These clouds are really freaking me out. I hate having to stand in line. And boy, what a line. These giraffes do not smell good. No, they do not. And they have such short necks. But I'm hearing we need to get on this ark. We've got to get on the ark.

It is about to rain. God is about to destroy humanity. Hey, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Are you Noah? Yeah, I know we look like humans, but we're actually podcasters. We are podcasters, so it's different. Have you heard of Ono, Ross, and Carrie? We investigate spirituality, claims of the paranormal, stuff like that.

And you have a boat and say the world's going to end, so it seemed like something for us to check out. We would love to be on the boat. We came two by two. What do you think? Ona Ross and Carrie, available on MaximumFun.org. Oh my gosh, hi. I'm Dave Holmes, host of the pop culture trivia podcast, Troubled Waters. On Troubled Waters, we play games like motivational speeches. It goes a little like this. Riley,

give us an improvised motivational speech. Why people should listen and subscribe to troubled waters. I look around this ad and I see a lot of potential to listen to comedians such as Jackie Johnson and Josh Gondelman, and they need you to get out there and listen to them. Attempt to figure out sound Reba's clues or determine if something is a Game of Thrones character or a city in Wales. I have chills. I'm going to give you 15 points.

All that and so much more on Troubled Waters. Find it on MaximumFun.org or wherever you choose to listen to podcasts. I'm excited about mine. I found out about mine at a museum when we went to the Museum of American History. Can I say how proud of us I am for like how many museums we've hit in the short time we've lived here?

I think we're doing a pretty good, we're keeping a pretty good pace. We're doing pretty good, yeah. We've hit a lot of the Smithsonian's. I think we're, I haven't been to a lot of the art ones. I know, and I'm desperate to go. I know. Well, it's hard. a lot of the smithsonians i think we're we i haven't been to a lot of the art ones i know and i'm desperate to go i know well it's it's it's hard i don't know that the when you go to a american

history museum or a natural history museum or air and space museum like it's it's interactive in a way for children that is good for us uh i don't know so much that they would be able to hang in a you know we went to the portrait gallery for like eight minutes uh before we had to yeah i did the national gallery of art when my friend ariel was in town with both boys and it was a little stressful because you have to make sure they don't touch things yes um but i thought they did pretty well yeah so uh at the national museum of american history great interactive exhibit where Henry and I learned about Susan Kerr, who is a graphic designer who is responsible for making some of the most iconic icons in the history of graphical user interfaces for computers. Yeah, that was actually that was a really cool little little exhibit. Yeah.

The larger exhibit. Yeah, it was like they have these little like panels with squares that you can flip over between white and black. Yeah, it's almost like a, yeah. It's kind of simple sort of icons that then it gets digitized in the computer. It's very cool. Henry was really into it and so was I. And I also learned about Susan Kerr, which is great. So Susan Kerr is an artist. Her background involved a pretty diverse lineup of different

kind of artistic disciplines, like sculpture. And she did some curation for museums. And she also did some sort of like exploration of kind of super early digital art, but it wasn't like a big focus of her background. And then in 1982, she was working as a sculptor. She got a cold call from Andy Hertzfeld, who was an old classmate of hers and also worked at Apple as one of the original team members

on their Apple Macintosh dev team. Very brief sort of sprinting history of apple the macintosh was uh meant to be designed as like and apple has done this so many times throughout its uh its history this super accessible family computer right like the apple and apple 2 were kind of that but the macintosh was meant to be like the one that you could use without any kind of background in computer sciences whatsoever. Which is how they ended up in like every elementary school across the country. Yeah. And it really springboarded Apple to be the company that it is today, right? So the whole idea is the Macintosh is that it was supposed to be this accessible thing,

right? And despite the fact that she didn't have, you know, this this extensive background doing like pixel artwork specifically, she crushed the brief that was given to her of creating an entire visual language of accessible and understandable user interface design. So she leaned mostly on her knowledge of like mosaic art and needlepoint that her mom taught her. She after she got this this job from Andy Hertzfeld, she went and she bought a pad of graph paper and began designing these icons in just a 32 by 32 square grid, filling in squares with with her pencil to create some really like important designs it's really important to note like and this is uh something that i think is probably alien completely to uh people who are of a younger generation than us that like graphical user interface was kind

of a novel idea at at this point like uh this, it was a lot of like navigating through your computer using console commands and kind of like having to know the language, the written language of the computer in order to use it correctly, right? This idea of like, here's a desktop with icons on it. You click on the icon to launch the program and then you click on the icon to do the thing that you want inside the program. Like all of that was a fairly new idea when the Apple Macintosh came around. And so this job that she had was pretty pioneering, right? And it wasn't just pioneering, it was really tough,

because a lot of the verbs that she was tasked with translating into iconography are pretty abstract, right? Or at least they were in 1982. So you think of things like, what is, what does it look like to save something? Now we know, of course,

it's an icon of a floppy disk. We know that because she fucking knocked it out. She cracked the case, right? What does it mean to delete stuff? Trash can, right? Scissors became, or cut became scissors.

When you first loaded up the Macintosh, the first icon that you saw was just a friendly little computer. Just a representation of the Macintosh computer with a smile on it. I bet she was really good at Pictionary. I bet she fucking destroyed at Pictionary. Fucking destroyed at Pictionary. When something went wrong, when there was like an error code for the Apple Macintosh, it was just a quirky little like cherry bomb with a lit fuse. All of these things that communicate so much within a 32 by 32 grid that made the Macintosh an incredibly easy to use computer and made it, you know, kind of a smash hit when it came out in 1984.

She had essentially not only designed like the whole like graphical design language for the whole platform. She worked on a lot of the marketing materials. She designed a lot of the typefaces that would be pretty iconic there's a typeface called chicago that like when you look at an old macintosh uh or any old apple computer like it is the font that it used and she made that too uh which is a kind of staggering like the amount of contributions that she made to apple is staggering the amount of contributions she made to like Apple is staggering. The amount of contributions she made to like visual representations of things that we use and see every single day is like almost impossible to believe.

Just think about like a cursor, right? Like a mouse cursor. She designed a lot of the cursor elements for the Apple Macintosh. And you think about like how much a cursor tells you based on how it kind of like contextually changes as you move it around a screen from things like Susan Kerr designed the I-beam cursor that appears whenever you scroll over text that you can change. Imagine like using a you know making a Google Doc and not knowing where the font is going to go in because you don't get that little I-beam cursor. Yeah. That's wild.

Uh-huh. She did a lot of other design stuff after Apple. She went on to – she designed the original cards for Solitaire for Windows 3.0. Oh, my gosh. It's just like something that I know a lot of people of our generation probably have a lot of fondness for. Oh, wow. I'm so glad you brought her because it's like you don't think about the individual that does that stuff. And also the fact that she was so prolific. Yeah. She went on to do a lot of design work for Facebook and for Pinterest.

Now she's a design architect at Niantic Labs, which is the developer of Pokemon Go, which fucking rips. Wow. Her work can be seen in the MoMA at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. And like I said, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. And I think she definitely belongs in all of those places, especially the Museum of American History. And I think she definitely belongs in all of those places, especially the Museum of American History, because it's the technology exhibit at the Museum of American History is like really fascinating. It runs the gamut from like, you know, there's a whole section about like Atari. And then there's a whole thing about sort of industrialization. The whole thing about sort of industrialization and then sort of sandwiched in the middle of that is just a little exhibit about Susan Kerr's incredible influential design work that has influenced the way that all of us use computers today. I think she's an absolute genius that her work is so pervasive that it's almost invisible, right?

It's 99% invisible with Roman Mars. almost invisible, right? It's 99% invisible with Roman Mars. She's an architect of these things that we interact with every day, right? Constantly. And so like you don't take note of all of those little icons and cursors and typefaces and graphical user interface things

on a daily basis. But then like also when you think about the history of interacting with computers, the enormous footprint that she has in that is like genuinely breathtaking. And I think that's kind of, I think that that is a level of talent that borders on the supernatural.

And so that's Susan Ker care i was really really glad to learn about her and uh yeah she there's like a bunch of uh like books like art books that she uh has released i think the moma has like a book of some of her like most famous icons with like uh the graph paper that she designed them on which i would love to see that um but yeah that's sus Kerr. Thanks, Susan. Great, great job. You crushed it.

And you crushed it by listening to this episode of Wonderful. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. See, I'm worried that didn't sound sincere enough. We really appreciate it. We really also appreciate Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. Thank you to MaximumFun.org.

Thank you to all of the listeners also who suggested that I play Stardew Valley for our bonus episode. I don't want to hear a single thought. I know. We've been very careful. We've been very careful. We've been tiptoeing around in our home. So what day are you on? And I'll be like, hey, how do you do this?

But I'm trying to save all of our great, great content for that bonus episode. Yeah, for the bonus episode of the Max Fun Drive, which is coming up soon. We'll tell you more about that when it gets here. We have merch over at McElroyMerch.com. Please go check that out. more about that uh when when it gets here uh we have merch over at mackroymerch.com please go check that out uh and we just announced a a virtual mbim bam live show uh that's gonna be next month uh all that stuff go to mackroyfamily.com you can check out uh all of it you want to mention the graphic novel oh my god yes next next, week after, the 21st, I think.

Oh, Jesus. We have a new graphic novel that comes out. It's The Adventure Zone 11th Hour. It's the adaptation of the fifth arc and the balance campaign, the first campaign for Adventure Zone. I'm really proud of it. I finally got it in last week and it's a big book.

It's a big book it's a big carry did a lot of drawing on this one gang it's so lovely it's really gorgeous and uh i i think if you like the adventure zone you're gonna really love it so if you would think about pre-ordering it do you feel like it can kind of stand alone i feel like there's a little bit about it that you can just kind of dip into i mean in the interest of pushing as many sales as possible i'm gonna say yes definitively but in an interest of pushing even more sales i would say buy all five of them um go to theadventurezonecomic.com you can find a link to pre-order that it really helps us out in uh a huge way yes uh with things like you know uh charting on the big lists and uh showing distributors how

many copies of the bookstore we we lean on pre-orders for a lot of that stuff because that's i guess the way the industry works theadventurezonecomic.com um that's it though that's gotta be it that has to be it yes that's it this time we're done thanks for listening we hope you learned something about yourself yeah okay what did you learn about yourself on this one oh man uh i learned that i should probably um go pee before we start recording. Yeah. Uh, I know that that's, that's a pro tip that you, um. Swear by. Yeah, swear by. And I, uh, need to learn because I'm sitting here right now and it is all I can think about.

Do you want to stop? Do you want to stop the show so you can go? I think that would be good. I just don't want to, I don't want people to think that this is our new sign off. You rushing to have a bathroom emergency? I will say from my perspective, it's a refreshing change of pace. I think that would be good. I just don't want people to think that this is our new sign-off. You rushing to have a bathroom emergency? I will say, from my perspective, it's a refreshing change of pace. Bye. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned.

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