We have a very special guest for this episode of Lost Xplorers. The great Kent Axell, Vegas stage magician and all-around cool guy, joined us to chop it up.

On this episode, we talk about the different types of magic, paranormal phenomena, the writing process of a magic routine, James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge, the need for mystery in These Capitalized Times, choosing to believe, and the creative process.

One of the most interesting conversations I've had in a while. Kent's a fascinating dude. If you're in Vegas, check out his show Ghost Stories. You can find out all the information you need on him via his website.

Kris and JDO talk about the strangness of passing time. JDO talks about the biggest viral scam he ever fell for. “Americans love nothing better than to be fooled.” JDO continues his path to becoming a cult leader by channeling Alan Watts. The strangeness of Florida. The World Weekly News as the ultimate American newspaper. What would an American Tory look like?

Philip K. Dick vs. Alan Watts. There’s something in the searching. We are all still children who want to stay up late at night. Speaking in metaphors.

Degrees of compassion. Focused and tactical intimacy. Conversion is a drug. “Language determines the world.”

From the notes of Kris Saknussemm...

Travel becomes Tourism. This Sacred - > Profane style degeneration is hardly an isolated phenomenon—in fact it might seem to be a Deep Algorithm. But I think the progenitors of the Tourism Age can to some extent be forgiven. It’s fine to say now that they should’ve extrapolated—seen ahead to what large-scale, organized, budget-minded transportation of people around the world for the purposes of recreation or information, fulfillment of some kind—what that would mean. What impact. Think of Tahiti and Hawaii, Venice and Dubrovnik. Yellowstone National Park.) The problem is the Education has so much more to do with Tourism than with Travel—and has for several decades. Public Education tried to apply the values of Trade School (standardization, consistency, certification) to a Liberal Arts model…while wholesale abandoning the Trade School and apprenticeship streams. Meanwhile, Liberal Arts succumbed to customer service. Here's the concluding sentence of one of my students’ analysis of the essay “The Loss of the Creature” by Walker Percy, which is as much about this theme / crisis as anything can be. “If you don’t know the significance of William Faulkner, the story of Robinson Crusoe, the message within A Brave New World, or the man who discovered insulin, it may be very difficult to understand, and Percy’s true message may never be revealed to a 21st century student.”

From the notes of Kris Saknussemm...

We said last time that we were going to investigate further how the distinction b/w Travel and Tourism might help us understand what’s happened to the project of national public Education in America. An odd proposition to some perhaps. But I think this is easily done, although it’s also easy to be very hard on Tourism. Travel can take many forms, but it’s never crass. Tourism can’t escape that tinge, that odor. Looking deeper, Travel suggests an openness to experience, a willingness to take risks, and to confront unexpected situations, even illness, violence, natural calamity, or falling in love. Tourism is precisely focused on at least managing risk, streamlining possibilities, reducing the unexpected, and delivering a consistent experience. Experience as Product (right off the conveyer belt). This Sacred - > Profane style degeneration is hardly an isolated phenomenon—in fact it might seem to be a Deep Algorithm. But I think the progenitors of the Tourism Age can to some extent be forgiven. It’s fine to say now that they should’ve extrapolated—seen ahead to what large-scale, organized, budget-minded transportation of people around the world for the purposes of recreation or information, fulfillment of some kind—what that would mean. What impact. But they had no precedent—nothing on the scale that would emerge. They weren’t far or deep thinkers and didn’t claim to be. But while there was a lot of greed and foolishness (and still is), there were good intentions too. I believe some early Tourism champions genuinely thought that exposing ever more middle class Westerners to beauty, culture, and wonders around the world would do them good—and wouldn’t degrade the points of interest, destinations, and ports of call. (In addition to the interesting philosophical questions involved, there are very practical physical matters of traffic congestion, inflated prices, resentful locals, and clogged toilets. The list is long, but think of Tahiti and Hawaii, Venice and Dubrovnik. Yellowstone National Park.)

From the notes of Kris Saknussemm...

Temporary tattoos and the latest Oscar’s night—two more examples of why we’ve entered the Post-Civilization Age. People who say the Oscar’s have been in “decline” for quite a while are the kind of folks who wouldn’t draw much distinction between Ted Bundy returning to have sex with a corpse three days after the murder, or three weeks. I maintain there’s a difference.

Moving along, it’s struck me of late that there’s a relationship between Education (public school system) and Tourism, which often goes unnoticed. We know there’s a connection between Education and Travel. Travel is how humanity has educated itself about the human globe (and all this means), the planet Earth, and the larger world / universe we’ve been able to comprehend. All good. Tourism? Hmm, not so good. Why? What is the difference between Travel and Tourism?

Many interesting people have tried to speak to this issue, including well-traveled writers such as Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams, and Jack Kerouac—hell, the list goes on and on. What a great list. But it doesn’t go that far back in time…because “tourism” in anything like the sense we mean it today really only fired up after WWII. Up to then, “travel” frequently meant adventure—both intentional and inadvertent. Calamity. Discovery. Decadence. Plunder. Escape. To be sure, the English fascination for a Tour of the Continent (Europe) was fashionable curriculum for the upper classes. But generally, Travel was a more eccentric endeavor. Hoity-toity or rough and ready. It was selective. A curious club.

I’ve recently had my students read Walker Percy’s wonderful essay “The Loss of the Creature.” It has a lot to say about reclaiming personal experience and sovereignty—and not sacrificing validation to a shadowy priest caste of so-called experts. It deals directly in the connection between Education and Travel or Tourism?

So, taking my view that Tourism arises as an industry (and as a system of social values) post-WWII…isn’t this about when the commitment to a fully national public school system takes off? I think before then, any sort of structured public education program was very porous and unevenly distributed even within states. More an idea than a system or a network. Is there a connection? What can the difference between Travel and Tourism possibly tell us about how the public education experiment is faring?

Kris's music piece at the end is titled "Recurring Dreams."

FROM THE NOTES OF KRIS SAKNUSSEMM...

If people haven’t read Jung’s work on Flying Saucers (as modern myth), I recommend it. I hadn’t looked at it in some time, but I think it reads even better in this age of social media. He completely skirts the issue of “real” or “imagined,” and focuses on the sheer popularity of the mythology. This is the view I took of cargo cult beliefs when I was a failed young anthropologist in Melanesia. Real/Unreal misses the point if something is deeply vivid at the social level. Jung’s short book makes a nice pairing with Randolph Stow’s remarkable novel Visitants, which is set in the Trobriand Islands during a UFO-cargo cult crisis. Stow was a young patrol officer, and the book provoked a nervous breakdown of lifetime impact. You can see why. In something like Melville, the strangeness starts early, and then Stow takes you right off any map.

To me, this strangely ties in with a larger phenomenon. Representation vs. Reality. Representation as Reality. It’s interesting to me to note how far we have degenerated from Schopenhauer’s ideas put forth in The World as Representation and Will. I think all forms of German idealism have a lot to answer for in Western thinking, but Schopenhauer had a lot more on his mind than we do today.

Case in point. Google’s Gemini AI image generator has recently caused a stir for ludicrous depictions of black Popes, black female Popes, black Vikings (although they look kind of cool), and images of the Founding Fathers as blacks and Native Americans (which rather contradicts the revisionist history program of today). The Right scorns the images as overzealous wokeness or outright historical misrepresentation. The Left dodges and weaves, and claims this is how stereotypes get broken down. The larger and deeper problem, however, is the notion that image alone is what counts.

This isn’t what Schopenhauer meant as “representation.” He meant a magical human capability of imagining all of existence. It was humancentric to be sure, but it was deep conceptually and structurally. Now what we mean is “optics.” Pure visual surface. We mean the artificial world of media and entertainment. Yet we know people aren’t really fooled by this. Just frustrated.

American black people know that one black President and a few millionaires and even billionaire celebrities don’t equate to genuine structural change. How can this discordance not cause confusion and anger?

Today on the show we have a special guest: author/teacher Matthew O'Brien! We chat about the expat lifestyle, finding love through a language barrier, and the lives of people who live in the flood channels beneath Las Vegas.

It's a great conversation. Matt is a fascinating guy. Here's his bio from his website, Beneath the Neon:

Matthew O’Brien is a writer, editor and teacher/tutor who lived in Las Vegas for twenty years and is currently based in San Salvador, El Salvador. His latest book, Dark Days, Bright Nights: Surviving the Las Vegas Storm Drains, shares the harrowing tales of people who lived in Vegas’ underground flood channels and made it out and turned around their lives. He’s also the author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas and My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas. Matt has taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Escuela Americana in San Salvador and is the founder of O’Brien Editing Services and Shine a Light, a nonprofit organization that provides housing, counseling and other services to the people living in the drains.