Introducing The Official "Old's Cool" Podcast
We've got a lot of wonderful minds all around us, full of ideas and experience, and hungry to share, so we've teamed up with Mariner Gallery to bring some of this genius to light in what is essentially a series of "intellectual spankings."
Seriously, the "Old's Cool" podcast is a weekly half-hour show-and-tell where we'll tackle some of the most important topics of the past, and the gnarly and divisive present. We 'll try to make the discussions pithy and relevant, and come to some sort of satisfying takeaway that needs to be learned for us all to step into the wild world, with our head if not held high, at least cocked at the right angle.
We'll also explore traditional (and non-traditional) lifestyles and crafts, and speak with the many (and mostly local) artists, disrupters, iconoclasts and recalcitrants who are fighting the good fight, with as much finesse and value-add as we can. While looking classy and having wicked fun the whole time of course.
Our inaugural podcast, which we kicked off the whole adventure with earlier this year, stars one of our West Point classmates, Mike Lerario, who fills in the backstory to the slogan "Patton Was Right" which is his admonition about us fighting the wrong enemy, i.e. the Nazis and not the Soviets. The General hit the nail on the head back then, and is now vindicated by the way worm has turned, so to speak.
Our second podcast was with Donald Osborne, bon vivant extraordinaire and CEO of Audrain Motor Group. The discussion ran from beauty, to truth, to opera, with a couple of short trips down memory lane to the lower East Side of New York and Steep Brook in Fall River, and how we finally ended up figuring out the best way to cross the road.
Stay tuned for something just as practical and fascinating next week, and week in and week out... hopefully!
We'll delve into topics that illuminate and inspire and try to understand how imagination and feelings/ intent unfortunately trumps skill and craft, especially in the immediacy and unforgivingness of today's fast-paced world. And why we need to slow down and re-assess our principles and priorites. And get back to basics.
How "Modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text." And how we can return to nature: craft and process and discernment.
Why "comparisons are odious" as Shakespeare is often quoted, but why the crucial qualifier "...but they are necessary" is almost always left out. In short, how we have to be intellectually honest and try to get back to the sometimes cruel but always crucial, beautiful heart of things and life, with some style and grace.
And wit!
Old's Cool Podcast #1 – "Patton was right." – Mike Lerario
Our inaugural broadcast features one of our West Point classmates, Mike Lerario, who fills in the backstory to the slogan "Patton was right" about us fighting the wrong enemy, i.e. the Nazis and not the Soviets. And we discuss why the General hit the nail on the head back then, and is now vindicated by the way the world has been hammered into submissiveness ever since.
Old's Cool Podcast #2 – "Beauty is Truth. Truth, Beauty." – Donald Osborne
Where we discuss the importance of style and good design and the honed, discerning artistic eye in our everyday lives. Or we try to – the digressions and sidebar salads elbow their way in. Jibes and asides take up most of the rest of the civilized part of the discussion. Socratic irony fills in the remaining blanks.
Old's Cool Podcast #3 – "The Craft of Art." – Rupert Nesbit
As promised, something just as abstract and practical as last week: we spoke with local artist Rupert Nesbit about modern art, and how imagination and feelings/ intent unfortunately trumps skill and craft and just about everything else these days – "Modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text."
Old's Cool Podcast #4 – "Working joyfully." – Ilse Nesbit
The Third and Elm Press, owned and operated by my friend Ilse Nesbitt, had an “Open” sign hanging in the window when I walked by later that afternoon to go to Battery Park to watch the sunset, so I popped in. The shop is so old school and intact you’d think you stepped over the threshold back into 1960. The motto is a quote from Goethe:
“Whoever works joyfully and enjoys what has been done is fortunate.”
Old's Cool Podcast #5 – "200 Years Behind the Times." – Brian Kiracofe
Scrimshanders is a scrimshaw boutique on Bowen's Wharf in Newport, Rhode Island, owned and operated by master artist and carver Brian Kiracofe. The slugline of his studio is: “200 Years Behind The Times” and that was the starting point of our interesting discussion about whales and bicycles and victory gardens.
The pendulum is swinging in the dark, people.
Backwards and upwards!
Old's Cool Podcast #6 – "Money is power. Art is Wealth." – James Langston
James Langston is a self-described Newporter, who is an artist, builder, and sailor among many other occupations and talents. He also has a honed designer's eye, a strong sense of community, passion for beauty and aesthetics, and is philosophical about the responsibilities and potential, for both good and evil, of wealth, the powerful, and ourselves.
Old's Cool Podcast #7 – "Epicurean Wisdom" – Peirce Law
Peirce Law, an old's cool friend from way back (we met him in high school) talks about the philosophy of Epicurus, and how his "garden" was just a variation on Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, and a model for our own Academy–a place for like-minded people to be able to engage in the passionate exchange of ideas, removed from politics and exigencies of the world. However, we're not just talking theoretical, ivory-tower stuff–if the situation requires or the country demands, we are ready and willing to heed the call of duty.
Peirce and I had just finished filming our podcast on Epicurus and were sitting down to a couple of Wally's weiners when my buddy Mark Luzio popped his head in and asked if we had five bucks–he wanted to buy a derby at the vintage place down the street and the guy wouldn't come down on the price.
He asked us what we were doing and we told him–he then asked if we talked about Lucretious. We hadn't, so I'll mention him here: he was a Roman philopher and poet (99–55 BC) who wrote a philosophical poem called De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), that outlined the main tenets of Epicureanism, and also proposed the "Big Bang" theory of the universe, thus exploding the Catholic's Creation fable, which is why it was intentionally "lost" to to history until a forgotten copy was discovered in some storage room in a monastery in Germany in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini.
Mark dashed back to the shop to buy his derby, and we finished our kraut dogs. He came back, bowlered, and sat down with us–and the conversation ranged all over the place. He's a jointer by trade, and showed us pictures of some of the work he's done, and it's astonishing: inlayed writing desks, double-helix spiral staircases first designed by DaVinci and also known as "chateau" stairs, with intricate French "Versailles" parquet floor landings, laid at a 45° that needed to be accurate to within 1/64th of an inch or they were impossible to assemble.
He then showed a picture of a table he had made with a rounded-off rectangualr top he said had "Sally Hemmings corners." We asked him what did that mean, and he said he first saw those type of corners on a workroom table at the Montecello Estate. Thomas Jefferson had brought over a famous Scottish jointer to finish all of the interior surfaces and furniture since there weren't any Americans who were trained to do that caliber of work at the time. We talked about Hemmings, and how she accompanied Jefferson to Paris, and was considered a free woman there, but chose to return to America with him.
Mark then found a photo of a desk-top box he had made out of Philippine mahogany with contrasting holly sides, which were as white as ivory. He told us that holly (and boxwood) had to be harvested at just the right time in their lives, and the right time of year or they would yellow and lose their brilliance.
The box had a sliding top, with a thumb hole, and inside the thumbhole was a 1902 "Barber" half dollar (designed by Charles E. Barber, chief mint engraver from 1892-1916), with the famous 13 stars and the Roman Head of Liberty, which replaced the "Seated Liberty" design, and was eventually replaced by the famous "Walking Liberty."
The head is adorned with a phrygian cap, which is like a red "smurf" hat, and it's also known as the "cap of freedom" and dates back to Roman times, where it was called the "pileus." The Romans would put it on a pike, aka the staff of vindication, servo ad pileum vocare, "to call the servants to the hat" which, when touched upon their enslaved heads, automatically made them free men.
The Jacobeans wore the phrygian cap during the French Revolution.
Such an interesting conversation with a well-read jointer, a well-read polyglot, and a well-read non-joiner.
Old's Cool Podcast #8 – "Everything's hard until..." – Mark Luzio
After our fantastic conversation with Mark last week, we decided to invite him on the podcast to continue to explore some of the themes we had already talked about: hands, craft, Lucretius, and the value of hard work and eternal learning, i.e. how to get a lot of fun and fulfillment out of life.
He came this morning with a bunch of props and stories, and we had so much fun, man.
Clap!