This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John wants to get some people in a room, referring to there being so many 24-year old people in Silicon Valley who are worth more than $200 million, which is how much Mick Jagger is worth, and John wants to get them all into a convention center and lecture them for a year.

The show title refers to the former porn theater called the Apple Theater in Seattle that has now been converted into an artisanal pork bakery.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

How the roll of the fluffer in the porn industry has changed (RL103)

It is early! John is a team-player today and he got his game-face on and is willing to put some points on that board to win this particular team of ball. They are in the seed-zone, which sounds like a porno-thing that a fluffer would have to be in. Merlin thinks that ”fluffer” is a nice term, but times have changed and while back in the old days fluffing was absolutely a thing, nowadays there is a whole group of people that are really into the fluffer girl or boy instead of it being used in the context of: ”You are not ready for prime-time, you are on the fluffer level!” Keep the cameras rolling, there is no distinction between star and fluffer now!

Merlin makes the analogy that the journalist is to the blogger as the porn-star is to the fluffer. You could absolutely get a hell of a following as a fluffer today. Merlin could see a reality show, maybe called ”Fluff you!”, like a Project Runway type thing or like Rachel Zoe, not that she is a fluffer, where you follow around one of the up-and-comers, or you could get a preeminent fluffer who is at the top of their game, like the Iman or fluffers. Merlin suggests calling the show ”The Cum Back”, like the Debra Winger of fluffing, someone who is unquestionably the top-fluffer in the game. Annie Sprinkle’s fluffer! The old porn-stars surely all had their under-study who was their fluffer and their travelled together.

It would be like that recent movie about all the background singers of famous bands (probably 20 Feet from Stardom), except they were the foreground fluffers. The unsung heroes of porn! There are so many documentaries you could make about the unsung heroes of porn. They were laboring in obscurity, the cops were kicking down their doors. Just recently Los Angeles made a law that you have to wear a condom in a pornographic filmed that is filmed in the Los Angeles area, which is making people want to leave because it is difficult to sell that to people. That is not the fantasy!

John’s friend Davie, the projectionist at the Apple Theater (RL103)

Merlin had a French language- and literature-professor in college who when he was at Madison worked at a porn theater and did clean-up in booths. It was an unpleasant job. John had a friend named Punk Rock Davie who used to work in the bars and the clubs, but little by little burned all his bridges and was no longer welcome anywhere. He never was a bartender and never rose above the level of bar back, which would be another great name for a documentary ”The Bar Back”, and eventually he ended up at the Apple theater in Seattle, which was a porn theater that is now being converted into an artisanal pork bakery.

At the time it was still showing 35mm film and it was open all night, maybe they closed for an hour between 7-8am, and John would sometimes go and sit with Davie in the projection booth and they would do drugs. They were full-length pornos and he had to change the reel half-way through, it was a serious business, like going to the movie. The theater was full of people who were just looking for a place to sleep. For the $7 to get into the theater you could spend the night there, which was a big part of the appeal of the waning days of big-city porn theaters. You couldn’t get a bed at the St. Vincent de Paul for $7.

Davie was terrible at his job. In the movie Fight Club they would slice in porno into regular films, but Davie would splice in car crash scenes and carnage scenes right at the moment of ejaculation. It was a universal projectionist game because Davie was not the kind of guy who would dream up something like this by himself. It was the era of research magazines and John was at Davie’s house one time and he had a mattress on the floor and a bookshelf made of cinder blocks with books full of autopsy photos, serial-killer photos, and people who had laid down on train tracks, and there were 600 beer cans.

He was chasing the Punk Rock dragon tale and John didn’t believe him. He didn’t want to see any of that stuff. But when Davie showed him the half a foot of film of some brutal murder that he was splicing into classic 1970s pornos John approved of that because Davie was doing serious psychic damage to people in the service of Speed the Collapse. On the other hand, the last group of people who need to be additionally fucked with psychologically were men who were sleeping in a porno theater. Those are not the people you want to activate and connect their sexuality to violent crime and send them out of the theater with an unhealthy association between orgasm and mass violence.

How your High School friends are getting old (RL103)

John ran into Davie the other day after not having seen him for 15 years, and the first thing John said was: ”Oh my God, I can’t believe you are alive!”, which is a bit of a faux pas even in Punk Rock circles and he looked all offended and said: ”I have a kid!” - ”Wow, that is great, you grew up, you had a kid! What are you doing?” - ”Nothing, just some temp job!” He was Punk Rock and was always a bit more haggard-looking than he should have been. When he was 21 years old they used to joke that 21 was 45 in Punk Rock years, but in fact he made it through the looking glass and now he looks amazing for a 44 year old, slim and well-groomed, but he was smoking a cigarette walking down the street in the middle of the day and John was noticing that this was still a thing some people would do.

When they were 21 it was very easy for a lot of them to adapt a mentality of: ”I don’t care! I do try to kill myself! Who cares? I am going to just die! Who cares if I get cancer? I am not going to live that long anyway!”, but when you are 45 and you have a kid and you still keep smoking…

Merlin wants to have a brighter light in here because he feels like he stepped on something. His house looks like Stalag XIII because has so many bright lights because he doesn’t want to step on a LEGO and fall down, and glancingly hit the edge of the table and die in a freak accident. That is Punk Rock now! Merlin doesn’t want to die in a freaky way that is super-hard to explain. He doesn’t want to die at all if he could avoid it, but eventually he will have to deal with that.

Credit to his incredible level of self-absorption Merlin does periodically stop and think: ”I wonder if my friends who were my age in High School are my age now!” because in his head they are maybe 30, maybe the have added a couple belt notches, and then you see them and they are old people. There is a bulkening happening to men. They are not fat, but they look wider in every respect, their neck is wider, how did their skull get wider? They look stretched. There is a 19-year old pair of eyes in there buried in a meat mask of age shame.

John was at the playground the other day and there was a bunch of dads who were teaching their sons to play baseball. The sons ranged in age between 4-7, and it wasn’t T-ball, bu there was a beardy dad pitching the ball and these kids were getting hits, running the bases, and fielding. Nobody was really yelling at the kids, but they were taking baseball very seriously because if you want to be a boy in the world you have to learn this game. John was watching them and was thinking that a) thank God he has a daughter so he doesn’t feel any pressure yelling at her to round second, and b) these guys were his age, some of them younger, and they all look old. They looked exactly like Bob Balaban, Tony Millionaire, and Charles Bukowski.

These were John’s peers in age, but they were yelling at their kid about baseball. John looked at his reflection in a slightly undulating puddle and thought to himself: ”Wait a minute. I am old like them!” and he had to sit down and get his inhaler out.

Merlin saw Duff McKagan on Portlandia (comedy TV show). He looks amazing and he is carved out of mahogany. He is a suave motherfucker, he looks very slender and fit and he is very focused and a very bright guy. Maybe he would be a great example of a fitness mentor. He is 50 years old now and still in amazing shape and youthful in every regard. Don’t let yourself turn into Bukowski, but chase after the shooting star of Duff McKagan. You just have to look a little bit better than other people, like in the likeness where you don’t have to outrun the bear, but outrun the other person.

John being overdressed at a meeting with the Seattle Music Commission, people not dressing up anymore (RL103)

The other day John went Downtown to his first official meeting with the mayor of Seattle, together with the rest of the Seattle Music Commission, the deputy mayor, the assistant deputy mayor, and the assistant deputy to the deputy mayor. They were talking about the future of Seattle, the Waterfront and a lot of big projects. In anticipation of going Downtown John put on a suit because a) he collects suits even though he has no use for them, and b) because he doesn’t work, spends most of the day naked walking around in a bathrobe swinging a sword and when he has a reason to go Downtown he can’t bring a sword and he is going to be a guy who gets dressed up in his clothes to have a meeting.

The first thing about living in the West, same in San Francisco and in Seattle, is that you judge the most important person in the room by how shabbily he is dressed. The billionaires in Seattle all show up to the finest restaurants in town in cargo shorts and fleece jackets. Paul Allen looks like the pile of clothes at the bottom of a locker, and that is true of everybody. In a nice restaurant in Seattle the best-dressed people are the waiters.

John had a tie and a shirt and a suit and some nice shoes and he had combed his hair, while everybody else on the music panel looked like a dump truck ran into a hot topic and the mayor and his people who have to wear suits are wearing the ”I have to wear a suit” suits, the kind of suit that a public servant wears that communicate: ”I am required to wear a suit out of respect for the office, but I am also a man of the people, so I am not wearing a nice or fancy suit and certainly not a chic suit, but I am wearing an affordable suit!”

When you see a politician or a person in public service wearing a really nice expensive slick suit you automatically distrust them. The ill-fitting cheap suit is… even when politicians get to be very powerful rich people who are having suits made for them they get them made in a boxy cut with an unfashionable line because you don’t want to look like a mobster, but you also don’t want to look like you are too Hollywood.

John was the fucking Barbie in this meeting, the person who everybody in the room was instinctively take less seriously because he got dressed up for this meeting in the style of a person who never gets to wear his fancy clothes. He wore collar bar and a tie pin, he was fucking Paul F. Tompkins, the only thing missing was a watch fob, and he realized he couldn’t keep doing this because he wants to walk up to the mayor after this and tell him his plan for a new Police Academy that he has been slowly percolating in his mind, and they are instinctively going to dismiss him as a fop, like a Victorian boy going to a fancy funeral. He was telegraphing that he was an amateur.

The gals were all chic, but in a comfortable Northwestern way. There is so much that other women can read into how a person is dressed and what they are trying to telegraph. John is pretty fashion-aware, but he is incapable of decoding it all. 99% of the men in the world are just wearing white athletic socks. They all looked great, but they were projecting ”We are women in powerful positions in our respective realms and the stuff has to be tailored just enough because we live in Seattle!”

John was having a lot of fun over the last couple of years buying suits at thrift-stores, the entire time conscious of the fact that there is no occasion for him to wear a suit. 98% of the time, certainly around the house, he is just dressed like a Saturday Night Live cast member in 1977, and when he goes out he is generally head-to-toe in wool because he is never sure if an electromagnetic pulse is going to knock out all the computers that run our cars and he is going to have to make it to the hill country before people start eating each other, so he is not going to wear a fucking suit.

John has been going to cocktail parties or having meetings with the people on the Arts Commission and they are all dressed like they were in a Fellini movie, while the Music Commission just grab their clothes from the free pile as they are leaving their apartment building on their way to work. But in the Arts Commission the dudes are seriously wearing Ascots (tie), and they have Italian shoes that are so pointy that they become Pagliacci shoes, which means that the people John needs to cajole up to are the arts people, the painters and the opera people, they really dress like fruit cakes.

Whatever it was 25 years ago when they started instituting the ”1% for art” business, they were going to rebuild the Freeway, which is a $500 project, but the legislature put a ”1% for art” in all public projects, which means 1% of the total budget of epic projects has to be set aside for there to be an art component, which is why there is so much publicly funded sculpture in big cities. There is a huge stainless steel donut in front of City Hall because they built a tunnel under the bay that cost $1 billion and 1% of that is millions of dollars, and immediately no-one in government wants anything to do with this lightning rod for people to be furious, which is why you even have an Arts Commission.

You dump a duffel bag full of cash in front of them, the rounding error from the latest tunnel project, and ask them to figure out a way how to disperse it. These guys are all wearing glasses that make John’s most outrageous glasses look like something he got at Costco, guys with Italian accents and glasses bigger than their head. The Arts Commission has real money. The Music Commission is interfacing with them, trying to entree with them in the sense that they have seniority because that commission is 50 years old whereas the Music Commission is 5 years old. They don’t appear to be condescending to them, but they have a long history of dealing with lots of money.

John has to establish himself as a serious member of this organization in order that some of his larger plans be put into place, and he is not going to get there by mincing in with his lavender shirt and his collar bar. He might wear a suit, but not a tie and his top shirt button open next time.

John is not going to make his reform projects happening if he is wearing a tie bar at any of those meetings with the Music Commission. At least they won dedicated clearly-marked parking zones outside The Showbox. A city lives and dies by its parking and if you can get your hands around the parking you end up in charge.

John’s plan for the future of the police (RL103)

John has a very good plan for the police. They talked about them not very long ago (see RL100) and got a lot of nice feedback about that, but strangely not from police fraternal organizations. Part of the problem of the militarization of the police has been the suburbanization of the police. The cops and the firemen all live in the suburbs now, they pursued the American Dream, and cop culture and fireman culture is suburbanite culture, which is intrinsically suspicious of people who live in the city. It fosters a racist outer ring contempt and dislike for poor people and people who live in town.

John’s plan for the modernization and re-integration of the cops is that every city should build a Police Academy in the heart of town. Part of the problem with the cops is that we started thinking about police as a job that requires a 4-year degree, which is a subset of a larger problem of the 4-year inflation. If you want to manage a Ziebart (auto-parts store) you have to have a 4-year degree, if you want the person in charge of the FroYo Machine at the Cold Stone Creamery you have to have a 4-year degree, or if you want to do anything that requires a key.

When Merlin worked at McDonalds there was a button he would hit, he would put the meat down, it would tell him when it was time to flip it and when it was time to salt it, it was literally idiot-proof, and if you want a job more than that today you need a college degree, and that is really fucked-up!

What that massive influx of people in colleges has done is make colleges worthless. They are not doing college job anymore. In the last 50 years people in politics were able to say that they wanted everyone to have an opportunity to go to college and it was an easy thing to say, a harder thing to do, but it was a thing in public life that they could direct money, resources, and a lot of glad-handing attention to, but they did not make a grand college-education accessible to everyone, they just made college stupid so that everybody could get into it.

One of the things we don’t need is cops that went to college. They need to go to a great police academy with a curriculum advise by John, located in the heart of town so that every day you see the young police trainees in their Easter Egg colored sweats, running up and doing their Calisthenics in the bus stations and we all get to see the cops in training, they are living with us, and their dormitories are right there in town. By the time an aspiring young police person graduates to become a badged officer they are inculcated in the language and culture of the city they intend to police.

They have trained in the town, not out in some firing range boot camp out in BFE and they are not being indoctrinated into a culture that lives outside of the city and is inherently hostile to the city. The concept of policing is very basic: The cops themselves do not have power, but their power is the power we grant them to police us because we need it because we are pig monkeys. We say collectively that we need to put someone in a position so we can call them when we need help. We want them to be young and strong and fleet-of-foot, but also smart enough and empowered just enough to make judgement calls.

The other day John was driving along with his daughter and every time a fire truck or police car goes by with their lights on she is very curious about what is going on and John always tells her that they are going to help somebody. All of that is part of the culturalization that happened to John when he was growing up, which is to be taught that the police and the firemen are our friends and they are there to help and protect you. She knows this pretty well now.

During John’s whole life, even during the many years when he was like: ”Fuck the police, man!” and he was socially hostile to the cops as part of his Rock’n’Roll underbelly, he also understood very clearly that recourse to the law was not a right, but it was a participatory aspect of citizenship. If you were ever going to call the cops you had better also hold up your end of the bargain by being a law-abiding citizen. The contempt John has for people is their selective citizenship where they call the cops and the fire department when they need help, but they also refuse to pay their taxes or they are bullies or they are greedy or cheaters in every other aspect of life.

He was sitting there teaching his daughter this fundamental thing, that the police and the fire department are there to help you, but there are large community of citizens in his own city who do not see the police that way, and the fathers in those communities are forced to teach their daughters a healthy suspicion of the police and to be careful around the police. There are surely plenty of families where the lesson from a very young age is: ”Avoid the police at all cost!” because they will hurt you if they get a chance. ”If you have problems, call a family members or run to someone who looks like us, but do not attract the attention of the police because it never ends well!”

Sharing a city, a culture, and a civic life with groups of fellow Americans who do not have the same recourse to the law and who do not feel like the police are there to help them, and as his daughter gets older he will for sure tell her to not mouth off to the police because the police are idiots for the most part, 24-year olds with criminal justice degrees who are inculturated to be unreflective with father issues, working out something wavy on criminal justice. Within the culture that is teaching and training them that is encouraged, and their lieutenants and captains also have not been fully culturated, but they have been allowed to maintain…

It is the problem with the CIA: The CIA is somewhat an independent organization that nominally answers to the president, but in fact presidents come and go and the CIA remains. They don’t feel answerable to anybody, which maintains an inner culture that over time has become infected and now the CIA is separate from the balance of power that keeps our government stable and they end up as a rogue organization. To bring them to heel requires an incredible amount of will from the congress and the executive, a will that they seldom express.

There needs to be actual effective 100% civilian oversight of these affairs. It is not sufficient that your organization investigate itself and declare… it happens in the Seattle Police Department all the time and also in the CIA. They did an investigation of that thing and determined that everybody acted properly, except that there was one thing they could have done better and the appropriate measures were taken. To fire everybody at the top is to then promote the lieutenants who were raised in the same culture. The only reason we are in that situation is that these organizations continue to recruit and indoctrinate generation after generation into what is essentially an unbeholden culture.

John’s plan long term for urban police departments is to reintegrate them into urban life. If you want a promotion in the Seattle City Police Department, then live in Seattle. If you want to get your Sergeant stripes, live in Seattle, not in Issaquah. If you live in Issaquah, why don’t you join the fucking Issaquah police department. If you want to work in the Seattle Police Department and you don’t want to live in Seattle then you are not Sergeant or Lieutenant material. This seems fundamental!

John has a close friend who works in the Seattle Fire Department and he describes the culture in the fire stations. A lot of these guys are mustache guys who are living on an acre and a half that they are buying with their inflated union salaries. He characterizes the Seattle Police Department inner culture as being basically redneck libertarian. It is a hard job! A lot of people are dialing 911 just because they are lonely, and rather than make friends they pretend they are having a heart attack so that some fireman will come and pet their hair. John calls 911 all the time to report that he saw a pigeon that was limping.

Merlin thinks it should be easy to get into the Police Academy building, but to leave you have to solve a crime or help someone two random days a week, like you have to help someone change a tire or solve a deadly murder suicide.

Merlin thinks that listening to John lecture is just the opening act, then there will be an abattoir and they will have to fight shirtless with garbage can lids. Merlin would be the keynote speaker. John would be softening them up and then Merlin would come in and sweep up and encourage them to hit each other with bats with nails in them, take the Top-5 video games and make them real.

The role music plays in culture and in city politics (RL103)

When the Rolling Stones played at the Kingdome there were 50.000 people there and everybody thought that was incredible, but then the following Wednesday 50.000 people were there to see the Seahawks lose to the Chicago Bears and you realize that 50.000 people to see the Rolling Stones happens once, but 50.000 people come to watch that stupid football team is every week, then there are 60.000 people watching the baseball team and a million more in the region watching it on TV.

Music is important to us in name only. Every single person at that football game has heard the Rolling Stones, but they don’t own 3 different $60 Rolling Stones jerseys and a Rolling Stones hat, they are not paying for an iPhone app that lets them watch the Rolling Stones every single time that they perform.

John gets into this with people all the time who think that music should be free, but a record album that took a year to make costs $10 on iTunes and you might listen to it 500 times in your life, or you can go to see a movie for $14 that you will watch once and that lasts 1 hour. Yet people go see movies without reflecting, while buying an album seems like a big investment. For those who live in the music world and think about music it has a preeminent importance, but culturally we ultimately value it as window-dressing. Music is a legit economic driver, but the mayor is leaving the meeting with the Music Commission and is going to meet with the representatives of the construction union, music is a drop in the bucket.

Even if you extend the powerful reasoning: Why do people come to Seattle to work at Microsoft if they can live in Palo Alto or San Jose, why would they choose to work at Amazon or a Seattle tech company? Most of them say that they want to be part of Seattle culture, they want to go to shows, they want to be part of the vibrant musical and cultural milieu that doesn’t exist in San Jose and has in a lot of ways been priced out of San Francisco. You can’t start a band in San Francisco now, it is $5000 a month for a 1-bedroom apartment!

They make that economic impact to the mayor all the time, that when people fill out surveys why they moved to Seattle music is always right at the top of the list, but it is intangible.

Two giant cultural holes in Merlin’s life are video games and sports. He doesn’t care and is actively against sports in some ways, and he is completely not interested in video games. Every time it occurs to him what those two uber-industries really mean he realizes how dumb he is because he doesn’t even think about sports. Think about how much money passes through that town whenever there is a sports game going on! Seattle just won the Super Bowl, and some people surely make the decision to hold a convention in Seattle and not in any other major city because they can connect it with going to a game and seeing The Black Hole S.O.N.S., which would be a good band name (actually Soundgarden).

Merlin asks John for Soundgarden’s first big hit and can’t remember the name, but John recently mentioned it in a recent interview that Merlin read. They never come to a conclusion, but they do a lot of singing. Later they say Merlin was thinking of Outshined, but he first confused it with Pretty Noose. There were some very powerful bass riffs in the Ben Shepherd era.

50.000 people divided by 4 when they come in cars and $35 per car to park and everybody gets a wiener dog, a kettle corn, there are people drinking beers, all the jerseys they are selling, it is a massive money wave every time one of these ball teams play. A lot of them are staying in hotels, probably the 5000 people who came for the Magic the Gathering…

Mick Jagger’s net worth being tiny compared to other expensive things despite his importance in culture (RL103)

The other day Mick Jagger’s long-time girlfriend committed suicide (L’Wren Scott, it happened one week before this episode was recorded), which was really tragic. She was taller than John and that alone made him have new respect for Mick Jagger. When small guys get to be a certain amount of rich and famous they are no longer self-conscious about their height and are dating women who are a foot and a half taller than they are. Sure! Why wouldn’t you! This girl is amazing and also super-tall!

John was astonished that their relationship seemed real and that Mick Jagger was really devastated by this, but one of the minute side details was that Mick Jagger was worth $200 million because in our culture now you have to append to every mention of somebody famous their age and also how much they are worth. It stuck out to John because he had just an hour before read an article that said that an Andy Warhol lithograph of some kind had recently sold at Sotheby’s for $117 million (probably Silver Car Crash) There are lots of people who have lots of money so that $100 million for a painting feels like normal. Those are bought for investment purposes and as one-upmanship, but still.

$200 million is less than the current Mega Ball which was $400 million at the time, and Mick Jagger stands atop a mountain with few others as a person who made his mark on the culture. He is very important to John and he feels unassailably rich and successful, even though their career started over in 1973 when their money was completely gone, and even accounting for his abysmal performance in the documentary about the Rock concert at Altamont in San Francisco (called Gimme Shelter).

Think about how many 24-year old in the Bay Area now have $200 million! John wants to have the power to rent a convention center and get them all in a room and lecture them for a year. He wants to show them PowerPoint demonstration one after the other! There are so many people now with $200 million who don’t deserve it and haven’t earned it. The fact that they wrote the Flappy Bird app or were the 4th employee of the fucking toilet brush app, and now they are worth $200 million. Fuck them! Fuck this capitalism that makes this real! Fuck it! Something is immoral about it and somebody should be arrested.

Merlin is trying to direct John’s attention away from trying to solve the capitalism problem.

ZZ Top playing in Seattle (RL103)

ZZ Top played in Seattle last night and John didn’t go, which surprises him. The first time he saw them live he got kicked out of the concert halfway through because some security ape saw him drinking a bottle of peach snaps and they booted him out and he was really upset. He wanted him to just take the schnapps, there were people all around him smoking pot. He was not even drinking Southern Comfort, but peach schnapps, what was he even thinking? It was the era!

The second time he saw them was at a county fair and Billy Gibbons had that thing that John has seen Tom Petty have too: They get to be a certain age and they are very skinny men, and when John was standing backstage he noticed that in both cases their show costume is not made out of regular clothes, which means they are wearing their show pants that are made to look good from 50 feet away, but they are sweat pants with elastic waist bands that have been tailored to look like they are stove pipe cowboy gunslinger pants, but up close and from behind these are comfort waist pants.

Because everybody now is wearing in-ear remote radio monitors everybody has a little receiver on their belt loop and that tends to pull down the elastic and you get a little glimpse of the small of Tom Petty’s back or the small of Billy Gibbons’ back, which is covered with a little tangle of white ass-hair and John never wanted to see that!