Small Talk

October 9, 2015August 27, 2017

Episode 35: We've Got You Covered!

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This week Dave and Steel bring Zac back on the show to discuss the joys and terrors of fairs (County and State alike), the golden era of Pauly Shore films, a guy who surfed a 20 foot wave on a motorcycle with skis attached, and the new Alexander Hamilton hip-hop Broadway musical. They also have their first poetry face-off (Mary Oppen vs. David Berman), cover some zany corporate hijinks, play great cover songs by Earth, Wind, & Fire, Pavement, M. Ward, Jamie Cullum, the Lemonheads, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Steel shares some book wisdom from the poet Brian Teare.

Episode 33: Small Town USA, Small Talk, To the Limits, Great Moments in Advertising History, OTC Hall of Fame, Unchained Melodies: 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and "Pig in First Person"

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by their old friend Jordan to discuss Dave’s recent move to a small town in Arizona, cover some small talk topics, describe some extraordinary feats of human endurance, great advertisements featuring pro athletes and attorneys for local markets, induct the newest member of the OTC Hall of Fame, share great music from The Bacon Brothers, Arcade Fire, Stan Rogers, The Tragically Hip, Fujima and Miyagi, and Kenny Loggins, and share a wrenching poem by John Levy, a Tuscon-based poet who works as a public defender.

Episode 29: Greatest Ever Haircuts, Small Talk, Everyday Heroes, Unchained Melodies: BECK!, and Bartleby, the Scrivener

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by their friend Julia to discuss their best and most memorable haircuts, the recent revival of the Yul Brenner sci-fi classic Westworld, a huge, beautiful net that’s been installed over Boston’s Greenway, and lower level Spanish football jerseys made to look like ham. The trio also give respect to a trio of everyday heroes, share six favorite songs from Beck’s incredible, eclectic musical career and Julia drops some books wisdom from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”.

Episode 27: Ode to Summer, Great Moments in Advertising, Small Talk, OTC Money, Would You Rather?, Unchained Melodies: Unrequited Love Edition, and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by their old friend Howard. Together the three of them discuss their shared love of water parks and share recent child-related misadventures in public pools, cover some great moments in 1990s advertisements, cover the eight benefits of saunas, what it’s like to write political speeches for a dishonest moron, and the return (to Netflix) of Reading Rainbow. They also introduce a new segment, OTC Money, in which they give advice for buying a car, play a few rounds of would you rather, share heartbreaking melodies of love and loss by Dr. Hook, Van Morrison, Biz Markie, Pepe Aguilar, Phil Collins, and The Contours, and Howard shares some book wisdom from the storyteller Donald Miller’s book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years about how to make your life into a meaningful story.

Episode 24: Life Hacks, Small Talk, Expert Testimony: Mississippi, Duke Basketball, and Buffalo!, OTC Authors: Thomas Nashe, Unchained Melodies, and The Genealogy of Morals

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by Steel’s graduate school buddy Eric. Together the trio share some recent life hacks, discuss the New Horizons spacecraft’s visit to Pluto (and its cargo of human remains), Sepp Blatter’s pope-blessed gold cross, and the strange phenomena of enormously popular online videos of other people playing video games. We grill Eric about all things Mississippi, his past life as an executive at Steve & Barry’s and a proud inhabitant of the Krzyzewskiville tent village, and his longstanding love for the Buffalo Bills, and Eric introduces us to the wild world of late 16th century English satire via the esteemed personages of Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey. We round the episode off with great Mississippi-connected music from Bob Dylan, The Weeks, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Mavis Staples, and Mountain, and Eric drops some book wisdom from Friedrich Nietzsche about the dangers of believing that we can achieve objectivity.

Episode 22: Adventures in Homeschooling, Small Talk, Expert Testimony: Parenting and Creativity, Everyday Heroes, Unchained Melodies, and I Hate To Leave This Beautiful Place

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This week Dave was out, so Steel had to hold down the fort without him. Fortunately, Rose and Emeline were available, and together the three of them had a delightful time, discussing Rose and Emeline’s homeschooling experiences, a newly discovered connection between the brain and the lymphatic system, the survival ability of the word ‘mother’, and the surging greatness that is emoji. The three of them also discussed some of the challenges of parenting and their struggles to balance familial commitments with the desire for a creative life, what it’s been like raising boys, the style era they’d feel most at home in, and three everyday heroes (all women) they wanted to praise. In this week’s edition of Unchained Melodies, the focus was on songs sung in languages other than English, and they shared great sounds from Fran Jeffries, Peter Pan Complex, Ana Tijoux, Natalia LaFourcade, Glen Check, and Super Furry Animals, before Rose shared some moving book wisdom from an Inuit folklorist recounted in Howard Norman’s memoir I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place.

Episode 19: Hug Daddy Game, Top 5 Norwegian Words, Small Talk, Expert Testimony: Ask the Marketer, Brother vs. Brother, Unchained Melodies, and East of Eden

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by their old friend Alan. Dave introduces the two men to a game he plays with his daughters called the “Hug Daddy Game,” Alan shares his fave favorite Norwegian words, and they run through a segment of small talk, discussing the latest FIFA scandals, Alan’s love of a well-edited Hobbit remake, and Nate DiMeo’s fantastic podcast the Memory Palace. We then present a very special feature, “Ask The Marketer,” in which we present several difficult to market products to Alan, a professional marketer, and he explains how he’d market these increasingly repulsive brands/products, following which we share great music about fictional characters from The Flaming Lips, The Brunettes, Mumford and Sons, The Spin Doctors, Suicide, and Duck Tales, and Alan closes the episode with some book wisdom from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Episode 17: OTC Vistas, Small Talk, Walden, Unchained Melodies: Summer Songs, and Cat's Cradle

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by Dave’s friend Rosie. Together the trio describe the most beautiful places they’ve ever been and discuss the greatness of Lonesome Dove, the latest in shipping crate swimming pool construction, and the legend of Mingering Mike, an imaginary soul singer who made good in the latest edition of Small Talk. Rosie and Steel also try to explain the greatness of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden to a skeptical Dave, and they have a bit of fun with a fill-in-the-blanks game. They share great summer tunes from Son Volt, Loudon Wainwright III, The Bowerbirds, Fountains of Wayne, crash, and The Drums, and Rosie drops some book wisdom from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Cat’s Cradle.

Links

OTC Vistas

Rosie: The Spiral Jetty [an earthwork by Robert Smithson] in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
Steel: Gandria/Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland
Dave: Marion Lake, Wyoming

Lonesome Dove

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m44NQUIOaiQ
Shipping container swimming pools
Mingering Mike: Jon Ronson’s Guardian article and his personal website

Walden

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

Read the book.

Unchained Melodies

Son Volt — Windfall

Loudon Wainwright III — The Swimming Song

The Bowerbirds — Overcome with Light

Fountains of Wayne — Leave the Biker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQalBzt8ECU

crash — Mad at the Clouds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnghXaEkE_Q

The Drums — Let’s Go Surfing

Book Wisdom

This week’s passage (read by Rosie) came from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. Wishing you all a ton of boko-maru in the coming days.

May 15, 2015August 27, 2017

Episode 16: Disney World, Small Talk, Ask OTC, Expert Testimony: OTC Comics, Unchained Melodies, and The Phantom Tollbooth

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by their friend Oliver. Together they discuss Dave’s recent family vacation to Disney World (including a refreshing stop at Club Cool!), explore the benefits of Transcendental Meditation, learn more about the Rocky Mountain Land Library, speculate about the return of Full House (it’s going to be called Fuller House!), offer listeners moving advice and dance tips, discuss Dave and Oliver’s shared passion for cartooning and comic books, share their envy of the voices of Antony Heggarty, Prince Nelson, Van Morrison, Vic Chesnutt, Charlie Puth, and Bobby Hatfield & Bill Medley, and drop some wisdom from Norton Juster’s classic children’s adventure novel The Phantom Tollbooth.

Episode 14: Poetry, Expert Testimony, Small Talk, Ask OTC, Unchained Melodies, and Charles Reznikoff

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This week Dave and Steel are joined by their friend Katie (a female nurse!) to discuss a huge panoply of things, including Steel’s love for poetry, Katie’s college softball career, A League of Their Own, the return of the brontosaurus, Wonder Woman’s freaky creator William Moulton Marston, and the difference between anabolic and boring steroids. Katie also leads the guys through a set of rapid fire ‘lightning round’ questions, and they take listener questions about home buying, flu shots, and high school math classes, and then share some great music from Cayetana, Lucius, Blackstreet, Alice Boman, and Jason Isbell, and Steel shares two poems from the criminally underread Charles Reznikoff: “[During the Second World War …]” and “Te Deum”.

Links

Poetry

Three of the life-changing poets that Steel talked about:

And here’s a bunch of articles about Emily Dickinson’s “Master” letters:

From Nicholas Rombes at the Rumpus
An article on Dickinson’s love life from the Emily Dickinson Museum
A review of a recent (2012) book which makes a case for identifying who Dickinson was addressing as “Master” in these letters

Expert Testimony

Katie’s Indiana University softball athlete page

A League of Their Own