Show notes
I first met Ken Layne sometime in 1991, back when Vanilla Ice ruled the pop charts, the Soviet Union was still a thing, and Canadians still had a reasonable expectation of winning the Stanley Cup.
We have been collaborating and experimenting ever since -- a little newspapering here, some music there, various dot-com shenanigans, all of it in a spirit of adventure, learning, and hijinks. Ken has written novels, launched radio stations/TV-production studios in Macedonia, created one of the first native online news sites, flitted in and out of the Gawker empire, then, most enduringly, left the digital world behind with a terrific quarterly Mojave publication (and later book) called the Desert Oracle. This in turn became one of my two favorite podcasts, a spooky and learned and quite musical campfire-talk, described herein as “bioregional about the place, the geology, the animals, the folklore, and especially the people who’ve lived there over recorded history and the bad things they’ve done.”
Ken, as you will hear, is a natural storyteller who’s always weaving history and religion and literature and charismatic animals into conversation, with a particular eye for the not readily explicable. I was thrilled to hear he was creating a Desert Oracle offshoot called The Eldritch Republic, focusing on “strange tales of America,” so invited him on The Revolutionaries to talk about the key role that providence played in 1775-76, and how George Washington was father not just of our country, but of the foxhound. Enjoy!
* Media isn’t local anymore
* Printed media isn’t in business anymore
* Highway 247 revisited
* Big Hairy Monsters (that aren’t named Ken Layne)
* Absolutely respectful to the monster
* “As soon as I could drive, I was out in the desert, I was reading Edward Abbey”
* Buy Desert Solitaire
* Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, Mary Hunter Austin
* No more Heritage Reports
* Shrooming at the Nixon Library
* The esoteric side of American history
* “They don’t fit into our sad era, which is the Era of Disenchantment”
* “So you might ask somebody who lives in Providence, Rhode Island: What’s the name of your city mean? And they might not know.”
* Mountain people: superior rifles
* New Englanders: rough, dumb, impetuous
* Everybody: drinking
* The brilliant, self-made, well-fed Henry Knox
* Washington: Instrument of Providence
* The Maryland 400 are our Sparta 300
* Surrounded by water on three sides by the world’s biggest Navy, which has never lost
* The Gods send a secret fog
* Benny boy Talmadge!
* “I like dogs. I’m a male of the species, and an American”
* Montgomery’s loyal (if side-switching) dog Rebel
* “Father of not just the country, but of the American foxhound”
* “I made a list, a historical list”
* Moxie, Vulcan, Ragman, Sweet Lips, Tippler, Drunkard, etc.
* “There was a dog named Satan at the White House”
* 1776, by David McCullough (Bookshop | Amazon)
* John Adams, by David McCullough (Bookshop | Amazon)
* Why the Internet was invented
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