Latest / My Favorite Things / My Favorite Things Episode 24: Poet Laureate and Author Chris La Tray

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My Favorite Things Episode 24: Poet Laureate and Author Chris La Tray · My Favorite Things

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Chris Latre, thanks for being here.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Brendan Leonard, thanks for having me here.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: You're a guy that I see in person more than I see not in person.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're right.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: We just see each other at the gym once or twice a week.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Getting swole.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Are you getting buff?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's not happening for me.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Not really, no.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty much just continuing in the ways that I'm trying to not be buff.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, can you, can you tell people a little bit about who you are?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, well, as,
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: as Brendan already identified, uh,
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Chris Latre and Dijinikaz,
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Chris Koshinikishin,
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: that's how you say,
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: my name is Chris Latre,
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: but you can call me Chris in Anishinaabemowin and then Michif,
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: which are the two languages of my people.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a citizen of the Little Shell Chippewa Tribe.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: And we are Anishinaabe, so we speak Anishinaabemowin and Michif.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: We're largely comprised of Métis people, which Michif is the language of.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: The Métis people,
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: for those of your tens of thousands of listeners who don't know,
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: are an Indigenous cultural group recognized in Canada as one of
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: the three Indigenous peoples who predate the existence of Canada as a country.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: So it's the Métis, the First Nations, and the Inuit people.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: And we also predate the existence of the United States,
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: but the United States chooses not to recognize us as
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: a unique indigenous cultural group.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm always compelled to remind people that we didn't cross the border.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: The border crossed us, which you hear other people say about that.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like on the other, you know, far to the South, they say the same thing.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, it's all the ripple effects of colonialism and all those things.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, so that's kind of where I come from.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: And
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a writer,
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a storyteller,
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: do a lot of public speaking,
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: been around in and out of Missoula for a long time,
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: grew up in Frenchtown,
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: which if I look out that window,
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: I can see the mill where my dad worked out in Frenchtown for 43 years or so,
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: maybe a little longer than that, which,
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: somebody would have told me my 17-year-old version that I would be living as
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: a doddering old man.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Within sight of that place,
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: I would have been like,
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: just kill me now because that's the last place I want to be living by.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: But here we are.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's not so bad.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not so bad.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I often like on my newsletter, I write a newsletter called An Irritable Métis.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: And every month I do a series of sentences from the previous month that's like
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: a reflection every single day.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I regularly refer to the OMD and it never fails that I'll get...
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like private messages from people saying, what is OMD?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I can just imagine these people searching the internet trying to figure out what
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: that initialism is.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: But it stands for Old Mill District.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think it makes where I live sound bougier.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like the Sawmill District in Missoula.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Where you take this blighted area and you throw up a couple condos.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then you call it something fancy and charge way too much for people to live there.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I call where I live, which is essentially a super fun site.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: The Old Mill District.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: And people are like, ooh, that sounds cool.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: But.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's really not.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like all you need is an arch in your neighborhood that says Old Mill District maybe.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: That'd be great.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Property values just through the roof.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: I even know where we could put that.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good idea.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you have written,
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: speaking of your sentences,
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: I recommend One Sentence Journal, your book, to so many people who...
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that indirectly led to your latest book, Becoming Little Shell.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Can you talk just a little bit about that before we get started?
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because you said a bunch about it in the beginning here.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well,
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: One Sentence Journal was just kind of this one-off thing where,
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: like you said,
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'd written these sentences and then Jim Harrison and Ted Kuzer's book,
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Braided Creek, was pretty inspirational to turning those sentences into poems.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: when that book came out, it totally redefined my creative life, I guess you can say.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: At the time,
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: I was kind of in between what I thought I was going to do and I was doing
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: a little bit of freelancing and...
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: that book came out and Becoming Little Shell is already kind of in the back
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: of my mind when that book came out.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I was at, did you ever go to Beargrass?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know Dombrowski?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: I know of him, yeah.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: So Beargrass was this writing retreat that used to happen up in Greeno,
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: kind of by behind Paws Up.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it was during the event there where I read from one sentence journal,
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: it just came out and there was a,
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: had just come out and there was a editor there from Milkweed.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of pitched her the idea for becoming Little Shell, just kind of off the cuff.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, I think We'd be interested in that story.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: So that was kind of the moment where the one kind of led to the other.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so the next year is when I brought back a proposal and gave it to Daniel Slager,
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: who runs Milkweed and was there the next year.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And later that day, he said, yeah, we're going to publish this book.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: And a couple of weeks later, I had to contract it just like that.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, the two are definitely related.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and the story is like,
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just summarize it very briefly,
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: hopefully I'm not too ham-fisted about this,
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: but you discovering your heritage through your dad's side of the family as Métis
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: and Little Shell,
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: but going backwards through that,
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: because your dad didn't really talk about it much,
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: and finding out more and more about that identity and the history of the people,
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: and then Would you say a lot of your work nowadays has stemmed from that book and
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: that work that you did?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm going to be working in that territory,
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think, for the rest of my life, at least as far as the prose writing is concerned.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: I had a great conversation with...
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: Drew Lanham, who wrote this book called The Home Place.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: He's a black ornithologist, MacArthur genius grantee guy.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Also, his book came out with Milkweed.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Home Place is a memoir.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then Jamie Ford, who's a Chinese-American novelist who lives in Great Falls.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's like a You know, multiple New York Times bestseller novelist guy.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: But we were all three faculty up at Kachemec Bay Writers Conference in Homer,
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Alaska last spring.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: And we had this conversation about you write these stories and it kind
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: of opens these doors and the book ends.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yet in some ways it's kind of just begun, you know.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: So now like I'm in the very beginning process of what the next thing is going to be
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: that Hopefully,
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: it's – well,
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: certainly,
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: it's different than Becoming Little Shell,
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: but it wouldn't exist if I hadn't done the things that I had to do
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: to write Becoming Little Shell.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, you're right.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's the field I'm going to be plowing probably for the rest of my life,
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: which isn't that far,
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: but it's still – there's tons of stuff to be uncovered and talked about.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: I like how you looked at your watch.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, I got a death coming up at 5 p.m. Well, you never know.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: These things, they control our lives.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: We kind of look to them for everything.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: I got a hard stop.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Brendan, you better speed it up here.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, let's, let's get into your list of things.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast is called my favorite thing.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I asked you to send a list of five of your favorite, uh, creative works.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And, um, yeah,
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: first one,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: I just decided the order since they're all recent for you,
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: but the first one is called water of the sky,
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: a dictionary of 2000 Japanese rain words.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Can you talk about how you discovered that or how it came into your life?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I actually saw it for the first time at the Vespiary.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know the Vespiary in Missoula?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it's Audra Loyal.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: She makes books,
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: but she also has a little used bookstore in that old warehouse off,
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: is it Tool or Sprague?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: that old,
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: that building that has,
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers might be based there.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of different things and like Garage Tees is kind of on the backside.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's down there in that kind of, Light old warehouse type stuff in Missoula.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, she had it and I was kind of eyeballing it.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: So then it just kind of lived in my brain.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking at it.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: I have it right here.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it just stayed with me because going back to the question
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: about becoming Little Shell,
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: one of the big revelations is the importance of language revitalization.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: So this book,
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: so she's an artist and she's painted a number of these Definitions to go
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: with just descriptions of rain.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is an indigenous language and there's this great book called,
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: what is it, 32 Words for Field, I think, that's Irish.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: Mankan Magan wrote and the...
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: The relationship there is how indigenous languages are so tied to the land
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: because we lived close to the land and just the beauty and the breadth of experience
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: as it shows in the language.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is a perfect example of that.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to attempt the word,
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: but here's a word that means the wild and heavy rains visible at the end of
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: the rainy season.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: A special word just for that.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: And another one would be...
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: A particular word for torrential rain or a word for rain that has poured enough, right?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: So imagine a few days of just a torrential downpour.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: You've got a word for what that kind of rain,
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: whereas we would just say, you know, I wish this fucking rain would stop.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: They have something a little more poetic than that, right?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so I love that.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: I love the idea that
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: That these celestial experiences or these relationships that we have with
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: the land can be summed up in so many different ways.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we lose when we lose Indigenous languages.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: We lose not just the words, because a lot of these are extinct too.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't just lose the words, we lose the words.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: The connection to that experience that we used to have,
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: all of us as humans, with the world around us.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: and English is just kind of a bludgeon in a lot of ways,
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: and it's not that,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: it's not as beautiful because it's not tied to this place
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: the way indigenous languages are.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking the other day about just how many idioms I rely on on a daily basis.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: A friend asked me to write a blurb for his book and I was just like,
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: it's really difficult for me for some reason.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I just kept going, what are you doing?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: But like the language is like,
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: the way we speak is so ridiculous,
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: especially when you have multiple ones in the same sentence, you know?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: How would anybody who doesn't speak, who's a native speaker of this language understand us?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: How much time do you think you spend searching for the right word
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: when you're writing your daily sentences?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do you get stuck sometimes?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, man, I'm going to be out here for 15, 20 minutes doing this one sentence.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Not so much the word, but maybe the arrangement of them.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because I never went to school for any of this stuff.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes I'm not sure if I'm grammatically correct.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't really care that much.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I've got maybe 200 good words and I just rotate them around.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't get too carried away on the word itself.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: I try and make sure I don't use the same one like three times.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you read some middle manager email and he's got the word around,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: like every fourth word is...
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to get together around noon and we're going to talk around this topic
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: and then we'll circle back and talk around this thing.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, I don't want to do that.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't get stuck on words too much.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I do sometimes kind of arrange them in different ways to make sure
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: that I'm actually saying what I want to say.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And is this book inspiring you?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: In a way, for an upcoming project at all, or is it just living in the back of your head?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: It lives in the back of my head because I do a lot,
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: like I get asked to speak at language conferences.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so revitalization of indigenous languages is something that I'm going
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: to be working on as something in addition to writing.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know,
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: there's been a few times where people have asked me,
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: like, you know, I was poet laureate.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: I was 11th Montana poet laureate.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: So my term was 2023 to 2025.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: And
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: A number of times I've been asked if I write my poetry in my native language first
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: or English first.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the reality is I can't write a single sentence in Anishinaabemowin
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: because it was lost to me.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe at some point I would love to be able to put out a book of...
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like one side is an English one and the facing page might be an Anishinaabemowin.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen other people do that, but I'm a long, long way from being able to do that by myself.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know,
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: the language thing is,
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm an advocate for that even as a,
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Do as I say,
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: not as I do because I don't spend nearly enough time learning it as I should
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: if I want to be capable of it.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: But to me,
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: that is one of
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: the most important conservation efforts facing us is indigenous languages
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: because you don't...
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: You don't conserve the land in any way like we need it to
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: without conserving indigenous culture.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: And indigenous culture is built upon the languages,
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: which is why they went after it in the first place.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so to me, it's a conservation effort as much as it is a cultural one.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you did not grow up with your dad speaking whatsoever or any relatives around, right?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: So he denied that we were native at all.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: But my mom talks about meeting his grandmother and my grandmother stayed close to her family.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: So they had to know because,
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: you know, my great grandparents, one of them barely spoke English at all.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I met her.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: When I was young,
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: so if my grandmother's mother only spoke whatever it was,
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: it could have been Michif,
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: it could have been Cree for all I know,
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: it could have been Anishinaabemowin or Ojibwe or Chippewa,
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: whatever, they all mean the same thing.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: She had to have known.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: She had to have,
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: if not been fluent in it,
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: she had to have been somewhat conversant in it because she was close to her mother
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: and that's what her mother spoke.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it just died there.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that's common in a lot of families.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's fascinating to think back about that stuff.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: And just wonder what my dad was carrying that he chose not to pass on.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And there's reasons for it,
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: you know?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it's one of those mysteries that I wish he was still around to ask him about.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and people can read about that in the book as well.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you were going to tackle a book similar to a Dictionary
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: of 2000 Japanese Rain Words,
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: what words would you tackle and what would they be about?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: My first thought is like sandwiches.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think I could do like International Dictionary of Words for Sandwiches.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: But what would yours be?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm sure you've wrestled with this kind of trope.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: Is a hot dog a sandwich?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm more a hot dog guy than I am a sandwich guy.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I was at the Little Shell Pow Wow two weekends ago and I had a Chippewa dog.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: And what a Chippewa dog was,
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: was a hot dog with fry bread and totally encasing it kind of like a...
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, they fry the whole thing?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know if the whole thing was fried or if they just somehow...
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: They must.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because it was seamless.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: The outer fried bread wrapping was seamless.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: So they must have...
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: So if you get those at the Pow Wow in Arlie, they're called Rez Dogs.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: But up at the Little Shell Pow Wow in Great Falls, they were called Chippewa Dogs.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: And see, I love that.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe I could go around and just find all the different ways
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: of creatively packaged hot dogs and write a book about that.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: I actually have a hot dog book for you next time I see you.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's like two years old,
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: but I found out about it because the lady went
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: to watch Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, my God.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Wrote this very fawning piece about Joey Chestnut, the competitive eater.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then I bought the book,
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: and then it's like her going around the country trying to eat some of
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: the best hot dogs.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's pretty good.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think you'd like it.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: I might.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean...
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole etymological and gastronomical exploration there,
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: especially if you cover it around the world, I suppose.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, sure.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: I like how we went from highbrow rainwards to hot dogs.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: We've slid back into our lanes, right?
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, let's go to, let's go to your, the second one on your list here.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: I, what's,
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: what's really interesting
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: about this podcast is how many times people will send me things that they,
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: they're going to talk about and how I discover this thing with
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: a pretty massive following that I had no idea existed.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: And is the pronunciation of the band Hailun?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Is that it?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or Heilung.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Heilung.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's Leafa Lotengard is the name of the album.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: How'd you find this?
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: So a few years ago,
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: my friend Bryn,
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: who works at Fact and Fiction Books,
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: shared their first live video,
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: which was actually the first live show they'd ever done.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: So they were basically like a studio band with three members and And they got really popular.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: So they said,
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: we're going to go out and we're going to do this show and we're going
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: to record it live.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that first one, which is just called LIFA, L-I-F-A, was their first live show ever.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it just blew my mind.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I just, as each subsequent record came out, I just bought it.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I just love it.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: How would you describe the music?
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you look like how whatever...
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Nightmarish streaming online music source that's often called folk or folk metal or whatever.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: But they play a lot.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of drums.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I love about it is all the percussion.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: But then they will beat on like antlers, hit antlers together.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: And there's occasional like old stringed instruments that they'll use.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: But it's mostly percussion and a lot of really cool vocal stuff.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: So like you've got these Tibetan throat singers and Inuit throat singers.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: So they do that kind of thing too.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Only it's a very,
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: like they're allegedly taking these old stories and things like ancient German
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: and Norwegian and Danish, all this stuff.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: And like they call their concerts rituals.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: What I love about it is I can't understand a freaking word.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: There's some English here and there.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: But what I love about it is that they're not trying to manipulate my emotions with the words.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just whatever the vibe is without being able to understand
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: a single thing they're saying,
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: it lets me kind of create a story for myself of what it's about.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I find that very just captivating.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like the album that I shared with you,
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: that live show, I actually had tickets for that show because it was at Red Rocks.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I had tickets to it.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then I got invited to represent the little shell at this commemoration of
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: the Treaty of Old Crossing of 1863.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I did that instead and went out to Minnesota and went to this treaty commemoration.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: But while I was driving out there, I listened to a lot of High Lung.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so part of it is like, God,
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: I could have been one of the voices cheering in that show,
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: you know, but I don't know.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's very animist and primal and kind of scary, depending on how you view those things.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: And the musicianship is...
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: She's spectacular and kind of the lead woman vocalist.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm spacing on her name.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you can put that in the show notes or whatever if you do that kind of thing.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: I know we're kind of by the seat of the pants here, but her singing is just spectacular.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: So it all just for me comes together.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: It has all of the kind of...
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Big show,
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: spectacular drama that the first band I fell in love with was Kiss for
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: the same reason.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Just larger than life and something that you wouldn't see out on the street.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: It just hits all the right buttons for me.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: On their Wikipedia page,
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: it says, well,
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: this is kind of an awkwardly worded sentence,
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: but it says,
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: as instruments,
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: items are used that may have already been available to humans in the Iron Age,
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: such as drums, bones, or spears.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then they have this whole list of things like drums, bones,
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: buffalo horn rattle,
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: clay rattle with human ashes,
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Hindu ritual bell, and constructed silver cut from the Viking Age.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, Pretty amazing stuff.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen interviews with him talking about trying to get some of this stuff
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: through customs,
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: like when they travel internationally and they've got this big duffel bag full
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: of swords and they're trying to convince the Russian customs guy
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: that they're not invading the country or whatever.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, like,
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: the video you sent me,
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: this is the Red Rocks concert,
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: but it says,
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Heilung is amplified history from Northern Europe and should not be mistaken for
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: a modern religious and or political statement of any kind.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because so many skinheads and Nazi types embrace, like,
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Nordic Religion and mythology is kind of like their means to prove that,
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: you know, whites are the dominant race or all of that stuff.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: So there's that whole thing,
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: both in punk rock and in metal,
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: where like Viking music is kind of like a dog whistle for white power, you know?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I know that's why Heilung has that disclaimer, like, we're not with those guys, you know?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: That makes sense.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: In not understanding the lyrics, you do want to steer clear of certain things nowadays.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: You really do.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: For sure.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: I heard a story about one of those old Westerns in the 70s
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: where they had these Navajo guys that were the only actual Indians on this movie set
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: and they had them speaking and then Years later,
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: they showed this movie to the community and everybody was laughing because
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: the Navajo guys were just shit-talking everybody else on the movie set.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: But nobody there knew what they were saying.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: They were just supposedly saying, talking to the white hero or whatever.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, look at that.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: Just ripping it.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I love that.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's fantastic.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, not completely unrelated,
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: but the entire jive discussion in the movie airplane,
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: I believe was improvised by the two guys hired to do it.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it wasn't like,
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: none of it was like actually written, um, which I thought, yeah, that's awesome.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so what,
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: what is this doing for you right now in your life that you've found new music that,
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: that speaks to you in some way?
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why do you think it hit when it did for you?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I still throw on Iron Maiden, you know, the stuff.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: If there's certain things,
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: if I want to,
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: like if I need to power through a couple miles around that circular track
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: that you've written about and I want a good distraction,
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: I still go back to this stuff, but I'm such a different person now.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: And for a while, I had this playlist I put together that was called Essential Rock.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it was all the 70s and 80s hard rock and metal that I listened to when I was a teenager.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: And while I still love the riffs and the energy,
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of the lyrics, I'm like, this is like screaming misogyny 99% of the time.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: And how did I not get utterly ruined by that?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe that's why it's taken me twice as long to become a decent person,
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: at least in the ways that I have.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was really struck by that.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Those were my favorite things at a given time and I still have
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: a certain
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: recollection of their importance in my life but it doesn't really speak to
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: who I am today.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And as someone who's trying to live just in the moment as much as possible,
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: It was easier for me to say, these are the things I'm really digging right now.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I won't next week.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe I just heard of them two weeks ago, but it's what I love right now.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's so, it's difficult.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's proven that it's difficult to find new music as you get older and older.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a struggle for me,
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: but I just don't want to be that guy who's just like,
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: all the bands were better when I was...
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Younger and better looking and didn't creak as much when I got up in the morning.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's refreshing to find something that you can embrace.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think some of it is just the way it's delivered, too, that's off-putting to me.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: We'll talk about...
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect days,
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: but just the scene of him going through and they're flipping through the cassettes
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: and they're in the record store or the music store.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Just the way you found music then.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, this looks like it might be kind of cool.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: I get overwhelmed, you know, like the streaming things.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: Even if I just want to listen to the stuff I have, you just get hit with all this.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, here's something new you might like.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: I don't.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want that every single time I pick it up.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so for me,
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: it's as much the way it's delivered to me as it is whether I want to take the time
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: to find it or not.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's like if you went into a restaurant and they were like, here's our menu.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: And you could look, you could choose from every food ever created.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: You'd be like, that'd be a nightmare.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: We need some constraints here.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, wow, that's a lot.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about Perfect Days.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: You're the second person to talk about this on this podcast.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: I watched it because of the recommendation of Nick Triolo before I had him on the podcast.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: What do you like about this movie?
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: What speaks to you about it?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: I like the depiction of a dude just living a simple life.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't have a bunch of stuff he wants to do.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: He's not...
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like he's a minimalist because if you look at his bookshelves
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: and his stacks of cassettes and all this stuff,
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: so he's not living this stripped down,
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm only going to own what I can carry in my backpack or fit in my car or whatever,
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: but he still has a very simple existence and he's not distracted by all
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: of this other stuff and I aspire to that,
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: being just as stripped down and simple living as I can.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what I love the most.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: I love the way it was shot.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of close shots.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was all handheld cameras and stuff.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think they did it in 15 days or something like that.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Just ridiculous.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like it's a master class in making a movie,
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: especially when you compare it with everything that we...
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: If we said,
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: let's meet down at the Carmike or whatever the hell it is we have in Missoula now
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: and pick a movie, it would be awful.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like that movie kind of ruined...
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: Watching movies for me, you know, because it's all real, you know?
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: I even the other day watched the first Fellowship of the Ring,
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: you know, the first Lord of the Rings trilogy movie and...
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like at the end, there's the big battle.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: Are you filming with that?
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: Have you seen it?
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: I should assume that people have.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: But like the very end,
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: the big battle before Frodo goes off of Sam by himself and Boromir gets killed
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: and they're fighting all those orcs out in the woods.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Those are all people really acting that stuff out.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas nowadays, you've got maybe one or two people and it's all green screen shit.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I just, I don't know.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's me being an old man again, but I just love...
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: How things used to be done.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it can be more impressive, right?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: CGI is kind of like the original AI,
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: if you will, where you're like, let's just make it happen.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: I know, I think about the original three Star Wars movies in the same way,
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: where you're like, Amazing.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: But also, this is all live somehow.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: They had to do a lot of it with miniatures and stuff.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: But you're still blown away by this giant destroyer ship going over the top of the camera.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: And really, it's probably just a guy
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: with a stick.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like this little small thing,
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: but like you're just getting your mind blown and none of it was computers.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, I hear you.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like I'm kind of with you in that part.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: But, yeah, there's also like the discussion of just like movies about normal people, you know.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because the main character in Perfect Days is a guy who cleans some of
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: the most architecturally beautiful toilets, public toilets in Japan, in Tokyo.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: But he's just a guy cleaning toilets and like...
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: When you tell people that, yeah, it's about this guy who cleans toilets.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how many people kind of think about that and go,
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: well, I don't know if I want to watch that movie.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't sound very interesting.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the first time I saw it,
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: I was waiting for the scene where he goes in within minutes after the guy
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: who ate too much Mexican food or whatever and didn't quite make it.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I was like, spoiler alert, that doesn't happen.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: But the story is that
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: Those toilets were made as like an art project.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then these guys wanted, they approached different people to make like a documentary of them.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if it's Wim Wenders or Wim Wenders,
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know, came in and said, yeah, I'll do this, but I'm going to make a movie.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like kind of like a.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: A documentary,
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: in a sense,
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: of these fancy art piece,
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: Japanese toilets with a story to kind of tie them all together.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I love that creative effort by Wim Wenders also to say,
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: yeah, you want to take advantage of my name, just talk about your things.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm going to do something cooler than that with it.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I love that aspect of it too.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it is.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: And just how he's observing the world, you know, and I don't know.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: I just, to me, it just had a really profound impact.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: There's one scene where,
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: because he's driving around in his little cleaning van and he's driving that kind of
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: the cameras up here and on this kind of higher rise
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: of traffic are all these cars just in gridlock.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then he's like on the lower level all by himself, just going down the highway or whatever.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, that's like an image also.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody else is just trapped in the modern rush, rush, get all you can, whatever.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he's just kind of living his life.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that again was like a statement of creativity that I really appreciated.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: Listening to cassettes, shooting photos with the film camera.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do you like other, like to me, that's a very slow movie.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you're waiting for something exciting to happen, you're going to fall asleep, you know?
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: Do you like other sorts of slow movies that are paced similarly to that?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think I do.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: The only one, I was thinking of one earlier today, Train Dreams.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: Did you see that?
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: I read the book, and as a dad with a young kid, I'm not ready for the movie, I think.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: I understand.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: So it's probably my favorite Dennis Johnson book, too.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: But I thought they did just a phenomenal job with the movie, too.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, stuff happens a little more than what happens in Perfect Days.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: But it's also kind of slow and just a character...
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Study in some ways and beautifully shot.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: So that was one I could think of.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I can recall times reflecting on a movie and thinking what I liked about it is
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: that it was slow, but I can't remember what any of them are.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: My kid refers to him as Emo Vader.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I can't see him now as anything other than Emo Vader.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: But he was in that.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: What was that movie?
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was like a crime movie.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Daniel Craig was in it.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: Wasn't.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, man, we're doing this.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to do this.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: I love that movie.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: And now I'm blanking on the name of it right now.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's Daniel Craig.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't Adam Driver like missing a hand or something like that?
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: And is it Channing Tatum?
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, he is.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: I will have to think what that movie is.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to have to look it up because I can't.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: And don't they rob like a racetrack or something like that?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: I want to say it's Talladega Motor Speed.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: Talladega.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I could be wrong.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: Logan Lucky.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it is.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: Logan Lucky.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's a wonderful movie.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: Not a slow movie.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: No, but fantastic.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: Charlotte Motor Speedway.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, that's what it is.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: And Adam Driver's great in it.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: So he's, yeah, he's Emo Vader, but also, he's also a couple other people.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: Lucky for him.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: No, for sure.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: Can we, can we chat about John Isaiah Pepion?
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Am I pronouncing that correctly?
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: You are.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: Can you say, can you talk about his art, who he is?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: So he is a Blackfeet ledger artist who has kind of blown up like internationally.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I put him on here when I was putting this list together because he did the art
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: that we used for the first Indigipalooza festival that we did.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: Two years ago.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: And well, I guess it'd be a year ago.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: And he's kind of become like one of our, so we have the people who organize it.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: Then there's a handful of people who've been involved as participants or presenters
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: that have been along for the whole thing also.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: And he's one of them.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: And he's just, he's chill and super talented.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: And he's just been really supportive.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was like really high on Pepe and When I made my list and I said,
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to put him on there so you can get his stuff.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's this company called Eighth Generation.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: They're out of Seattle and they sell like native jewelry and blankets, you know, native design.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: So Pepian has a whole line of stuff there.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: I was gifted a blanket for a...
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: Keynote I did at the Minnesota Indian Education Association Conference a couple years ago.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: And the blanket they put on me was a Pepian one.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: So he's just great.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: And he's Blackfeet.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's local.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's just awesome.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like that Ken Burns.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: That Ken Burns American Bison or American Buffalo documentary he did a few years ago.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like Pepian's Ledger Art is like the Poster or what we would call the DVD cover or
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: the Blu-ray cover if those things existed anymore.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I just love to see his success.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: Did you discover him because of the blanket or were you aware of him before then?
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: I was already aware of him.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I also,
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: because one of the,
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: my friend Anna,
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: who's one of the co-organizers of Indigipalooza taught on the Flathead Reservation
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: for Twenty-some years and taught at Two Eagle River,
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: which is the tribal school up there, elementary.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: And Papian was one of her students.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I've known about him for several years because of that relationship also.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was kind of our in.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's like to get this international artist to work on our budget was part of
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: that history of the relationships that we have in these areas where Some
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: of us have lived for a long time,
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: so that's part of what I appreciate him so much is that he's not,
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: you know, he's still keeping it real with the local folks, you know?
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Was there,
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: did you have any trepidation about like,
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: well, maybe this guy's too big for us now, but let's ask anyway, or how did that go?
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: What we did the first year is just say,
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: hey, do you have anything that we can license, basically?
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: And he just sent us a few options and we chose the Magpie one.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then my friend Aaron Draplin,
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: who's a pretty big time graphic designer,
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: took that and kind of reworked it for our logo, for lack of a better term.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, Pepian loved it.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: So...
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's like we didn't commission something original for him from him, but I think we will.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: But what I love is that this last year,
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: just a month ago,
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: someone in one of the panel discussions,
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: someone asked about Ledger Art and Pepin was there and...
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: I said, well, we have one of the best ledger artists in the world in the room right now.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe he'll answer that question.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he was all the way on the other side of the room.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: And like,
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: if you or I would have been invoked,
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: we would have probably gotten up and met me halfway across the room.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: And he just, you know, he was just chilling and he just waited.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: Waited for you to walk all the way across
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: that big room and handed the mic.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I had just told him this Paul Bunyan story,
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: told the audience this Paul Bunyan story about related to the creation of
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: the Red Lakes on the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota and how there's two
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: of them there.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's when Nanabuju knocked out Paul Bunyan.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: He landed on his ass and his butt cheeks created the indentations that filled up
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: with water to become the Red Lakes.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the people had asked,
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: the person asked the question,
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: like, what is off, is there anything that's off limits?
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like in your ledger art, what do you, what do you portray?
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, is there a cultural statement in this?
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I handed the, the mic to Pepien and he says, well, I don't, I don't draw butt cheeks.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you kind of had to be there, but it was pretty funny.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, his timing was perfect.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: Did he say more or was that it?
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then he went on to talk about how it is,
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: you know, it's part of telling the story of his people, a lot of what he does.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, he blended the humor with answering the question as well.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate that, you know.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: Not taking himself too seriously.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: Do you own other pieces or just the blanket?
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: I have a couple things.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think I have like a coffee mug and I get gifts a lot.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the public speaking I do, especially Native communities and 8th Gen.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: It used to be Pendleton.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: people would give because blankets are,
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know, one of our traditional ways that we honor someone.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so I've gotten the one peppy and blanket as well as a bunch of others,
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: but people will give me coffee mugs and,
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: and like you can get neckties and just,
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have a lot of use for a necktie,
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: but the fact that it's like native art on it is, is pretty cool.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I have pins and just that kind of thing.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was, I was just reading, um,
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: a biography of Keith Haring,
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: the artist a few months ago and, um,
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it was only him,
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: but he was really instrumental in taking art from this thing
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: that only rich people could buy on canvases and hang on their walls and
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: in their houses with lots of wall space to things that artists can actually sell,
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: like coffee mugs and blankets and smaller things like that, T-shirts and all that.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: Art is for the people.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think about that, too.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can buy inexpensive art, and I love that ability.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: That whole, like,
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: like my,
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned my friend Draplin,
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: he does the same thing,
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: he does stuff for, for huge companies and does talks for these huge companies.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know,
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: we were the first year of Indigitalooza,
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: we were kind of in a bind because the people we were trying to work
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: with weren't coming through.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Hey man, we don't have much of a budget and we need some stuff.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: And like three days later,
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: we've got this whole line of,
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: a screen printable poster and,
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: and the, that,
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: Art turned into a graphic that we can use for stickers and stuff, just like that.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: I like artists who do that.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm going to charge...
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: Corporate America is one thing,
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm still going to be here for my friends who need shit too.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: I aspire to that.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's like one thing, if a university wants me to come talk, I'm not going to do it for $200.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: But if Poplar High School,
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: if you can put me up somewhere, I don't care what you pay me, if at all.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: Give me an Airbnb and a Chippewa dog and we're good.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: Draplin has a story about that in one of his very old talks where he's like,
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: I got paid, you know, $40,000 to do that logo.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: This one here, I got a hot dog, but it made my buddy's mom happy or something like that.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: That was the Cobra Dogs.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: Cobra Dogs.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it was.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: Where his buddy, his buddy gets, they got a cease and desist from GI Joe or Hasbro.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_00: Draplin's legendary.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite things he's ever done was he did like a whole series of stuff
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: for yellow mustard.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I have just regular yellow mustard, like a trucker hat.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, man, that's great.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I bought one and it just did, it was way too big for me.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: I have a big like silk kind of like,
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: it's too big to be a bandana,
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: but it's just like a wall hanging of the yellow mustard.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: I go over there and I almost have to bring an extra bag when I travel to Portland.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: And all the field notes and all that stuff.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty cool.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: He's easy to root for, for sure.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, all right.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: We're, we're at your fifth item here.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm realizing now you don't have really like a writing book on this.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: I guess the dictionary of 2000 Japanese rain words is kind of a, just a purely words book.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: But, um, this last narrative
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: though, you're right.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, photographer, Alexandra, can you say that?
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: Can you say her name?
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: The last name?
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's style.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if she still does.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a couple of years.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: I already knew who DeSteiger was, but I'd never heard her talk before.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: But she's also a musician.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: But her thing is she spends winters on this island as like the caretaker
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: of this creepy asshole hotel.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: All by herself.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then she takes photos of the island that it's on and all the buildings and stuff.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just, it's all black and white, like medium.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a medium frame camera she uses.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: Develops her own prints, you know.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: And again, it's one of those very, almost a hermit existence.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, not so different from kind of the vibe of Perfect Days either.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't plan that, but I realized that a lot of these things that I like are...
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of similar in that just trying to step away from
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: the hustle and bustle of modern life.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was going to go with The Shining.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's that too.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: I love the idea of the solitude and being there,
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm probably too scared of the dark in that big building to want to be there all
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: by myself for seven months or whatever it is.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, is that why the work appeals to you, do you think?
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because do you have a wish to be away for a while to just work for
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: some peace?
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: I love solitude.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to invoke Thoreau because everybody invokes Thoreau.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the first thing people say is, yeah, well, his mom did his laundry.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, that really wasn't the point.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: He wasn't trying to live away from everybody.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a great documentary that PBS did of him too.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of the stuff to go back to that question about slow stuff.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: I love that documentary and there's a great documentary I just watched
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: about Georgia O'Keeffe and then the Mary Oliver documentary just came out.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I've watched all three of those and just loved them.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I just love the slow stuff.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: The solitude, I like the landscape, you know, because it's not overrun with people.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: her neighbors are all older than human relatives,
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: you know, birds and things like that.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I love that.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: I love black and white photography.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: So again,
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: it's one of those things that is kind of hitting a lot of my favorite things,
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_01: you know, from the broad sense.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: You're not trying to get like a writer's residency to do something like that and get away?
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever done anything like that?
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: Best I can do is a couple nights at an Airbnb, I think, at this point.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I haven't done anything remote like that.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: What's the one in Wyoming?
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, Ucross.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: One of these years I'm going to apply for that.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: I had a residency in Crested Butte, Colorado, which is not...
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was during the off-season,
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: so I guess it was kind of quiet,
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: but it still,
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: I was around people a fair amount,
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: so it wasn't like this isolated solitude existence,
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: solitary existence,
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: but I did find that,
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: and then I did 10 days at Deer Butte in Butte,
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: which is just a little house up on the hill that you can stay in for up to 10 days,
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: and both of those residencies I found to be very probably necessary for
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: a certain point in every book,
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: At least,
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: not the poetry books,
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: but certainly the prose stuff where you can just get in that world that you're in
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: and just live there for however much time you have without having to jerk back into,
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: oh, you know, I got to put the clothes in the dryer.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I've had the same sprinkler on for three days, you know, that kind of stuff.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: Dude, I know.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: Your...
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: Your creative or writing career was
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: mostly after your son was pretty grown up.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: Do I have the timeline kind of correct?
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like you have one less busy thing in your life?
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, before,
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote like three fantasy novels in my 20s that will never see the light of day.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so he was, I started those before he was even born.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then, yeah, how old would he have been?
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: He was still in the house when I was doing a fair amount of like my freelance stuff.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: But by the time One Sentence Journal came out, you know, he was an adult.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, you're right.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's the appeal of it to me right now.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's like everything requires so much attention all the time with a four-year-old.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then when it doesn't require it,
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: you're shot and you just want to sit and stare at your bookshelf.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: No, I get that.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it'd be nice someday, writing residency.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if it's any consolation, that never really changes, even when they become adults.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, all right.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, don't create any illusions for yourself.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: Just, just learn to live with it.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's,
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: it seems,
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: it seems like if you have a bigger,
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: bigger project coming up, maybe, maybe that is a good ticket for you soon.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: But, um, the, the book, Small Island, Big Picture, is there a bit of writing in there as well?
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: Or is it?
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there is,
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: so you've got the forward and the intro and all that,
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: but then, yeah, there's, there's, um,
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: I guess that's a great question because it helps kind of identify,
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: you know, I like short things.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: I like micro, flash, whatever we call it.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: So there's like little,
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: I guess I could call these flash nonfiction things related to some of the photos.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_01: one sentence journal is,
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know, the poems are short and I just love,
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: I love the constraints of writing something short to just see,
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: How much you can say in as little space as possible, which is challenging.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: I remember,
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: when I first started freelancing for the Missoula Independent,
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: the whole thing was Ace Frehley,
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: who is the original guitarist for Kiss, was coming to Missoula on his solo tour.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd already been writing record reviews
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: for like underground heavy music websites where they paid you in the CDs
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: that you got to review.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so I thought, oh, I'm already a pro at this stuff.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so I contacted Skylar, who was the editor at the Indie at the time.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, you know, we can probably do that.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: But You know, you should probably see some of your work.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: You want to write some reviews for a while.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, yeah, no problem, no problem.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the word limit was either 200 or 300 words for their record reviews.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I couldn't tell you what the first one was.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I type it all out and look at it.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's like 800 words.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, this is impossible.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I had to learn how to, you know, brevity of language the whole bit.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I came to appreciate just...
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: That constraint,
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: to say what you want to say,
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: what you really need to say, just distilled down to its purest essence.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I like to think a couple of times I got it right.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I was just writing it to a formula because it was due in 30 minutes
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: and I hadn't even listened to the record yet, you know, that kind of stuff.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: And, but yeah, I like that.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I definitely appreciate that about this book too.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's a, that's a great point.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: I forget the writer.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: I should be,
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: a friend sent me a podcast interview with this like fairly famous,
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: like sports writer who also writes novels.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: And he, the presenter or the interviewer asked him about writer's block.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, I don't have a problem with writer's block.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_00: I have a problem with writer's vomit where you just like,
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: he's like, it's easy to write 5,000 words of garbage.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's, that's the problem we need to focus on.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, that's true for sure.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever read, I'm looking him up here so I make sure I get his name right.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: Eduardo Galeano.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: So he's, did I lose you somewhere here?
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: Start moving windows around and all of a sudden I have no idea what I'm looking at.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, there we are.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: He does that.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: So he wrote this book called
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, now I can't think of what it is.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: But his books are typically like just short little observations.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: I want to say it's mirrors, which is like the history of humanity or something.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it goes way back into antiquity
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: and just writes these short little vignettes taking you through history.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like from Venezuela or Honduras or someplace like that.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: But he's spectacular.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it works in that.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: He does longer form too, but the stuff I like best is just those short little blasts.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: I love a good 600-page book, but what I love better is a good 130-page book.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're at an hour.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: I should wrap this up.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for doing this.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to go through your list real quick here.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: Water of the Sky, a Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words by...
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: Is it Mia Ando?
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Mia Ando.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Heilong's album,
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_00: Leafa Lutengard,
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: which I'll put the link to the YouTube video of the Red Rocks concert
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_00: that you sent me.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: Perfect Days, the movie.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: John Isaiah Pepian, the artist.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the photo book, Small Island Big Picture by Alexandra DeSteiger.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: Man, thanks so much for doing this.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: This has been super fun.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for asking me.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I figured it would be,
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: but yeah,
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: we've been talking about doing something for a year now,
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: so it's cool to finally do it.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, lovely.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome, dude.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.