WITB : What The Hell Was In Their Bag? (hour 2 – Laurel Halo)

WITB

On my show, Box of Chocolates you really never know what you’re gonna get, and that little line of lame marketing works on so many damn levels. One show concept I like to pull out now and again centers around these videos posted by mega indy record/media/ephemera store Amoeba Records. While not a monolithic global chain, they are a small regional (if you want to accept the state of California as a region, which Californians would argue with because the people of the Central Valley feel dissed by the rest of the state and NorCal and SoCal have been at a war of sensibilities for as long as I can remember) chain with stores in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Hollywood.

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So on their YouTube marketing platform they post videos called What’s In My Bag. Where just a delightful mix of artists come to the store for a shopping spree and then show you/us what they decided to pick up. I then take some of these and turn them into playlists. This episode was especially awesome because Laurel turned me on to some pretty cool shit that was completely unbeknowst to me. Well obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have needed to be turned on to it. This episode of Box of Chocolates was originally streamcast on the second of July 2017.

And now back to the long running fictitious speech from the novel The Story of B, authored by Daniel Quinn.

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The Boiling Frog

18 May, Schauspielhaus  Wahnfried, Radenau

Systems thinkers have given us a useful metaphor for a certain kind of human behavior in the phenomenon of the boiled frog. The phenomenon is this. If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.

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We all know stories of frogs being tossed into boiling water—for example, a young couple being plunged into catastrophic debt by an unforeseen medical emergency. A contrary example, an example of the smiling boiled frog, is that of a young couple who gradually use their good credit to buy and borrow themselves into catastrophic debt. Cultural examples exist as well. About six thousand years ago the goddess-worshipping societies of Old Europe were engulfed in a boiling up of our culture that Marija Gimbutas called Kurgan Wave Number One; they struggled to clamber out but eventually succumbed. The Plains Indians of North America, who were engulfed in another boiling up of our culture in the 1870s, constitute another example; they struggled to clamber out over the next two decades, but they too finally succumbed. A contrary example, an example of the smiling-boiled-frog phenomenon, is provided by our own culture. When we slipped into the cauldron, the water was a perfect temperature, not too hot, not too cold. Can anyone tell me when that was? Anyone?

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Blank faces.

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I’ve already told you, but I’ll ask again, a different way. When did we become we? Where and when did the thing called us begin? Remember: East and West, twins of the common birth. Where? And when?

Well, of course: in the Near East, about ten thousand years ago. That’s where our peculiar, defining form of agriculture was born, and we began to be we. That was our cultural birthplace. That was where and when we slipped into that beautifully pleasant water: the Near East, ten thousand years ago.

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